Babel anc- Bible ft wo Xectures ai>5o Etnfeo&sing tbe flDost flmportant Criticisms anb tbe Butbor's IRepiies m 3H\ ffriefcricb 2>elit3scb fAkxemd?f3 rians. But our greatest and most constant delight is ¦ Fig. 31. Procession of Idols. derived from the contemplation of their noble and simple architecture, as it is exhibited for example in the portal 26 BABEL AND BIBLE. Fig. 32. Transportation of the Gigantic Stone Bulls. Fig. 33. Portal of the Palace of Sargon. (Representing the noble style and simplicity of the Assyrian architecture ) BABEL AND BIBLE. 27 of Sargon's palace excavated by Botta (Fig. 33) , or from the magnificent representations of animals, replete with the most startling realism, which these "Dutchmen of antiquity" created. For example, the idyllic picture of the grazing antelopes (Fig. lia ; also Fig. 34) , or the dying lioness of Nineveh, so justly renowned in art (Fig. 35) . Fig. 34. Idyllic Scenes from Assyrian Art. The excavations on Babylonian soil disclose in like manner the art and culture of the mother country of As syrian civilisation far back in the fourth millennium, — a period which the boldest flights of fancy would otherwise have scarcely dreamt of recovering. We penetrate lastly here into the period of that primitive un-Indo-Germanic and likewise un-Semitic nation of Sumerians, who are 28 BABEL AND BIBLE. the creators and originators of the great Babylonian civ ilisation, of those Sumerians for whom the number 60 and not 100 constituted the next higher unit after 10. F'g- 35- The Dying Lioness of Nineveh. That Sumerian Priest-King whose magnificently pre served head (Fig. 36) the Berlin Museum now shelters, Fig. 36. Head of a Sumerian Priest-King. (A noble type from the dawn of human history. ) may unquestionably be characterised as a noble represen tative of the human race from the twilight of history. BABEL AND BIBLE. 29 But gratifying and instructive as all these discov eries may be, they have yet, so to speak, the significance of details and externalities only, and are easily surpassed in scope and importance by the revelations which it still remains for us to adduce. I am not referring now to the highly important fact that the Babylonian and Assyrian methods of reckoning time, which were based on accurate astronomical observa tions of solar eclipses, etc., enabled us to determine the chronology of the events narrated in the Book of Kings, — a circumstance that was doubly gratifying owing to the discovery of Robertson Smith and Wellhausen that the chronology of the Old Testament had been forcibly made to conform to a system of sacred numbers, which counted 480 years from the end of the Exile back to the founding of the temple of Solomon, and again 480 years backward from that date to the Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt (1 Kings vi. 1) . I can also adduce in this place but a single, and that an inconspicuous, illustration of the far-reaching influence which the cuneiform investigations have exercised on our understanding of the text of the Old Testament, — a result due to the remarkably close affinity between the Baby lonian and Hebrew languages and to the enormous com pass of the Babylonian literature. We read in Numbers vi. 24-27: "The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: The Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace." Countless times has this blessing been given and re- 30 BABEL AND BIBLE. ceived ! But it was never understood in its full depth and import until Babylonian usage informed us that ' ' to lift up one's countenance or eyes upon or to another," was a form of speech for "bestowing one's love upon an other, for gazing lovingly and feelingly upon another, as a bridegroom upon a bride, or a father upon a son." This ancient and glorious benediction, therefore, invokes on man with increasing emphasis God's blessing and protec tion, God's benignant and gracious consideration, and lastly God's own love, — finally to break forth into that truly beautiful greeting of the Orient, "Peace be with thee!" Yet the greatest and most unexpected service that Babel ever rendered the philological interpretation of the Bible must yield the palm for wide-reaching significance to the fact that here on the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris as early as 2250 B. C. we find a highly organised constitutional stale. Here in these Babylonian lowlands, having an area not greater than that of Italy, yet extra ordinarily rich by nature and transformed by human in dustry into a veritable hotbed of productiveness, there existed in the third millennium before Christ a civilisa tion comparable in many respects with our own. It was Hammurabi, the Amraphel of the Bible, that ultimately succeeded in expelling the Elamites, the her editary enemy of Babylon, from the country, and in weld ing North and South together into a single union, with Babylon as political and religious center. His first solici tude was to establish a uniform system of law over the entire country, and he accordingly promulgated a juridic code that determined in the minutest manner the rights BABEL AND BIBLE 31 and privileges of his citizens. The relations of master, slave, and hireling, of merchant and apprentice, of land lord and tenant, are here precisely fixed. There is a law, for example, that a clerk who has delivered money to his superior for goods that he has sold shall obtain a receipt for the transaction. Reductions in rent are provided for in case of damage by storms and wild beasts. The fish ing rights of boroughs along the canals are precisely de fined. And so on. Babylon is the seat of the Supreme Court, to which all knotty and disputed points of law are submitted. Every able-bodied man is subject to military duty. But Hammurabi softened by many decisions the severity of the recruiting laws ; for example, in the inter ests of stock-raising he exempted herdsmen from military service, and he also conferred special privileges on an cient priestly families. We read of money having been coined in Babylon, and the distinctively cursive character of their script points to a very extensive use of writing. Many letters of this ancient period have been preserved. We read, for example, the letter of a wife to her absent husband, ask ing his advice on some trivial matter ; the epistle of a son to his father, announcing that a certain person has unspeakably offended him, and that his impulse is to give the miscreant a severe drubbing, but that he prefers to have the advice of his father on the matter ; and another, still stranger one, in which a son implores his father to send him at once the money that he has so long promised him, fortifying his request with the contumelious insin uation that in that event only will he feel justified in re suming his prayers for his father's salvation. Every- Co >w wr >5 5 w Fig. 37. The Temples and Palaces on the Quays of Babylon. Imaginative Restoration. (After G. le Bon. BABEL AND BIBLE. 33 thing, in fact, points to a thoroughly organised postal system throughout the empire, and this conclusion is corroborated by the distinctest evidence that there existed causeways and canals in Babylonia which extended far beyond its boundaries and which were kept in perfect condition. Commerce and industry, stock-raising and agricul ture, flourished here in an eminent degree, while science, Fig. 38. Palace of King Sargon at Khorsabad. (Restored by Victor Place.) geometry, mathematics, and notably astronomy, attained a height of development that has repeatedly evoked the admiration of modern scientists. Certainly not Paris, and at most Rome, can bear comparison with Babylon in the extent of influence which it exercised upon the world for 2000 years. Bitter testimony do the prophets of the Old Testa- 34 BABEL AND BIBLE. ment bear to the surpassing splendor and unconquerable might of the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar (see Figs. 37, 38, 39, 40, and 41) . "Babylon," cries Jeremiah, "hath been a golden cup in Yahveh 's hand, that made all the earth drunken" (Jer. li. 7) ; and the Revelation of St. John still quivers with the detested memory of Babel the Great, the gay voluptuous city, the wealth-teeming me tropolis of commerce and art, the mother of harlots and Fig. 39. Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh. (Imaginative Restoration. After Ferguson.) of all abominations of the earth. Yet so far back as the beginning of the third millennium before Christ Babylon had been this great focus of culture, science, and litera ture, the "brain" of Hither Asia, the power that dom inated the world. In the winter of 1887, a band of Egyptian fellahs who were excavating in the ruins of the palaces of Amen- ophis IV. at El-Amarna, between Thebes and Memphis, BABEL AND BIBLE. 35 discovered about 300 clay tablets of many forms and sizes. These tablets were found to contain the corre spondence of Babylonian, Assyrian, and Mesopotamian kings with the Pharaohs Amenophis III. and IV., and, most important of all, the letters of the Egyptian gover nors of the great Canaanite cities of Tyre, Sidon, Akko, Askalon, etc., to the Egyptian court; and the museum at Berlin is so fortunate as to possess the only letters that rnmfH L V i~ . ' ~X ' v'l 1 * I. Fig. 40. Chariot and Attendants of Sennacherib with Castle on a Mountain. (After Layard.) came from Jerusalem, — letters written before the entrance of the Israelites into the promised land. Like a powerful searchlight, these clay tablets of El-Amarna shed a flood of dazzling effulgence upon the profound obscurity which shrouded the political and cultural conditions of the period from 1500 to 1400 B.C.; and the mere fact that the mag nates of Canaan, nay, even of Cyprus, made use of the BABEL AND BIBLE. 37 Babylonian language and script, and like the Babylonians wrote on clay tablets, the mere fact that the Babylonian language was the official language of diplomatic inter course from the Euphrates to the Nile, is in itself indis putable proof of the omnipotent influence which Baby lonian civilisation and literature exercised on the world from the year 2200 until 1400 B.C. When the twelve tribes of Israel invaded the land of Canaan, they entered a country which belonged absolutely to the domain of Babylonian civilisation . It is an unim portant but characteristic feature of the prevailing state of things that a Babylonish garment excited the avarice of Achan when the first Canaanite city, Jericho, was stormed and plundered (Joshua vii. 21) . And not only the in dustry, but also the commerce and law, the customs and the science of Babylon were the standards of the land. Knowing this, we comprehend at once why the systems of measures, weights, and coins used in the Old Testa ment, and the external form of their laws ("if a man do this or that, he shall be punished after this manner or that") are Babylonian throughout. So also the sacer dotal customs and the methods of offering sacrifices were profoundly influenced by Babylonian models ; and it is a remarkable fact that Israelitic traditions are altogether at variance in their accounts of the origin of the Sabbath, — as will be rendered apparent by a comparison of Exodus xx. 11 and Deuteronomy v. 15. But now the matter is clearer. The Babylonians also had their Sabbath day (sha- battu) , and a calendar of feasts and sacrifices has been unearthed according to which the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 38 BABEL AND BIBLE. 28th days of every month were set apart as days on which no work should be done, on which the king should not change his robes, nor mount his chariot, nor offer sacri fices, nor render legal decisions, nor eat of boiled or roasted meats, on which not even a physician should lay hands on the sick. Now this setting apart of the sev enth day for the propitiation of the gods is really under stood from the Babylonian point of view, and there can therefore be scarcely the shadow of a doubt that in the last resort we are indebted to this ancient nation on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris for the plenitude of blessings that flows from our day of Sabbath or Sun day rest. And more still. There is a priceless treasure in the Berlin Museum, a tablet of clay, containing the Babylo nian legend of how it came to pass that the first man for feited the boon of immortality. The place where this tablet was found, namely El-Amarna in Egypt, and the numerous dots scattered over it in red Egyptian ink, showing the pains that some Egyptian scholar had taken to master the intricacies of the foreign text, are ocular evidence of the zeal with which the productions of Baby lonian literature were cultivated over the vast extent of territory which stretched from Canaan to the land of the Pharaohs. Shall we be astonished, therefore, to learn that entire cycles of Biblical stories have been suddenly brought to light from the darkness of the Babylonian treasure-heaps, in much purer and more primitive form than they exist in the Bible itself? The Babylonians divided their history into two great periods : that before the Flood and that after the Flood. BABEL AND BIBLE. 39 Babylonia was in the true sense of the word the land of deluges. Like all alluvial lowlands bordering on great streams that flow into the sea, it was exposed to floods of the direst and most unique character. It is the home of the cyclone or tornado, with its accompaniment of earth quake and cloudburst. Only twenty -five years ago, in the year 1876, a tornado of this character gathered in the Bay of Bengal, and amid the crashing of thunder and with a violence so terrific as to dismast ships distant nearly two hundred miles, approached the delta of the Ganges, met the ebbing tide, and engulfing it in its own titanic tidal-wave, hurled oceans of water over an area of 141 square leagues to a depth of 45 feet, drowning 215,000 human beings, and only losing its strength as it broke against the highlands that lay beyond. Now the credit belongs to the celebrated Viennese geologist, Eduard Suess, for having discovered the exact and detailed de scription of just such a tornado in the Babylonian story of the Flood inscribed on this tablet (Fig. 42) from the library of Sardanapalus at Nineveh and committed to writing 2000 years before Christ. The sea plays the prin cipal part in this flood, and therefore the ark of the Baby lonian Noah, Xisuthros, is cast back upon a spur of the Armenio-Medean mountains ; but in other respects it is the same old story of the Flood, so familiar to us all. Xisuthros receives from the god of the watery deep the command to build a ship of certain dimensions, to coat it thoroughly with pitch, and to put on board of it his entire family together with the seeds of all living things. The ship is entered, its doors are closed, it is cast adrift upon the devastating waves, and is finally 40 BABEL AND BIBLE. stranded upon a mountain bearing the name of Nizir. Then follows the famous passage: "On the seventh day I took forth a dove and released it ; the dove flew hither and thither, but finding no resting-place returned." We then read that a swallow was sent forth ; it also found no resting-place and returned. Finally a raven was sent forth, which, noticing that the waters had subsided, did Fig. 42. Tablet Containing Babylonian Story of the Flood. not return. Xisuthros then abandons his ship and offers sacrifices on the summit of the mountain. The sweet odor was scented by the gods, etc., etc. This entire story, precisely as it is here written, afterwards travelled to Canaan, but owing to the totally different conformation of the land in this latter country, it was forgotten that the sea had played the principal role, BABEL AND BIBLE. 