[1107] I follow Zimmern's rendition of the line.
[1108] Schöpfung und Chaos, pp. 168 seq.
[1109] Adapa.
[1110] The phrase 'knowledge of good and evil' (Gen. ii. 17) is simply an expression equivalent to our 'everything,' or to the Babylonian 'secrets of heaven and earth.'
[1111] See pp. [476] seq. Sayce has even gone so far as to suggest an identification of Adapa (by reading Adawa) with the Biblical Adam, but this conjecture is untenable.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE VIEWS OF LIFE AFTER DEATH.
The problem of immortality, we have seen, engaged the serious attention of the Babylonian theologians. While the solutions they had to offer could hardly have been satisfactory either to themselves or to the masses, it must not be supposed that the denial of immortality to man involved the total extinction of conscious vitality. Neither the people nor the leaders of religious thought ever faced the possibility of the total annihilation of what once was called into existence. Death was a passage to another kind of life, and the denial of immortality merely emphasized the impossibility of escaping the change in existence brought about by death. The gods alone do not pass from one phase of existence to the other. Death was mysterious, but not more mysterious than life. The Babylonian religion does not transcend the stage of belief, characteristic of primitive culture everywhere, which cannot conceive of the possibility of life coming to an absolute end. Life of some kind and in some form was always presupposed. So far as man was concerned, created by some god,—Bel, Ea, Aruru, or Ishtar, according to the various traditions that were current,[1112]—no divine fiat could wipe out what was endowed with life and the power of reproduction.
No doubt, the impossibility for the individual to conceive of himself as forever deprived of consciousness, was at the bottom of the primitive theory of the perpetuity of existence in some form. Among ancient religions, Buddhism alone frees itself from this theory and unfolds a bold doctrine of the possibility of a complete annihilation. The question, however, whether the continuity of existence was a blessing or a curse was raised by many ancient nations. The Babylonians are among these who are inclined to take a gloomy view of the passage from this world to the existence in store for humanity after death, and the religious leaders were either powerless or disinclined to controvert this view.