The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

“An offence I have committed unwillingly against my god.

A sin against my goddess unwillingly have I wrought:

O lord, my transgressions are many, manifold are my sins!”

The disease or misfortune that had overtaken him was a proof of the sin, even though it had been committed involuntarily or in ignorance that it was wrong. “When I was little I sinned,” says another psalm, “yea, I transgressed the commandments of my god.”[403]

Repentance has its corollary confession, whether public or private. And the ritual texts show that both public and private confession was practised in Babylonia. Indeed, private confession seems to have been the older and more usual method. The penitential psalms are in the first person singular, like the Hebrew psalms; in public confession the Babylonian probably believed that a man was more likely to think about the sins of others than about his own.

Penitence implies a need of absolution. It also implies [pg 498] a belief in the sinfulness of human nature and the purity of the divine. The purity, it is true, may be ceremonial rather than moral, and in the early days of Babylonian religion the ceremonial element almost obscured the moral. But as time went on the moral element grew ever stronger, and the ritual texts began to be superseded by prayers of a more spiritual character. The prayers addressed by Nebuchadrezzar to Merodach rise almost to the height of a passionate faith in the absolute goodness and mercy of the god.

Speaking generally, then, we may say that the religion of Babylonia was essentially anthropomorphic, with all the faults and virtues of an anthropomorphic conception of the divine. But it was grafted on a primeval stock of Sumerian shamanism from the influences of which it never wholly shook itself free. It thus differed from Hebrew anthropomorphism, with which in other respects it had so much in common. Behind the lineaments of Hebrew anthropomorphism ghost or goblin are not to be found.

And yet between the religion of Babylonia and that of Israel there was much that was alike. It was natural, indeed, that it should be so. The Babylonians of history were Semitic, and Abraham the Hebrew had sprung from a Babylonian city. In the last lecture I drew attention to the similarity that existed between the temples of Babylonia and that of Jerusalem, a similarity that extended even to details. There was the same similarity between the Babylonian rituals and the Mosaic Law; the priesthood, moreover, was established on the same lines, and the prophets and seers of Israel have their analogues in those of Chaldæa. The religious law and ritual of the Hebrews looks back like their calendar to the banks of the Euphrates.

The same lesson is taught by the literary traditions [pg 499] of the Hebrew people. The cosmology of Genesis has its roots in the cosmology of Eridu, and the first home of mankind is placed by the Old Testament in Eden, “the plain” of Babylonia, which was watered by the Tigris and Euphrates. The Babylonian story of the Deluge is the parent of that which is recounted in the Hebrew Scriptures, while it was at Babylon that the dispersal of mankind took place. The background of Hebrew history is as purely Babylonian as the background of Hebrew ritual.

And, as Gunkel has shown,[404] the old Babylonian traditions embodied in the Book of Genesis must have made their way to the West at the very beginning of Hebrew history. They enter into the web of the earliest Hebrew thought, and are presupposed by Hebrew literature. The cosmology which saw the primordial element in the watery deep, and told of the victory that had been won over Tiamât, the dragon of chaos, must have been already known in Canaan when the language and script of Babylonia were taught in its schools, and Babylonian literature studied in its libraries. Long before the Mosaic age, the literary culture of Babylonia had profoundly affected the peoples of Syria, and had penetrated even to the banks of the Nile. Need we be surprised, then, if we find a “sea” in the temple of Solomon, the symbol of beliefs which had their origin on the shores of the Persian Gulf, or priestly ordinances which recall those of ancient Chaldæa?