Theophilus G. Pinches

“ In that day Eridu was made, Ê-sagila was constructed—
Ê-sagila, which the god Lugal-du-azaga founded within the Abyss.
Babylon he built, Ê-sagila was completed.
He made the gods (and) the Anunnaki together,
The glorious city, the seat of the joy of their hearts, supremely he proclaimed.
Merodach bound together a foundation before the waters,
He made dust, and poured (it) out beside the foundation,
That the gods might sit in a pleasant place.
He made mankind—
Aruru made the seed of mankind with him. ”

“ The Lord is a jealous God and avengeth.
Who can stand before His indignation?
With an overrunning flood He will make a full end of the place thereof, and will pursue His enemies into darkness.
The gates of the rivers are opened, and the palace is dissolved.
Thy shepherds slumber, O king of Assyria, thy worthies are at rest; thy people are scattered upon the mountains, and there is none to gather them.” And there is much more in the same strain that the Hebrew Oracle of Nahum concerning the fall of Nineveh gives. ”

“ The glorious victory gained, and the Dragon of Evil subdued and relegated to those places where her exuberant producing power, which, to all appearance, she still possessed, would be of use, Merodach, in the fulness of his power as king of the gods, perfected and ordered the universe anew, and created his crowning work, Mankind. ”

“ What power the “Tablets of Fate” conferred on their possessor, we do not know, but in all probability the god in whose hands they were, became, by the very fact, creator and ruler of the universe for ever and ever.
This creative power the king of the gods at once proceeded to exercise. Passing through the heavens, he surveyed them, and built a palace called Ê-šarra, “The house of the host,” for the gods who, with himself, might be regarded as the chief in his heavenly kingdom. ”

“ All might have been well, to all appearance, but for the creation of woman, who, giving way to the blandishments of the tempter, in her turn tempted the man, and he fell. Death in the course of nature was the penalty, the earthly paradise was lost, and all chance of eating of the tree of life, and living for ever, disappeared on man's expulsion from his first abode of delight. ”

“ After the account of the creation of the beasts of the field, the Tigris and the Euphrates, vegetation, lands, marshes, thickets, plantations and forests, which are named, to all appearance, without any attempt at any kind of order, “The lord Merodach” is represented as creating those things which, at first, he had not made, namely, the great and ancient shrines in whose antiquity and glorious memories the Babylonian—and the Assyrian too—took such delight. ”

“ If a wife hate her husband, and say to him, ‘Thou art not my husband,’ they may throw her into the river.
“If a husband say to his wife, ‘Thou art not my wife,’ he shall pay her half a mana of silver. ”

“ Thus, in varying ways, did the ancient Babylonians live and wed, adopt children and inherit. Other incidents were there in their lives also, as when a man divorced his wife—an unpleasant experience for them both, in all probability—though often enough this must have taken place to the great joy of one or the other, or possibly of both, for it must have been a much less solemn thing with them than with us—the marriage tie. ”

“ The fact is, Nabonidus was either the most intelligent, or one of the most intelligent, men in Babylonia. To all appearance he was not a ruler, but a learned man, full of love for his country and its institutions, and desirous of knowledge, which he obtained at all costs. Whenever he had to restore a temple, he at once excavated in its foundations for the records of early kings which he knew to be there, and he was often successful in finding what he wanted. As he always recorded what he found, his cylinder-inscriptions nearly always possess a value far beyond those of other kings of Babylon. ”

“ How great the change which came over the Eastern world with the disappearance from the political horizon of the power of Assyria can hardly be estimated. In the time of Merodach-baladan, the Chaldean who had mounted the Babylonian throne, an embassy was sent to the Jewish king Hezekiah with a present and kind inquiries as to his health, apparently to see whether it was worth while making an alliance with him. Merodach-baladan felt that he would need all the outside help that he could get against the Assyrians, with whom he was in constant conflict. ”

“ In Assyrian and Babylonian history, it is always the king who is the ruler, whatever influence his spouse may have had in determining his policy as such being always unmentioned, and therefore unknown to the world at large. The present inscription, however, seems to testify that Sammu-ramat was known outside the walls of the palace, and that one of the greatest in the kingdom thought fit to do her honour by associating her with the king in the dedication to Nebo which he made for the preservation of the lives of the king, the queen, and himself. ”