41 and we accordingly find in the Bible two distinct versions of the Flood, which are not only absolutely impossible from the point of view of natural science, but are also at diametrical variance with each other, the one giving as the duration of the Flood a period of 365 days and the other a period of 40+ (3x7), or 61 days. We owe the discovery that two fundamentally different versions of the story of the Flood were welded together into one in the Bible, to the orthodox Catholic body surgeon of Louis XV., Jean Astruc, who, in the year 1753 first submitted, as Goethe expresses it, the books of Moses "to the probe and knife," and thus became the founder of Pentateuch criticism, or that branch of inquiry which seeks to in crease and clarify our knowledge of the many diversified sources of which the Five Books of Moses are composed. These are facts which from the point of view of sci ence are as immutable as rock, however stubbornly people on both sides of the Atlantic may close their eyes to them. When we remember that minds of the stamp of Luther and Melancthon once contemptuously rejected the Copernican system of astronomy, we may be certain that the results of the scientific criticism of the Pentateuch will tarry long for recognition. Yet it is just as certain that some day they will be openly admitted. The ten Babylonian kings who reigned before the Flood have also been accepted in the Bible as the ten antediluvian patriarchs, and the agreement is perfect in all details. In addition to the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, the eleventh tablet of which contains the story of the Flood, 42 BABEL AND BIBLE. we possess another beautiful Babylonian poem, the story of the Creation. In the primordial beginning of things, according to this epic, down in the gloomy chaos, surged and raged the primeval waters, the name of which was Tiamat. When the gods declared their intention of forming an orderly cosmos out of the chaos, Tiamat arose (usually represented as a dragon, but also as a seven-headed ser pent) , and made ready for combat to the death. Monsters of all descriptions she spawned from her mighty depths, especially gigantic venom-blown serpents ; and in their company she set forth bellowing and snorting to her con flict with the gods. The Celestials quaked with terror when they saw their direful foe. The god Marduk alone, the god of light, of dawn, and of the vernal sun, came forward to do battle with her, his sole stipulation being that sovereign rank among the gods should be accorded him. Then follows a splendid scene. First the god Mar duk fastened a gigantic net to the East and the South, to the North and the West, lest any part of Tiamat should escape. He then mounted in shining armor and radiant with majesty his celestial chariot, which was drawn by four spirited steeds, the admired cynosure of the eyes of all the surrounding gods. Straightway he made for the dragon and her dread embattled train, sending forth his challenge for the contest. Then Tiamat shrieked loudly and fiercely, till her deepmost foundations trembled and shook. She opened her maw to its uttermost, but before she could shut her lips Marduk made enter into her belly the evil hurricane. He seized his lance and pierced her BABEL AND BIBLE. 43 heart. He cast her carcass down and placed himself upon it, whilst her helpers were taken captive and placed in close confinement. Thereupon Marduk cut Tiamat in twain, as cleanly as one would sever a fish, and of the one half he made the roof of heaven and of the other he made the earth ; and the heaven he inlaid with the moon, and the sun, and the stars, and the earth he covered with plants and animals, until finally the first man and the first woman, made of mingled clay and celestial blood, came forth from the hand of their creator. Since Marduk was the city-god of Babel, it is quite intelligible that this story found widespread diffusion in Canaan. Nay, the poets and prophets of the Old Testa ment went so far as to attribute directly to Yahveh the heroic deeds' of Marduk, and to extol him as the cham pion that broke the head of the dragons in the water (Psalms lxxiv. 13 et seq. ; lxxxix. 10) , and under whom the helpers of the dragon stooped (Job ix. 13) . Passages like the following from Isaiah li. 9 : "Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of Yahveh; awake, as in the days of old, in the generations of ancient times. Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab in pieces and pierced the dragon?" or passages like that from Job xxvi. 12 : "He divideth the sea with his power, and by his understand ing he smiteth the dragon," read like explanatory comments on the little image which our expedition found representing the god Marduk, of the powerful arm, the far-seeing eye, and the far-hearing ear, the symbol of intelligence clad in majestic glory, with the conquered dragon of the primeval waters at his feet (Fig. 44) . ^^%jif 4 Fig 44. Marduk with the Conquered Dragon of the Primeval Waters at His Feet. fy't ~j c > in *{l*XZ5Z£$]$i£. -^iaOr- f^fW tig. 43 The " Black Obelisk." ' (Lenormant, V., p. 329.) 1 Erected by Shalmaneser II. (860-825 B.C.) to Fig. 45. Conical Piece of Clay from a Babylonian Coffin. record the victories of his 31 military expeditions. BABEL AND BIBLE. 45 The priestly author that wrote the first chapter of Genesis took infinite pains to eliminate all mythological features from his story of the creation of the world. But since his story begins with the gloomy, watery chaos which bears precisely the same name as Tiamat, namely Tehom, and since this chaos was first divided by the light, and heaven and the earth appeared afterwards, and heaven was set with the sun, the moon, and the stars, and the earth was covered with flowers and with animals, and finally the first man and woman went forth from the hand of God, it will be seen that there is a very close re lationship between the Biblical and the Babylonian story of the creation of the world ; and it will be obvious at the same time how absolutely futile all attempts are and will forever remain, to harmonise our Biblical story of the creation with the results of natural science. It is an interesting fact that echoes of this same con flict between Marduk and Tiamat may still be heard in the Revelation of St. John the Divine, in the battle be tween the archangel Michael and the beast of the deep, "that old serpent called the Devil and Satan." This en tire group of stories, which is also represented in the tale of St. George and the dragon, brought by the crusaders from the East, is distinctively Babylonian in character; inasmuch as many, many hundred years before the Apoc alypse and the first chapter of Genesis were written, we find this conflict between the powers of light and the powers of darkness renewed at the break of every day and the beginning of every spring, depicted in gorgeous relief on the walls of the Assyrian palaces (Fig. 46) . But the discovery of this relationship is of still 46 BABEL AND BIBLE. greater importance. The commandment not to do unto one's neighbor what one would not like to have done unto oneself is indelibly engraven on every human heart. "Thou shalt not shed the blood of thy neighbor," "thou shalt not draw near thy neighbor's wife," "thou shalt not take unto thyself the garment of thy neighbor," — all these fundamental postulates of the human instinct of Fig. 46. Battle Between Marduk and Tiamat, the Powers of Light and the Powers of Darkness. (Ancient Assyrian bas-relief now in the British Museum.) self-preservation are read in the Babylonian records in precisely the same order as they are given in the fifth, sixth and seventh commandments of the Old Testament. But man is also a social being, and for this reason the commandments of humanity, charity, mercy, and love, also form an inalienable patrimony of the human race. Therefore when a Babylonian Magus was called to a man BABEL AND BIBLE. 47 who was ill and began to inquire what sin had stretched him on the sick-bed, he did not rest satisfied with the re cital of the greater sins of commission like murder and robbery, but he asked : " Hath this man refused to clothe one that was naked ; or hath he refused light to one that was imprisoned?" The Babylonian lays great stress, too, on the higher forms of human morality ; speaking the truth and keeping one's word were sacred duties with them, while to say "yes" with the lips and "no" with the heart was a punishable transgression. It is not sur prising that infringements of these commandments were regarded by the Babylonians precisely as they were by the Hebrews, as sins, for the Babylonians also in all their doings considered themselves as dependent on the gods. But it is certainly more remarkable that they also con ceived all human afflictions, particularly sickness and death, as a punishment for sins. In Babel as in the Bible, the notion of sin dominates everything. Under these circumstances it is intelligible that Babylonian thinkers also pondered deeply over the problem of how it was pos sible that a creature that had been created in the image of God and was God's own handiwork could have fallen a victim to sin and to death ; and the Bible has a profound and beautiful story of the temptation of woman by the serpent. The serpent again? That has an unmistakably Baby lonian ring. It was doubtless the same serpent, the pri mordial foe of the gods, that sought to revenge itself on the gods of light by seeking to estrange from them their noblest creature? Or was it the serpent of which it is once said that it ' ' destroyed the dwelling-place of life ' ' ? 48 BABEL AND BIBLE. The question as to the origin of the Biblical story of the Fall of Man is of the utmost importance from the point of view of the history of religion as well as from that of the theology of the New Testament, which, as is well known, contrasts with the first Adam by whom sin and death were brought into the world, a second Adam. May I lift the veil, may I point to an old Babylonian cylinder-seal (Fig. 47) , on which may be seen in the center a tree bearing pendent fruits, to the right a man, distinguishable by his horns, which are the sym bol of strength, to the left a woman, both with their hands outstretched to ward the fruit, and be- „. „ _ c hind the woman the ser- Fig. 47. Sacred Tree and Serpent. A Babylonian conception of the Fall of Man. pent? Is it not the Very mi acme of likelihood that there is some connection between this old Babylonian picture and the Biblical tale of the Fall of Man? Man dies, and while his body is buried in the grave his departed soul descends into ' ' the land of no return ing," into Sheol, into Hades, into the gloomy, dust- impregnated locality, where the shades flutter around like birds and lead a joyless and sodden existence. Dust covers the doors and the bolts, and everything in which the heart of man took delight is mouldy and dust-laden. With such a disconsolate outlook it is intelligible that both Hebrews and Babylonians looked upon length of days here below as the sovereign boon ; and on every single one of the great flag-stones with which the holy BABEL AND BIBLE. 49 street of Marduk in Babylon was paved, and which was discovered by the German expedition to that city, there was engraved a prayer of Nebuchadnezzar which closed with the words: "O, L,ord Marduk, grant to us great length of days ! ' ' But strange to say, the Babylonian conception of the Underworld is one degree pleasanter than that of the Old Testament. On the twelfth tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, the Babylonian Underworld is described in the minutest details. We read there of a space situated beneath the Underworld which was apparently reserved for souls of unusual piety and ' ' in which they reposed on beds of ease and quaffed clear water." Many Babylonian coffins have been found in Warka, Nippur, and Babel, but the Berlin Museum recently ac quired a small conical piece of clay (Fig. 45) , which has evidently been taken from a coffin of this kind, and the inscription of which plaintively requests that whosoever may find the coffin shall leave it undisturbed and unin jured in its original resting-place ; and the text concludes with words of blessing for him who performs so kind a deed : "May his name be blessed in the Upperworld, and in the Underworld may his departed spirit drink of clear water. ' ' In Sheol, therefore, there exists a place for particu larly pious souls, where they repose on beds of ease and quaff clear water. The remainder of Sheol, therefore, appears to be especially adapted to the needs of the im pious and to be not only dusty but to be also without water, or at most furnishing "roily water," — in any event a place of thirst. 50 BABEL AND BIBLE. In the Book of Job (xxiv. 18) , which appears to be extremely conversant with Babylonian modes of thought, we find comparisons drawn between the arid, waterless desert which is reserved for those that have sinned, and the garden with fresh, clear water which is reserved for the pious. And in the New Testament, which has most curiously amalgamated this sentiment with the last verse of the Book of Isaiah, we read of a flaming hell in which the rich man languishes from want of water, and of a garden (for that is the meaning of Paradise) full of fresh, clear water for Lazarus. And the pictures which painters and poets, theo logians and priests, and last of all Mahomet the prophet, have drawn of this Hell and this Paradise, are well known. Behold yonder poor Moslem, sick and feeble, who on account of his weakness has been abandoned by the cara van in the desert. A jug filled with water is by his side. With his own hands he digs his shallow grave in the des ert sands, resignedly awaiting his death. His eyes are aglow with expectation, for in a few moments angels will issue from the open portals of Paradise and greet him with the words: " Selam ''alaika, thou hast been a god fearing man ; enter therefore for all eternity the garden that Allah has prepared for his own." The garden stretches before him like the vast ex panse of heaven and earth. Luxuriant groves casting plentiful shadows and laden with sweet fruits are inter sected iu all directions with babbling brooks and dotted with bubbling springs ; while aerial bowers rise from the banks of the streams. Paradisian glory suffuses the BABEL AND BIBLE. 51 countenances of the beatified ones, who are filled with happiness and serenity. They wear green brocaded gar ments made of the finest silk ; their arms are adorned with gold and silver spangles ; they lie on couches with lofty bolsters and soft pillows, and at their feet are thick carpets. So they rest, seated opposite one another at richly - furnished tables which offer them everything their hearts desire. Brim ming goblets go the rounds, and youths endowed with immortality and resembling scattered pearls carry silver beakers and crystal vessels filled with Main, the most delicious and clearest water from the spring Tasnim, from which the archangels drink, redolent with cam phor and ginger. And this water is mixed with the rarest old wine, of which one can drink as much as one pleases, for it does not inebriate and causes no headaches. And then there are the maidens of Paradise ! Maidens with skin as soft and delicate as the ostrich egg, with voluptuous bosoms, and with eyes like glittering pearls concealed in shells of oysters, — gazelle-like eyes full of chaste but enrapturing glances. Two and seventy of Fig. 48. Assyrian Angel. Type representing manly strength and intelligence. (Bas-relitf of Kuyunjik. Lenormant, IV., pp. 432-433.) 