We find twelve constellations or signs of the zodiac are mentioned as set to fix the year. I am inclined to consider that the preceding words, “stars, their appearance in figures of animals he arranged,” relate specially to the stars of the zodiac. The inventor of this astrogony probably regarded the stars as originally scattered in an irregular manner over the heavens,—rather as chaotic material from which constellations might be formed, than as objects separately and expressly created. Then they were taken and formed into figures of animals, set in such a way as to fix the year through the observation of these constellations. It is hardly necessary, perhaps, to remind the reader that the word zodiac is derived from a Greek word signifying an animal, the original name of the zone being the zodiacal way, or the pathway of the animals. Our older navigators called it the Bestiary.[46] “Twelve months or signs in three rows.” Smith takes the three rows to mean (i.) the zodiacal signs, (ii.) the constellations north of the zodiac, and (iii.) the constellations south of the zodiac. But this does not agree with the words “twelve signs in three rows.” Possibly the reference is to three circles, two bounding the zodiac on the north and south respectively, the third central, the ecliptic, or track of the sun; or the two tropics and the equator may have been signified. Instead of “twelve signs in three rows,” we should, probably, read “twelve signs along a triple band.” The description was written long after astronomical temples were first erected, and as the designer of a zodiacal dome like that (far more recently) erected at Denderah would set the twelve zodiacal signs along a band formed by three parallel circles, marking its central line and its northern and southern limits, so we can understand the writer of the tablet presenting the celestial architect as working in the same lines, on a grander scale; setting the twelve zodiacal signs on the corresponding triple band in the heavens themselves.
The next point to be noticed in the Babylonian astrology is the reference to “wandering stars.” Mr. Smith remarks that the word nibir, thus translated, “is not the usual word for planet, and there is a star called Nibir near the place where the sun crossed the boundary between the old and new years, and this star was one of twelve supposed to be favourable to Babylonia.” “It is evident,” he proceeds, “from the opening of the inscription on the first tablet of the Chaldæan astrology and astronomy, that the functions of the stars were, according to the Babylonians, to act not only as regulators of the seasons and the year, but also to be used as signs, as in Genesis i. 14; for in those ages it was generally believed that the heavenly bodies gave, by their appearance and positions, signs of events which were coming on the earth.” The two verses relating to Nibir seem to correspond to no other celestial bodies but planets (unless, perhaps, to comets). If we regard Nibir as signifying any fixed star, we can find no significance in the marking of the course of the star Nibir, that it may do no injury and may not trouble any one. Moreover, as the fixed stars, the sun, and the moon, are separately described, it seems unlikely that the planets would be left unnoticed. In the biblical narrative the reference to the celestial bodies is so short that we can understand the planets being included in the words, “He made the stars also.” But in an account so full of detail as that presented in the Babylonian tablet, the omission of the planets would be very remarkable. It is also worthy of notice that in Polyhistor’s Babylonian traditions, recorded by Berosus, we read that “Belus formed the stars, the sun, the moon, and the five planets.”
In the tablet narrative the creator of the heavenly bodies is supposed to be Anu, god of the heavens. This is inferred by Mr. Smith from the fact “that the God who created the stars, fixed places or habitations for Bel and Hea with himself in the heavens.” For according to the Babylonian theogony, the three gods Anu, Bel, and Hea share between them the divisions of the face of the sky.
The account of the creation of the moon is perhaps the most interesting part of the narrative. We see that, according to the Babylonian philosophy, the earth is regarded as formed from the waters and resting after its creation above a vast abyss of chaotic water. We find traces of this old hypothesis in several biblical passages, as, for instance, in the words of the Third Commandment, “the heaven above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth;” and again in Proverbs xxx. 4, “Who hath bound the waters in a garment? who hath established all the ends of the earth?” “The great gates in the darkness shrouded, the fastenings strong on the left and right,” in the Babylonian account, refer to the enclosure of the great infernal lake, so that the waters under the earth might not overwhelm the world. It is from out the dark ocean beneath the earth that the god Anu calls the moon into being. He opens the mighty gates shrouded in the nether darkness, and creates a vast whirlpool in the gloomy ocean; then “at his bidding, from the turmoil arose the moon like a giant bubble, and passing through the open gates mounted on its destined way across the vaults of heaven.” It is strange to reflect that in quite recent times, at least 4000 years after the Babylonian tablet was written, and who shall tell how many years after the tradition was first invented?—a theory of the moon’s origin not unlike the Babylonian hypothesis has been advanced, despite overwhelming dynamical objections; and a modern paradoxist has even pointed to the spot beneath the ocean where a sudden increase of depth indicates that matter was suddenly extruded long ago, and driven forcibly away from the earth to the orbit along which that expelled mass—our moon—is now travelling.
It would have been interesting to have known how the Babylonian tablet described the creation of Shamas, the sun; though, so far as can be judged from the fragments above quoted, there was not the same fulness of detail in this part of the description as in that relating to the moon. Mr. Smith infers that the Babylonians considered the moon the more important body, unlike the writer or compiler of the book of Genesis, who describes the sun as the greater light. It does not seem to follow very clearly, however, from the tablet record, that the sun was considered inferior to the moon in importance, and certainly we cannot imagine that the Babylonians considered the moon a greater light. The creation of the stars precedes that of the moon, though manifestly the moon was judged to be more important than the stars. Not improbably, therefore, the sun, though following the moon in order of creation, was regarded as the more important orb of the two. In fact, in the Babylonian as in the (so-called) Mosaic legend of Creation, the more important members of a series of created bodies are, in some cases, created last—man last of all orders of animated beings, for instance.
