Chapter 23

14. There is one feature in the Biblical narrative, which, at first sight, wears the appearance of mythical treatment: it is the familiar way in which God is represented as coming and going, speaking and acting, after the manner of men, especially in such passages as these: "And they heard the voice of the Lord God _walking in the garden in the cool of the day_" (Gen. iii. 8); or, "Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God _make coats of skins and he clothed them_" (Gen. iii. 21). But such a judgment would be a serious error. There is nothing mythical in this; only the tendency, common to all mankind, of endowing the Deity with human attributes of form, speech and action, whenever the attempt was made to bring it very closely within the reach of their imagination. This tendency is so universal, that it has been classed, under a special name, among the distinctive features of the human mind. It has been called ANTHROPOMORPHISM, (from two Greek words _Anthropos_, "man," and _morphê_, "form,") and can never be got rid of, because it is part and parcel of our very nature. Man's spiritual longings are infinite, his perceptive faculties are limited. His spirit has wings of flame that would lift him up and bear him even beyond the endlessness of space into pure abstraction; his senses have soles of lead that ever weigh him down, back to the earth, of which he is and to which he must needs cling, to exist at all. He can _conceive_, by a great effort, an abstract idea, eluding the grasp of senses, unclothed in matter; but he can _realize_, _imagine_, only by using such appliances as the senses supply him with. Therefore, the more fervently he grasps an idea, the more closely he assimilates it, the more it becomes materialized in his grasp, and when he attempts to reproduce it out of himself--behold! it has assumed the likeness of himself or something he has seen, heard, touched--the spirituality of it has become weighted with flesh, even as it is in himself. It is as it were a reproduction, in the intellectual world, of the eternal strife, in physical nature, between the two opposed forces of attraction and repulsion, the centrifugal and centripetal, of which the final result is to keep each body in its place, with a well-defined and limited range of motion allotted to it. Thus, however pure and spiritual the conception of the Deity may be, man, in making it real to himself, in bringing it down within his reach and ken, within the shrine of his heart, _will_, and _must_ perforce make of it a Being, human not only in shape, but also in thought and feeling. How otherwise could he grasp it at all? And the accessories with which he will surround it will necessarily be suggested by his own experience, copied from those among which he moves habitually himself. "Walking in the garden in the cool of the day" is an essentially Oriental and Southern recreation, and came quite naturally to the mind of a writer living in a land steeped in sunshine and sultriness. Had the writer been a Northerner, a denizen of snow-clad plains and ice-bound rivers, the Lord might probably have been represented as coming in a swift, fur-lined sleigh. Anthropomorphism, then, is in itself neither mythology nor idolatry; but it is very clear that it can with the utmost ease glide into either or both, with just a little help from poetry and, especially, from art, in its innocent endeavor to fix in tangible form the vague imaginings and gropings, of which words often are but a fleeting and feeble rendering. Hence the banishment of all material symbols, the absolute prohibition of any images whatever as an accessory of religious worship, which, next to the recognition of One only God, is the keystone of the Hebrew law:--"Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.--Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them" (Exodus, xx. 3-5).

But, to continue our parallel.

15. The ten antediluvian kings of Berosus, who succeed the apparition of the divine Man-Fish, Êa-Oannes (see p. 196), have their exact counterpart in the ten antediluvian patriarchs of Genesis, v. Like the Chaldean kings, the patriarchs live an unnatural number of years. Only the extravagant figures of the Chaldean tradition are considerably reduced in the Hebrew version. While the former allots to its kings reigns of tens of thousands of years (see p. 196); the latter cuts them down to hundreds, and the utmost that it allows to any of its patriarchs is nine hundred and sixty-nine years of life (Methuselah).

