The late lamented George Smith believed that amongst the fragments of the Chaldean Genesis, discovered by him, one might be interpreted as relating to the fall of the first man, and that it contained the curse pronounced upon him by the God Ea, after his transgression.[62] But this was an illusion, which a more profound study of the cuneiform document has dispelled. Smith's translation, which was too hasty, immature, and, moreover, hardly intelligible, turns out erroneous from beginning to end. Since then Mr. Oppert has given us an entirely different version of the same text,[63] the first possessing a really scientific character, in which the general meaning becomes tolerably clear, though there are still many obscure and uncertain details. One thing at least is now quite established: the fragment has no kind of reference to original sin and the curse of man. We must therefore leave it entirely outside the sphere of our present researches; endeavouring, however, to convey a warning to such as may be tempted, in dependence on the celebrated Assyriologist, to make use of it in a Commentary on the Bible.
Thus, then, we have no formal and direct proof that the tradition of the original transgression, as told in our Holy Scriptures, formed part of the cycle of the records of Babylon and Chaldea, respecting the origin of the world and of man. Neither do we find any allusion to the subject in the fragments of Berosus. But, despite this silence, a similarity between Chaldean and Hebrew traditions on this point, as upon others, has so great a probability in its favour as almost to amount to a certainty. Further on we shall return to certain very valid proofs of the existence of myths relating to a terrestrial paradise in the sacred traditions of the lower basin of the Euphrates and Tigris. But it behoves us to dwell for a few moments on the representations of the sacred and mysterious plant, guarded by celestial genii, that Assyrian bas-reliefs so often display. Up to the present time no text has been found to elucidate the meaning of the symbol, and we have to deplore a want, that no doubt will one of these days be met by the discovery of new documents. But the study of these figured monuments alone renders it impossible to doubt the high importance of this representation of the sacred plant. Whether it appear alone, or, as sometimes happens, worshipped by royal figures, or, as I have just said, guarded by genii in an attitude of adoration, it is incontrovertibly one of the loftiest of religious emblems; and what places this character beyond doubt is, that we often see above the plant the symbolic image of the Supreme God, the winged disc—surmounted or not by a human bust. The cylinders of Babylonian or Assyrian workmanship present this emblem no less frequently than the bas-reliefs of Assyrian palaces, and always under the same conditions, and evidently attributing to it an equal importance.
It is very difficult to avoid comparing this mysterious plant, in which everything points out a religious symbol of the first order, with that famous tree of life and knowledge which plays so prominent a part in the narrative of the earliest transgression. All paradisiacal traditions make mention of it; the tradition in Genesis, which sometimes seems to admit of two trees, one of life and one of knowledge, sometimes of one tree only combining both attributes, and standing in the midst of the garden; the Indian tradition, which supposes four plants on the four counterforts of Mount Méru; and, lastly, that of the Iranians, which sometimes treats of a single tree springing from the very middle of the holy spring of water, Ardvî-çûra, in Airyana-Vædja, and sometimes of two, corresponding exactly to those of the Biblical Eden. This similarity is so much the more natural, that we find the Sabians or Mendaites, an almost pagan sect, dwelling in the environs of Bussorah, who retain a great number of Babylonian religious traditions, to be also conversant with the tree of life, which they designate in their Scriptures as Setarvan, "that which shades." The most ancient name of Babylon in the idiom of the Ante-Semitic population, Tin-tir-kî, signifies "the place of the tree of life." Finally, the representation of the sacred plant which we assimilate with that of the Edenic traditions, appears as a symbol of life eternal on those curious sarcophagi, in enamelled clay, belonging to the latest period of Chaldean civilization, after Alexander the Great, which have been discovered at Warkah, the ancient Uruk.
