It would be interesting to go more into detail concerning the special moral virtues consecrated by the two religions, or the various moral attributes specially attributed to the divinities. Such a study would demand two long treatises on Greek and Babylonian ethics. I have only time and power to indicate here a few points. The peoples of the old world show many general points of resemblance with each other in their moral ideas, and as compared with ourselves many salient points of difference. And moral statistics have rarely any value for proving the influence of one race upon another. As the Babylonian society was more complex in the second millennium than was the Hellenic, so must its morality have been; but it will not be found futile from the point of view of our main purpose to compare the two in respect of some special virtues, as we have already compared them incidentally in regard to the ideas about homicide.
The idea of the sin of perjury belongs to the earliest stage of religious ethic, and is the starting-point of much moral evolution. It is magical in its origin; for the oath-taker enters into communion with the divinity, by touching some sacred object or eating sacred food charged with divine power, which, being now within him, will blast him if he forswears. This dangerous power becomes interpreted as the anger of the deity by whom the person swears falsely. Hence the belief arose in early Mesopotamia and Greece, and generally in the cults of personal gods, that they punish perjury as a dire offence: such punishment will fall on the community or individual, and often on both: therefore a social moral instinct arises against perjury. This might develop into a moral idea among a progressive people that truthfulness, quite apart from the ritual of the oath, was dear to God in any case, and was therefore a religious virtue. And of this religious virtue attaching to truthfulness, however it came to attach, we have evidence in a Babylonian ritual of confession; before the evil demon can be exorcised, the priest asked certain questions of the penitent, and twice he asks, “Has he said, yea for nay, and nay for yea?”[148.1] But in no Hellenic record have I ever been able to find a religious parallel to this. The Hellenic religious spirit was most sensitive in respect to perjury, and no religion ever reprobated it more. In regard to ordinary truthfulness, Hellenic religion had nothing to say, no message to give, and Hellenic ethics very little. In the poetic story, Athena smiles on the audacious mendacities of Odysseus, and Hermes loves the liar Autolykos. Not that the religion consecrated mendacity, only it failed to consecrate truth.
It is only the great Achilles who hates with the hate of hell the man who says one thing with his tongue and hides another thing in his heart.[148.2] This is the voice of northern honour, but it has no religious import.
The ideas connected with perjury have this further value for the history of ethics, that they contributed much to the growth of international morality. It is often supposed that the earliest morality is merely tribal or clannish, and that in respect of the alien it is nonexistent; but this account of morality is false wherever perjury is found to be a sin. For one great occasion for oath-taking is a treaty or a contract with an alien power. And Homer is our witness that it was considered an immoral act for either Achaeans or Trojans to break their mutual oath. And this early idea of international morality inspires the Tel-El-Amarna correspondence and the Hittite treaty with Rameses. International morality also includes the duty of hospitality, and the pre-Homeric world had developed this moral sense strongly, and no doubt through the aid of religion; the stranger who puts himself into communion with Hestia, the holy hearth, or with Zeus Xenios, has a moral right to protection, and the abduction of Helen was regarded as a sin on the part of Paris against Zeus the god of the guest-right. I have not yet been able to find a cult-concept in Babylonian religion parallel to that of Zeus Xenios, or any reference to hospitality as a sacred duty; yet we know that this was and is as highly regarded by some Semitic races as it ever was by the Hellenic. We may suspect, however, that as Babylonian society was in many respects very modern and complex, the religious sanction of hospitality had decayed.
Looking now at the moral code as regulating the relations of members of the same tribe or community, we cannot doubt that clan-morality was already highly developed in the proto-Hellenic period: the rights and duties of kinsmen are the basis of this morality, and these were consecrated by the worship around the altar of Zeus “in the courtyard,” which may have been a primitive religious gathering-place for the kinsfolk of the early Aryan household. Homer is our first witness for the cult of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος,[150.1] but it is evident that it had been long in existence before his time. The earliest moral duty that the tie of kinship imposes is the maintenance of peace and goodwill, and as the kindreds grow into a political community, this becomes the basis of political morality and the corner-stone of the religion of the city. The Homeric age, and probably their predecessors, have attained this ethical religious idea; and though Homer is the first to give voice to it, we will not suppose that he discovered it: “outcast from clan, from holy law, and holy hearth is he who longs for bitter battle among the people of his own township.”[150.2] And to this early age we must also impute the religious morality of the monogamic family: the son fears the curse of the father and of the mother, even of the elder brother: “thou knowest that the powers of judgment defend the right of the elder-born”—Iris says warningly to Poseidon.[150.3] The Erinyes are specially charged with the preservation of the morality of the family and clan, and with the punishment of the two chief offences against the sacred blood of the kin, murder and incest. Of the first, enough has been said; the religious view of the earliest Greeks concerning the second is first attested by Homer, who mentions “the woes of Oedipus that the Furies of his mother bring to pass for him”;[150.4] he is thinking more of the incestuous marriage than of the parricide. As regards ordinary adultery, it is only from the later period of Greek literature that we hear protests against it as a sin, though the sentiment of moral indignation against the adulterer is no doubt pre-Homeric. One or two Greek myths that may reflect very early thought express the severe reprobation on the part of the father of unchastity in his unmarried daughter; myths telling of cruel sentences of death imposed for the offence. But these suggest no religious feeling; the sentiment may well have arisen from the fact that under the patriarchal system the virgin-daughter was the more marriageable and commanded a higher bride-price.