52 BABEL AND BIBLE. these Paradisian maidens may every god-fearing man choose unto himself, in addition to the wives that he pos sessed on earth, provided he cares to have them (and the good man will always cherish desire for the good) . All hatred and envy has departed from the breasts of the de vout ones; no gossip, no slander, is heard in Paradise. uSelam, Selam!" everywhere; and all utterances con- Fig. 49. Angels with Eagle Heads The Holy Tree in the Centre. (British Museum.) elude with the ringing words : cl-hamdu lillahi rabbi-l- ''alamin, the praise is the Lord's, the master of all crea tures. This is the culminating point in the development of that simple and unpretentious Babylonian conception of the crystal-clear water which god-fearing men were des tined to drink in Sheol. And these conceptions of the BABEL AND BIBLE. 53 torments of Hell and of the blissful pleasures of Paradise to-day sway the hearts of untold millions. It is well-known, also, that the conceptions of the messengers of the gods, or of the angels, with which the Egyptians were utterly unacquainted, are characteristi cally Babylonian, and also that the conception of cheru- Fig. 50. Winged Cherub, with Body of Bull and Human Head (After Layard.) bim and seraphim and of the guardian angels that watch over the ways of men had its origin in Babylon. The Babylonian rulers stood in need of hosts of messengers to bear their behests into all quarters of their dominions ; and so also their gods were obliged to have at their beck 54 BABEL AND BIBLE- and call legions of messengers or angels, — messengers with the intelligence of men, and therefore having the form of men, but at the same time equipped with wings, in order to be able to carry through the winds of heaven the commands of the gods to the inhabitants of earth ; in addition, these angels were invested with the keenness of vision and the rapidity of flight of the eagle ; and to those Fig. 50a. Winged Cherub, with Body of Lion and Human Head (After Layard.) whose chief office it was to guard the entrance to their divine masters was imparted the unconquerable strength of the bull, or the awe-inspiring majesty of the lion. (Figs. 48, 49, 50, and 50a.) The Babylonian and Assyrian angels, like those in Ezekiel's vision, are very often of hybrid shape. Take, for example, the cherubim of which a type is given in BABEL AND BIBLE. 55 Fig. 50, with their wings, their bull's bodies, and their honest, serious human countenances. Then again we find types like that discovered in the palace of Ashurna- zirpal (Fig. 51) , which bears the closest possible resem blance to our conception of angels. These noble and radiant figures, which art has rendered so attractive and familiar in our eyes, will always retain a kindly place in our hearts. Fig. 51. Angels with Human Heads. (Noble types closely resembling the Christian conception of angels.) But the demons and the devils, whether they take for us the form of the enemies of man or that of the primordial foes of God, — to these we were destined to bid farewell for all eternity, for the ancient Persian dualism was not after our hearts. " I form the light and create darkness : I make peace and create evil : it is I, Yahveh, that do all these things.'1'1 So justly declares the greatest 56 BABEL AND BIBLE. prophet of the Old Testament, Isaiah (xlv. 7) . Demons like that represented in Fig. 52,— though such pictures are not without interest for the history of duelling, — or caricatures like that represented in Fig. 53, may be corn- Fig. 52. Duel of Lion-Headed and Eagle-Footed Demons. (British Museum. After Lenormant.) mitted forever and aye to the obscurity of the Babylonian hills from which they have risen. (See also Fig. 54.) In his excavations at Khorsabad, Victor Place dis covered the supply-depot of the palace of Sargon. One of the store-rooms contained pottery of all sorts and sizes, BABEL AND BIBLE. 57 and another utensils and implements made of iron. Here were found arranged in beautiful order abundant supplies of chains, nails, plugs, mattocks, and hoes, and the iron had been so admirably wrought and was so well preserved that it rang like a bell when struck ; and some of these implements which were then twenty-five centuries old could be forthwith put into actual use by the Arabian workmen. This drastic intrusion of Assyrian antiquity upon our own days naturally fills us with amazement, and yet it is nothing more than what has happened in the intellectual domain. When we distinguish the twelve signs of the zodiac and call them Aries, Taurus, Gemini, etc. (see Fig. 55) , when we divide the circle into 360 parts, the hour into 60 minutes, and the minute into 60 seconds, and so on, — in all this, Sumerian and Babylo nian civilisation still lives with us to-day. And possibly I have also been successful in my en deavor to show that many Babylonian features still cling, through the medium of the Bible, to our religious think ing. The elimination from our religious thought of the purely human conceptions derived from these admittedly Fig. 53. Babylonian Devil. Demon of the Southwest Wind. (Louvre. After Smith.) 58 BABEL AND BIBLE. talented peoples, and the liberation of our thought gen erally from the shackles of deep-rooted prejudices, will in no wise impair true religion and the true religious spirit, as these have been taught us by the prophets and poets of the Old Testament, but most sublimely of all by Jesus ; on the contrary, both will come forth from this Fig. 54.. A Demon Supporting a Tablet.1 (Assyrian bronze tablet. After Lenormant.) process of purification far truer and far more intensified than ever they were before. I may be allowed finally a word with regard to the feature that invests the Bible with its main significance 1 The two upper horizontal strips in the left-hand side of the figure represent the heavens (the celestial bodies and the celestial genii). The third strip exhibits a funeral scene on earth. The fourth strip represents the Underworld bathed in the floods of the ocean. BABEL AND BIBLE. 59 from the point of view of general history, — its monothe ism. Here too Babel early opened a new and undreamt-of prospect. It. is remarkable, but no one can definitely say what our Teutonic word God originally signified. Philologists vacillate between ' ' inspiring timidity ' ' and ' ' delibera tion." But the word which the Semitic Canaanite races, Fig. 55. Sagittarius and Scorpio. Signs of the Zodiac, as represented by the Babylonians. (Lenormant, V., p. 180.) to whom the Babylonians are most nearly related and from whom the Israelites afterward sprang, coined for God, is not only lucid as to its meaning, but conceives the notion of divinity under so profound and exalted a form that this word alone suffices to shatter the legend that "the Semites were, time out of mind, amazingly deficient in religious instinct ; ' ' while it also refutes the 60 BABEL AND BIBLE. popular modern conception that the religion of Yahveh, and therefore also our Christian belief in God, is ulti mately sprung from a species of fetishism and animism such as is common among the South Sea cannibals, or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. There is a remarkably beautiful passage in the Ko ran, VI, 75 et seq., which so fascinated Goethe that he expressed the desire to see it dramatised. Mahomet has mentally put himself in the place of Abraham, and is endeavoring to realise the manner in which Abraham had reached the monotheistic idea. He says: "And when the gloom of night had fallen, Abraham stepped .forth into the darkness; and behold, there was a star shining above him. Then he cried out in his gladness : ' This is my Lord! ' But when the star grew dim, he said: 'I love not those that grow dim.' And when the moon rose radiantly in the firmament, he cried out in exceeding gladness : ' This is my Lord ! ' But when it set, he said : 'Alas, I shall surely be one of the people that must needs err.' But when the sun rose dazzlingly in the morning, he said: 'This is my Lord, this is the greatest of all! ' But when the sun set, then he said: 'O, my people, verily I am rid of your idolatry of many gods, and I lift up my countenance to him alone that created the heavens and the earth.' " That ancient Semitic word for God, so well known to us from the sentence, Eli Eli lama azabtani, is El, and its meaning is the goal ; the goal toward which are directed the eyes of all men that look Heavenward only, "which every man sees, which every man beholds from afar" (Job xxxvi. 25) ; the goal to which man stretches BABEL AND BIBLE. 61 forth his hands, for which the human heart longs as its release from the uncertainties and imperfections of this earthly life, — this goal the ancient Semitic nomads called El, or God. And inasmuch as there can in the nature of things be only one goal, we find among the old Canaanite races which settled in Babylonia as early as 2500 years before Christ, and to whom Hammurabi himself be longed, such beautiful proper names as "God hath given," "God be with thee," "With the help of my God I go my way," etc. Fig. 56. Clay Tablets Containing the Words "Yahveh is God." (Time of Hammurabi or Amraphel. British Museum.) But more ! Through the kindness of the director of the Egyptian and Assyrian department of the British Museum I am able to show you here pictures of three little clay tablets (Fig. 56) . What, will be asked, is to be seen on these tablets, fragile broken pieces of clay, with scarcely legible characters scratched on their sur face? True enough, but they are valuable from the fact that their date may be exactly fixed as that of the time of Hammurabi, one of them having been made during the reign of his father, Sin-muballit ; but still more so from 62 BABEL AND BIBLE. the circumstance that they contain three names which are of the very greatest significance from the point of view of the history of religion. They are the words: la- ah- ve- Hit la- ku- um- ilii Yahveh is God. Yahveh, the Abiding One, the Perma nent One (for such is, as we have reason to believe, the significance of the name) , who, unlike man, is not to morrow a thing of the past, but one that endures forever, that lives and labors for all eternity above the broad, re splendent, law-bound canopy of the stars, — it was this Yahveh that constituted the primordial patrimony of those Canaanite tribes from which centuries afterward the twelve tribes of Israel sprang. The religion of the Canaanite tribes that emigrated to Babylonia rapidly succumbed, indeed, before the poly theism that 'had been practised for centuries by the an cient inhabitants of that country. But this polytheism by no means strikes an unsympathetic chord in us, at least so far as its conception of its gods is concerned, all of whom were living, omnipotent, and omnipresent be ings that hearkened unto the prayers of men, and who, however much incensed they might become at the sins of men, were always immediately ready again with offers of mercy and reconciliation. And likewise the representa tions which these deities found in Babylonian art, as for instance that of the sun-god of Sippar enthroned in his Holy of Holies (Fig. 57) I are far removed from every - 1 See also Fig. 31. «»"«''-"> '-^i, . >;h""; }'f'.^^f Fig. 57, The Sun- God of Sippar Enthroned in His Holy of Holies. (Lenormant, V., p. 301.) 64 BABEL AND BIBLE. thing that savors of the ugly, the ignoble, or the gro tesque. The Prophet Ezekiel (chap, i.) in his visions of his Lord saw God enter on a living chariot formed of four winged creatures with the face of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle, and on the heads of these cherubim he saw (x. 1) a crystal surface supporting a sapphire throne on which God was seated in the likeness of a man, bathed in the most resplendent radiance. Noting carefully these Fig. 58. Babylonian Cylinder-Seal with Representation Resembling the Vision of Ezekiel. details, can we fail to observe the striking resemblance which his vision presents to the representation of a god which has been found on a very ancient Babylonian cyl inder-seal (Fig. 58) ? Standing on an odd sort of vessel, the prow and stern of which terminate in seated human figures, may be seen two cherubim with their backs to each other and with their faces, which are human in form, BABEL AND BIBLE- 65 turned to the front. Their attitude leads us to infer that there are two corresponding figures at the rear. On their backs reposes a surface, and on this surface stands a throne on which the god sits, bearded and clothed in long robes, with a tiara on his head, and in his right hand what are apparently a scepter and a ring: and behind the throne, standing ready to answer his beck and call, is a servitor of the god, who may be likened to the man "clothed with linen" (Ezekiel ix. 3, and x. 2) that exe cuted the behests of Yahveh. Notwithstanding all this, however, and despite the fact that many liberal and enlightened minds openly ad vocated the doctrine that Nergal and Nebo, that the moon-god and the sun-god, the god of thunder Ramman, and all the rest of the Babylonian Pantheon were one in Marduk, the god of light, still polytheism, gross poly theism, remained for three thousand years the Babylonian state religion, — a sad and significant warning against the indolence of men and races in matters of religion, and against the colossal power which may be acquired by a strongly organised priesthood based upon it. Even the religion of Yahveh, under the magic stand ard of which Moses united into a single nation the twelve nomadic tribes of Israel, remained infected for centuries with all manner of human infirmities, — with all the un sophisticated anthropomorphic conceptions that are char acteristic of the childhood of the human race, with Israel- itic particularism, with heathen sacrificial customs, and with the cult of legal externalities. Even its intrinsic worth was impotent to restrain the nation from worship ping the Baal and the Astarte of the indigenous Canaan- 66 BABEL AND BIBLE. ite race, until those titanic minds, the prophets, discov ered in Yahveh the god of the universe, and pleaded for a quickening of the inner spirit of religion with exhorta tions like that of Joel, "to rend their hearts and not their garments," and until the divinely endowed singers of the Psalms expressed the concepts of the prophetic leaders in verses which awaken to this day a living echo in the hearts of all nations and times, — until, in fine, the proph ets and the psalmists paved the way for the adhortation of Jesus to pray to God in spirit and truth and to strive by dint of individual moral endeavor in all spheres of life after higher and higher perfection, — after that perfection which is our Father's in Heaven. SECOND LECTURE IN EXPLANATION. WHO is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah ? This that is glorious in his apparel, marching in the greatness of his strength ? "It is I (Yahveh) that speak in righteousness, mighty to save." Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat ? "I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the peoples there was no man with me : Yea, I trod them in mine anger, and trampled them in my fury ; And their lifeblood is sprinkled upon my garments, and I have stained all my raiment. For the day of vengeance was in mine heart, and the year of my redemption was come. And I looked, and there was none to help ; and I wondered that there was none to uphold : Therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me, and my fury, it upheld me. And I trod down the peoples in anger, and made them drunk with my fury, And I poured out their lifeblood on the earth. In language, style, and sentiment, forsooth a genuine Bedouin song of battle and victory ! Not at all ! This utterance of Isaiah lxiii. 1-6, and a hundred other prophetic utterances full of inex tinguishable hatred toward the races roundabout: toward Edom and Moab, Asohu and Babel, Tyre and Egypt, mostly masterpieces of Hebrew rhetoric, are to be accepted as representing the ethical prophetism of Israel, and this at its high tide ! These outpourings of political jealousy and of passionate hatred on the part of long vanished generations, born of certain contemporary conditions and perhaps comprehensible from a merely human standpoint, must serve us children of the twentieth century after Christ, must serve 70 BABEL AND BIBLE. even Occidental and Christian races, as a religious guide for refine ment and edification ! Instead of losing ourselves "in grateful admiration" in the contemplation of God's manifestation in our own people, from primitive Germanic times down to the present day, we continue, from ignorance, indifference or blindness, to concede to those early Israelitic oracles the character of a "revela tion," which cannot be justified either in the light of science or in that of religion or of ethics. The more deeply I dive into the spirit of the prophetic writ ings of the Old Testament, the more I shrink from Yahveh, who slaughters the nations with the insatiable sword of his wrath, who has but one favorite child, and surrenders all other nations to night and shame and destruction, who said even to Abraham- (Genesis xii. 2): " I will bless them who bless thee, and those who curse thee, them will I curse" — and I seek refuge with him who taught in life and in death : "Bless them that curse you," and I hide, full of trust and joy and earnest longing for moral perfection, in the God to whom Jesus taught us to pray, the God who is a loving and just father to all men on earth. Charlottenburg, May 1, 1903. SECOND LECTURE. \ ^ 7H Y this opposition to ' ' Babel and Bible ' ' when » » logic itself compels this sequence of the words? And how can anyone expect to be able to suppress these serious questions, which involve the entire Bible with the catchword "Primitive Revelation," when this is shown to be false by a single forgotten verse of the Old Testa ment? And does in fact "the ethical monotheism of Is rael" in its function as " a real revelation of the living God," constitute the unassailable bulwark in the conflict of opinions which Babel has aroused in these later days? It is a pity that so many people permit their delight in the great advantage which Babel is constantly offering us as "interpreter and illustrator" of the Bible to be spoiled by a narrow regard for dogmatic questions to such a degree that they even entirely ignore that advantage. And yet, how grateful all readers of and commentators on the Bible must needs be for the new knowledge which has been revealed, and is constantly being revealed, to us by the laborious excavations among the ruins of Babylon and Assyria! On principle I too avoid continually speaking of "confirmations" of the Bible. For indeed the Old Tes tament as a source of ancient history would be in a bad 72 BABEL AND BIBLE. case if it required everywhere confirmation by cuneiform inscriptions. But when the Biblical Books of Kings (2 tE^^s* Fig. 59. The Ruins at Tell Ibrahim, Site of the City of Kutha. Kings xvii. 30) states that the inhabitants of the city of Kutha who settled in Samaria worshipped the god Nergal, Fig. 60. Nergal, the Patron God of Kutha. and we now know, not alone that this Babylonian city of Kutha (Fig. 59) lies buried under the ruins at Tell Ibra- BABEL AND BIBLE. 73 him, twenty-one miles northeast of Babylon, but also that a cuneiform inscription expressly informs us that the patron god of Kutha was called Nergal (Fig. 60) , — this is really valuable information. While there seemed to be no prospect of ever dis covering the town and district of Chalach, to which a portion of the Israelites taken captive by Sargon were ¦¦•¦ , r--!Zr*2 ¦i-r-< '¦ r-^i Fig. 6i. Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser II. Fig. 62. Assyrian Letter. Written from Chalach, the Babylonian home of the exiled Israelites. transplanted (2 Kings xvii. 6; xviii. 11), we now pos sess, from the library of Asurbanipal at Nineveh, a letter written from Chalach (Fig. 62) , in which a certain Mar- duk-nadin-achi, laying emphasis upon his steadily mani fested loyalty, petitions the king to help him regain his estate, which had been given him by the king's father, and which had supported him for fourteen years until at * >* >^ti eu &mf ** .-< fWffiuwnn y«>x HTT^/n^r^ 1.1 — — - «JN| i , hi irflra i j ^M' m / Fig. 64. a gp Wy jg s^.^Tsr^feT fw _JfcHMJ2^^p''i'r'i,'l Wir^lJ^^F^^r^r-T^f J*«T ^TTwWT'W Fig- 65. W Wl&^&J&*-ty*1ffe& U^= ^f J$^HiVTr»TNFi ^ *#f?*=T«< ^ -# # a rt i Fig. 66. 78 BABEL AND BIBLE. last the governor of the land of Mashalzi had taken it from him. As to the inhabitants of the northern kingdom of Israel, who are presented to oui eyes so vividly by the famous black obelisk of Shalmaneser II. (Fig. 61) in its second row of relief figures (Figs. 63-66) — they are the ambassadors of King Jehu (840 B. C.) with gifts of vari- ^r-^r^sstefe. ous sorts, — we now know all three I of the localities where the ten tribes found their grave: Chalach, some what farther east than the moun tainous source of the upper Zab, called Arrapachitis ; the province of Goshen along the Chabor prob ably not far from Nisibis ; and thirdly, the villages of Media. Until recent times the con quest and plundering of Egyptian Thebes mentioned by the prophet Nahum (iii. 8 ff.) has been a puzzle, so that no one knew to what the words of the prophet re- Assurbanipal's Ten- ferred : "Art thou (Nineveh) better than No-amon (i. e., Thebes), that is situate in the waters of the Nile, with waters round about her. . .? Yet was she carried away, she went into captivity; her young children were dashed in pieces at the top of all the streets, and they cast lots for her honorable men, and all her great men were bound in chains." But then there was discovered at Nineveh the mag- Fig. 67 Sided Clay Prism BABEL AND BIBLE. 79 nificent ten-sided clay prism of Asurbanipal (Fig. 67) , which reports in its second column that it was Asurbani pal who, pursuing the Egyptian king Urdamane" from Memphis, reached Thebes, conquered it and carried away silver, gold, and precious stones, the entire treasure of the palace, the inhabitants, male and female, a great and immeasurable booty, from Thebes to Nineveh the city of his dominion. And how much the language of the Old Testament Fig. 68. Antelope Leukoryx. is indebted to the cuneiform literature ! The Old Testa ment mentions repeatedly an animal called re'em, a fierce, untamable animal armed with fearful horns (Psalms xxii. 22) and most nearly related to the ox (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 17 ; Psalms xxix. 6 ; comp. Isaiah xxxiv. 7) , to use which in field labor on the plain like a common ox seems to the poet of the Book of Job (xxxix. 9 ff.) a ter rible, an inconceivable thought: "Will the wild ox be content to serve thee, or will he abide by thy crib? Canst 80 BABEL AND BIBLE. thou bind the wild ox with his guiding-band in thy fur row? Or will he harrow the valleys after thee? " Despite the fact that the buffalo now roams in herds the forests beyond the Jordan, it was nevertheless diffused over Asia Minor from Arachosia only a short time before the beginning of our era ; hence it had become customary as a result of comparison with Arabian usage, which styles the antelopes ' ' cattle of the desert ' ' and applies the name rPm to antilope leukoryx (Fig. 68) , to under- Fig. 69. The Re'em, or Wild Bull. (After a bas-relief in the palace of Sennacherib.) stand under the Hebrew re'em this species of antelope. But as this antelope, despite its long, sharp horns, is a slender-limbed and soft-eyed creature, it was beyond com prehension how it should occur to a poet to imagine it hitched to a plow and then to shudder at the thought. The cuneiform inscriptions have informed us what the remit is : it is the powerful, fierce-eyed, wild ox with stout curved horns, an animal of the wood and the moun tain, which scales the highest summits, an animal of tre- BABEL AND BIBLE. 81 mendous physical strength, the chase for which, like that for the lion, was especially popular with the Assyrian kings on account of its hazardousness. The presence of Fig. 70. Hunting the Re'em. this animal, which is most closely related to the bos urus of Caesar (Bell. Gall. VI. 28) and to the wisent (bison) *&-' Fig. 71. The Hill of Basil. of Middle-High-German literature, is scientifically estab lished for the region of Mt. Lebanon : the cuneiform in scriptions mention the re'em countless times, and the alabaster reliefs of the Assyrian royal palace present it very clearly to our eyes. (Fig. 69.) "St5" fe .,¦ *w '. j^sg -. A«SRe.D7U( f^ Kas". l.'EUPHRATEv^»"»u'«MucjHLi£f p . >•#? -¦¦^.,s Fig. 72. The Palm-Bordered Banks of the Euphrates, Laving the Ruins of Babylon. BABEL AND BIBLE. 83 King Nebuchadnezzar reports that he adorned the city gate of Babylon which is dedicated to the goddess Istar with burned bricks upon which were represented remus and gigantic serpents standing upright. The re discovery of this Istar Gate and its excavation to a depth of fourteen meters, where the underflow begins, consti tutes one of the most valuable achievements of recent years in our exploration of the ruins of Babylon. Hail to thee, thou hill of Babil (Fig. 71) , and to all thy fellows on the palm-bordered banks of the Euphrates ! Fig. 73. The Wild Bull (Re'em) on the Istar Gate. Brick mosaic in enameled colors. (Fig. 72.) How the heartbeats quicken when, after weeks of picking and shoveling under the glowing sun beams of the East, suddenly the structure that has been sought is revealed, when upon a giant block of stone cov ered with characters the name " Istar Gate" is read, and gradually the great double gate of Babylon, flanked northward on each side by three mighty towers, rises in a splendid state of preservation from the bowels of the 84 BABEL AND BIBLE. earth! And wherever you may look, on the surfaces of the towers as well as upon the inner walls of the gate way, droves of remus carved in relief, the uppermost row in brilliant contemporary enamel, standing forth in fasci nating splendor of colors against the deep blue back ground. (Fig. 73.) "Vigorously strides the wild ox with long paces, with proudly curved neck, with horns pointed threaten ingly forward, ears laid back, and inflated nostrils ; his Fig. 74. The Lion of Babylon. Brick mosaic in enameled colors. muscles are tense and swelling, his tail raised and yet falling stiffly downwards, — all as in Nature, but ideal ised."1 Where the smooth hide is white, horns and hoofs shine like gold ; where the hide is yellow, these are of malachite green, while in both kinds the long hair is col ored dark blue. But a truly imposing effect is produced by a white ox in relief, in which the long hair, as well as the horns and hoofs, is tinted a delicate green. Thus 1 From a treatise on these relief figures by Walter Andrae. BABEL AND BIBLE. 85 the re'em of the Istar Gate through which led the tri umphal highway of Marduk proves to be a worthy com panion for the widely known ' ' lion of Babylon ' ' which adorned the triumphal highway itself. (Fig. 74.) And Biblical science is enriched by still another ani mal of the strangest sort, a fabulous animal, familiar to us from the days of our youthful religious instruction, and which could not fail to make a fascinating impression upon all who passed through the Istar Gate toward the Fig. 75. The Dragon of Babel. Enameled brick mosaic. palace of Nebuchadnezzar, — I refer to the Dragon of Ba bel. (Fig. 75.) "With neck stretched far forward and looks darting poison the monster marches along," — it is a serpent, as is shown by the elongated head with its forked tongue, the long, scale-covered trunk and the wriggling tail, but at the same time it has the fore -legs of the panther while its hind-legs are armed with mon strous talons ; in addition to all this it has on its head long, straight horns and a scorpion's sting in the end of 86 BABEL AND BIBLE. its tail. Thanks are due to all whose faithful labor con tributes to secure such choice and exceedingly important archaeological treasures ! Quite apart from many such individual interpreta tions and illustrations, Assyriology is restoring confi dence in the authenticity of the text of the Old Testa ment, which has for some time been so violently assailed. For, finding itself constantly face to face with more and more difficult texts full of rare words and phrases, it real ises that there are also in the Old Testament scriptures great numbers of rare and even unique words and phrases ; it takes delight in these, attempts to interpret them from their context, and in not a few cases finds its efforts re warded by the presence of these very same words and phrases in Assyrian. In this manner it recognises what a fatal error it is on the part of modern exegesis to make conjectural interpretations of such rare words and diffi cult phrases, to "emend" them, and only too frequently to replace them with meaningless substitutes. In truth every friend of the Old Testament Scriptures should as sist with all his might in bringing to light the thousands of clay tablets and all other sorts of written monuments that lie buried in Babylon, and which our expedition will bring to light as soon as the first objects set before it are accomplished, thereby making possible for the textual interpretation of the Old Testament more rapid and more important progress than it has experienced within the two thousand years preceding. Indeed, entire narratives of the Old Testament re ceive their interpretation from Babylon. In our early youth we inherit the burden of the foolish notion of a BABEL AND BIBLE. 