16. The resemblances between the two Deluge narratives are so obvious and continuous, that it is not these, but the differences that need pointing out. Here again the sober, severely monotheistic character of the Hebrew narrative contrasts most strikingly with the exuberant polytheism of the Chaldean one, in which Heaven, Sun, Storm, Sea, even Rain are personified, deified, and consistently act their several appropriate and most dramatic parts in the great cataclysm, while Nature herself, as the Great Mother of beings and fosterer of life, is represented, in the person of Ishtar, lamenting the slaughter of men (see p. 327). Apart from this fundamental difference in spirit, the identity in all the essential points of fact is amazing, and variations occur only in lesser details. The most characteristic one is that, while the Chaldean version describes the building and furnishing of a _ship_, with all the accuracy of much seafaring knowledge, and does not forget even to name the pilot, the Hebrew writer, with the clumsiness and ignorance of nautical matters natural to an inland people unfamiliar with the sea or the appearance of ships, speaks only of an _ark_ or _chest_. The greatest discrepancy is in the duration of the flood, which is much shorter in the Chaldean text than in the Hebrew. On the seventh day already, Hâsisadra sends out the dove (see p. 316). But then in the Biblical narrative itself, made up, as was remarked above, of two parallel texts joined together, this same point is given differently in different places. According to Genesis, vii. 12, "the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights," while verse 24 of the same chapter tells us that "the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days." Again, the number of the saved is far larger in the Chaldean account: Hâsisadra takes with him into the ship all his men-servants, his women-servants, and even his "nearest friends," while Noah is allowed to save only his own immediate family, "his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives" (Genesis, vi. 18). Then, the incident of the birds is differently told: Hâsisadra sends out three birds, the dove, the swallow, and the raven; Noah only two--first the raven, then three times in succession the dove. But it is startling to find both narratives more than once using the same words. Thus the Hebrew writer tells how Noah "sent forth a raven, which went to and fro," and how "the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot and returned." Hâsisadra relates: "I took out a dove and sent it forth. The dove went forth, to and fro, but found no resting-place and returned." And further, when Hâsisadra describes the sacrifice he offered on the top of Mount Nizir, after he came forth from the ship, he says: "The gods smelled a savor; the gods smelled a sweet savor." "And the Lord smelled a sweet savor," says Genesis,--viii. 21--of Noah's burnt-offering. These few hints must suffice to show how instructive and entertaining is a parallel study of the two narratives; it can be best done by attentively reading both alternately, and comparing them together, paragraph by paragraph.

17. The legend of the Tower of Languages (see above, p. 293, and Genesis, xi. 3-9), is the last in the series of parallel Chaldean and Hebrew traditions. In the Bible it is immediately followed by the detailed genealogy of the Hebrews from Shem to Abraham. Therewith evidently ends the connection between the two people, who are severed for all time from the moment that Abraham goes forth with his tribe from Ur of the Chaldees, probably in the reign of Amarpal (father of Hammurabi), whom the Bible calls Amraphel, king of Shineâr. The reign of Hammurabi was, as we have already seen (see p. 219), a prosperous and brilliant one. He was originally king of Tintir (the oldest name of Babylon), and when he united all the cities and local rulers of Chaldea under his supremacy, he assorted the pre-eminence among them for his own city, which he began to call by its new name, KA-DIMIRRA (Accadian for "Gate of God," which was translated into the Semitic BAB-IL). This king in every respect opens a new chapter in the history of Chaldea. Moreover, a great movement was taking place in all the region between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf; nations were forming and growing, and Chaldea's most formidable rival and future conqueror, Assyria, was gradually gathering strength in the north, a fierce young lion-cub. By this newcomer among nations our attention will henceforth mainly be claimed. Let us, therefore, pause on the high place to which we have now arrived, and, casting a glance backward, take a rapid survey of the ground we have covered.