Looking at the code of family and social duties in the ethical religion of Babylon, of which the private penitential hymns and confessional ritual of exorcism are the chief witnesses, we find no figures whose concept and function remind us at all of the Erinyes, the curse-powers on the side of righteousness; but there is evidence in the literature of a family morality more advanced and more articulate than the primitive Greek. Among the sins mentioned in the ritual of confession, alluded to above, those indicated by the following questions are of interest: “Has he caused variance between father and son, mother and daughter, father-in-law and daughter-in-law, brother and brother, friend and friend, partner and partner? Has he conceived hatred against his elder brother, has he despised his father and mother, insulted his elder sister?”[151.1] All these acts of social misconduct are supposed to give a man into the possession of the evil demon, which must be exorcised before God will admit him to his fellowship again. Though magical ideas are operative in the ceremony, yet we discern here a high religious morality. And among the other moral offences clearly considered as sins in the same formula are such as shedding one’s neighbour’s blood, committing adultery with one’s neighbour’s wife, stealing from one’s neighbour. We find also a certain morality in the matter of property and commerce given a religious sanction in this text: “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark” was a religious law in ancient Babylonian ethics as in our present liturgy; it would appeal to the Hellene who reverenced Zeus Ὅριος; and there are reasons for believing this cult-idea to have been in vogue very early in Greece. The Babylonian code also recognises the sin of using false measure or false coin. And the confessional liturgy agrees in many points with the famous hymn to Shamash, where phrases occur such as “Shamash hates him who falsifies boundaries and weights”; “Shamash hates the adulterer.”[152.1] It excites our envy also, by stamping as sins certain unpatriotic acts, such as “the spreading a bad report concerning one’s city,” or “bringing one’s city into evil repute.”
We may say, then, that we find a high degree of morality in early Greece, a still higher at a still earlier period in Babylon, and both are obviously indigenous and natural products. And both reveal the phenomenon that marks an early stage of social morality: as the tribe or the family are one flesh, one corporate unit of life, so the members are collectively responsible, and “the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.” This was the familiar law of old Hellas, and we may say of the ancient Mediterranean society; the first to make the momentous protest against it, and to proclaim the responsibility of the individual conscience, was Theognis for the Hellenes and Ezekiel for the Hebrews. The Babylonian, advanced in moral thought as he was, had not escaped the bondage of the older clan-faith: in an incantation-hymn to Marduk,[152.2] the man who is seeking deliverance prays “may the sins of my father, of my grandfather, my mother, my grandmother, my family, my whole circle of kindred, not come near me, may they depart from my side.”
One other characteristic of early moral thought and feeling is that the sense of sin is not wholly ethical according to our modern criteria, but is partly regarded as something external to the will and purpose, something inherent in certain acts or substances of which the performance or the contagion renders a man a sinner. Thus in the Babylonian confessional liturgy and hymns of penitence, while there is much that would appeal to the most delicate moral consciousness, and is on the same level with the most spiritual passages in the Hebrew psalms, there is also a strong admixture of what is alien and non-moral. The confessional formula[153.1] asks a man, for instance, “whether he has sat in the chair of a person under a ban,” that is, “a man forbid,” a person impure and under a curse; “whether he has met him, has slept in his bed, has drunk from his cup.” In one of the penitential hymns that might be addressed to any god, “to the god that I know, and to the god that I do not know,” as the formula expresses it, we find such sorrowful confessions as “without knowing it, I have eaten of that which is abominable in the sight of my god: without knowing it, I have trodden on that which is filthy in the sight of my goddess”; “my sins are many, great is my transgression.”[153.2] This must be taken quite literally: contact with unclean things or with unclean persons, eating of forbidden food, is put in the same category with serious offences against social morality, and all these expose a man equally to the power of the evil demon and to the loss of his God’s protection. And this is a half-civilised development in Babylonian psychology of the primeval savage law of tabu: nor, as I think, is there yet any proof that the people of the Mesopotamian culture ever attained to the highest plane of ethical enlightenment; the later Zarathustrian religion of the Persian domination is strongly fettered by this ritualistic morality, in which the distinction between that which is morally wrong and that which is physically unclean, is never clearly apprehended.