87 Nebuchadnezzar who was turned into a beast; for the Book of Daniel tells us (iv. 26-34) how the King of Babylon walked upon the roof of his palace, and after feasting his eyes once more on the splendor of the city he had built, received from heaven the prophecy that he should live, an exile from among men, with the beasts of the field and after the fashion of the beasts. Thereupon, according to account, Nebuchadnezzar ate grass in the wilderness like unto an ox, wet by the dew of heaven, while his hair grew like unto the feathers, of the eagle and his finger-nails like unto birds' claws. Yet no educator of youth should ever have ventured to teach such things, and especially not after the appear ance of Eberhard Schrader's treatise on The Insanity of Nebuchadnezzar , without at the same time pointing out the fact that the purer and more primitive form of this story has long been known in a Chaldsean legend trans mitted to us in Abydenus. This tells us that Nebuchad nezzar, after reaching the zenith of his power, went out upon the roof of his palace, inspired by a god, he ex claimed: "I here, Nabuchodrosor, announce to you the coming of the calamity which neither Bel nor Queen Beltis can persuade the Fates to avert. Perses (that is, Cyrus) will come . . . and bring servitude upon you. O would that he, before my fellow-citizens perish, might be driven through the desert, where neither cities nor the track of men can be found, but where wild beasts graze and birds fly about, while he wanders about solitary in caves and gorges. But may a better lot . . . befall me." Who could fail to perceive in this that the Hebrew writer has made a free version of the Babylonian legend, 88 BABEL AND BIBLE. especially since he lets us see plainly in verse 16 that the very wording of the original was quite familiar to him ! What Nebuchadnezzar wishes for the enemy of the Chal- daeans, this the author of the pamphlets full of errors and carelessness which are combined to make the Book of Daniel, has Nebuchadnezzar suffer himself, in order to exemplify as drastically as possible to his countrymen, who were being persecuted by Antiochus Epiphanes, the truth that God the Lord is able to humble deeply even the mightiest king who rebels against Yahveh. When shall we finally learn to distinguish the form from the content even within the covers of the Old Tes tament ? The author of the Book of Jonah preaches to us two lofty doctrines : that no one can escape from God, and that no mortal dare presume to dictate terms to God's mercy and patience, or even to set limits for them. But the form in which these truths are clothed is human, is fancifully Oriental, and if we should continue to believe to-day that Jonah while in the whale's belly prayed a conglomeration of passages from the Psalms, part of which were not composed until several centuries after the de struction of Nineveh, or that the King of Nineveh did such deep penance that he gave commands even to oxen and sheep to put on sackcloth, we should be sinning against the reason bestowed upon us by God. But all these are details which sink into insignifi cance under an intenser light. It was an exceedingly happy thought which struck the representatives of the various German ecclesiastical bodies who went to Jerusalem as guests of the German BABEL AND BIBLE. 89 Emperor to take part in the dedication of the Church of Our Saviour, that of founding in Jerusalem a "German Evangelical Institute for the Archaeology of the Holy Land." O would that our young theologians might go thither, and not merely in the cities, but better still out in the desert, familiarise themselves with the manners and customs of the Bedouins, which are still so com pletely the same as in the times of Ancient Israel, and plunge deeply into the Oriental mode of thought and ex pression : might listen to the story-tellers in the tents of the desert or hear the descriptions and accounts of the sons of the desert themselves, full of fancy that bubbles up vigorously and unhampered and only too often ex ceeds unconsciously the bounds of fact ! And if even the modern Orient, wherever we go and listen and look, furnishes such an abundance of sugges tions for the interpretation of the Bible, how much more will this be the case with the study of the ancient litera ture of the Babylonians and Assyrians which is in part contemporary with the Old Testament ! Everywhere there are more or less important agreements between the two literatures which are most closely related in language and style, in mode of thought and expression. I will cite here the sacredness of the number seven as well as that of the number three, for which we have evidence in both literatures : "Land, land, land, hear the word of the Lord," exclaims Jeremiah (xxii. 29) ; "Hail, hail, hail to the king, my lord," more than one Assyrian scribe begins his letter. And as the seraphim before the throne of God call one to another: "Holy, holy, holy is Yahveh Zebaoth" (Isaiah vi. 3), so we read at the be- 90 BABEL AND BIBLE. ginning of the Assyrian temple liturgy a threefold astir, that is, "salutary," or "holy." ' ' God created man out of the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man be came a living soul," — thus runs the so-called Yahvistic account of creation (Genesis ii. 7) . The very same con ceptions are found among the Babylonians : man is formed of earth (mud, clay) , as for instance Eabani is created out of a pinched off and moisted piece of clay (compare Job xxxiii. 6 : "I too am made of a pinch of clay ") , and for that reason he returns again thither (so Genesis iii. 19) ; but he becomes a living being through the breath of God. In the opening of a letter to the Assyrian king the writers characterise themselves as "dead dogs" (cf. 2 Samuel ix. 8) , whom the king, their master, had caused to live by "putting the breath of life into their nostrils." According to Babylonian notions the spittle of human beings possesses in a marked degree magic power. Spittle and spells are closely related conceptions, and spittle has death-dealing as well as life-giving power. ' ' O Mar duk," — thus runs a prayer to the patron deity of Babel, — ' ' O Marduk ! thine is the spittle of life ! ' ' Who is not reminded by this of New Testament narratives such as that of Jesus taking the deaf and dumb man aside, put ting his fingers in his ears, spitting and touching the man's tongue with the spittle, saying, "Hephata," "Be opened!" (Mark vii. 33 ff., and compare viii. 23, John ix. 6 ff.) Yahveh conducts his people on the march through the desert by means of a pillar of cloud by day and a pil lar of fire by night (comp. also Isaiah iv. 5) ; but Esar- BABEL AND BIBLE. 91 haddon, King of Assoria, before setting out upon a cam paign, also receives the prophetic message: "I, Istar of Arbela, will cause to rise upon thy right hand smoke and upon thy left fire." "Set thine house in order," says the prophet Isaiah to King Hezekiah when he is sick unto death, "for thou art sick and wilt not live" (Isaiah xxxviii. 1) , while the Assyrian general Kudurru, to whom the king has sent his own personal physician, thanks the king with the words: "I was dead, but the king, my lord, has made me to live." The soul of a man sick unto death is con ceived as already straying in the underworld, has already gone down into the pit (Psalms xxx. 4) . For this reason the goddess Gula, the patron genius of physicians, has the title "Awakener of the dead" : an Oriental physician who did not raise people from the dead would be no phy sician at all. How great the similarity between all things in Babel and Bible ! Here as well as there the fondness for ren dering speech and thought vivid by symbolical actions (I cite here merely the scapegoat which is chased away into the desert) ; here as well as there the same world of con stant wonders and signs, of perpetual revelations of the divinity, particularly through dreams, the same naive conceptions of the divinity ! As in Babel the gods eat and drink and even retire to rest, so Yahveh goes walking in Paradise in the cool of the evening, or takes delight in the smell of Noah's sacrifice. And just as in the Old Testament Yahveh speaks to Moses and Aaron and to all the prophets, so also in Babel the gods speak to men, 92 BABEL AND BIBLE. either directly or through the mouth of their priests and divinely inspired prophets and prophetesses. Revelation ! For a long time all scientifically trained theologians, whether Evangelical or Catholic ¦, have for centuries been firmly convinced that it was a grievous error to have regarded the invaluable remains of ancient Hebrew scriptures collected into the Old Testament as constituting collectively a religious canon, as being from beginning to end a revealed book of religion. For among them are writings such as the Book of Job, which ques tions the very existence of a just God, and in language that sometimes borders on blasphemy, and other very profane compositions, such, for example, as wedding songs (the so-called Song of Solomon) . In the pretty love-song, Ps. 45, we read, v. 11 ff. : " Hear, O daughter, and consider and incline thine ear : forget also thine own people and thy father's house; and if the king shall de sire thy beauty — for he is thy lord — fall down before him." It is very easy to imagine what the results must be when books and passages like these were forced to submit to a theological, and even a Messianic, interpretation (cf. the Epistle to the Hebrews i. 8 f.) , — the result could not fail to be such as it was in that mediaeval Catholic monk who, when he read in his Psalter the Latin maria, "the seas," crossed himself as in the presence of "Maria," meaning Mary, the mother of Christ. But for the re mainder of the Old Testament literature also the doctrine of verbal inspiration has been surrendered even by the Catholic Church. The Old Testament itself has com pelled this result, with its mass of contradictory duplicate BABEL AND BIBLE. 93 accounts, and with the absolutely inextricable confusion which has been brought about in the Pentateuch by per petual revision and combination. And to be perfectly serious and frank, — we have not deserved such an immediate and personal revelation from the divinity anyway. For mankind has unto this day treated with absolute flippancy the most primitive and genuine revelation of the holy God, the ten command ments on the tables of the law from Sinai. Dr. Martin Luther said : "Das Wort sie sollen lass en stahn." (Inviolate the Word let stand !) and yet in the Smaller Catechism, from which our chil dren are instructed, the entire second commandment has been suppressed, the same upon which God laid such especial emphasis (Exodus xx. 22 f.) : "Thou shalt not make unto thyself any image or any likeness," etc., and have put in its place the last commandment, or rather prohibition of covetousness (wicked desire) , after having torn it in two, which might easily have been recognised as unpermissible by comparing Exodus xx. 17 and Deu teronomy v. 18. The command to honor father and mother is not the fourth but the fifth, and so on. And in the Catholic Catechism, which has the same method of numbering the commandments, the first commandment is, indeed, fuller : ' ' Thou shalt have no other gods before me ; thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image, to worship it," but immediately after we read: "Nevertheless, we make images of Christ, of the mother of God and of all the 94 BABEL AND BIBLE. saints, because we do not worship them, but only rev erence them." This entirely ignores the fact that God the Lord expressly says : ' ' Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image to worship and to reverence.1 (Consider also Deuteronomy iv. 16.) But if we regard the matter for a while from the standpoint of the letter of the Thora, this reproach falls still more heavily upon Moses himself, a shrill and unani mous reproach from all the people of the earth who ask after God if haply they may find him. Just think of it: The Almighty God, "the All-container, the All-sus- tainer," the inscrutable, unapproachable, proclaims from the midst of fire and cloud and to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning his most holy will, Yahveh, "the rock whose work is perfect," with his own hands carves two tablets of stone and engraves upon them with his own fingers, those fingers that keep the world in equilib rium, the Ten Commandments, — and then Moses in anger hurls away the eternal tables of the eternal God and breaks them into a thousand pieces ! And this God a second time writes other tables, which present his last autograph revelation to mankind, the most unique and tangible revelation of God, — and Moses does not consider it worth while to report literally to his people, and thus to mankind, what God had engraved upon those tables. We scholars regard it as a serious reproach to one of our number if, in dealing with an inscription by any one soever, though but a shepherd who may have perpetuated his name upon some rock on the Sinaitic peninsula, he reports it inaccurately or incorrectly in even a single :R. V., "serve." BABEL AND BIBLE. 95 character; whereas Moses, when he impresses the ten commandments upon his people once more before cross ing the Jordan, not only changes individual words, trans poses words and sentences, but even substitutes for one long passage another which, however, he also emphasises expressly as being the very literal word of God. And accordingly we do not know to this day whether God commanded that the Sabbath day be kept holy in memory of his own rest after finishing the six days' labor of crea tion (Exodus xx. 11 ; comp. xxxi. 17) , or in commem oration of the incessant forced labor of his people during their stay in Egypt (Deuteronomy v. 14 ff.) . The same carelessness has to be regretted in other points that concern God's most sacred bequest to men. To this day we are hunting for the peak in the mountain- chain of the Sinaitic peninsula which corresponds with all that is told, and while we are most minutely informed regarding vastly less important things, such, for in stance, as the rings and the rods of the box which con tained the two tables, we learn absolutely nothing about the outward character of the tables themselves, except that they were written upon both sides. When the Philistines capture the ark of the covenant and place it in the temple of Dagon at Ashdad, they find on the second morning following the image of the god Dagon lying in fragments before the ark of Yahveh (1 Samuel v. f.) . And then when it is brought to the little Jewish border-town of Beth Shemesh and the inhabitants look at it, seventy of them pay for their presumption by death, — according to another account fifty thousand ( ! ) (1 Sam. vi. 19) . Even one who touches the ark from 96 BABEL AND BIBLE. inadvertence is slain by the wrath of Yahveh (2 Sam. 6-7 f.). But as soon as we touch the soil of the historical period, history is silent. We are told in detail that the Chaldaeans carried away the treasures of the temple at Jerusalem and the gold, silver, and copper furnishings of the temple, the fire pans and basins and shovels (2 Kings xxiv. 13 ; xxv. 13 ff.) , but no one is concerned about the ark with the two God-given tables ; the temple goes down in flame, but not a single word is said of the fate of the two miracle-working tables of the Almighty God, the most sacred treasure of the Old Covenant. We do not propose to ask the cause of all this, but only to record the fact that Moses is exonerated by the critical study of the Pentateuch from the reproach which belongs to him according to the strict letter of the Thora. For, as is confirmed by many and among them Dillmann (Commentary to the Books of Exodus and Leviticus, p. 201) , this authority so highly valued even on the Catholic side, "We have the ten commandments in two different revisions neither of which is based upon the tables them selves, but upon other versions." And similarly all the other so-called Mosaic laws are transmitted to us in two comparatively late revisions, separated from each other by centuries, whence all the differences are easily enough accounted for. And we know this also, that the so-called Mosaic laws represent regulations and customs part of which had been recog nised in Israel from primitive times, and part of which had not received legal recognition until after the settle ment of the people in Canaan, and were then attributed BABEL AND BIBLE. 