[AQ] It should be mentioned, however, that scholars have of late been inclined to see in this name an allusion to the passage of the Jordan at the time of the conquest of Canaan by Israel, after the Egyptian bondage.
BABYLONIAN RELIGION.
1. In relating the legend of the Divine Man-Fish, who came out of the Gulf, and was followed, at intervals, by several more similar beings, Berosus assures us, that he "taught the people all the things that make up civilization," so that "nothing new was invented after that any more." But if, as is suggested, "this monstrous Oannes" is really a personification of the strangers who came into the land, and, being possessed of a higher culture, began to teach the Turanian population, the first part of this statement is as manifestly an exaggeration as the second. A people who had invented writing, who knew how to build, to make canals, to work metals, and who had passed out of the first and grossest stage of religious conceptions, might have much to learn, but certainly not everything. What the newcomers—whether Cushites or Semites—did teach them, was a more orderly way of organizing society and ruling it by means of laws and an established government, and, above all, astronomy and mathematics—sciences in which the Shumiro-Accads were little proficient, while the later and mixed nation, the Chaldeans, attained in them a very high perfection, so that many of their discoveries and the first principles laid down by them have come down to us as finally adopted facts, confirmed by later science. Thus, the division of the year into twelve months corresponding to as many constellations, known as "the twelve signs of the Zodiac," was familiar to them. They had also found out the division of the year into twelve months, only all their months had thirty days. So they were obliged to add an extra month—an intercalary month, as the scientific term is—every six years, to start even with the sun again, for they knew where the error in their reckoning lay. These things the strangers probably taught the Shumiro-Accads, but at the same time borrowed from them their way of counting. The Turanian races to this day have this peculiarity, that they do not care for the decimal system in arithmetic, but count by dozens and sixties, preferring numbers that can be divided by twelve and sixty. The Chinese even now do not measure time by centuries or periods of a hundred years, but by a cycle or period of sixty years. This was probably the origin of the division, adopted in Babylonia, of the sun's course into 360 equal parts or degrees, and of the day into twelve "kasbus" or double hours, since the kasbu answered to two of our hours, and was divided into sixty parts, which we might thus call "double minutes," while these again were composed of sixty "double seconds." The natural division of the year into twelve months made this so-called "docenal" and "sexagesimal" system of calculation particularly convenient, and it was applied to everything—measures of weight, distance, capacity and size as well as time.
2. Astronomy is a strangely fascinating science, with two widely different and seemingly contradictory aspects, equally apt to develop habits of hard thinking and of dreamy speculation. For, if on one hand the study of mathematics, without which astronomy cannot subsist, disciplines the mind and trains it to exact and complicated operations, on the other hand, star-gazing, in the solitude and silence of a southern night, irresistibly draws it into a higher world, where poetical aspirations, guesses and dreams take the place of figures with their demonstrations and proofs. It is probably to these habitual contemplations that the later Chaldeans owed the higher tone of religious thought which distinguished them from their Turanian predecessors. They looked for the deity in heaven, not on earth. They did not cower and tremble before a host of wicked goblins, the creation of a terrified fancy. The spirits whom they worshipped inhabited and ruled those beautiful bright worlds, whose harmonious, concerted movements they watched admiringly, reverently, and could calculate correctly, but without understanding them. The stars generally became to them the visible manifestations and agents of divine power, especially the seven most conspicuous heavenly bodies: the Moon, whom they particularly honored, as the ruler of night and the measurer of time, the Sun and the five planets then known, those which we call Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury. It is but just to the Shumiro-Accads to say that the perception of the divine in the beauty of the stars was not foreign to them. This is amply proved by the fact that in their oldest writing the sign of a star is used to express the idea not of any particular god or goddess, but of the divine principle, the deity generally. The name of every divinity is preceded by the star, meaning "the god so-and-so." When used in this manner, the sign was read in the old language "Dingir"—"god, deity." The Semitic language of Babylonia which we call "Assyrian," while adapting the ancient writing to its own needs, retained this use of the sign "star," and read it îlu, "god." This word—Ilu or El—we find in all Semitic languages, either ancient or modern, in the names they give to God, in the Arabic Allah as well as in the Hebrew Elohim.