18. Looking with strained eyes into a past dim and gray with the scarce-lifting mists of unnumbered ages, we behold our starting-point, the low land by the Gulf, Shumir, taking shape and color under the rule of Turanian settlers, the oldest known nation in the world. They drain and till the land, they make bricks and build cities, and prosper materially. But the spirit in them is dark and lives in cowering terror of self-created demons and evil things, which they yet believe they can control and compel. So their religion is one, not of worship and thanksgiving, but of dire conjuring and incantation, inconceivable superstition and witchcraft, an unutterable dreariness hardly lightened by the glimmering of a nobler faith, in the conception of the wise and beneficent Êa and his ever benevolently busy son, Meridug. But gradually there comes a change. Shumir lifts its gaze upward, and as it takes in more the beauty and the goodness of the world--in Sun and Moon and Stars, in the wholesome Waters and the purifying serviceable Fire, the good and divine Powers--the Gods multiply and the host of elementary spirits, mostly evil, becomes secondary. This change is greatly helped by the arrival of the meditative, star-gazing strangers, who take hold of the nature-worship and the nature-myths they find among the people to which they have come--a higher and more advanced race--and weave these, with their own star-worship and astrological lore, into a new faith, a religious system most ingeniously combined, elaborately harmonized, and full of profoundest meaning. The new religion is preached not only in words, but in brick and stone: temples arise all over the land, erected by the _patesis_--the priest-kings of the different cities--and libraries in which the priestly colleges reverently treasure both their own works and the older religious lore of the country. The ancient Turanian names of the gods are gradually translated into the new Cushito-Semitic language; yet the prayers and hymns, as well as the incantations, are still preserved in the original tongue, for the people of Turanian Shumir are the more numerous, and must be ruled and conciliated, not alienated. The more northern region, Accad, is, indeed, more thinly peopled; there the tribes of Semites, who now arrive in frequent instalments, spread rapidly and unhindered. The cities of Accad with their temples soon rival those of Shumir and strive to eclipse them, and their _patesis_ labor to predominate politically over those of the South. And it is with the North that the victory at first remains; its pre-eminence is asserted in the time of Sharrukin of Agadê, about 3800 B.C., but is resumed by the South some thousand years later, when a powerful dynasty (that to which belong Ur-êa and his son Dungi) establishes itself in Ur, while Tintir, the future head and centre of the united land of Chaldea, the great Babylon, if existing at all, is not yet heard of. It is these kings of Ur who first take the significant title "kings of Shumir and Accad." Meanwhile new and higher moral influences have been at work; the Semitic immigration has quickened the half mythical, half astronomical religion with a more spiritual element--of fervent adoration, of prayerful trust, of passionate contrition and self-humiliation in the bitter consciousness of sin, hitherto foreign to it, and has produced a new and beautiful religious literature, which marks its third and last stage. To this stage belong the often mentioned "Penitential Psalms," Semitic, nay, rather Hebrew in spirit, although still written in the old Turanian language (but in the northern dialect of Accad, a fact that in itself bears witness to their comparative lateness and the locality in which they sprang up), and too strikingly identical with similar songs of the golden age of Hebrew poetry in substance and form, not to have been the models from which the latter, by a sort of unconscious heredity, drew its inspirations. Then comes the great Elamitic invasion, with its plundering of cities, desecration of temples and sanctuaries, followed probably by several more through a period of at least three hundred years. The last, that of Khudur Lagamar, since it brings prominently forward the founder of the Hebrew nation, deserves to be particularly mentioned by that nation's historians, and, inasmuch as it coincides with the reign of Amarpal, king of Tintir and father of Hammurabi, serves to establish an important landmark in the history both of the Jews and of Chaldea. When we reach this comparatively recent date the mists have in great part rolled aside, and as we turn from the ages we have just surveyed to those that still lie before us, history guides us with a bolder step and shows us the landscape in a twilight which, though still dim and sometimes misleading, is yet that of breaking day, not of descending night.

