Babylonian religion

“ But all pioneering work is necessarily imperfect, and for many a day to come the history of Babylonian religion must be left to the pioneer. Year by year, indeed, the materials are increasing, and it may be that a discovery will yet be made, like that of the Pyramid texts in Egypt, which will reveal to us the inner religious thought and belief of Babylonia in those distant ages, when Nippur and Eridu, and not as yet Babylon, were the theological centres of the land. ”

“ A lecture on the myths of Babylonia may perhaps seem out of place in a course, the subject of which is Babylonian religion. But religion has its mythology as well as its theology, and sometimes the mythology has had a good deal to do with moulding or even creating its theology. Moreover, the myths of Babylonia were intimately connected with its worship of the gods. They all related, so far as we know, to the gods and spirits, or else, to what Greek theology would have called heroes and demi-gods. They embody religious beliefs and practices ”

“ The history of Babylonian religion is divided into periods of growth and periods of decadence. The influence of domestic religion was invariably opposed to the new and high doctrines which emanated from the priesthood, and in times of political upheaval tended to submerge them in the debris of immemorial beliefs and customs. ”

“ The most enduring influence in Babylonian religion was the early Sumerian; and as Sumerian modes of thought were the outcome of habits of life necessitated by the character of the country, they were bound, sooner or later, to leave a deep impress on the minds of foreign peoples who settled in the Garden of Western Asia. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that imported deities assumed Babylonian characteristics, and were identified or associated with Babylonian gods in the later imperial pantheon. ”

“ No consecutive account of the Babylonian religion can as yet be given, nor will it for many years come within the range of possibilities to achieve it. Abundant fragments of Babylonian religious and mythological literature have indeed been brought to light by the excavations of the last few years, and by dint of strenuous efforts a large proportion has been classified and deciphered. ”

“ Henceforward he is acknowledged in heaven as well as in earth, the supreme Bel or Baal of Semitic faith, the father of gods and men. Ea, the lord of the deep, and Bel of Nippur, “the lord of the earth,” alike yield up to him their powers; he assumes their names and titles; and, thanks to the centralising influence of Babylon, Babylonian religion approaches monotheism as nearly as its local character ever allowed it to do. The creator alone could rightfully claim the worship of the creatures he had made. ”

“ That we do not encounter more in Babylonia is due to the decided tendency that has been noted towards a centralization of power in a limited number of deities. Instead of gods of boundaries, we have numerous demons and spirits in the case of the developed Babylonian religion, into whose hands the care of preserving the rights of owners to their lands is entrusted. ”

“ The solar features in his character passed out of sight; he was not only the giver of the empire of the world to his adopted son and vicegerent, the king of Babylon, he was also the divine counterpart and representative of the king in heaven. The god had made man in his own image, and he was now transformed into the likeness of men. Two ideas, consequently, struggled for the mastery in Babylonian religion—the anthropomorphic [pg 334] conception of the deity, and the belief in his identification with other gods ”

“ EARLY BABYLONIAN RELIGION The Beginnings of Babylonian Religion
The true beginning of a religion is that epoch in its history when it succeeds, by reason of local or national circumstances and environment and by racial genius, in raising itself from those purely animistic influences which are characteristic of early faith and from which all great religions have emerged, if they have not been able entirely to free themselves from associations which by reason of their antiquity and the hold they achieve on the mind of humanity are particularly difficult to cast off. ”

“ A combination of the Babylonian with the Persian religion could only be effected by the degradation of the Babylonian deities into half-divine, half-daemonic beings, infinitely remote from the supreme God of light and of heaven, or even into powers of darkness. ”

“ Standing far above him is the triad, Anu, Bel, and Ea, the gods that personify, as we have seen, the great divisions of the universe,—heaven, earth, and water. These gods, accordingly, take precedence of Nin-girsu in the first list. In a succeeding chapter, the significance of this triad for the Babylonian religion will be fully set forth. For the present, it is sufficient to note that the systematization of popular beliefs, involved in the distinctions thus emphasized in the groupings of deities into classes, begins at so early a period. ”

“ From the days of Khammurabi onward there was a tendency to exalt Bel-Merodach at the expense of all his brother gods. The development of Babylonian religion, in fact, went hand in hand with that of the Babylonian State. The foundation of an empire had made the Babylonian familiar with the conception of a supreme sovereign, under whom there were vassal kings, and under them again a dependent nobility. ”

“ Beyond such references, which are not as clear as they might be, we have no data through which their age can be determined; but so far as the ideas which they convey and the religious spirit manifested in them are concerned, there is no reason why they should not be assigned to as early a period as some of the incantation texts. It is characteristic of the Babylonian, as, in a measure, of all religions, that the old and the new go hand in hand; that more advanced conceptions, so far from setting aside primitive ones, can live and thrive in the same atmosphere with the latter. ”

“ Power of the Good One, no longer a perceptible light, but as if one should say, an emanation of God.” Some years ago, we could hardly have looked for her prototype or first appearance in the history of religions in any other direction than Babylonia, where the worship of Ishtar, her Babylonian counterpart, goes back as far as we can trace Babylonian religion. Now, however, it is plain that other races than the Babylonians may have been concerned in the spread of the worship of the Great Mother throughout Western Asia. ”

“ Within recent years a school has arisen in Germany which emphasizes the part played by Babylon in the religious development of Western Asia, and, in a minor degree, of Europe. The evidence on which reliance has been placed to prove the spread of Babylonian thought throughout the ancient world has been furnished mainly by Israel and Greece; and it is claimed that many features both in Hebrew religion and in Greek mythology can only be rightly studied in the light thrown upon them by Babylonian parallels from which they were ultimately derived. ”

“ But those who have tried to discover similar ideas in the records of Babylonian eschatology have hitherto entirely failed. Certain phrases and certain mythic data may be, and have been, pressed to support the theory that Babylonian religion and ethics were not without some belief in judgment and resurrection;216.1 but it is overpressure, and the phrases may easily be misunderstood. No clear evidence points to Babylonian belief in posthumous judgment; the title “god of judgment” attached to Nergal might have merely a political significance. ”

“ They cannot even be said to be gods of a minor order—they are hardly anything more than personifications of certain phenomena that have their source in the human intellect. In giving to these personified powers the determinative indicative of deity, the Babylonian schoolmen were not conscious of expressing anything more than their belief in the divine origin of the power and skill exercised by man. To represent such power as a god was the only way in which the personification could at all be effected under the conditions presented by Babylonian beliefs. ”

“ His worship is not limited to any particular spot. All of Babylonia lays claim to him. The ethical import of such a conception is manifestly great, and traces of it are to be found in the religious productions. It impressed upon the Babylonians the common bond uniting all mankind. The cult of Ea must have engendered humane feelings, softening the rivalry existing among the ancient centers of Babylonian power, and leading the people a considerable distance, on the road to the conception of a common humanity. When the gods decide to destroy mankind, it is Ea who intercedes on behalf of humanity ”

“ Since, however, the material upon which any age works is not of its own making, but is furnished by a preceding one, it follows that much of the intellectual activity of an age manifests itself in a transformation of its literary or speculative heritage. This process was constantly going on in Babylonia, and had we more material—and older material—at our disposal, we would be able to trace more clearly than we can at present, the various stages that led to the system of theology, as embodied in the best productions of the ancient Babylonian schoolmen. ”

“ The title of “Shepherd,” moreover, was at times given to the Babylonian kings in days subsequent to the Semitic Empire of Sargon of Akkad. So far as our materials allow us to judge, city-life was the gift of the Sumerian to the primitive Semitic nomad. [89]
To the Semite, however, I believe I have shown in my Lectures on Babylonian religion, [90] we must ascribe an important theological conception. In [94] historical Babylonia the gods were conceived of in the form of man. Man was created in the image of God because the gods themselves were men. ”

“ Divested of its idealistic side, however, there would seem to be no escape from regarding the Babylonian idea of the origin of things as monistic. [*] This idea has its reflection, though not its reproduction, in the first chapter of Genesis, in which, verses 2, 6, and 7, water is represented as the first thing existing, though not the first abode of life. This divergency from the Babylonian view was inevitable with a monotheistic nation, such as the Jews were, regarding as they did the Deity as the great source of everything existing. ”

“ There is a point beyond which it could not go without giving rise to a totally changed conception of the gods and their relationship to men. Prayer in its higher form, as the result of an irresistible prompting of the emotions, without any other purpose than the longing to come into closer communion with a superior Power, involves such a change in religious conceptions, and hence is conspicuous in the Babylonian ritual by its absence. ”

“ A mere barren list of divine names and titles, or even the assurance that theology had identified certain gods with one another, will not carry us very far; at most they are but the dry bones of a theological system, which must be made to live before they can tell us what that system actually was.
The study of ancient Babylonian religion is thus beset with many difficulties. Our materials are imperfect, [pg 258] and yet at the same time are perpetually growing ”

“ When we come, however, to the position held by the gods in the pantheon, their relationship to one another, and the traits which secured for them popular and royal favor, the differences between the Babylonian and the Assyrian phases of the religion will be found to be more accentuated. ”

“ Nothing is more common than the interchange of myths and popular traditions. They travel from one place to the other, and contradictory accounts of one and the same event may be circulated, and find credence in one and the same place.
The two distinct Babylonian versions of the creation of the world that have up to the present time been found, have come to us in a fragmentary form. Of the one, indeed, only some forty lines exist, and these are introduced incidentally in an incantation text; [682] of the other version, portions of six tablets [683] have been recovered ”

“ The goddesses of Babylonia, with few exceptions, become mere shadowy reflections of the gods, with but little independent power, and in some cases none at all. They owe what popularity they enjoyed to their association with their male companions. In consequence of this inferior rôle played by the female deities, the tendency becomes more pronounced, as we pass from the first to the second period of Babylonian history, to reduce by assimilation the small number that have independent attributes, until we reach a condition in which we have practically only one goddess, appearing under many forms. ”

“ This tendency was in a measure offset by the pride that the rulers of the second Babylonian period still took in parading at times, as large a number as possible of deities under whose protection they claimed to stand. As we pass from one age to the other, the number of minor deities thus invoked also tends to diminish, and the occasions likewise when they are invoked become limited to the more solemn invocations at the beginning and the close of inscriptions. ”

“ The theory of the triad succeeds in maintaining its hold upon Babylonian minds from a certain period on, through all political and intellectual vicissitudes. To invoke Anu, Bel, and Ea becomes a standing formula that the rulers of Babylonia as well as of Assyria are fond of employing. These three are the great gods par excellence. They occupy a place of their own. The kings do not feel as close to them as to Marduk, or to Ashur, or even to the sun-god, or to the moon-god. ”