3. This religion, based and centred on the worship of the heavenly bodies, has been called Sabeism, and was common to most Semitic races, whose primitive nomadic life in the desert and wide, flat pasture-tracts, with the nightly watches required by the tending of vast flocks, inclined them to contemplation and star-gazing. It is to be noticed that the Semites gave the first place to the Sun, and not, like the Shumiro-Accads, to the Moon, possibly from a feeling akin to terror, experiencing as they did his destructive power, in the frequent droughts and consuming heat of the desert.[AR]
4. A very prominent feature of the new order of things was the great power and importance of the priesthood. A successful pursuit of science requires two things: intellectual superiority and leisure to study, i.e., freedom from the daily care how to procure the necessaries of life. In very ancient times people in general were quite willing to acknowledge the superiority of those men who knew more than they did, who could teach them and help them with wise advice; they were willing also to support such men by voluntary contributions, in order to give them the necessary leisure. That a race with whom science and religion were one should honor the men thus set apart and learned in heavenly things and allow them great influence in private and public affairs, believing them, as they did, to stand in direct communion with the divine powers, was but natural; and from this to letting them take to themselves the entire government of the country as the established rulers thereof, was but one step. There was another circumstance which helped to bring about this result. The Chaldeans were devout believers in astrology, a form of superstition into which an astronomical religion like Sabeism is very apt to degenerate. For once it is taken for granted that the stars are divine beings, possessed of intelligence, and will, and power, what more natural than to imagine that they can rule and shape the destinies of men by a mysterious influence? This influence was supposed to depend on their movements, their position in the sky, their ever changing combinations and relations to each other; under this supposition every movement of a star—its rising, its setting, or crossing the path of another—every slightest change in the aspect of the heavens, every unusual phenomenon—an eclipse, for instance—must be possessed of some weighty sense, boding good or evil to men, whose destiny must constantly be as clearly written in the blue sky as in a book. If only one could learn the language, read the characters! Such knowledge was thought to be within the reach of men, but only to be acquired by the exceptionally gifted and learned few, and those whom they might think worthy of having it imparted to them. That these few must be priests was self-evident. They were themselves fervent believers in astrology, which they considered quite as much a real science as astronomy, and to which they devoted themselves as assiduously. They thus became the acknowledged interpreters of the divine will, partakers, so to speak, of the secret councils of heaven. Of course such a position added greatly to their power, and that they should never abuse it to strengthen their hold on the public mind and to favor their own ambitious views, was not in human nature. Moreover, being the clever and learned ones of the nation, they really were at the time the fittest to rule it—and rule it they did. When the Semitic culture spread over Shumir, whither it gradually extended from the North, i.e., the land of Accad, there arose in each great city—Ur, Eridhu, Larsam, Erech,—a mighty temple, with its priests, its library, its Ziggurat or observatory. The cities and the tracts of country belonging to them were governed by their respective colleges. And when in progress of time, the power became centred in the hands of single men, they still were priest-kings, patesis, whose royalty must have been greatly hampered and limited by the authority of their priestly colleagues. Such a form of government is known under the name of theocracy, composed of two Greek words and meaning "divine government."
5. This religious reform represents a complete though probably peaceable revolution in the condition of the "Land between the Rivers." The new and higher culture had thoroughly asserted itself as predominant in both its great provinces, and in nothing as much as in the national religion, which, coming in contact with the conceptions of the Semites, was affected by a certain nobler spiritual strain, a purer moral feeling, which seems to have been more peculiarly Semitic, though destined to be carried to its highest perfection only in the Hebrew branch of the race. Moral tone is a subtle influence, and will work its way into men's hearts and thoughts far more surely and irresistibly than any amount of preaching and commanding, for men are naturally drawn to what is good and beautiful when it is placed before them. Thus the old settlers of the land, the Shumiro-Accads, to whom their gross and dismal goblin creed could not be of much comfort, were not slow in feeling this ennobling and beneficent influence, and it is assuredly to that we owe the beautiful prayers and hymns which mark the higher stage of their religion. The consciousness of sin, the feeling of contrition, of dependence on an offended yet merciful divine power, so strikingly conspicuous in the so-called "Penitential Psalms" (see p. [178]), the fine poetry in some of the later hymns, for instance those to the Sun (see p. 171), are features so distinctively Semitic, that they startle us by their resemblance to certain portions of the Bible. On the other hand, a nation never forgets or quite gives up its own native creed and religious practices. The wise priestly rulers of Shumir and Accad did not attempt to compel the people to do so, but even while introducing and propagating the new religion, suffered them to go on believing in their hosts of evil spirits and their few beneficent ones, in their conjuring, soothsaying, casting and breaking of spells and charms. Nay, more. As time went on and the learned priests studied more closely the older creed and ideas, they were struck with the beauty of some few of their conceptions—especially that of the ever benevolent, ever watchful Spirit of Earth, Êa, and his son Meridug, the mediator, the friend of men. These conceptions, these and some other favorite national divinities, they thought worthy of being adopted by them and worked into their own religious system, which was growing more complicated, more elaborate every day, while the large bulk of spirits and demons they also allowed a place in it, in the rank of inferior "Spirits of heaven" and "Spirits of earth," which were lightly classed together and counted by hundreds. By the time a thousand years had passed, the fusion had become so complete that there really was both a new religion and a new nation, the result of a long work of amalgamation. The Shumiro-Accads of pure yet low race were no longer, nor did the Semites preserve a separate existence; they had become merged into one nation of mixed races, which at a later period became known under the general name of Chaldeans, whose religion, regarded with awe for its prodigious antiquity, yet was comparatively recent, being the outcome of the combination of two infinitely older creeds, as we have just seen. When Hammurabi established his residence at Babel, a city which had but lately risen to importance, he made it the capital of the empire first completely united under his rule (see p. [226]), hence the name of Babylonia is given by ancient writers to the old land of Shumir and Accad, even more frequently than that of Chaldea, and the state religion is called indifferently the Babylonian or Chaldean, and not unfrequently Chaldeo-Babylonian.