I shall have hereafter to point out how this tendency on the part of the goddess to vanish, as it were, out of sight, leaving the god alone in possession, resulted in Assyria in raising its supreme god Assur to something of the position occupied by Yahveh in Israel. Assur is wifeless; now and again, it is true, a wife is assigned to him by the pedantry of the scribes, but who it should be was never settled; and that he needed a wife at all, was never acknowledged generally. Like Chemosh in Moab, Assur reigns alone; and though the immemorial influence of Babylonia kept alive the worship of Istar by the side of him, it was Assur and Assur only who led the Assyrian armies to victory, and in whose name they subdued the disobedient. It was not until the kings of Assyria became kings also of Babylon that Istar encroached on the rights of Assur, or that an Assyrian monarch betook himself to her rather than to the god of his fathers in the hour of his necessity. As long as the capital remained at the old city of Assur, none but the god Assur might direct the counsels and campaigns of its princes, or confer upon them the crown of sovereignty. When Tiglath-pileser III. acknowledged himself the son of Bel-Merodach, and received from his hands the right to rule, it was a sign that the older Assyrian dynasty had passed away, that the kingdom had become a cosmopolitan empire, and that the venerable traditions [pg 347] of Babylon had subjugated its conquerors from the north. The mixed races of Babylonia had overcome the purer Semites of Assyria, Istar had prevailed against Assur, and Semitic monotheism sought a home in the further West.
Lecture V. Sumerian And Semitic Conceptions Of The Divine: Assur And Monotheism.
In the preceding lectures I have assumed that the conception of the deity which we find in the later historical monuments of Babylonia and Assyria was of Semitic origin, differing radically from that formed of the godhead by the earlier Sumerian population. But it will doubtless be asked what basis there is for such an assumption; why may we not suppose that the later conception has developed naturally and without any violent break from older beliefs which were equally Semitic? Why, in short, must we regard the animism which underlay the religion of Babylonia as Sumerian, and not rather as the earliest form of Semitic faith?
The first and most obvious answer to the question would be, the fact that the older names of the superhuman beings who became the gods of the later creed are not Semitic, but Sumerian. En-lil of Nippur is the Sumerian En-lila, “lord of the ghost(s)”; when he becomes a Semitic god he receives the Semitic title of Bilu, Baal, “the lord.” And the further fact that in many cases the Sumerian name continued to be used in Semitic times, sometimes slightly changed, sometimes adapted to the needs of Semitic grammar, proves not only that the Sumerian preceded the Semitic, but also that the Sumerian cult on its literary and philological side was assimilated by the Semitic settlers in Babylonia. The gods and [pg 349] goddesses of Babylonia were Sumerian before they were Semitic; though they wear a Semitic dress, we have to seek their ancestry outside the Semitic world of ideas.
As we know them, they are clothed in human form. The deities whose figures are found on the seal-cylinders of Babylonia or engraved on the walls of the Assyrian palaces are all alike in “the likeness of man.” Bel-Merodach is as much a man as the king whom he adopted as his son; the sun-god who rises between the twin mountains of the dawn steps forth as a human giant to run his course; and Istar is a woman in mind and thought as well as in outward form. There are no animal gods in Babylonia, no monstrous combinations of man and beast such as meet us in the theology of Egypt. Not but that such combinations were known to the Babylonians. But they belonged to the primeval world of chaos; they were the brood of Tiamât, the dragon of lawlessness and night, the demons who had been banished into outer darkness beyond the world of light and of god-fearing men. Like the devils of medieval belief, they were the divine beings of an alien faith which the gods of the new-comers had exiled to the limbo of a dead past. Even the subterranean Hades of Semitic Babylonia recognised them not. The gods worshipped by the Semite were Baalim or “Lords,” like the men whom they protected, and whose creators they were believed to be.
Wherever the pure Semite is found, this belief in the anthropomorphic character of the deity is found also. Perhaps it is connected with that distinguishing characteristic of his grammar which divides the world into the masculine and the feminine, the male and the female. At any rate the Semite made his god in the likeness of men, and taught, conversely, that men had been made in the likeness of the gods. The two beliefs are but the [pg 350] counter sides of the same shield; the theomorphic man implies an anthropomorphic god. The god, in fact, was but an amplified man with amplified human powers; his shape was human, so too were his passions and his thoughts. Even the life that was in man was itself the breath of the god. That man was not immortal like the gods, was but an accident; he had failed to eat of the food of immortality or to drink of the waters of life, and death therefore reigned in this lower world. The gods themselves might die; Tammuz, the spouse of Istar, had been slain by the boar's tusk of angry summer, and carried into the realm of Hades,[268] and the temple of Merodach at Babylon was also known as his tomb. As the gods were born, so could they die; they could marry also and beget children, and they needed meat and drink like the sons of men. Indeed, the world of the gods was a duplicate and counterpart of the world of mankind. On “the mountain of the world,” the Babylonian Olympos, [pg 351] the supreme god held his court; around him were ranged his subjects and servants, for there were servants in heaven as there were on earth; celestial armies went forth at his bidding, and there were wars among the gods as among men. Even theft was not unknown among them; a legend tells us, for instance, how the god Zu stole the tablets of destiny which were hung like the Urim and Thummim on the breast of “father Bel,” and therewith acquired for awhile the right and power to control the fate of the universe. As far back as we can trace the history of Semitic religion, whether in Babylonia, in Canaan, or in Arabia, its fundamental conception is always the same; the gods are human, and men are divine.
It is not surprising, therefore, that as soon as the Semitic element becomes paramount in Babylonia, the king becomes a god. At Babylon he was made the adopted son of Bel-Merodach by taking the hand of the deity, and thereby became himself a Bel, a ruler of “the people of Bel” over whom he was henceforth to exercise undisputed lordship. In earlier days, Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the first Semitic empire in Western Asia, and his son Naram-Sin, were explicitly deified. Naram-Sin is even addressed as “the god of Akkad”;[269] and a seal-cylinder found by Gen. di Cesnola in Cyprus describes its owner as “the servant of the god Naram-Sin.”[270] The title of “god” is assumed by the Semitic successors of Sargon, to whatever city or dynasty they belonged; even the Sumerian princes in Southern Babylonia followed the example of their Semitic suzerains, and [pg 352] Gudea, the high priest of Lagas, built temples to his own godhead, where for long centuries his cult continued to be observed, and sacrifices and offerings to be made to him.[271] The occupation of Babylonia by the Arab or Canaanite dynasty to which Amraphel belonged, made no difference in the divine honours paid to the king; he still assumed the title of “god,” and his subjects adored him by the side of Bel. But a change came with the conquest of Babylonia by Kassite hordes from the mountains of Elam; the foreign kings ceased to be divine, and the title of “god” is given to them no more. As the doctrine of the divine right of kings passed away in England with the Stuarts, so too the belief in the divinity of the king disappeared in Babylonia with the fall of the Semitic dynasties. Nothing could show more plainly its essentially Semitic origin, and the little hold it possessed upon the non-Semitic part of the population. The king was a god only so long as he was a Semite, or subject to Semitic influence and supremacy.
The apotheosis of the king is thus coeval with the rise of Semitic domination in Babylonia. In the older Sumerian epoch we look in vain for any traces of it. Man was not yet divine, for the gods were not yet human. There was as yet no Semitic Bel, and En-lil of Nippur was but a “lord of ghost(s).”