The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

Speak not of things that are hidden, [practise] mercy,

When thou makest a promise (to give), give and [hold] not [back].”

Already, in the age of Khammurabi, the author of the story of the Deluge makes it the punishment inflicted on mankind for their misdeeds, and the Chaldæan Noah is rescued from it by Ea on account of his piety. The penitential psalms and ritual texts are full of illustrations of the same fact. It is true that the misdeeds are often merely involuntary violations of the ceremonial law or offences against the ritual, but the sense of guilt attaching to them is already profound. It required centuries before the Babylonian was able to distinguish between moral and ceremonial sin,—if, indeed, he ever succeeded [pg 494] in doing so,—but at an early period a consciousness of the heinousness of sin already lay heavily upon him, as well as of the need of repentance. A profound sense of his transgressions, and of the punishment they deserved, had grown up within him long before he had learnt to confine it to moral guilt. In this respect, again, he differed from the Egyptian: penitence and the consciousness of sin belonged to Babylonia; we look in vain for them in the valley of the Nile. The light-hearted Egyptian was too contented to feel them; the gods he worshipped were, like himself, kindly and easy-going, and the pantheism of the upper classes offered no place to a reproachful conscience.

But the gods of Babylonia, in the days when the Sumerian and the Semite had become one people, were stern judges. The theology of Eridu was coloured and darkened by that of Nippur; Ea might save Xisuthros from the waters of the Flood, but En-lil had doomed all men to destruction. And whether it was the sun-god who was worshipped, or the moon-god of Ur, it was still a judge who beheld and visited all the deeds of living men. In the sun-god the judge predominated, in the moon-god the father, but that was all. The father was also a judge, the judge was also a father, and the same word might be used to denote both.

But it must be remembered that the judgeship of the son-god and the fatherhood of the moon-god were confined to the present world. They were not dead gods like Osiris, whose tribunal was in another world. There was no postponing the evil day, therefore; a man's sins were visited upon him in this life, just as it was also in this life that his righteousness was rewarded. A death-bed repentance was useless; penitence, to be effective, must be manifested on this side of the grave.

Hence came the penitential ritual which forms so [pg 495] striking a feature in the service-books of Babylonia. It was reduced to a system, like the confessional in later days. The penitent was instructed by the priest what to say, and the priest pronounced his absolution. For the exercise of priestly absolution was another essential feature of Babylonian religion.

Besides the consciousness of sin and the conception of repentance, the idea of mediation must also be traced to Babylonia. On the earliest seals the priest is represented as acting as a mediator between the worshipper and his god. It is only through the priest that the layman can approach the deity and be led into the presence of the god. This idea of mediation has a twofold origin. On the one side, it goes back to the beliefs which saw in the magician—the predecessor of the priest—the possessor of knowledge and powers that were hidden from the rest of mankind; on the other side, it has grown out of the doctrine that the priest was the vicegerent of the god. It was thus the result of the union of two conceptions which I believe to have been respectively Sumerian and Semitic. The deified king or pontiff necessarily took the place of the god on earth; Gudea, for instance, at Lagas was the representative of the god Inguriṡa, and therefore himself divine. The fact that the gods were represented in human forms facilitated this conversion of the minister of the deity into his adopted son and representative; the powers and functions of the god were transferred to him, and, like the vassal-prince in the absence of the supreme king, he acted in the god's place.

The Semitic Baal was a lord or king of human shape and passions. He thus stood in marked contrast to the Sumerian ghost or spirit; and, as we have seen, the gulf between them is too deep and broad to be spanned by the doctrine of evolution. For the Sumerian the world outside man was peopled with spirits and demons; for the [pg 496] Semite it was a human world, since man was made in the image of the gods. The triumph of the gods of light and order over the monsters of chaos symbolised not only the birth of the present creation, but also the theological victory of the Semite over the Sumerian. And with the victory came a conception of the divine which was modelled on that of the organised State. As the human head of the State was himself a god, delegating his authority from time to time to his human ministers, so too in the world of gods there was a supreme Baal or lord who was surrounded by his court and ministers. Foremost among these were the sukkalli or “angels,” the messengers who conveyed the will of their lord to the dwellers upon earth. Some of them were more than messengers; they were the interpreters and vicegerents of the supreme deity, like Nebo “the prophet” of Borsippa. And as vicegerents they naturally became the sons by adoption of Bel; Asari of Eridu first takes the place of Ea, whose double he originally was, and then in the person of Merodach becomes his son; Nin-ip of Nippur, the messenger of En-lil, is finally transformed into his son, and addressed, like Horus in Egypt, as “the avenger of his father.”[401] The hierarchy of the gods is modelled upon that of Babylonia, and the ideas of mediation and vicegerency are transferred to heaven.

Repentance, the consciousness of sin, and mediation are thus conceptions all of which may be traced back to Babylonia. And each of them leads naturally, if not inevitably, to other and cognate conceptions. Mediation, as I have pointed out, is partly dependent on a belief in a doctrine of vicegerency, which, in combination with a profound sense of sin, leads in turn to the doctrine of [pg 497] absolution. And mediation itself is given a wide meaning. The priest mediates between the layman and his deity; the lesser gods between mankind and the supreme Baalim. M. Martin aptly compares the intercession of Abraham for the doomed cities of the plain, and the doctrine of the intercession of the Saints in the Christian Church.[402]

The consciousness of sin, again, is similarly far-reaching. It extends to sins of ignorance and omission as well as to sins of commission. Time after time the penitential psalms ask forgiveness for sins the very nature of which was unknown to the penitent. “The sin that I have done I know not,” he is made to say, “The transgression that I have committed I know not.”