“ Merodach, in the legend of the Creation, there appears as the greatest hunter (using the word in the Hebrew sense of “entrapper”) that ever lived. For did he not, when Tiamtu, the great dragon of chaos and disorder, tried to usurp the dominion of the gods, and bring ruin on their fair work, chase and entrap her, thereby winning the throne of the kingdom of heaven, and laying the universe under an everlasting debt to him? With his net he caught and held her fast, and, standing on her body, slew her. ”

“ The Pharaoh upon the throne was of the same race as himself, and he and all Semitic foreigners in the land, including his father and brethren, were dependent on the same state of things continuing. What he then did would have the effect of placing the native Egyptians still more in the power of their ruler, consolidating the dynasty of Semites to which he belonged, and going far, therefore, to ensure the permanency of its rule. In acting as he did, Joseph was only doing what any other man in his position and of his race would have done. ”

“ No appearance of the Deity as the first and only cause of the existence of things—
must be held as a sufficient series of prime reasons why the Babylonian and the Hebrew versions of the Creation-story must have had different origins.
As additional arguments may also be quoted the polytheism of the Babylonian account; the fact that it appears to be merely the setting to the legend of Bêl and the Dragon, and that, as such, it is simply the glorification of Merodach, the patron divinity of the Babylonians, over the other gods of the Assyro-Babylonian Pantheon. ”

“ We may take it for granted that the history of the Creation grew piece by piece, as different minds thought over and elaborated it. The first theories we should expect to find more or less improbable—wild stories of serpents and gods, emblematic of the conflicting powers of good and evil, which, with them, had their origin before the advent of mankind upon the earth. ”

“ It is only reasonable to suppose, however, that among a people so intelligent as the Babylonians, there were at least some who, thinking over the nature of the world in which they lived and the destiny of mankind, saw that the different gods whom the people worshipped could not all be governors of the universe, but, if they existed at all, must be only manifestations of the Deity who held the supreme power. ”

“ The King. Around the Babylonian king is hedged a certain amount of mystery, for we see him but dimly. What he did year by year we know, but what his general way of life was the tablets do not reveal to us. He lived in a “great house,” ê-gala in Akkadian, êkallu in Semitic Babylonian, and there is hardly any doubt that the people looked upon him as a great high-priest, and often as being himself divine. Indeed, some, if not many, of the Babylonian kings were regarded as gods, and had their worshippers, apparently whilst they were still inhabitants of this earth. ”

“ All the divinities descending from Tiamtu were, to judge from the inscriptions, creators, and as they advanced towards perfection, so also did the things that they created advance, until, by contrast, the works of Tiamtu became as those of the Evil Principle, and when she rebelled against the gods who personified all that was good, it became a battle between them of life and death, which only the latest-born of the gods, elected in consequence of the perfection of his power, to be king and ruler over “the gods his fathers,” was found worthy to wage. ”

“ As has been said above, Merodach was the god that was regarded by the Babylonians and Assyrians as he who went about doing good on behalf of mankind. If he saw a man in affliction—suffering, for instance, from any malady—he would go and ask his father Aa, he who knew all things, and who had promised to impart all his knowledge to his royal son, what the man must do to be cured of the disease or relieved of the demon which troubled him. ”

“ Here we have another possible Babylonian parallel to the story of the death of Abel, in which the driving forth of her who makes the lament from her city and from her palace might well typify the expulsion of Eve from Paradise, and her delivery into the power of her enemy, who is, to all appearance, the king of terrors, into whose hands she and her husband were, for their disobedience, consigned. In this really beautiful Babylonian poem her “enemy” seems to reproach her, telling her how it was she, and she alone, who had ruined herself. ”

“ Life in Babylonia at this early period must have been exceedingly primitive, and differed considerably, as the East does even now, from what we in Europe are accustomed to. The city of which we can get the best idea, Sippar, the Sippara of the Greeks, generally regarded (though probably wrongly) as the Sepharvaim of the Bible, now represented by the mounds known as Abu-habbah, whence most of the early contract-tablets revealing to us the daily life of these ancient Babylonians came, was situated on the Euphrates, “the life of the land.” ”