19. When we attempt to realize the prodigious vastness and remoteness of the horizon thus opened before us, a feeling akin to awe overcomes us. Until within a very few years, Egypt gloried in the undisputed boast of being the oldest country in the world, i.e., of reaching back, by its annals and monuments, to an earlier date than any other. But the discoveries that are continually being made in the valley of the two great rivers have forever silenced that boast. Chaldea points to a monumentally recorded date nearly 4000 B.C. This is more than Egypt can do. Her oldest authentic monuments,--her great Pyramids, are considerably later. Mr. F. Hommel, one of the leaders of Assyriology, forcibly expresses this feeling of wonder in a recent publication:[BK] "If," he says, "the Semites were already settled in Northern Babylonia (Accad) in the beginning of the fourth thousand B.C., in possession of the fully developed Shumiro-Accadian culture adopted by them,--a culture, moreover, which appears to have sprouted in Accad as a cutting from Shumir--then the latter must naturally be far, far older still, and have existed in its completed form IN THE FIFTH THOUSAND B.C.--an age to which I now unhesitatingly ascribe the South-Babylonian incantations." This would give our mental vision a sweep of full six thousand years, a pretty respectable figure! But when we remember that these first known settlers of Shumir came from somewhere else, and that they brought with them more than the rudiments of civilization, we are at once thrown back at least a couple of thousands of years more. For it must have taken all of that and more for men to pass from a life spent in caves and hunting the wild beasts to a stage of culture comprising the invention of a complete system of writing, the knowledge and working of metals, even to the mixing of copper and tin into bronze, and an expertness in agriculture equal not only to tilling, but to draining land. If we further pursue humanity--losing at last all count of time in years or even centuries--back to its original separation, to its first appearance on the earth,--if we go further still and try to think of the ages upon ages during which man existed not at all, yet the earth did, and was beautiful to look upon--(_had_ there been any to look on it), and good for the creatures who had it all to themselves--a dizziness comes over our senses, before the infinity of time, and we draw back, faint and awed, as we do when astronomy launches us, on a slender thread of figures, into the infinity of space. The six ages of a thousand years each which are all that our mind can firmly grasp then come to seem to us a very poor and puny fraction of eternity, to which we are tempted to apply almost scornfully the words spoken by the poet of as many years: "Six ages! six little ages! six drops of time!"[BL]

FOOTNOTES:

[BJ] Maspero, "Histoire Ancienne," p. 173.

[BK] Ztschr. für Keilschriftforschung, "Zur altbabylonischen Chronologie," Heft I.

[BL] Matthew Arnold, in "Mycerinus":

"Six years! six little years! six drops of time!"

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VII.

Professor Louis Dyer has devoted some time to preparing a free metrical translation of "Ishtar's Descent." Unfortunately, owing to his many occupations, only the first part of the poem is as yet finished. This he most kindly has placed at our disposal, authorizing us to present it to our readers.

ISHTAR IN URUGAL.

Along the gloomy avenue of death To seek the dread abysm of Urugal, In everlasting Dark whence none returns, Ishtar, the Moon-god's daughter, made resolve, And that way, sick with sorrow, turned her face. A road leads downward, but no road leads back From Darkness' realm. There is Irkalla queen, Named also Ninkigal, mother of pains. Her portals close forever on her guests And exit there is none, but all who enter, To daylight strangers, and of joy unknown, Within her sunless gates restrained must stay. And there the only food vouchsafed is dust, For slime they live on, who on earth have died. Day's golden beam greets none and darkness reigns Where hurtling bat-like forms of feathered men Or human-fashioned birds imprisoned flit. Close and with dust o'erstrewn, the dungeon doors Are held by bolts with gathering mould o'ersealed. By love distracted, though the queen of love, Pale Ishtar downward flashed toward death's domain, And swift approached these gates of Urugal, Then paused impatient at its portals grim; For love, whose strength no earthly bars restrain, Gives not the key to open Darkness' Doors. By service from all living men made proud, Ishtar brooked not resistance from the dead. She called the jailer, then to anger changed The love that sped her on her breathless way, And from her parted lips incontinent Swept speech that made the unyielding warder quail. "Quick, turnkey of the pit! swing wide these doors, And fling them swiftly open. Tarry not! For I will pass, even I will enter in. Dare no denial, thou, bar not my way, Else will I burst thy bolts and rend thy gates, This lintel shatter else and wreck these doors. The pent-up dead I else will loose, and lead Back the departed to the lands they left, Else bid the famished dwellers in the pit Rise up to live and eat their fill once more. Dead myriads then shall burden groaning earth, Sore tasked without them by her living throngs." Love's mistress, mastered by strong hate, The warder heard, and wondered first, then feared The angered goddess Ishtar what she spake, Then answering said to Ishtar's wrathful might: "O princess, stay thy hand; rend not the door, But tarry here, while unto Ninkigal I go, and tell thy glorious name to her."

