A Mother-Goddess Theory
One outstanding feature of Babylonian religion is the worship of the great earth-mother. This is a universal religious phase, but in few systems do we find it so prominent as in Babylonia and indeed in the whole Mesopotamian tract. Efforts have been made to show that in Mesopotamia there encountered one another two streams of people of opposing worship, one worshipping a male, and the other a female deity. With those who worshipped the man-god—hunters and warriors with whom women were considered more as beasts of burden than anything else—man was the superior being. The other people who worshipped the woman-god were not necessarily more civilized; the origin of their adoration may have been a scarcity of women in the tribe. Where these two streams fused the worship of an androgyne, or man-woman god, is said to have resulted. But were there peoples who specifically and separately worshipped male and female deities? If certainty can be approached in debating such matters, these deities would assuredly be animistic, and a people who worship animistic gods do not worship one god or one sex, but scores of spirit-gods of both sexes. Wherever we find a mother-earth, too, we are almost certain to discover a father-sky. The cult of the great mother-goddess was of rather later origin. All localities and all regions in the Semitic world possessed such a deity and it was the fusion of these in one that produced Ishtar or Astarte, who was probably also the 'Diana of the Ephesians.' Perhaps the best parallel to this Semitic worship of the earth-mother is to be found in the mythology of the ancient Mexican races, where each pueblo, or city-state, possessed its earth-mother, several of whom were finally merged, after the conquest of their worshippers, in the great earth-mother of Mexico.
Babylonian Influence on Jewish Religion
But Babylonian-Assyrian religion is chiefly of interest to the student of comparative religion in that it casts a flood of light upon that wonderful Jewish faith with which the history of our own is so closely identified.
Professor Sayce[1] writes:
"There was one nation at all events which has exercised, and still exercises, a considerable influence upon our own thought and life, and which had been brought into close contact with the religion and culture of Babylonia at a critical epoch in its history. The influence of Jewish religion upon Christianity, and consequently upon the races that have been moulded by Christianity, has been lasting and profound. Now Jewish religion was intimately bound up with Jewish history, more intimately perhaps than has been the case with any other great religion of the world. It took its colouring from the events that marked the political life of the Hebrew people; it developed in unison with their struggles and successes, their trials and disappointments. Its great devotional utterance, the Book of Psalms, is national, not individual; the individual in it has merged his own aspirations and sufferings into those of the whole community. The course of Jewish prophecy is equally stamped with the impress of the national fortunes. It grows clearer and more catholic as the intercourse of the Jewish people with those around them becomes wider; and the lesson is taught at last that the God of the Jews is the God also of the whole world. Now the chosen instruments for enforcing this lesson, as we are expressly told, were the Assyrian and Babylonian. The Assyrian was the rod of God's anger, while the Babylonish exile was the bitter punishment meted out to Judah for its sins. The captives who returned again to their own land came back with changed hearts and purified minds; from henceforth Jerusalem was to be the unrivalled dwelling-place of 'the righteous nation which keepeth the truth.'
"Apart, therefore, from any influence which the old religious beliefs of Babylonia may have had upon the Greeks, and which, as we shall see, was not so wholly wanting as was formerly imagined, their contact with the religious conceptions of the Jewish exiles must, to say the least, have produced an effect which it is well worth our while to study. Hitherto the traditional view has been that this effect exhibited itself wholly on the antagonistic side; the Jews carried nothing away from the land of their captivity except an intense hatred of idolatry, more especially Babylonian, as well as of the beliefs and practices associated therewith."
Professor Ignatius Goldziher, of Budapest, has enlightened us, in a passage in his Mythology among the Hebrews, as to the great influence wielded by Babylonian upon Jewish religion. He says: "The receptive tendency of the Hebrew manifested itself again prominently during the Babylonian Captivity. Here first they gained an opportunity of forming for themselves a complete and harmonious conception of the world. The influence of Canaanitish civilization could not then be particularly powerful on the Hebrews; for that civilization, the highest point of which was attained by the Phœnicians, was quite dwarfed by the mental activity exhibited in the monuments of the Babylonian and Assyrian Empire, which we are now able to admire in all their grandeur. There the Hebrews found more to receive than some few civil, political, and religious institutions. The extensive and manifold literature which they found there could not but act on a receptive mind as a powerful stimulus; for it is not to be imagined that the nation then dragged into captivity lived so long in the Babylonian-Assyrian Empire without gaining any knowledge of its intellectual treasures. Schrader's latest publications on Assyrian poetry have enabled us to establish a striking similarity between both the course of ideas and the poetical form of a considerable portion of the Old Testament, especially of the Psalms, and those of this newly-discovered Assyrian poetry. It would be a great mistake to account for this similarity by reference to a common Semitic origin in primeval times; for we can only resort to that in cases which do not go beyond the most primitive elements of intellectual life and ideas of the world, or designations of things of the external world. Conceptions of a higher and more complicated kind, as well as æsthetic points, can certainly not be carried off into the mists of a prehistoric age. It is much better to keep to more real and tangible ground, and to suppose those points of contact between Hebrew and Assyrian poetry which are revealed by Schrader's, Lenormant's, and George Smith's publications, to form part of the contributions made by the highly civilized Babylonians and Assyrians to the Hebrews in the course of the important period of the Captivity.
"We see from this that the intellect of Babylon and Assyria exerted a more than passing influence on that of the Hebrews, not merely touching it, but entering deep into it and leaving its own impress upon it. The Assyrian poetry of the kind just mentioned stands in the same relation to that of the Hebrews as does the plain narrative texts of the Hebrews, and as does the sacrificial Tablet of Marseilles to the Hebrews' beginnings of a sacerdotal constitution. The Babylonian and Assyrian influence is of course much more extensive, pregnant, and noteworthy."
The Abbé Loisy in a French work, Les myths babyloniens, et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse (Paris, 1901), says a few things upon Jewish and Babylonian mythical relations worth translating: