I spoke of these Babylonians having just the same puzzles presented to their minds by what we call "the forces of Nature" as the Egyptians had, but said that they answered them a little differently. The Egyptians, as we saw, tried three different kinds of answer. They made a great god of the sun, they made a great god of Osiris, who was originally just the god of one place (like many others), and they made gods of all sorts of animals. Now, trying to understand the religion of the ancient Babylonians, we may rule out entirely all idea of animal worship—that is to say, the third kind of answer which the Egyptians made to their puzzles. It does not seem to have been thought of by the Babylonians at all. Let us forget those sacred cats and crocodiles of the Nile.
Osiris and Ra
And then, having cast them aside, we may see a very remarkable likeness between the other guesses that the two peoples made, and the way in which they tried to work the different guesses in with one another. For you may remember that the Egyptians, after forming the idea of Ra, the sun-god—a god that had his eye over all the world—and after imagining Osiris to be so powerful as to rule divinely over all Egypt: after they had thus exalted these two gods at the expense of all the others, they then began to regard the two as one—the one being but one form of the other—Osiris, as Ra, traversing the heavens, and Ra, as Osiris, ruling the earth. And since Ra, the Sun, was supposed to go under the earth at night, in order to get back to the east to begin his journey across the sky again the next morning, there was no great difficulty in imagining him, again as Osiris, ruling over the dead in the under-world also.
And now, in Babylonia, we find that almost exactly the same thing happened. Shamash was their name for the sun-god, the Egyptians' Ra. Then there was a god whom they called Merodach, or Marduk: he was the god of Babylon. But Babylon was not always a great city. The earliest capital city was south of Babylon. So Marduk was only as one god among many. But then, as Babylon grew and became the great centre, Marduk came to be regarded as the great god of all the country, exactly as had happened with Osiris in Egypt. And then, again just as in Egypt, they began to look on Shamash and on Marduk as two forms of one and the same great deity. Thus, it is wonderful how like each other were the guesses at truth in the two empires. Bel-Merodach, as he was sometimes called (Bel or Baal means Lord), became of such immense importance that the king was never considered to be properly appointed as ruler until he had been received by Merodach at Babylon, in the god's great temple there. The Assyrian kings, whose capital was Nineveh, in the north of Babylonia, when they had conquered their former masters of Babylon, still came to Babylon and paid their homage to the Babylonian god.
But, again as in Egypt, there were a number of other gods besides Marduk, in other places, whose authority was considered very powerful just in these places; and there were other heavenly bodies besides Shamash, the sun, that had worship. There was Sin, the moon, and especially there was Ishtar, the planet Venus, the Ashtaroth that you read of in the Bible. Ishtar was goddess of the spring and of all the life-giving forces in Nature.
And in Babylonia, as in Egypt, there were immense numbers of priests, and their power was great. They were occupied in the ceremonies to the gods, and in care of the temples, and a great part of their time was taken up in watching the stars and planets. They saw that many of the happenings on earth depended on the heavenly bodies—the sun made the seed grow in the damp warm earth; perhaps they knew that the moon affected the tides. At all events they saw that certain events on earth happened at the same time as certain other events in the heavens; so they grew to think that the earthly happenings were caused by the changes of the planets in the sky far more than they are.
Astronomy
But this mistaken idea about the influence of the stars on the earth had the excellent effect that it made these old Babylonian priests to be great star-gazers. They were great astronomers, and in spite of their errors made great steps in knowledge. And because you can go very little way in astronomy without mathematics, they became mathematicians too. We owe a great deal to what these wise men of the East, watching the stars so long ago, found out for us.
Some of the Babylonians also believed in fearful demons and powers of evil, and it seems as if they imagined their gods to take much more notice of their behaviour, their good and bad conduct, than the Egyptians' gods were supposed to take. We saw that the Egyptian idea was that so long as they performed all the religious rites exactly, that was all that the gods cared about. But the Babylonians thought that their gods did interest themselves a great deal about the right or wrong conduct of the men over whom they ruled, and punished or rewarded them in this life accordingly.
And through all this that I am telling you about the religion of the early Babylonians, I want you to bear in mind that Abraham, the founder of the Jewish nation, came from "Ur of the Chaldees," that is, from the south of Babylonia. That means that he came carrying with him beliefs and customs that he and his clan (if I may call it so) had learnt in Babylonia. Telling you these Babylonian beliefs, I am really telling you the origins of the beliefs which have come down to us through the Israelites. That is what makes their story so particularly interesting for us.