The ordinances and temples were but the outward symbols of the ideas that had created them. The anthropomorphism of Semitic Babylonia is reflected in the anthropomorphism of the Israelites. The sense of sin and of the overwhelming power of the deity, the efficacy of penitence and the necessity of a mediator, [pg 500] are common to both Babylonia and Israel. Hence it is that the penitential psalms of the Babylonian ritual bear so striking a resemblance to the psalms of the Old Testament; hence, too, the individual element and deep spirituality that characterise them. Israel was indebted to Babylonia for something more than the seeds of a merely material civilisation.
It is true that there is a gulf, wide and impassable, between the Babylonian religion as we decipher it in the cuneiform tablets, and the religion of Israel as it is presented to us in the Old Testament. On the one side, we have a gross and grotesque polytheism; on the other, an uncompromising monotheism. Babylonian religion made terms with magic and sorcery, and admitted them in a certain degree to its privileges; they were not incompatible with polytheism; but between them and the worship of the one God there could be no reconciliation. It was the same with the sensualities that masqueraded at Erech in the garb of a religious cult; they belonged to a system in which the sun-god was Baal, and a goddess claimed the divided adoration of man. To Israel they were forbidden, like the necromancy and witchcraft with which they were allied.
But deep and impassable as may be the gulf which separated the Mosaic Law from the official religion of Babylonia, different as may have been the development of prophecy in Babylonia and Israel, the primordial ideas from which they started were strangely alike. The same relation that is borne by the religion of ancient Egypt to Christianity is borne by the religion of Babylonia to Judaism. The Babylonian conception of the divine, imperfect though it was, underlay the faith of the Hebrew, and tinctured it up to the end. The Jew never wholly freed himself from the dominion of beliefs which had their first starting-point in the “plain” of [pg 501] Babylonia; his religious horizon remained bounded by death, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continued to be the God of the living and not of the dead. It was in this world that the righteous were rewarded and the wicked punished; the world to come was the dreary shadow-land of Babylonian teaching, a land of darkness where all things are forgotten, but also a land where “the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.”
Index.
absolution, Babylonian doctrine of, [497].