[27] "Quiest. Natur.," 111., 29, ed. Haase, p. 235.
[28] LI. 108 ff.
[29] This was the most important festival in the Babylonian calendar; see above, [pp. 190], [296].
[31] The position of the sun at the vernal equinox varies, of course, only very slightly from year to year. Its displacement amounts to only a day in about seventy-two years; and, if we assign thirty degrees to each of the twelve ecliptic constellations, it takes 2151 years to pass, in this way, through a single figure of the zodiac.
[32] The fact that the bull was employed to decorate Ishtar Gate at Babylon affords no grounds for connecting the bull with the city-god. The bull is always associated with the God of Thunder (see above, [p. 294], n. 1). whereas Marduk was essentially a solar deity. This latter fact is made use of by the mycologists, who argue that an Age of the Sun would naturally follow an Age of the Moon, and that solar myths'are to be looked for as characteristic of this second period.
[33] The admission that the Marduk-myths were unaffected by the Ram is difficult to reconcile with the importance attached by the astral mythologist to the advent of a new Age.
[34] See his "Das alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients" (1st ed., Leipzig, 1904), and more especially the revised and enlarged English edition published in 1911 in the "Theological Translation Library." In his introduction to this edition of the work Canon Johns, while stating that it is not the province of the writer of an introduction to combat any of the opinions of the author, admits that he differs from Dr. Jeremias' opinions on many points. A reviewer of the volumes in the "Church Quarterly Review," Vol. LXXIV., No. 147 (April, 1912), pp. 166 ff., comments on "the apologetic impulse which is as marked in Dr. Jeremias as its form is peculiar." Readers who might be inclined to see in the work grounds for condemning the results obtained by the literary criticism of the Old Testament are warned by Canon Johns in his introduction that they "would be ill-advised to lean too heavily on this staff of Babylonia."
[35] Ezek. viii., 14.