The manner of representing this sacred plant varies in Assyrian bas-reliefs and exhibits different degrees of complexity.[64] It is, however, invariably a plant of moderate size, of pyramidal form, having a straight stem from which spring numerous branches, and a cluster of large leaves at its base. In one example only[65] is the plant represented with sufficient accuracy to enable us to classify it as the Asclepias acida or Sarcostemma vinimalis, the plant known as the Soma to the Aryans of India, the Haoma to the Iranians, the crushed branches of which afford the intoxicating liquor offered as a libation to the gods, and identified with the celestial beverage of life and immortality. More generally, however, the plant has a conventional and decorative aspect, not answering exactly to any natural type, and it is this purely conventional form which the Persians have borrowed from Assyro-Babylonian art, and which represents the Haoma on gems, cylinders or cones of Persian workmanship in the era of the Achemenides.[66] Such an adoption of the most usual shape of the sacred plant of the Chaldeans and Assyrians by the Persians, in order to represent their own Haoma—although the conventional bore no similarity to the real plant—proves that they recognized a certain analogy in the conception of the two emblems. In point of fact the Persians have shown great discernment in their borrowing and adapting; and where they took Chaldeo-Assyrian art for model and for teaching, they only adopted such of those religious symbols common in the basin of the Euphrates and Tigris, as might be rendered applicable to their own peculiar doctrines, and even to a very pure Mazdeism. The adoption of the image of the divine plant of the Chaldeo-Assyrians in order to represent the Haoma is, therefore, a conclusive sign that an assimilation of the symbols had taken place, and we find in it a new proof in support of the close connection between the plant guarded by genii on Assyrian or Babylonian monuments and the tree of life of paradisiacal tradition. Indeed, if Indians vary in opinion as to the nature of the mysterious trees of their earthly paradise of Mènu, even generally admitting of four different species, and if the Bundehesh-pehlevi, in bestowing on the tree of Airyana-Vædja the name of Khembe, appears to have had in view one of the plants placed by Indians on the counterforts of Mèru—i.e., the Panelea orientalis, which in Sanscrit is called Kadamba; it is the "white Haoma," the Haoma type that is almost always found in the sacred books of Mazdeans springing from the middle of the fountain Ardvî-çûra, and distilling the beverage of immortality. The Aryans of India connected a similar idea with their Soma, for the fermented liquor that they produced by pounding its branches in a mortar, and offered as a libation to their gods, is named by them Amritam, "ambrosia draught that renders immortal." The Haoma and its sacred juice is also called "that which keeps off death," in the ninth chapter of the Yaçna of the Zoroastrians. It is for this reason that, both with the Indians and the Iranians, the personification of the sacred plant and its juice, the god Soma, or Haoma, prototype of the Greek Dionysius, becomes a lunar divinity, inasmuch as he is the guardian of the ambrosia stored by the gods in the moon. And here we have another similarity forced upon us when we stand before Assyrian bas-reliefs, where the sacred plant is guarded by winged genii, having heads of eagles or peripterous vultures. These symbolic beings present, indeed, a singular analogy with the Garuda, or rather the Garsudas of Indian Aryans, genii, half men, half eagles. Now, in the Indian myths, more particularly in the beautiful story of the Astika-parva of the Mahâbhârata, it is Garuda who reconquers the ambrosia Amritam—that is, the sacred juice of the Soma, used for libations, that had been stolen by demons, and who restores it to the celestial god, himself remaining its guardian. The part played by him and by the eagle-headed genii of Assyrian monuments, with regard to the tree of life, is consequently the same as that which we find in Genesis assigned to Kerubin, armed with flaming swords, who were placed by God at the gate of Eden, after the expulsion of the first human pair, to prevent the entrance into Paradise, and to guard its tree of life.
In one part at least of Chaldea properly so called, to the south of Babylon, it appears as though it were no longer the type we have just been considering that was employed to represent the tree of life. It was the palm, the tree that furnished the majority of the inhabitants of the district with food, and with fruit from which they distilled a fermented and intoxicating liquor, a kind of wine; the tree to which they were wont to attribute in a popular song as many benefits as there are days in the year—this palm it was that was there considered the sacred, the paradisiacal tree. We have the proof of this in cylinders that show us the palm surmounted by the emblem of the Supreme God, and guarded by two eagle-headed genii. Moreover, the essential character of the tree of life lies in its fruits affording an intoxicating juice, the beverage of immortality; and accordingly the books of the Sabians or Mendaites associate it with the tree Setarvan, "the perfumed vine," Sam Gufro, above which hovers "the Supreme Life" in the same way as does the emblematic image of divinity in its highest and most abstract form above the plant of life in the monumental representations of Babylon and Assyria.