97 bodily to Moses, and later, for the sake of greater sacred ness and inviolability, to Yahveh himself. The same process we see in connection with the laws of other races — I will mention here the law-book of Manu — and it is precisely the case with the law-making Babylon. In my first lecture on this subject I pointed out the fact that we find in Babylon as early as 2250 B. C. a State with a highly developed system of law, and I spoke of a great Code of Hammurabi which established civil law in all its branches. While at that time we could only infer the existence of this Code from scattered but perfectly reliable details, — the original of this great Law Book of Hammurabi has now been found, and therewith a treasure of the very first rank has been conferred upon science and especially upon the science of law and the history of civilisation. It was in the ruins of the" acrop olis of Susa, about the turn of the year 1901-1902, that the French archaeologist de Morgan and the Dominican monk Scheil had the good fortune to find a monument of King Hammurabi in the shape of a diorite block 2.25 meters high. It had apparently been carried away from Babylon along with other plunder by the Elamites. On it had been engraved in the most careful manner 282 paragraphs of law (Fig. 76) . As the King himself says, they are "laws of justice which Hammurabi, the mighty and just King, has established for the use and benefit of the weak and oppressed, of widows and orphans." " Let the wronged person," thus we read, "who has a case at law, read this my monumental record and hear my pre cious words ; my monument shall explain his case to him and he may look forward to its settlement ! With a heart 98 BABEL AND BIBLE. full of gratitude let him then say : ' Hammurabi is a lord who is like a real father to his people.' " But although Fig. 76. A Portion of the Inscription of the Laws of Hammurabi. the King says that he, the sun of Babylon, which sheds the light over North and South in his land, has written BABEL AND BIBLE. 99 down these laws, nevertheless he in his turn received them from the highest judge of heaven and earth, the Fig. 77. Hammurabi Before Shamash, the God of Law. Sun god, the lord of all that is called "right," and there fore the mighty tablet of the law bears at its head the 100 BABEL AND BIBLE. beautiful bas-relief (Fig. 77) , which represents Hammu rabi in the act of receiving the laws from Shamash, the supreme law-giver. Thus and not otherwise was it with the giving of the Law on Sinai, the so-called making of the Covenant be tween Yahveh and Israel. For the purely human origin and character of the Israelitic laws are surely evident enough ! Or is any one so bold as to maintain that the thrice holy God, who with his own finger engraved upon the stone tablet Id tirzach "thou shalt not kill," in the same breath sanctioned blood- vengeance, which rests like a curse upon Oriental peoples to this day, while Hammu rabi had almost obliterated the traces of it? Or is it pos sible that any one still clings to the notion that circum cision, which had for ages before been customary among the Egyptians and the Bedouin Arabs, was the mark of an especial covenant between God and Israel? We understand very well, according to Oriental thought and speech, that the numerous regulations for every possible petty event in daily life, as for instance, the case of a fierce ox that kills a man or another ox (Exodus xxi. 28 f., 35 f.) , that the prohibitions of foods, the minute medicinal prescriptions for skin diseases, the detailed directions regarding the priest's wardrobe, are represented as derived from Yahveh. But this is alto gether outward form ; the God who prefers the offerings of "a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart (Ps. li. 17) , and who took no pleasure in the worship by burnt offerings after the fashion of the "heathen" peoples, cer tainly did not ordain this worship by burnt offerings with its minute details, nor devise the recipes for ointment BABEL AND BIBLE. 101 and burnt incense "after the art of the perfumer," as the expression runs (Exodus xxx. 25, 35). It will be the business of future investigators to de termine to just what extent the Israelitic laws both civil and levitical are specifically Israelitic, or general Semitic, or how far they were influenced by the Babylonian code which is so much older and which had certainly extended beyond the borders of Babylon. I think, for instance, of the law of retribution, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, of the feast of the new moon, the so-called " shew bread," the high priest's breast plate, and many other things. For the present we must be thankful that the institution of the Sabbath day, the origin of which was unclear even to the Hebrews themselves, is now recog nised as having its roots in the Babylonian Sabattu, "the day par excellence." On the other hand, no one has maintained that the Ten Commandments were borrowed even in part from Babylon, but on the contrary it has been pointed out very emphatically that prohibitions like the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh spring from the instinct of self-preservation which is common to all men. In fact, the most of the Ten Commandments are just as sacred to the Babylo nians as to the Hebrews: disrespect for parents, false witness, and every sort of covetousness are also punished severely in Babylonian law, generally with death. Thus, for instance, we read in the very third paragraph of Ham murabi's code : "If in a law suit any one on the witness- stand utters falsehoods and cannot support his testimony, he shall himself be punished with death if the life of an other is involved." 102 BABEL AND BIBLE. The Second Commandment is specifically Israelitic, the prohibition of every sort of image-worship, which in its direct application seems to have a distinctly anti- Babylonian point. But in connection with the eminently Israelitic First Commandment, "I am Yahveh, thy God; thou shalt have no other gods beside me," may I be permitted to treat more fully one point which deeply and permanently concerns all who are interested in Babel and Bible, — the monotheism of the Old Testament. From the standpoint of Old Testament theology I can understand how, after it has unanimously and rightly given up the verbal in spiration of the ancient Hebrew scriptures and thus rec ognised, perhaps unintentionally but quite logically, the wholly unauthoritative character of the Old Testament writings as such for our belief, our knowledge and our investigations, — I say I can understand how theology now claims as divine the spirit that pervades them and preaches with so much the greater unanimity the ' ' ethi cal monotheism of Israel," the "spirit of prophecy" as " a real revelation of the living God." Great consternation seems to have been produced by the names mentioned in my first lecture, which we find in surprisingly great numbers among the North-Semitic nomads who immigrated into Babylon about 2500 B. C. : "El (i. e., God) hath given," "God sits in control," "If God were not my God," "God, consider me," "God is God," "Jahu (i. e., Yahveh) is God." I really do not understand this uneasiness. For since the Old Testa ment itself represents Abram as preaching in the name of Yahveh (Gen. xii. 8) , and since Yahveh had already BABEL AND BIBLE. 103 been the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, those old names such as Jahu-ilu, i. e., Joel, ought really to be welcomed with joy. And these names should prove very opportune, particularly for those theologians who regard themselves as affirmative and who hold that ' ' all divine inspiration has undergone a gradual historical develop ment," thereby turning the orthodox notion of inspira tion upside down, as it seems to me. However, the great majority of theologians feel and fear rightly that these names, which are more than a thousand years older than the corresponding names in the Old Testament, which attest the worship of a single god named Jahu, "the permanent" (whether a tribal god or what not) , and which moreover might indicate the initial point of an historical development of the belief in Yahveh as existing in very much wider circles than merely among the descendants of Abram, will thereby throw serious doubt upon its claim to be a special revela tion. And therefore they are laboring and tormenting themselves in the effort to explain away these names, hesitating at no means. But though the waves spew and foam, like a lighthouse in the dark night stand fast the names of the descendants of North Semitic Bedouins from 2300 B. C, "God is God," "Jahu is God." It seems to me that exaggerations should be avoided in either direction. I have never ceased to emphasise the gross polytheism of the Babylonians, and am far from feeling obliged to disguise it. But I regard it as just as much out of place to make the Sumerian-Babylo- nian pantheon and its representation in poetry, particu larly in popular poetry, the butt of shallow wit and sar- 104 BABEL AND BIBLE. castic exaggerations, as we should properly condemn such ridicule if directed at the gods of Homer. Nor should the worship of divinities in images of wood or stone be in any wise glossed over. Only it should not be forgotten that even the Biblical account of creation has man created ' ' in the likeness of God," in dia metrical contradiction of the constantly emphasised ' ' spirituality ' ' of God , — as has rightly been pointed out by students of theology. And in view of this fact we can understand after all how the Babylonians reversed this method and conceived and represented their gods in the image of man. The prophets of the Old Testament do exactly the same thing , at least in spirit . In perfect agreement with the Babylonians and Assy rians the prophet Habakkuk (chap, iii.) sees Yahveh ap proach with horses and char iot, bow and arrows and lance, and even with "horns at his side,"1 with horns, the symbol of authority and strength and victory (cp. Numbers xxiii. 22) , the cus tomary adornment of the headdress of both higher and !R. V., "rays coming forth from his hand." Fig. 78. Horns the Emblem of Strength. BABEL AND BIBLE. 105 lower divinities among the Assyrio-Babylonians (Fig. 78) . And the representations of God the Father in Christian art: in Michael Angelo, Raphael, and all our illustrated Bibles, — the representation of the first day of Fig. 79. The Ancient of Days. (After Schnorr von Karolsfeld.) creation (Fig. 79) is taken from Julius von Schnorr's illustrated Bible, — are all derived from a vision of the Prophet Daniel (vii. 9) who sees God as the "Ancient of Days, his garments white as snow and the hair of his head like unto pure wool," 106 BABEL AND BIBLE. But the Babylonians can endure with the same equa nimity as the Catholic Church the wearisome ridicule of the Old Testament prophets cast upon the Babylonian idols who have eyes but see not, ears but hear not, a nose but smell not, and feet but cannot go. For just as intel ligent Catholics see in the images merely the representa tions of Christ, Mary, and the saints, so did the intelli gent Babylonians : no hymn or prayer was addressed to the image as such, — they are always appealing to the divinity that dwells beyond the bounds of earth. In passing judgment upon the "ethical monothe ism ' ' of Israel also a certain moderation would seem to be desirable. In the first place, we must except from consideration in this connection much of the pre-exilic period, during which Judah as well as Israel, kings as well as people, were dominated by an ineradicable yet quite natural predilection for the indigenous Canaanitish polytheism. Furthermore, it seems to me a particularly unwise proceeding on the part of certain hotspurs to portray the ethical level of Israel, even that of the pre-exilic period, as elevated far above that of the Babylonians. It is un deniable that the warfare of the Assyrio-Babylonians was cruel and sometimes barbarous. But so was the conquest of Canaan by the Hebrew tribes accompanied by a tor rent of innocent blood; the capture of "the great and goodly alien cities, of the houses full of all good things, of the cisterns, the vineyards, the olive-groves" (Deuter onomy vi. 10 f.) was preceded by the "devoting" (Deu teronomy vii. 2, R. V., margin) of hundreds of villages on both sides of the Jordan, that is, by the merciless BABEL AND BIBLE. 107 massacre of all the inhabitants, even of the women and the very smallest of children. And as for right and jus tice in state and people, the persistent denunciations by the prophets of both Israel and Judah of the oppression of the poor, of widows and of orphans, taken in conjunc tion with stories such as that of Naboth's vineyard (1 Kings xxi) , reveal a profound corruption of both kings and people, while the almost two thousand years' exist ence of the nation of Hammurabi would seem to justify the application to it of the saying : ' ' Righteousness ex alt eth a nation." We actually possess a monumental tablet which warns the Babylonian king himself most insistently against every species of injustice ! "If the king takes the money of the people of Babylon to appropriate it to his own treasury, and then hears the suit of the Babylo nians and permits himself to be inclined to partisanship, then Marduk, the Lord of heaven and earth, will set his enemy against him and give his possessions and his treasure to his enemy." In the matter of love of one's neighbor, of compas sion upon one's neighbor, as has already been remarked, there is no deep gulf to be discovered between Babylon and the Old Testament. In passing let me call attention here to one other point. Old Testament theologians make very merry over the Babylonian account of the Flood with its poly theism, and yet it contains one element which appeals to us much more humanely than that of the Bible. "The Deluge," thus Xisuthros tells us, "was over. I looked forth over the wide ocean, lamenting aloud because all 108 BABEL AND BIBLE. humankind had perished." Eduard Suss, the celebrated Austrian geologist, confessed long since that in touches like this ' ' the simple narrative of Xisuthros bears the stamp of convincing truth." We find no report of any compassion on the part of Noah. The Babylonian Noah and his wife are transformed into gods ; this too would have been impossible in Israel. Of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to the Feast of Weeks we read, Deuteronomy xvi. 11 (comp. also xii. 18) : "And thou shalt rejoice before Yahveh, thy God, thou and thy son and thy daughter and thy manservant and thy maid servant," — but where is the wife? It is generally recog nised that the position of women in Israel was a very subordinate one from earliest childhood. We find in the Old Testament scarcely a single girl's name which ex presses in the cordial manner customary in the case of boy's names, joyful gratitude to Yahveh for the birth of the child. All the tender pet-names of girls, such as "Beloved," "Fragrant One," "Dew-born," "Bee," "Gazelle," "Ewe" (Rachel), "Myrtle" and "Palm," ' ' Coral ' ' and ' ' Crown ' ' cannot in my opinion deceive us on this point. The woman is the property of her parents and afterwards of her husband ; she is a valuable ' ' hand ' ' upon which in marriage a great share of the heaviest do mestic burdens are laid. And above all, as in Islam, she is disqualified for performing religious rites. All this was different and better in Babylon : for in stance, we read in the time of Hammurabi of women who have their chairs carried into the temple; we find the names of women as witnesses in legal documents, and other similar things. Right here in this matter of the BABEL AND BIBLE. 