'When thou risest in the eastern horizon of heaven,
Thou fillest every land with thy beauty.
*****
When thou settest in the western horizon of heaven,
The world is in darkness like the dead.
*****
Bright is the earth when thou risest in the horizon,
When thou shinest as Aton by day.
The darkness is banished, when thou sendest forth thy rays.
*****
How manifold are all thy works,
They are hidden from before us,
O thou sole god, whose powers no other possesseth,
Thou didst create the earth according to thy desire,
While thou wast alone.
*****
The world is in thy hand,
Even as thou hast made them.
When thou hast risen, they live.
When thou settest, they die.
For thou art duration, beyond thy mere limbs,
By thee man liveth,
And their eyes look upon thy beauty,
Until thou settest.'[[2]]

[[3]] See further the appreciative account of the reform by J. H. Breasted, History of Egypt, pp. 355-378.

The Influence of Babylonia.—The fact that Palestine used the script and language of Babylonia suggests that it shared other features of its culture. Among the Amarna Tablets were Babylonian mythological texts which had been carefully studied or used for reading-exercises in Egypt. One, the myth of Eresh-ki-gal and Nergal, narrating the descent of the latter into Hades, recalls the story of Persephone. Another, the myth of Adapa, tells how the hero who refused the food and water of life in heaven was denied the gift of immortality. It is inconceivable that Palestinian speculation did not turn to the mysteries of life and death, or that a people should acknowledge Nergal—or any other deity—without some formal beliefs. May we assume, therefore, that Palestinian thought was pre-eminently Babylonian? The question is as important for our period as for the Old Testament, and, in the absence of texts wherewith to institute a comparison, we conclude with a brief account of the bearing of the available evidence upon the problem.

The formulated beliefs, the theology, and the mythology which all races possess to some degree or other have grown up from that primitive philosophy of man which seeks to explain all that he saw about him. The old question: 'What mean ye by this service?' (Exod. xii. 26) is typical of the inquiry which ritual (and indeed all other) acts invariably demand; the danger lies in our assuming that the proffered explanations necessarily describe their origin, and in confusing the essential elements with those which are accidental and secondary. The excavations at Gezer suggest an illustration. What rites were practised in its caves or in the great tunnel which leads to the subterranean spring cannot be asserted, but there is a living tradition that the waters of the flood burst forth in the neighbourhood. Similar flood-stories can be localised elsewhere. In Hierapolis water was poured into a chasm below the sanctuary twice a year, and according to the Pseudo-Lucian it was here that the waters of Deucalion's flood were absorbed—hence the rite! But Melito reports that water was emptied into a well in the city in order to subdue a subterranean demon—evidently some earlier chthonic deity. Similar water-rites were known in Palestine and Syria as a 'descent' or Yerīd, and it may be presumed that an echo of the term survives in 'Ain Yerdeh at the foot of Gezer. We do not reach the root of the matter, but we can notice the diverse explanations of the same rite (which probably originated in a charm to procure rain), the ubiquity of certain traditions, their persistence, and the ease with which they adjust themselves. Further, it is instructive to observe how the rite has been shaped in the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles and has been dressed in accordance with specific religious beliefs (cp. Zech. xiv. 16 sq.).

Some archæological details may next be summarised. An altar at Taanach, with protuberances suggestive of horns, bore in bold relief winged animals with human faces, lions, a tree with a goat on either side, and a small human figure clutching a serpent. Though it may belong to the eighth or seventh century, similar scenes recur upon seals and other objects of all dates. Animals (especially of the deer or gazelle kind) are common, either alone or in conjunction with trees or men. Man-headed bulls with wings, sphinxes, and scenes of combat also appear. The ubiquitous myth of the dragon-slayer finds a parallel in the Egyptian scene of a foreign god (Sutekh) piercing the serpent with his spear, or in the later grandiose representations of the sturdy boy at Petra who grips the dragon.[[3]] One seal shows a seven-branched tree grasped by two men with the sun and moon on one side and two stags on the other. In a second, a human figure stands before a kind of pillar which is surmounted by an eight-rayed star. A third had been impressed upon a tablet from Gezer which bore nineteen distinct objects, including sun, moon, star, serpent, fish, crab, animals, etc. Some of the signs were at once recognised as zodiacal, and less elaborate specimens from Gezer and Megiddo furnish parallels. But inscribed Babylonian boundary-stones of our period bear analogous symbols; they are the emblems of the deities whose powers are thus invoked by the inscription should the land-mark be damaged or removed. The more gods, the more powerful the charm.

[[3]] The former is given by F. L. Griffith, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, xvi. p. 87, the latter by A. Jeremias, Alte Test., etc., p. 456 sqq., fig. 151.

Such objects with all their Babylonian associations may in certain cases have been imported or copied from foreign originals; the scenes could have been absolutely meaningless or even subject to a new interpretation. But it is as difficult to treat every apparently foreign object as contrary to Palestinian ideas, as it is to determine how sacrificial and other scenes would otherwise have been depicted. Religion found its expression in art; art was the ally of idolatry, and the later uncompromising attitude of Judaism towards display of artistic meaning implies that the current symbolism, etc., reflected intelligible religious conceptions. But it does not follow that these conceptions were everywhere identical.

Again, when a scimitar from a tomb at Gezer resembles that which a priest holds in a sacrificial scene upon a Gezer seal, we may suppose that the seal represents a familiar Palestinian ceremony. But the same type of weapon is found in Assyria and Egypt in the age of the Nineteenth Dynasty, and it is therefore impossible to treat it or the scene as distinctively Palestinian. The ubiquity of the dragon-conflict, too, warns us that the same underlying motive will present itself in a great variety of external shapes, and it is interesting to find that the idea of the slayer as a child actually points away from Babylonia. Features which find their only parallel in the accumulation of Babylonian evidence are not inevitably of Babylonian origin. Our land was exposed to diverse influences, an illustration of which is afforded by certain seals with cuneiform characters. The owner of one is styled a servant of Nergal (see p. [93]); it bears Egyptian symbols (those of life and beauty), and a scene of adoration, partly Egyptian and partly Babylonian in treatment. It has been ascribed to the First Dynasty of Babylon. Later come the seals of the Sidonian Addumu 'beloved of the gods (?)' and his son; on one is an Egyptianised representation of Set, Horus, and Resheph. Yet another combines two conventional scenes, the priest leading a worshipper before a deity (Babylonian), a king slaying a kneeling enemy (Egyptian).[[4]] In the presence of such fusion the problem becomes more complex. If, in the Greek age, it is found that Adonis and Osiris or Astarte of Byblos and Isis resembled each other so closely that it was sometimes difficult to determine which deity was being celebrated, the relation between the Baalath of Byblos and Hathor, or between Shamash and Amon-Re could have been equally embarrassing in our period. In fact, as Palestine continues to be brought into line with other lands the task of determining specific external influences becomes more intricate.

[[4]] See (a), Sellin, Tell Ta'annek, fig. 22, pp. 27 sq., 105 (Vincent, Canaan, fig. 117, p. 170 sq.); (b) Winckler, Altorient. Forschungen, iii. p. 177 sq.; and (c) E. J. Pilcher, Proc. Soc. Bibl. Arch., xxiii. p. 362.