Part 4 (1/2)

[Footnote 23: Delitzch: Babel und Bibel.]

Other texts show that a t.i.tle of Bel was Masu, a word that letter for letter is the same as the Hebrew Mosheh or Moses.[24]

[Footnote 24: Records of the Past, i. 91.]

It is in this way that Sargon and Khammurabi fuse. Meanwhile the t.i.tle Masu, or hero, was not confined to Bel. It was given also to Marduk, the tutelary G.o.d of Babylon, from whom local monotheism proceeded.

That monotheism, in appearance relatively modern, actually was archaic. The Chaldean savants knew of but one really existing G.o.d. To them, all others were his emanations. The deus exsuperantissimus was represented by a single stroke of the reed, a sign that in its vagueness left him formless and incommunicable, therefore unwors.h.i.+pable, hence without a temple, unless Bab-ili, Babylon, the Gate of G.o.d, may be so construed.

The name of the deity, fastidiously concealed from the vulgar, was, in English, One. Not after, or beneath, or above, but before him, a trinity swung like a screen. From it, for pendant, another trinity dangled. From the latter fell a third. Below these glories were the coruscations of an entire nation of inferior G.o.ds. The latter, as well as the former, all of them, were but the fireworks of One. He alone was. The rest, like Makhir, were G.o.ds of dream. To the savants, that is; to the magi and seers. To the people the sidereal triads and planetary divinities throned in the Silver Sky augustly real, equally august, and in that celestial equality remained, until Khammurabi gave precedence to Bel, who as Marduk, Bel or Baal Marduk, Lord Marduk, became supreme.

Before Bel, then, the other G.o.ds faded as the Elohim did before Jahveh, with the possible difference that there were more to fade--sixty-five thousand, a.s.surnatsipal, in an inscription, declared.

Over that army Bel-Marduk acquired the t.i.tle, perhaps significant, of Bel-Kissat, Lord of Hosts. Yet it was less as a usurper than as an absorber that the ascension was achieved. Bel but mounted above his former peers and from the superior height drew their attributes to himself. It was sacrilege none the less. As such it alienated the clergy and enraged the plebs. Begun under Khammurabi and completed under Nabonidos, it was the reason why, during the latter's reign, orthodox Babylon received Cyrus not as a foe but a friend.

From the spoliation, meanwhile, no nebulousness resulted. Bel was distinctly anthropomorphic. His earthly plaisance was the Home of the Height, a seven-floored mountain of masonry, a rainbow pyramid of enamelled brick. At the top was a dome. There, in a glittering chamber, on a dazzling couch, he appeared. Elsewhere, in the vermillion recesses of a neighbouring chapel, that winged bulls guarded and frescoed monsters adorned, once a year he also appeared, and, above the mercy seat, on an alabaster throne, sat, or was supposed to sit, contemplating the tablets of destiny, determining when men should die.

To the Greeks, the future lay in the lap of the G.o.ds. To the Babylonians the G.o.ds alone possessed it, as alone also they possessed the present and the past. They had all time as all men have their day.

That day was here and it was brief. Death was a descent to Aralu, the land whence none return, a region of the underworld, called also Shualu, where the departed were nourished on dust. Dust they were and to dust they returned.

Extinction was not a punishment or even a reward, it was a law.

Punishment was visited on the transgressor here, as here also the piety of the righteous was rewarded. When death came, just and unjust fared alike. The Aryan and Egyptian belief in immortality had no place in this creed, and consequently it had none either in Israel, where Sheol was a replica of Shualu. To the Semites of Babylonia and Kanaan, the G.o.ds alone were immortal, and immortal beings would be G.o.ds. Man could not become divine while his deities were still human.

Exceptionally, exceptional beings such as Gilgames and Adra-Khasis might be translated to the land of the Silver Sky, as Elijah was translated to heaven, but otherwise the only mortals that could reach it were kings, for a king, in becoming sovereign, became, _ipso facto_, celestial. As such, ages later, Alexander had himself wors.h.i.+pped, and it was in imitation of his apotheosis that the subsequent Caesars declared themselves G.o.ds. Yet precisely as the latter were man-made deities, so the Babylonian Baalim were very similar to human kings.

For their hunger was cream, oil, dates, the flesh of ewe lambs. For their nostrils was the perfume of prayers and of psalms; for their pa.s.sions the virginity of girls. Originally the first born of men were also given them, but while, with higher culture, that sacrifice was abolished, the sacred harlotry, over which Ishtar presided, remained.

Judaism omitted to incorporate that, but in Kanaan, which Babylonia profoundly influenced, it was general and, though reviled by Israel, was tempting even, and perhaps particularly, to Solomon.[25]

[Footnote 25: 1 Kings xi. 5. ”Solomon went after Ashtoreth.”]

The latter's temple was similar to Bel's, from which the Hebraic ritual, terms of the Law, the Torah itself, may have proceeded, as, it may be, the Sabbath did also. On a tablet recovered from the library of a.s.surbanipal it is written: ”The seventh day is a fast day, a lucky day, a sabbatuv”--literally, a day of rest for the heart.[26]

[Footnote 26: Cuneiform Insc. W. A. ii. 32.]

In Aralu that day never ceased; the dead there, buried, Herodotos said, in honey, were unresurrectably dead, dead to the earth, dead to the Silver Sky. Yet though that was an article of faith, through a paradox profoundly poetic, there was a belief equally general, in ghosts, in hobgoblins, in men with the faces of ravens, in others with the bodies of scorpions, and in the post-mortem persistence of girls that died pure.

These latter, in searching for someone whom they might seduce, must have afterward wandered into the presence of St. Anthony. Perhaps, too, it was they who, as succubi, emotionalized the dreams of monks.

Yet, in view of Ishtar, they could not have been very numerous in Babylon where, however, they had a queen, Lilit, the Lilith of the _Talmud_, Adam's vampire wife, who conceived with him shapes of sin.

In these also the Babylonians believed, and navely they represented them in forms so revolting that the sight of their own image alarmed them away.

From these shapes or, more exactly, from sin itself, it was very properly held that all diseases came. Medicine consequently was a branch of religion. The physician was a priest. He asked the patient: Have you shed your neighbour's blood? Have you approached your neighbour's wife? Have you stolen your neighbour's garment? Or is it that you have failed to clothe the naked? According to the responses he prescribed.[27]

[Footnote 27: IV. R. 50-53. _Cf._ Delitzch: _op. cit._]

But the priest who was a physician was also a wizard. He peeped and muttered, or, more subtly, provided enchanted philters in which simples had been dissolved. These devices failing, there was a series of incantations, the _Ritual of the Whispered Charm_, in which the most potent conjuration was the incommunicable name. To that all things yielded, even the G.o.ds.[28] But like the Shem of the Jews, it was probably never wholly uttered, because, save to the magi, not wholly known. In the formulae of the necromancers it is omitted, though in practice it may have been p.r.o.nounced.

[Footnote 28: Lenormant: La Magie chez les Chaldeens.]

Even that is doubtful. A knowledge of it conferred powers similar to those that have been attributed to the Christ, and which the Sadducees ascribed to his knowledge of the tetragrammation. A knowledge of the Babylonian Shem was as potent. It served not only men but G.o.ds.