109 position of women we may perceive clearly how pro foundly the Babylonian civilisation was influenced by the non-Semitic civilisation of the Sumerians. And how variously pitched is that instrument, the human temperament ! While Koldewey and others with him are astonished anew that the excavations in Babylo nia bring to light absolutely no obscene figures, a Catho lic Old Testament scholar knows of ' ' numberless statu ettes found in Babylon which have no other purpose but Fig. 80. Babylonian Clay Figures Representing the Goddess of Birth. to give expression to the lowest and most vulgar sensual ity." Thou poor goddess of childbirth, poor goddess Is tar! However, although thou be moulded only of clay, yet needst thou not blush to appear in this company (Fig. 80) ; for I am certain thou wilt give no offence, just as certain as that we are none of us offended but on the contrary love to give ourselves up to the contempla tion of the glorious and familiar marble statue of Eve with her children (Fig. 81) . 110 BABEL AND BIBLE. And although an Evangelical specialist in the Old Testament, finding occasion in a passage of a Babylonian poem, which has not yet received its definitive interpre tation, exclaims with similar ethical indignation, that we ' ' must needs search through the most vulgar corners of Further Asia in order to find its analogues," I cannot, indeed, boast of equal knowledge of local details, but I would like to remind him of the reasons why our school authorities so urgently de manded extracts from the Old Testament, and to warn him against throwing stones, lest all too speedily his own glass house come crashing about his ears. However, these skirmishes, provoked by my opponents, into the realm of the moral level of the two nations in volved, seem to me of infinitely less importance than a final ob servation in connection with the proclamation of the ' ' eth ical monotheism ' ' of Israel or of the ' ' spirit of prophet- ism" as "a genuine revelation of the living God," which in my opinion has not yet received fitting atten tion. Five times a day and even more frequently the ortho dox Moslem prays the Paternoster of Islam, the first Sura of the Koran, which closes with the words : "Lead us, O Fig. 81. Eve and Her Children. (A marble statue by Adolf Brutt.) BABEL AND BIBLE. Ill Allah, the right way, the way of those whom thou hast favored, who are not smitten by thy wrath [like the Jews] and who are not in error [like the Christians]." The Moslem alone is the one favored by Allah, he alone is the one chosen by God to adore and worship the true God. All other men and races are kafirun, heretics, whom God has not predestined to eternal salvation. Just such and not otherwise, deeply rooted in the nature of the Semite, does the Yahvism of Israel show itself to be, in the pre- exilic as well as in the post-exilic period. Yahveh is the only true (or highest) God, but at the same time he is the God of Israel solely and exclusively, Israel is his chosen people and his inheritance ; all other nations are Gojim or heathen, given over by Yahveh himself to god- lessness and idolatry. This is a doctrine absolutely ir reconcilable with our nobler conception of God, but which, nevertheless, is uttered in uncloaked language in the nineteenth verse of the fourth chapter of Deuteronomy, a passage which at the same time destroys with a single phrase the illusion of a " primitive revelation " : " Lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven and when thou seest the sun and the moon and the stars, even all the host of heaven, thou worship them and reverence them, which Yahveh, thy God, hath divided unto all the peoples under the whole heaven ; but you Yahveh hath taken and brought forth out of Egypt, to be unto him a people of inheritance." According to this, the worship of the heavenly bodies and of idols was willed and decreed by Yahveh himself upon the peoples under the whole heaven. So much the more dreadful is the shock when in Deute ronomy vii. 2, Yahveh gives the command to exterminate 112 BABEL AND BIBLE- mercilessly on account of their impiety the seven great and powerful peoples whom Israel may expect to find already in possession of Canaan, or when we read, verse 16 : "And thou shalt consume all the peoples which Yah veh thy God shall deliver unto thee ; thine eye shall not pity them." It goes hard to regard as inspired by the holy and just God this monotheism of the exclusively national type. It is not manifested in the nature of the case in such passages as the account of the creation, but in gene ral it runs throughout the Old Testament undeniably from Sinai on: "I am Yahveh, thy God," to Deutero- Isaiah : "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people," and to Zechariah's prophecy (xx. 8, 23) : "Thus saith Yahveh Zebaoth : In those days it shall come to pass that ten men shall take hold, out of all the languages of the na tions ( Gojim) , shall even take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying: 'We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you. ' " It is this monotheism that left all the other nations of the earth "without hope" and "without God in the world," as for instance the Apostle Paul assumes (Ephesians ii. 11 f.) . And yet we have all been so hypnotised from youth up by this dogma of the ' ' exclusive inheritance of Israel ' ' (Ephe sians ii. 12) , that we regard the history of the ancient world from an entirely wrong point of view and are even satisfied to claim for ourselves at this day the role of a "spiritual Israel," forgetting the mighty historical revo lution which was accomplished in the New Testament times under the influence of John the Baptist and the preaching of Jesus, that dramatic conflict between Juda- BABEL AND BIBLE. 113 ism, Jewish Christianity, and Gentile Christianity, which made it possible for Peter to exclaim (Acts x. 34 f.) : " Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of per sons, but that in every nation, he that feareth him and is acceptable to him," thus tearing down the partition be tween the Oriental-Israelitic and the Christian-philosophic conception of the universe. For my own part, I live firm in the belief that the early Hebrew scriptures, even if they lose their standing as "revealed" or as permeated by a " revealed " spirit, will nevertheless always maintain their great importance, especially as a unique monument of a great religio-histo- rical process which continues even into our own times. The lofty passages in the prophets and the psalms, filled with a living confidence in God and with longing for re pose in God, will always find a living echo in our hearts, despite the particularistic limitation of its literal text and its literal meaning, which are largely obliterated anyway in our translation of the Bible. Indeed, words like those of the prophet Micah (vi. 6-8) : "Wherewith shall I come before Yahveh, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will Yahveh be pleased with thou sands of rams, or ten thousands of rivers of oil? Or shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, O man, what is good ; and what doth Yahveh require of thee, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God! " — words like these, insisting on an ethical manifestation of religion in the life (and which are also found in Babylonian writings) , come, as it were, 114 BABEL AND BIBLE. from the very soul of all sincerely religious people to day. But on the other hand, let us not blindly cling to antiquated and scientifically discredited dogmas from the vain fear that our faith in God and our true religious life might suffer harm ! Let us remember that all things earthly are in living motion and that standing still means death. Let us look back upon the mighty, throbbing force with which the German Reformation filled the great nations of the earth in every field of human endeavor and human progress ! But even the Reformation is only one stage on the road to the goal of truth set for us by God and in God. Let us press forward toward it, humbly but with all the resources of free scientific investigation, joy fully professing our adherence to that standard perceived with eagle eye from the high watch-tower and courage ously proclaimed to all the world : ' ' The further develop ment of religion." THE STRUGGLE FOR BABEL AND BIBLE LITERATURE ON BABEL AND BIBLE. J. Barth, Babel und israelitisches Religionswesen. A Lecture. Ber lin, 1902; 36 pp. Prof. Dr. Karl Budde, Das Alte Testament und die Ausgrabungen. Giesen, 1903. (A Lecture, delivered May 29, 1902, at the Theological Conference at Giessen); 39 pp., of which, how ever, only pp. 1-10 are pertinent. Dr. Johannes Doller, Imperial and Royal Court Chaplain and Director of Studies at the Frintaneum, Vienna, Bibel und Babel oder Babel und Bibel ? Eine Entgegnung aufProf. F. Deliizsc/z's "Babel und Bibel." Padernborn, 1903. Prof. Dr. Hommel, Die altorientalischen Denkmdler und das Alte Testament. Eine Erwiderung auf Prof . Fr. Delitzsch's "Babel und Bibel." Berlin, 1902; 38 pp. Dr. Alfred Jeremias, pastor of the Lutheran Church at Leipzig, Im Ka7tipfe um Babel und Bibel. Ein Wort zur Verstdndigung und Abwehr. Leipzig, 1903; 35 pp. Prof. D. R. Kittel, Die babylonische7i Ausgrabungen vnd die biblische Urgeschichte. Leipzig, 1902; 36 pp. See also under Sec tion II., p. 91. W. Knieschke, pastor at Sieversdorf, Bibel und Babel, El und Bel. Eine Replik auf Fricdrich Delitzschs's Babel und Bibel. West- end-Berlin, 1902 ; 64 pp. Dr. Eduard Konig, Prof, of theology. Bibel und Babel. Eine kulturgeschichtliche Skizze. Sixth, enlarged edition, with ref erence to the most recent literature on the subject of Babel and Bible. Berlin, 1902; 60 pp. 118 BABEL AND BIBLE. Prof. D. Sam. Oettlt, Der Kampf urn Bibel und Babel. Ein reli- gionsgeschichtlicher Vortrag. Second edition. Leipzig, 1902; 32 pp. Rabb. Dr. Ludw. A. Rosenthal, Babel und Bibel oder Babel gegen Bibel? Ein Wort zur Klarung. Berlin, 1902; 31 pp. Prof. Bruno Baentsch, Jena, "Babel und Bibel. Eine Priifung des unter diesem Titel erschienenen Vortrages von Friedrich Delitzsch, besonders auf die darin enthaltenen religions- geschichtlichen Ausfiihrungen," in the Protestantische Monats- hefte, edited by D. Julius Websky. Vol. VI., No. 8 (August 15, 1902). Berlin, 1902. Cf. also two articles, signed B. B., "Noch einmal Babel und Bibel," in the Thiiringer Rund schau, March 2nd and 9th, 1902. Prof. Dr. C. H. Cornill, Breslau, Deutsche Litteraturzeitung, 1902, No. 27 (July 5). Heinrich Danneil (Schonebeck a. E. ), "Babel und Bibel," Magdeburgische Zeitung, No. 25, 1902, Beiblatt. Privatdocent Dr. W. Engelkemper, Munster, "Babel und Bibel," Wissenschaftliche Beilage ziir Germania, 1902, Nos. 31 (July 31) and 32 (August 7). Berlin, 1902. Prof. D. Gunkel, "Babylonische und biblische Urgeschichte. " Christliche Welt, XVII., 1903, No. 6 (Feb. 5), cols. 121- 134- Prof. Dr. Peter Jensen, "Babe! und Bibel," Die christliche Welt, XVI., 1902, No. 21 (May 22), cols. 487-494. Franz Kaulen, Bonn, "Babel und Bibel," Literarischer Hand- weiscr zundchst fiir alle Katholiken deutscher Zunge. XL., Nos. 766 and 767, 1901-1902. P. Keil, London, "Babel und Bibel." Pastor bonus. Zeitschrift fiir kirchliche Wissenschaft und Praxis, edited by Domkapitular Dr. P. Einig. XV., parts 1, 2, 3 (Oct. 1, Nov. 1, Dec. 1, 1902). Prof. D. R. Kittel, Leipzig, "Jahve in Babel und Bibel," Theo- logisches Liter aturblatt, XXIII. , No. 17 (April 25, 1902). Also, "Noch einmal Jahve in Babel und Bibel," ibid., No. 18 (May 2, 1902), and "Der Monotheismus in Babel und BABEL AND BIBLE. 119 Bibel," Allgemeine evangelisch-lutherische Xirchenzeitung, 1902, No. 17 (April 25, 1902). Rabbi Dr. S. Meyer, Regensburg, "Die Hypothesenglaubigen," Deutsche israelitische Zeitung, XIX., No. 8 (20th February, 1902); and "Nochmals Babel und Bibel," ibid., No. 10 (6th March). "Babel und Bibel," JVeue preussische (Xreuz-) Zeitung, 1902, No. 211 (7th May). Signed 1 [Lie. theol. Prof. Riedel, Greifswald]. Wolff, "Babel und Bibel," Evangelische Xirchenzeitung, 1902, No. 28 (cols. 657-662). OPINIONS ON "BABEL AND BIBLE." EMPEROR WILLIAM ON "BABEL AND BIBLE." (A Letter from His Majesty Emperor William II to Admiral Hollman, President of the Oriental Society.) February 15, 1903. My Dear Hollman: My telegram to you will unquestionably have removed the doubts which you still entertained regarding the concluding pas sage of the lecture, which was clearly understood by the audience and therefore could not be altered. I am glad, nevertheless, that the subject-matter of the second lecture has again been taken up, and I gladly seize the opportunity after a perusal of a copy of the proofs to state again clearly my position with regard to it. During an evening's entertainment with us Professor Delitzsch had the opportunity to fully confer and debate with Her Majesty, the Empress, and Dr. Dryander, while I listened and remained passive. Unfortunately he abandoned the standpoints of the strict historian and Assyriologist, going into religious and theological conclusions which were quite nebulous or bold. When he came to speak of the New Testament, it became clear at once that he developed such quite divergent views regard ing the person of our Saviour that I had to express the diametri cally opposite view. He does not recognise the divinity of Christ as a deduction therefrom and asserts that the Old Testament con tains no revelation about him as the Messiah. Here the Assyriologist and the historical investigator ceases and the theologian begins, with all his light and shadow sides. In this province I can only urgently advise him to proceed cautiously, step by step, and at any rate to ventilate his theses only in the theological books and in the circle of his colleagues. Spare us, BABEL AND BIBLE. 