And, further, the fact that in the cosmogonic traditions of the Chaldeans and Babylonians respecting the tree of life and paradisiacal fruit, there was contained a dramatic myth, closely resembling in form the Biblical narrative of the Temptation, appears to be as positively established as may be in the absence of written texts, by a cylinder of hard stone preserved in the British Museum.[67] There we actually see a man and woman, the former wearing on his head the kind of turban peculiar to Babylonians,[68] seated opposite each other on either side of a tree, from whose spreading branches two big fruits hang—one in front of each of the figures who are stretching out their hands to gather it. A serpent is rearing himself behind the woman. This representative might serve as a direct illustration of the narrative in Genesis, nor as M. Friedrich Delitzsch has observed, can it lend itself to any other interpretation.
M. Renan has no hesitation in agreeing with ancient commentators in finding a vestige of the same traditions among the Phenicians in the fragments of the Book of Sanchoniathon, translated into Greek by Philo of Byblos. In point of fact it is there told, in connection with the first human pair, that Aion—which seems a rendering of Havah—"invented feeding on the fruits of the tree." The learned academician even thinks he discovers in this passage an echo of some type of Phenician figured representation, retracing a scene such as that recorded in Genesis, and visible on the Babylonian cylinder. Certain it is that, at the epoch of the great influx of Oriental traditions into the classic world, we see a representation of the kind figure on several Roman sarcophagi, where it indicates positively the introduction of a legend analogous to the narrative of Genesis, and associated with the myth of the formation of man by Prometheus. One famous sarcophagus in the Capitol Museum displays in the neighbourhood of the Titan, son of Japetos, who is performing his work as modeller—a pair—man and woman—in the nudity of primeval days, standing at the foot of a tree, the man's gesture showing that he means to gather its fruit.[69] We meet with the same group in a bas-relief built into the wall of the small garden of the Villa Albani in Rome, only here it is in still closer conformity with the Hebrew tradition, as a huge serpent is coiled round the trunk of the tree beneath which the two mortals are standing. It is this plastic type that was imitated and reproduced by the earliest Christian artists, when they attempted the representation of the fall of our first parents, which formed so favourite a subject with them, both in sculpture and painting.
On the sarcophagus of the Capitol the presence in proximity of Prometheus of one of the Parcæ drawing the horoscope of the man whom the Titan is forming, leads us to suspect in these sculptured subjects the influence of the doctrine of those Chaldean astrologists who had spread themselves, during the later centuries before the Christian era, throughout the Greco-Roman world, and had acquired an especial amount of credit in Rome. Nevertheless, the date of these last monuments renders it possible to look upon the representation of the first pair beside the tree of Paradise, of which they are about to eat, as directly borrowed from the Old Testament itself, as well as from the cosmogony of Chaldea or Phenicia. But the existence of this tradition in the cycle of the indigenous legends of the Canaanites seems to me placed beyond doubt by a curious painted vase of Phenician workmanship of the seventh or sixth century B.C., discovered by General di Cesnola, in one of the most ancient sepulchres of Idalia, in the Isle of Cyprus.[70]
There we actually see a leafy tree, from the branches of which hang two large clusters of fruit, while a great serpent is advancing with undulating movements towards the tree, and rearing itself to seize hold of the fruit.[71]
Now, we are justified in doubting that in Chaldea, and still more in Phenicia, a tradition parallel to the Biblical account of the Fall ever assumed a significance as exclusively spiritual as it does in Genesis, or that it contained the moral lesson also to be found in the story as given in the Zoroastrian scriptures. The spirit of grossly materialistic Pantheism in the religion of those lands rendered this impossible. Nevertheless, we may remark that among the Chaldeans, and their disciples the Assyrians, at all events from a given epoch, the notion of the nature of sin and the necessity of repentance was to be found more precisely formed than amongst the majority of ancient peoples, and consequently it is difficult to believe that the Chaldean priesthood did not, in their profound speculations on religious philosophy, seek for some solution of the problem of the origin of evil and sin.