The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

O sun-god, on this day purify and illumine the king the son of his god!

Whatever worketh evil in his body let it be taken away!

Cleanse him like the goblet of the Zoganes!

Illumine him like a cup of ghee;

like the copper of a polished tablet let him be made bright!

Release him from the ban!”[323]

The last words illustrate that strange mixture of spiritual thought and the arts of the sorcerer to which I have more than once alluded. The hymns to the sun-god were not yet emancipated from the magical beliefs and ceremonies in which they had had their origin; they were still incantations rather than hymns in the modern sense of the word. The collection to which they belonged must have been used by the class of priests known as “Chanters” or “Enchanters,” who had succeeded to the sorcerers and medicine-men of the pre-Semitic past; and the fact explains how it is that in many of them we [pg 416] have an alternating antiphonal service, portions of them being recited by the priest and other portions by the worshipper. In some instances, indeed, the verses seem to have been alternately intoned by the priest and the assistant ministers, like the canticles or psalms in the Christian worship of to-day. The practice had its origin in the magical ritual, where the sorcerer first recited the incantation, and then called upon the individual to repeat it once or oftener after him. It is another proof of the intimate connection that existed between the hymns and the incantations out of which they had sprung; like the Veda or the Zend-Avesta, the sacred books of ancient Chaldæa mixed magic and the spiritual worship of the gods together in a confusion which seems to us difficult to understand.

It was the same with the penitential psalms which constitute the third division of the sacred literature of Babylonia. In many respects they resemble the psalms of the Old Testament. Like them they are intended for public use, in spite of their individualistic form; the individual represents the community, and at times it is the national calamity and the national sin to which reference is made. After the revolt and reconquest of Babylon by Assur-bani-pal, when the city was still polluted by the corpses of those who had perished by famine or the sword, the prophets[324] ordered that its shrines and temple-roads should be purified, that its “wrathful gods and angry goddesses” should be “appeased by prayers and penitential psalms,” and that then, and only then, the daily sacrifices in the temples should be offered once more.[325] Doubtless the penitential psalms were in the first instance the spontaneous outpouring of the heart of the individual; it was his sufferings that [pg 417] they depicted, and his sins that they deplored; but as soon as they had been introduced into the worship of the temple, and become part of the public cult, the individual element in them fell into the background, and in the sins and sufferings of the individual both priest and laity saw those of the whole community.

Like the Hebrew psalms, again, they express the belief that sin is the cause of suffering and calamity, and that it can be removed by penitence and prayer to the offended deity. But whereas the Hebrew monotheist knew of one God only who could inflict punishment and listen to the repentant words of the sinner, the Babylonian polytheist was distracted by the uncertainty as to what particular divinity he had offended, and to whom, therefore, his penitent appeal should be addressed. In the penitential psalms, accordingly, it is the vague and general “god” and “goddess” that are invoked, rather than a particular deity. It is only occasionally that the names of special gods are introduced, and then a long list of them is sometimes given, in the hope that among them might be the divinity whose anger had been excited, and whose wrath the sufferer was eager to appease.

Sin, it must be remembered, in the eyes of the Babylonian included a good deal more than moral wrong-doing. There were ritual sins as well as moral sins, offences against the ceremonial law as well as against the moral or spiritual code. The sin was not unfrequently involuntary, and the sufferer did not even know in what particular respect he had offended against the divine laws. It may have been the eating of forbidden food, such as that which drove Adam and Eve from the sinless garden of Paradise. Or, again, it may have been a real sin, a sin of thought and word committed in the secrecy of the heart. “Was he frank in [pg 418] speaking,” it is asked in a confession which is put into the mouth of a suppliant, “but false in heart? Was it ‘yes’ with his mouth, but ‘no’ in his heart?” So far as the punishment was concerned, little distinction was made between moral and ceremonial sin; both were visited alike, and the sin of ignorance was punished as severely as the sin that was committed with deliberate intent.