This mental attitude is supported in the older and later Mesopotamian system by a vivid polydaimonism; the evil demon is on the alert to destroy the family and the individual; and where the demon is in possession the god departs. As the demon takes advantage of every accidental act, whether conscious or unconscious, the idea arises in the over-anxious spirit that one cannot be sure when or how often one has sinned, and all illness or other misfortune is attributed to some unknown offence.[154.1] The utterance of the Hebrew psalmist, “who can tell how oft he offendeth: cleanse Thou me from my secret faults,” may express the intense sensitiveness of a very spiritual morality, or it may be merely ritualistic anxiety. This latter is certainly the explanation of the strikingly similar phrases in a Babylonian penitential hymn—“the sins that I have done I know not; the trespass that I have committed I know not.”[154.2] The feeling of sin is here deep and very moving—“take away from me my wickedness as a cloak… my God, though my sins be seven times seven, yet undo my sins”; yet the context that illustrates this passionate outpouring of the heart, shows that the sin might be such as the accidental stepping on filth. Such ideas, allowed to obsess the mind, easily engender despondency and pessimism; and this tone is heard and once or twice is very marked in some of the most striking products of Babylonian religious poetry; for instance, in the penitential hymn just quoted from, the poet sorrowfully exclaims: “Men are dumb, and of no understanding: all men who live on the earth, what do they understand? Whether they do right, or wrong, they understand nothing.” But the strangest example of this is a lyric of lamentation that reminds us vividly of the book of Job, found in the library of Assurbanipal, and of great antiquity and of wide vogue, as Zimmern shows.[155.1] It is a masterpiece of the poetry of pessimism: the theme is the sorrow and tribulation of the righteous who has served God faithfully all his life, and feels at the last that he has had no profit of it; and his main thought is expressed in the lines, “If I only knew that such things were pleasing before God; but that which seems good to a man’s self, is evil in the sight of God: and that which according to each man’s sense is to be despised, is good in the sight of his God. Who can understand the counsel of the Gods in heaven? A god’s plan is full of darkness, who hath searched it out?”
It is easy in all this to detect the intimate associations with Biblical thought and feeling; and we may trace back to Babylon the daimonistic theory of morals that colours the New Testament, and has prevailed throughout the centuries of Christendom, and is only slowly losing its hold. But at the same time all this sharply divides early Babylonian thought from what we can discern of the early Hellenic, and more than any other evidence confirms the belief that the great Eastern and Western races were not in close spiritual contact at the time when Hellenism was in the making. Certain external resemblances in the thought and feeling about these matters are to be found in Hellas and in Mesopotamia; that is to say, the germs are identical, for they are broadcast all over the world; but the intensity of their cultivation, and their importance in relation to other life-forces, are immeasurably different. In the earliest Greek legend we discover the reflex of that external unpurposive morality that I have tried to define above: the acts of Oedipus were not according to our moral judgment ethically wrong, for they were wholly unintentional: yet in the oldest legend he is πᾶς ἄναγνος, as he calls himself in Sophocles’ play, and a sinner in the eyes of the gods; nor could all the virtue and valour of Bellerophon save him from the wrath of heaven aroused by the accidental slaying of his brother. Certain acts were supposed to put upon a man a quasi-physical, quasi-spiritual miasma, without reference to will or purpose, and render him hateful to God and man. But the bondage of the Greek mind to this idea was slighter and more temporary. And after all, the external sins in these legends were parricide, incest, and fratricide, dreadful things enough in themselves. We do not hear of any Hellene’s agony of remorse on account of treading accidentally on filth, or eating malodorous food. Homer, indeed, is marvellously untroubled by any ritualistic pharisaic code; we might even take him as a witness that there was none at all in earliest Hellas. We should be undoubtedly wrong. The early Greek must have had, like all mankind, his “tabus” in plenty; for to suppose that all that we find in Hesiod and in the later inscriptions were a sudden discovery, would be childish. I may be able to consider the evidence concerning early Greek tabus when I compare the ritual. I will only say here that we have reason to believe that at no period was the Hellene morbidly perturbed about these, or ever moralised them up to that point where they could exercise a spiritual tyranny over his moral sense. He might object to touching a corpse or to approaching an altar with blood upon him; but it does not seem to have occurred to him, as it did to the Persian, and with almost equal force to the Babylonian, that accidental contact with an impure thing instantly started into existence an army of demons, who would rush abroad to destroy the world of righteousness.[157.1]