If we turn now from the consideration of the Babylonian tradition of the creation of the heavenly bodies to note how the biblical account differs from it, not only or chiefly in details, but in general character, we seem to recognize in the latter a determination to detach from the celestial orbs the individuality, so to speak, which the older tradition had given to them. The account in Genesis is not only simpler, and, in a literary sense, more effective, but it is in another sense purified. The celestial bodies do not appear in it as celestial beings. The Babylonian legend is followed only so far as it can be followed consistently with the avoidance of all that might tempt to the worship of the sun, moon, and stars. The writer of the book of Genesis, whether Moses or not, seems certainly to have shared the views of Moses as to the Sabæanism of the nation from which the children of Abraham had separated. Moses warned the Israelite,—“Take good heed unto thyself, lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven; and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven.” So the writer of Genesis is careful to remove from the tradition which he follows all that might suggest the individual power and influence of the heavenly bodies. The stars are to be for signs, but we read nothing of the power of the wandering stars “to do injury or trouble any one.” (That is, not in the book of Genesis. In the song of Deborah we find, though perhaps only in a poetic fashion, the old influences assigned to the planets, when the singer says that the “stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Deborah, however, was a woman, and women have always been loth and late to give up ancient superstitions.) Again, the sun and the moon in Genesis are the greater and the lesser lights, not, as in the Babylonian narrative, the god Shamas and the god Uru.
We may find a parallel to this treatment of the Babylonian myth in the treatment by Moses of the observance of the Sabbath, a day of rest which the Babylonian tablets show to have had, as for other reasons had been before suspected, an astrological significance. The Jewish lawgiver does not do away with the observance; in fact, he was probably powerless to do away with it. At any rate, he suffers the observance to remain, precisely as the writer of the book of Genesis retains the Babylonian tradition of the creation of the celestial bodies. But he is careful to expurgate the Chaldæan observance, just as the writer of Genesis is careful to expurgate the Babylonian tradition. The week as a period is no longer associated with astrological superstitions, nor the Sabbath rest enjoined as a fetish. Both ideas are directly associated with the monotheistic principle which primarily led to the separation of the family of Abraham from the rest of the Chaldæan race. In Babylonia, the method of associating the names of the sun, moon, and stars with the days, doubtless had its origin. Saturn was the Sabbath star, as it is still called (Sabbatai) in the Talmud. But, as Professor Tischendorf told Humboldt, in answer to a question specially addressed to him on the subject, “there is an entire absence in both the Old and New Testaments, of any traces of names of week-days taken from the planets.” The lunar festivals, again, though unquestionably Sabaistic in their origin, were apparently too thoroughly established to be discarded by Moses; nay, he was even obliged to permit the continuance of many observances which suspiciously resembled the old offerings of sacrifice to the moon as a deity. He had also to continue the sacrifice of the passover, the origin of which was unmistakably astronomical,—corresponding in time to the sun’s passage across the equator, or rather to the first lunar month following and including that event. But he carefully dissociates both the lunar and the lunisolar sacrifices from their primary Sabaistic significance. In fact, the history of early Hebrew legislation, so far as it related to religion, is the history of a struggle on the part of the lawgivers and the leaders of opinion against the tendency of the people to revert to the idolatrous worship of their ancestors and of races closely akin to them—especially against the tendency to the worship of the sun and moon and all the host of heaven.
In the very fact, however, that this contest was maintained, while yet the Hebrew cosmogony, and in particular the Hebrew astrogony, contains indubitable evidence of its origin in the poetical myths of older Babylonia, we find one of the strongest proofs of the influence which the literature of Babylon, when at the fulness of its development, exerted upon surrounding nations. This influence is not more clearly shown even by the fact that nearly 2000 years after the decay of Babylonian literature, science, and art, a nation like the Assyrians, engaged in establishing empire rather than in literary and scientific pursuits, should have been at the pains to obtain copies of many thousands of the tablet records which formed the libraries of older Babylonia. In both circumstances we find good reason for hoping that careful search among Assyrian and Babylonian ruins may not only be rewarded by the discovery of many other portions of the later Assyrian library (which was also in some sense a museum), but that other and earlier copies of the original Babylonian records may be obtained. For it seems unlikely that works so valuable as to be thought worth recopying after 1500 or 2000 years, in Assyria, had not been more than once copied during the interval in Babylonia. “Search in Babylonia,” says Mr. Smith, “would no doubt yield earlier copies of all these works, but that search has not yet been instituted, and for the present we have to be contented with our Assyrian copies. Looking, however, at the world-wide interest of the subjects, and at the important evidence which perfect copies of these works would undoubtedly give, there can be no doubt,” Mr. Smith adds, “that the subject of further search and discovery will not slumber, and that all as yet known will one day be superseded by newer texts and fuller and more perfect light.”
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