The penitent continues:
Besides thee, there is no guiding deity.
I implore thee to look upon me and hear my sighs.
Proclaim pacification,[472] and may thy soul be appeased.
How long, O my mistress, till thy countenance be turned towards me.
Like doves, I lament, I satiate myself with sighs.
The priest once more sums up the penitent's prayer:
With pain and ache, his soul is full of sighs;
Tears he weeps, he pours forth lament (?).
A trait which appears in many of these psalms is the anonymity beneath which the offended deity is veiled. His or her name is often not mentioned, the deity being simply referred to as god or goddess, and at times it is left doubtful whether the sinner has 'sinned' against the demands of a god or a goddess, or against several deities. This feature is not without significance. In some cases, no doubt, the name of the specific deity was to be added by the penitent,[473] but in others this does not appear to be indicated. The anonymity is the natural result of the conception of sin involved in these productions. The sinner, becoming conscious of his guilt only as a conclusion drawn from the fact of his suffering from some misfortune, could only surmise, but never be entirely certain, wherein his offence consisted or what deity he had offended. In the case of the recital of incantation formulas, the question as to the offended deity was a minor one, and may indeed, at an earlier stage of thought, not have entered into consideration at all. This anonymity, therefore, which characterized the penitential psalms was not due to any advance in thought, but one can easily see how it led to such an advance. What may be called the personal aspects of the gods were less accentuated. The very fact that no particular god could in many cases be specified entailed, as a consequence, that the views held of the gods gained in abstractness. The general thought of one's dependence upon these supernatural powers, without further specification, superinduced a grouping of the gods under a common aspect, as the directors of man's fate. In short, the notion of deity, not indeed as a unit, but as a collective idea, begins to dawn in Babylonia. At the same time we must beware of exaggerating the force that this notion acquired. There is not the slightest trace of any approach to real monotheism in Babylonia, nor can it even be said that the penitential psalms constitute a bridge leading to such an approach. The strong hold that astrology at all times, and up to the latest periods, had upon both the popular and the educated mind was in itself sufficient to prevent the Babylonians from passing, to any considerable degree, beyond the stage in which the powers of nature were personified and imbued with real life. The penitential psalms presuppose this belief as much as any other branch of the religious literature; they merely illustrate this belief in the purest form of which, in the course of its development, it was capable.