The Assyrian and Hebrew Hymns of Praise

by Charles Gordon Cumming

To the servant who graciously calls upon thy name, be gracious;

For the king who fears thee determine a good fate;

To the sons of Babylon give generously.

It would seem that this petition might be little more than a pious conclusion, or even a postscript to the hymn. If this be true, then the main purpose of the psalm is that of praise, and one must class it among the hymns, remembering however that it is an evolution from the hymnal introduction of the prayer.

Very similar is the case of Sin No. 5. In this psalm are twenty-three lines of invocation, fifteen lines of ascription, and eleven lines of petition. Moreover the portion which we have called ascription opens with a couplet of question and answer:

Who is exalted in heaven, thou alone art exalted;

Who is exalted on earth, thou alone art exalted.

This couplet is followed by eight lines in praise of the word of Sin, expressed however in the second person, not the third. Unfortunately, the translation of four of the remaining lines is so uncertain that no conclusion can be drawn from them as to the nature of the whole psalm. However, the petition at the close is a general one in behalf of temple and city, and the calling upon the various gods of the pantheon to placate Sin is a recognition of the supreme place of that deity. Here again then, as in the case of the hymn to Sarpanitum, we have a hymn, standing at the end of the line of development of the hymnal introductions.

We have left of the hymns of Class I, two hymns which have no petition at the close. The first of these, however, the hymn to Enlil, may be regarded as introductory to the offering of sacrifices. Nevertheless it is practically an independent hymn and sung, as the conclusion shows, by a congregation:

Father Enlil, with song majestically we come. The hymn to Shamash (No. 7) is unique among the Assyrian hymns, because of its length, being four hundred and twenty-four lines. The style is uniform throughout. In the beginning of the poem line four is a repetition of line two, and line three simply adds the name Shamash to line one. As in other hymns so here the god’s name is held back from the first line in order that it may be inserted with greater emphasis in the second line. Here too there are repeated invocations to the god, that is we have an invocation and ascription of praise, then a second invocation and ascription of praise. Throughout the poem nearly every line is complete by itself and there is no strophic arrangement. Nor are there rhetorical questions, nor questions and answers, to relieve the monotony. Portions of it read like wisdom literature: