Such emotion and mental attitude is consonant with the Hebraic and with much of the modern religious temper; but entirely out of harmony with all that we know of the Hellenic. The religious habit of the Hellene strikes us by comparison as sober, well-tempered, often genial, never ecstatically abject, but even—we may say—self-respecting. Tears for sin, lamentations and sighs, the countenance bowed to the ground, the body cleaving to the pavement, these are not part of his ritual; the wrath of God was felt as a communal more often than as an individual misfortune, and in any case was averted, not by emotional outpourings of the individual heart, but by ritual acts, solemn choruses, soothing sacrifice and songs, or by special piacular lustrations that wiped off the taint of sin. Tears are never mentioned,[193.1] except indirectly in the fictitious lamentations for some buried hero, annually and ceremoniously lamented, such as Achilles. Nor can we find in earlier Hellenic ethic the clear recognition of fear and humility among the religious virtues,[193.2] while both are paraded in the inscriptions of the later Babylonian kings, even in those that reveal a monstrous excess of pride.[193.3] The Hellenic god might punish the haughty and high-minded, he did not love the grovelling, but rather the man of moderate life, tone, and act. Such is God for the civic religion of the free man; while the Babylonian liturgy reflects the despotic society. The Hellene, for instance, does not try to win for himself the favour of the divinity by calling himself his slave. And the common phrase found on the Greek Christian tombs, ὁ δοῦλος τοῦ Θεοῦ, has passed into Christianity from Semitic sources.[193.4] This single fact illustrates, perhaps better than any other, the different temper of the old Oriental and old European religions; and there is a curious example of it in the bilingual Graeco-Phoenician inscription found in Malta,[194.1] commemorating a dedication to Melkarth or to Herakles Ἀρχηγέτης: the Phoenicians recommend themselves to the god as “thy slaves,” the Greeks use neither this nor any other title of subservient flattery. In this connection it is well to note the significance of marking the body of the worshipper by branding, cutting, or tattooing with some sign that consecrated him as slave or familiar follower to the divinity. The practice, which may have been of great antiquity, though the evidence is not earlier than the sixth century B.C., was in vogue in Syria, Phrygia, and in early Israel, and was adopted by some Christian enthusiasts, but no proof of it has yet been adduced from Mesopotamia. It was essentially un-Hellenic, but was apparently followed by some of the Dionysiac thiasoi as a Thracian tradition.[194.2]
In fact, it is only in the latest periods that we find in Hellas an individual personal religion approaching the Babylonian in intensity. The older cult was communal and tribal rather than personal; even the household gods, such as Zeus Κτήσιος and Ἑρκεῖος, the gods of the closet and storehouse, the hearth-goddess, were shared by the householder in common with the nearest circle of kindred. These cults were partly utilitarian, and the moral emotion that they quickened was the emotion of kinship: they do not appear to have inspired a high personal and emotional faith and trust. Nor usually had the average Hellene of the earlier period the conception of a personal tutelary divinity who brought him to life, and watched over his course, preserving, rebuking, and interceding for him. The Babylonian fancy of the great king sitting in infancy on the lap of the goddess and drinking milk from her breasts would not commend itself to the religious sense in Greece.
In Mesopotamia and in the other Semitic communities the fashion of naming a child after the high god or goddess was very common—commoner I am inclined to think than in Hellas, though in the latter country such names as Demetrios, Apollodoros, Zenon, Diogenes, point to the same religious impulse; but they appear to have arisen only in the later period. The Hellenic language did not admit, and Hellenic thought would not have approved of, those mystic divine names, which express as in a sacred text some quality or action of the divinity, such as we find in the Bible (“the Lord will provide”), and in pre-Islamitic inscriptions of Arabia, Ili-kariba, “My God hath blessed”; Ili-azza, “My God is mighty”; Ili-padaja, “My God hath redeemed.”[195.1] Such names served as spells for the protection of the child, and are speaking illustrations of the close personal dependence of the individual upon the god.
This is also illustrated by another fashion, possibly ancient, of Semitic religious nomenclature: not only was the individual frequently named after the deity, but the deity might sometimes receive as a cult-title the name of the individual. Of this practice among the polytheistic Semites the only examples of which I am aware come from a late period and from the region of Palmyra: Greek inscriptions of the late Imperial era give such curious forms as Θεὸς Ἀὐμοῦ, Θεὸς Οὐασεάθου, Θεὸς Ἀμέρου:[196.1] and these descriptive names in the genitive must designate the principal worshipper or founder of the cult; they are mostly un-Greek, as the religious custom certainly is, which is illustrated by such ancient Biblical expressions as “the God of Abraham,” “the God of Jacob.” We may find an example of the same point of view in the Phrygian title of Μὴν Φαρνάκου in Pontus, if we take the most probable explanation, namely, that it is derived from the Persian Pharnakes, the founder of the cult;[196.2] and again in a Carian dedication to Zeus Panamaros Ἀργύρου, as Ἄργυρος is found in the same neighbourhood as the name of a living man.[196.3]
The only parallel that Hellenic religion offers is the doubtful one, Athena Αἰαντίς, whose temple is recorded at Megara:[196.4] it may be that the goddess took her title from the hero because his grave was once associated with the temple. In any case, it is not so striking that the mythic hero should stand in this intimate relation with the deity as that the living individual should.
The ecstatic and self-prostrating adoration of divinity which is characteristic of the Babylonian temper might manifest itself at times in that excess of sentiment that we call sentimentality: we catch this tone now and again in the childlike entreaties with which the supplicator appeals to the deity as his father or mother; in the poetic pathos of the hymns to Tammuz, which sometimes remind us of the sentimentality of some of our modern hymns: he is called “Lord of the tender voice and shining eyes”; “he of the dove-like voice.”[197.1] Such language may be called “hypokoristic,” to use a Greek phrase; it belongs to the feminine sentiment in religion, and we are familiar with it in our own service. No echo of it is heard in the older Greek religious literature nor in any record of Greek liturgy. We can, indeed, scarcely pronounce on the question as to the tone to which primitive Greek wailing-services were attuned. We have only a few hints of some simple ancient ritual of sorrow: the pre-Homeric Greek may have bewailed Linos and Hyakinthos, as we hear that the Elean women in a later period bewailed Achilles; but if, indeed, the fragment of a Linos-threnody that the Scholiast on Homer has preserved for us is really primitive,[197.2] it has some pathos, but much brightness and nothing of the Babylonian sentimentality. The spirit of the Greek religious lyric strikes us as always virile, and as likely to be unsympathetic with the violent and romantic expression of sorrow or with endearing ecstasy of appeal.
The other trait that should be considered here in the religious spirit of the Mesopotamian Semites is fanaticism, an emotional quality which often affords a useful basis of comparison between various religions. This religious phenomenon is best known by its deadly results; but in itself it is most difficult to define, as are other special moral terms that imply blame and are highly controversial. It is only found among those who feel their religion so deeply as to be relatively indifferent to other functions of life. We impute fanaticism when the tension of religious feeling destroys the moral equilibrium or stunts development of other parts of our nature, or prompts to acts which, but for this morbid influence, would excite moral indignation. It may display itself in the artistic and intellectual sphere, as by iconoclasm or the suppression of arts and sciences; or in the discipline of individual life, as by over-ascetic self-mortification. Its coarsest and most usual manifestation is in war and the destruction of peoples of alien creed. A war or a slaughter is called fanatical, if its leading motive is the extermination of a rival religion, not for the sake of morality or civilisation, but as an act in itself acceptable to one’s own jealous god. The ascetic type of fanaticism is specially a product of the Far East: the murderous type is peculiar to the Semitic spirit, when unchastened by a high ethical sympathy or a sensitive humanism; for the chief record of it is in the pages of the history of Israel, Islam, and Christianity, so far as this last religion has been in bondage to certain Semitic influence. It is a question of interest whether we find fanaticism of this type in the Mesopotamian area and in the ancient polytheistic communities of the Western Semites. We might expect to find it because of the intensity of the religious spirit that seems to have been a common inheritance of all these stocks. The more fervent the worship, the more is the likelihood that the dangerous idea of a “jealous” god will emerge, especially when races are living under the illusion of the “fallacy of names.” By a fatal logic of devotion, the jealous god may be thought to favour or ordain the destruction of those who worship the deity under other names, which meant, for the old world, other gods. Only this must be carefully distinguished from the other more innocent idea, proper to all tribal religions, that the deity of the tribe, like a good citizen, will desire victory for his people’s arms.