ISHTAR'S LAMENT.

"All love from earthly life with me departed, With me to tarry in the gates of death; In heaven's sun no warmth is longer hearted, And chilled shall cheerless men now draw slow breath.

"I left in sadness life which I had given, I turned from gladness and I walked with woe, Toward living death by grief untimely driven, I search for Thammuz whom harsh fate laid low

"The darkling pathway o'er the restless waters Of seven seas that circle Death's domain I trod, and followed after earth's sad daughters Torn from their loved ones and ne'er seen again.

"Here must I enter in, here make my dwelling With Thammuz in the mansion of the dead, Driven to Famine's house by love compelling And hunger for the sight of that dear head.

"O'er husbands will I weep, whom death has taken, Whom fate in manhood's strength from life has swept, Leaving on earth their living wives forsaken,-- O'er them with groans shall bitter tears be wept.

"And I will weep o'er wives, whose short day ended Ere in glad offspring joyed their husbands' eyes; Snatched from loved arms they left their lords untended,-- O'er them shall tearful lamentations rise.

"And I will weep o'er babes who left no brothers, Young lives to the ills of age by hope opposed, The sons of saddened sires and tearful mothers, One moment's life by death eternal closed."

NINKIGAL'S COMMAND TO THE WARDER.

"Leave thou this presence, slave, open the gate; Since power is hers to force an entrance here, Let her come in as come from life the dead, Submissive to the laws of Death's domain. Do unto her what unto all thou doest."

Want of space bids us limit ourselves to these few fragments--surely sufficient to make our readers wish that Professor Dyer might spare some time to the completion of his task.

INDEX.

A.

Abel, killed by Cain, 129.

Abraham, wealthy and powerful chief, 200; goes forth from Ur, 201; his victory over Khudur-Lagamar, 222-224.

Abu-Habba, see Sippar.

Abu-Shahrein, see Eridhu.

Accad, Northern or Upper Chaldea, 145; meaning of the word, ib.; headquarters of Semitism, 204-205.

Accads, see Shumiro-Accads.

Accadian language, see Shumiro-Accadian.

Agadê, capital of Accad, 205.

Agglutinative languages, meaning of the word, 136-137; characteristic of Turanian nations, ib.; spoken by the people of Shumir and Accad, 144.

Agricultural life, third stage of culture, first beginning of real civilization, 122.

Akki, the water-carrier, see Sharrukin of Agadê.

Alexander of Macedon conquers Babylon, 4; his soldiers destroy the dams of the Euphrates, 5.

Allah, Arabic for "God," see Ilu.

Allat, queen of the Dead, 327-329.

Altaï, the great Siberian mountain chain, 146; probable cradle of the Turanian race, 147.

Altaïc, another name for the Turanian or Yellow Race, 147.

Amarpal, also Sin-Muballit, king of Babylon, perhaps Amraphel, King of Shinar, 226.

Amorite, the, a tribe of Canaan, 133.

Amraphel, see Amarpal.

Ana, or Zi-ana--"Heaven," or "Spirit of Heaven," p. 154.

Anatu, goddess, mother of Ishtar, smites Êabâni with death and Izdubar with leprosy, 310.

Anthropomorphism, meaning of the word, 355; definition and causes of, 355-357.

Anu, first god of the first Babylonian Triad, same as Ana, 240; one of the "twelve great gods," 246.

Anunnaki, minor spirits of earth, 154, 250.

Anunit (the Moon), wife of Shamash, 245.

Apsu (the Abyss), 264.

Arali, or Arallu, the Land of the Dead, 157; its connection with the Sacred Mountain, 276.

Arallu, see Arali.

Aram, a son of Shem, eponymous ancestor of the Aramæans in Gen. x., 131.