“ This identification of deities with each other would [pg 059] seem to have been a far from uncommon thing in the ancient East during those heathen times. A large number of deities of the Babylonian Pantheon are identified, in the Assyrian proper names, with a very interesting divinity whose name appears as Aa, and which may possibly turn out to be only one of the many forms that are met with of the god Ya'u or Jah, who was not only worshipped by the Hebrews, but also by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, and other nations of the East in ancient times. ”

“ In the best class of tablets every tenth line is often numbered—a proof that the Assyrians and Babylonians were very careful with the documents with which they had to deal. The Babylonian tablets closely resemble the Assyrian, but the style of the writing differs somewhat, and it is, in general, more difficult to read than the Assyrian. None of the tablets of the Creation-series are, unfortunately, perfect, and many of the fragments are mere scraps, but as more than one copy of each anciently existed, and has survived, the wanting parts of one text can often be supplied from another copy. ”

“ The creatures whom Tiamtu had created to help her and strike terror into the hearts of the gods, were also brought into subjection, along with Kingu, her husband, from whom the tablets of fate were taken by the conqueror as things unmeet for Tiamtu's spouse to own. It is probable that we have here the true explanation of the origin of this remarkable legend, for the tablets of fate were evidently things which the king of heaven alone might possess, and Merodach, as soon as he had overcome his foe, pressed his own seal upon them, and placed them in his breast. ”

“ To those who inhabited Babylon's desolation, the most important thing, in all probability, was the worship, with all the old rites and ceremonies, of the deities whose temples and shrines still existed there. But those old priests and temple scribes occupied their time in another way, namely, the keeping of careful records of every historical event for the purpose of being able to tell the future. ”

“ Bas-relief and inscription of Hammurabi, generally regarded as the Biblical Amraphel (Gen. xiv. 1) , apparently dedicated for the saving of his life. In this he bears the title (incomplete) of “King of Amoria” (the Amorites) , lugal Mar [tu] , Semitic Babylonian sar mât Amurrî (see page 315) . [pg ii] “There is a charm in finding ourselves, our common humanity, our puzzles, our cares, our joys, in the writings of men severed from us by race, religion, speech, and half the gulf of historical time, which no other literary pleasure can equal.”—Andrew Lang. ”

“ But we shall never in all probability know whether they thus analyzed and compared the two faiths, though it is very possible that they did, for it is said that the Egyptians were attracted to Christianity by the comparison of Christ with their Osiris. Such, however, is the tendency of the mind of mankind. Ever unwilling to break with the old, he seeks for some analogy in the new, to form a bridge whereby to pass to higher things. Minor deities have ever tended to become Christian saints, and such may have been—indeed, probably was—the case with the Babylonians and the Assyrians. ”

“ In the temple of the Sun-god and the Moon-god they declared that they would treat each other well. One shall not bring action against the other, nor act hostilely towards him. There is no cause for action on the part of the one against the other. They have invoked the spirit of Nannara, Šamaš, Merodach, Lugal-ki-ušuna, and Ḫammurabi the king. ”

“ Palace of Adad-nirari, the great king, the powerful king, king of the world, king of the land of Aššur; the king who, in his youth, Aššur, king of the Igigi, called, and delivered into his hand a kingdom without equal; his shepherding he (Aššur) made good as pasture for the people of the land of Aššur, and caused his throne to be firm; the glorious priest, patron of Ê-šarra, he who ceaseth not to uphold the command of Ê-kura, who continually walketh in the service of Aššur, his lord, and hath caused the princes of the four regions to submit to his feet. ”

“ Facts concerning the ancient East, from Babylonia on the east to Egypt on the west, face the reader as he goes through that attractive narrative, and make him wonder at the state of society, the political situation, and the beliefs of the people which should have made his migrations possible, brought about the monotheistic belief which characterizes his life and that of his descendants, and enabled him and his sons after him to attain such a goodly store of the riches of this world. ”