As regards Mesopotamia, in his History of Ancient Religions Tiele finds in Assyrian history the same traces of murderous fanaticism as in Israelitish.[199.1] So far as I have been able as yet to collect the evidence, this statement appears to contain some exaggeration. For I have not found any record of a war that an Assyrian or Babylonian ruler undertakes at the command of a “jealous god” against a people whose only offence is an alien worship. The motives for a war appear to be of the ordinary human and secular kind; Palestine, for instance, is attacked, not because Marduk or Asshur personally hates Jahwé, but because the country holds the key of the route to Egypt. Such Biblical narratives as the destruction of Jericho, Ai, and the Amalekites find no real parallel in Mesopotamian chronicles. Yet in these also the temper of homicidal religion is strong enough to be dangerous. Neither in the Babylonian nor in the Assyrian divinities is there any spirit of mercy to the conquered. On that early relief of Annabanini of the third millennium B.C., the goddess leads to the king the captives by a hook in their noses to work his will upon them.[199.2] And in the later records of the great Assyrian Empire, the deities appear prominently as motive forces, and the most cruel treatment of captives is regarded as acceptable to them. The worst example that Tiele quotes is the great inscription of Assurbanipal, who, after speaking of himself as “the Compassionate, the King who cherishes no grudge,”[199.3] naïvely proceeds to narrate how he tore out the tongues of the rebels of Babylon, hewed their flesh into small pieces, and flung it to the dogs, swine, and vultures; and “after I had performed these acts, I softened the hearts of the Great Gods, my Lords.” But the lines that follow suggest that what “softened their hearts” was not so much the tortures and massacres, which they might approve of without directly commanding, but the religious measures that Assurbanipal immediately undertook for the purification of Babylon, whose temples had been polluted with corpses. Again, Tiglath-Pileser III. speaks of himself as the Mighty One “who in the service of Asshur broke in pieces like a potter’s vessel all those who were not submissive to the will of his god”;[200.1] and a little later, Sargon recounts how “Merodach-Baladin, King of the Chaldaeans,… who did not fear the name of the Lord of Lords… broke the statues of the great gods and refused his present to me.”[200.2] Yet it would be a misunderstanding to speak of these, as Tiele does, as if they were wars of religion, like the Crusades or the war against the Albigenses. Asshur sends the king to the war invariably, but rather for the sake of the king’s profit and glory than for the propagation of Asshur’s religion; for his enemies are very frequently of the same religion as himself. The above phrases must be understood probably in a political sense rather than a religious; the god and the king are so intimately associated that whoever insults or injures one, insults or injures the other. We may suspect that Merodach-Baladin’s breach of the divine statutes consisted in his omitting to send his usual tribute to Sargon. When two men had spoken scornfully of the gods of Assurbanipal, both the king and the gods would wish to avenge the insult:[200.3] it was natural, therefore, for Assurbanipal to torture and flay them. In warring against an alien people, the king is warring against alien gods; therefore if he sacks the alien city he may capture and take away, or—more rarely—destroy, the city’s gods. Thus Asarhaddon had taken away the idols of Hazailu, King of Arabia, and of Laili, King of Iadi; but when these kings had made submission and won his favour he returned to them the holy images, having first inscribed them with his own ideogram and a mark of the might of Asshur:[201.1] thus the gods, having the brandmark of the great king and the imperial deity, become tributary divinities. Or if he wished to wipe a people out, the Assyrian conqueror might break their idols to dust. Thus Assurbanipal broke in pieces the gods of the Elamites—the most deadly foes of Babylon—and thereby “eased the heart of the Lord of Lords.”[201.2] But many of the Elamite deities he led away; and of one of them he speaks in terms of reverence, Sašinak, the god of destiny, “who dwells in hidden places, whose working no one sees.”[201.3] It is more difficult to understand why Sanherib should boast to have destroyed the deities of Babylon after his capture of the city; for the leading Babylonian divinities certainly belonged to the Assyrian Pantheon.
The evidence here quoted justifies us in attributing fanaticism to the religious temper of Babylonia and Assyria; not because the wars were evangelising, undertaken in the service of religion, but because the savage cruelty that accompanied them is deemed, as it is in the early Hebraic view, acceptable to the national gods. The idea of divine mercy is potent in the liturgies; but neither morality nor religion would appear to have inculcated any mercy towards the alien foe; and this lack of moral sympathy may be termed a passive fanaticism. The same fanatic temper might be traced in the savagery of the punishments for offences against the State-religion, and was reflected also at times in the legal code.[202.1]
From other polytheistic Semitic communities we have no record, so far as I am aware, that bears on the phenomenon that we are considering, except the famous Moabite Stone, of which the style is in this respect strikingly Biblical. Mesha regards himself as sent by his god Chĕmosh to take Nebo from Israel, and he explains why he slaughtered all within the walls, man, woman, and child, “for I had devoted it to Chĕmosh.” Fanaticism does not so naturally belong to polytheism as to monotheism; yet it seems that at times the polytheistic Semites could be as prone to this vice of the religious temper as the monotheistic Israelites.