121 the laymen, and, above all, the Oriental Society, from hearing of them. We carry on excavations and publish the results in behalf of science and history, but not to conform or attack religious hypoth eses. Professor Delitzsch, the theologian, has run away with Profes sor Delitzsch, the historian ; his history is exploited merely for the benefit of his theology. I regret that Professor Delitzsch did not adhere to his original program which he developed last year; viz., to determine, on the basis of the discoveries of our society and by means of critically verified translations of the inscriptions, the extent to which these materials shed light on the history of the people of Israel or eluci date the historical events, customs and habits, traditions, politics and laws of the Israelites. In other words, he should have shown the mutual relationship in which the undeniably powerful and highly developed civilisation of the Babylonians stood to that of the Israelites, and the extent to which the former might have in fluenced the latter or have impressed upon it its own stamp. He could thus have saved, so to speak, from a purely human point of view, the honor and good name of the Babylonian people which has certainly been depicted in the Old Testament in a revolting and grossly one-sided manner. This was indeed his original inten tion, — at least as I conceive it, — and certainly his is a most fruit ful and interesting field, the investigation, elucidation, and expla nation of which necessarily interests us laymen in the highest degree and would have placed us under the highest obligation to him. At precisely here is the place where he should have stopped but beyond which unfortunately his ardent zeal led him. As was not otherwise to be expected, the excavations brought information to light which has a bearing also on the religion of the Old Testa ment. He should have mentioned this fact and should have em phasised and explained whatever coincidences occurred ; but all purely religious conclusions it was his duty to have left for his hear ers themselves to draw. Thus the interest and the favor of the lay public would have been gained in the fullest measure for his lec ture. He approached the question of revelation in a polemical tone, more or less denying it or reducing it to a matter of purely human development. That was a grave error, for thereby he touched on the innermost, holiest possession of many of his hearers. 122 BABEL AND BIBLE. And whether he did so justifiably or unjustifiably, — and that is for our present purpose quite indifferent, since we are concerned here not with scientific conventions of theologians but with lay people of all ages and professions, — he still either demolished or endangered the dearest conceptions, or it may be, the illusions of many of his hearers, — conceptions with which these people had in terwoven their oldest and dearest associations. And unqestionably he shattered or at least undermined for these people their faith. It is a deed that only the greatest genius should venture to attempt and for which the mere study of Assyriology did not justify him. Goethe also once discussed this question, calling emphatic at tention to the fact that one must be on one's guard in speaking to the general public not to destroy even such insignificant structures as mere "pagodas of terminology." The fundamental principle, that it is very important to distinguish precisely between what is and what is not adapted to the place, the public, etc., appears to have escaped the excellent Professor in his zeal. As a professional theologian it is permissible for him to publish in technical reviews and for his colleagues theses, hypotheses, and theories, nay, even convictions which it would not be proper for him to utter in a pub lic lecture or book. I should now like to advert again to my personal attitude toward the doctrine of revelation and to state it in terms similar to those I have formerly employed toward you, my dear Hollman, and toward other gentlemen. I distinguish between two different kinds of revelation, — one progressive, and, as it were, historical ; the other purely religious, as preparing the way for the future Messiah. Regarding the former, it must be said for me, it does not ad mit of a doubt, not even the slightest, that God reveals himself continuously in the race of man created by him. He breathed into man the breath of his life and follows with fatherly love and inter est the development of the human race. In order to lead it for ward and develop it, he reveals himself in this or that great sage, whether priest or king, whether among the heathen, the Jews, or the Christians. Hammurabi was one. So was Moses, Abraham, Homer, Charlemagne, Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kant, and Emperor William the Great. These he sought out and endowed with his grace to accomplish splendid, imperishable results for their people, in their intellectual and physical provinces, according BABEL AND BIBLE. 123 to his will. How often my grandfather pointed out that he was only an instrument in the Lord's hands. The achievements of the great intellects of the world were do nated by God to the nations in order that they might through their aid make further progress, and might feel their way farther and farther through the labyrinths which yet remained uninvestigated. Unquestionably God did "reveal" himself differently to the differ ent races according to their position and rank in the scale of civil isation, and he does the same to-day. For just as we may be over whelmed by the grandeur, magnificence, and might of nature when we look upon it and wonder while so doing at the grandeur of God who is revealed in it, so assuredly are we justified, when we con template the grand and splendid deeds that a man or a nation has accomplished, in wondering with gratitude at the splendor of the revelation made by God in them. He works directly upon us and among us. The second form of revelation, the more religious, is that which leads to the manifestation of our Lord. It was introduced with Abraham, slow but forward looking and omniscient, for humanity was lost without it. Now begins the most astonishing activity of God's revelation. Abraham's race and the peoples developing from it regard faith in one God as their holiest possession, and, it fol lows, hold fast to it with ironlike consistency. It is their duty to foster and cherish it. Split up during their Egyptian captivity, the divided elements were again welded together by Moses, ever trying to hold fast to their monotheism. It was the direct inter vention of God that caused the rejuvenation of this people, thus proved through centuries, till the Messiah, heralded by prophets and psalmists, finally appeared, the greatest revelation of God in the world, for he appeared in the son himself. Christ is God, God in human form. He redeemed us and inspires, entices us to follow him. We feel his fire burning in us. His sympathy strengthens us. His discontent destroys us. But also his intercession saves us. Conscious of victory, building solely upon his world, we go through labor, ridicule, sorrow, misery, and death, for we have in him God's revealed word, and he never lies. That is my view of these matters. For us of the Evangelical Denomination the Word has, through Luther, been made our all, and as a good theologian Delitzsch should not have forgotten that our great Luther taught us to sing and believe • 124 BABEL AND BIBLE. " Inviolate the Word let stand." It is to me self-evident that the Old Testament contains many sections which are of a purely human and historical nature, and are not God's revealed word. These are merely historical descriptions of incidents of all kinds which happen in the political, religious, moral, and intellectual life of this people. The legislative act on Sinai, for example, can be only regarded as symbolically inspired by God. When Moses had to reburnish well known paragraphs of the law, perhaps derived from the code of Hammurabi, in order to incorporate and bind them into the loose, weak fabric of his people, here the historian can perhaps construe from the sense or wording a connection with the laws of Hammurabi, the friend of Abraham. That is perhaps logically correct. But that will never disguise the fact that God incited Moses thereto and in so far revealed himself to the people of Israel. Accordingly it is my opinion, that henceforward in his lectures before our society it will be better for our good Professor to let matters of religion alone. On the other hand, he may depict un disturbed the relation which the religion, customs, etc. of the Baby lonians bear to those of the Old Testament. For me the following conclusions result from the foregoing discussions. i. I believe in the one and only God. 2. We human beings need a form in order to teach his exist ence, especially for our children. 3. This has hitherto been the Old Testament. The present version of this will be possibly and substantially modified under the influence of research through inscriptions and excavations. That does not matter. Neither does it matter that much of the nimbus of the chosen people will thereby disappear. The kernel of the contents of the Old Testament will remain always the same, — God and his works. Religion has never been the result of science, but the pouring out of the heart and being of man from intercourse with God. With cordial thanks and greetings, Your Faithful Friend, Wilhelm, I. R. P. S. — You may make the utmost use of these lines. Let all who are interested read. BABEL AND BIBLE. 125 PROFESSOR HARNACK ON THE EMPEROR'S ATTITUDE TOWARD "BABEL AND BIBLE." The Emperor has spoken, in order to express his position without ambiguity in an historico-theological dispute. This is something new, but in view of all the circumstances the Emperor's decision is quite easily explained. The opinion was likely to be come widespread, had indeed become widespread, that the Em peror occupied the same theological standpoint as Dr. Delitzsch. Not wishing to permit this misunderstanding to continue, the Em peror wrote as the public has read. From the point of view of scholars there was, indeed, no real controversy. It has long been known that a portion of the myths and legends of the Old Testament, together with important ele ments of ancient Israelitish civilisation, had their origin in Baby lon. It was equally beyond question that this fact is fatal to the current notion of the inspiration of the Old Testament. For the refutation of this belief there was no need of reference to Babylon : a hundred other observed facts had contributed to destroy it. But the knowledge of these facts had not become common property. However, the theologians cannot be held to blame for this. They had done their duty toward spreading the information in books and pamphlets and lectures. Our German literature points with pride to a work of such eminence as Wellhausen's History of Israel; it appeals to all educated people and is classic in form and content. And beside it stand a half dozen other excellent works, each of which gives full and accessible information regarding Old Testament literature and history. But Church and School have been in league to suppress this knowledge by excluding it from their domain. And indeed they are not alone to blame. Indolence and fear have done their share. To Delitzsch's lectures is due the credit for the fact that we now hear preached from the house-tops what before was but like a voice in the wilderness. "Credit," indeed, is scarcely the word ; it is due to the force of circumstances. But we do not need to weigh the individual credit for the result ; we hail with gratitude the fact that Delitzsch has given wide currency to a more correct view of the Old Testament. But has he in fact done this? Unquestionably he has removed a great error : the belief that the materials of the Old Testament 126 BABEL AND BIBLE- are all original. But how little does the material amount to in the history of religion and of the spirit! If to-day some one should go before the public and announce to it: "Gentlemen, I come to re- relieve you from a great error ; you have hitherto believed that Goethe's Faust was an original work, while in fact it is only a recent secondary product ; for the entire material of it is found in a popu lar legend of the sixteenth century," — what would be the reply to him? He would be laughed to scorn, and Delitzsch would join in the laugh. Without doubt he is very far from trying to determine the value of the Old Testament religion on the ground of its depend ence upon Babylon, but in my opinion he has not done enough to prevent the establishment of a false conception of the matter in his hearers and readers. This public is very far from conceding to the prophets and the psalmists what it concedes without hesitation to a Goethe. Furthermore, for the very reason that there has pre vailed hitherto a notion of the supernatural character of the Old Testament, the pendulum of opinion, following a familiar psycho logical law, now swings to the opposite extreme. To-day it is the talk of the streets that "the Old Testament no longer amounts to much." At this point the Emperor enters the arena with his letter. But meantime the chasm had become deeper. As the result of an interview the monarch had become convinced that Professor De litzsch did not hold the orthodox belief regarding the divinity of Christ, and that the examination of the Old Testament among other reasons prevented his holding this belief. In the face of this nega tive conviction the Emperor wished to leave no doubt regarding his own positive conviction. We must thank him for the way in which he did this. It is true, the reproof which Delitzsch has received cannot fail to be painful to him, and he must feel deeply his being excluded from the domain of theology upon which the Emperor himself now en ters. But that was surely not the intention : the Emperor means to say, and he is right in so saying, that Delitzsch's authority as an Assyriologist does not also extend to his theological doctrines. Be yond this he concedes absolute freedom to the convictions of the scholar. Absolute freedom, — this sentiment shines forth from the Em peror's utterances with pleasing and inspiring effect. He has no thought of issuing a peremptory decree ; the whole letter is per- BABEL AND BIBLE. 127 meated with the spirit of freedom. He knows very well that com mands are out of place in connection with these delicate and sacred matters, and he knows that theology cannot pass by these ques tions, but that they must be treated most seriously, with liberty and courage. He leaves them to theological science. But still more pleasing is the effect of the positiveness, the frankness and warmth with which the Emperor himself takes his stand in these matters. What he has written is from the depth of his heart ; he utters it just as he thinks and feels it, and he has written it down like one who is trying to take account of his own mind, with all the minute marks of individual feeling and individ ual experience. He feels his soul bound to Christ, and he is not willing to speak of religion without praising him and confessing his allegiance to him. The Emperor's utterance professes to be a personal confession of faith, and as such it deserves respect. But it would certainly not be in accordance with the spirit of the imperial author if we were to give no other response than silence. In the Evangelical Church the ultimate and supreme questions are always open to dis cussion, and each generation must work out the answers anew. Our spiritual life also depends upon crises and finds its very vitality in them. How should we be silent when the profoundest and most solemn questions challenge us in this form? All Evangelical Christians will frankly and joyfully agree with the final sentence of the Emperor's letter: "Religion was never the result of science, but an overflow of the heart and being of man from his intercourse with God." Theology subscribes to this prop osition ; it knows right well that it does not work creatively, but merely tries to follow reverently in thought something that already is. Not less will be the general accord with the Emperor's convic tion that religion must have forms, so that we may explain our selves and give mutual instruction, but that these forms cannot be imperishable. I think that even Professor Delitzsch has attained the capital feature of his purposes in the concession that the cus tomary forms of the current school traditions regarding the Old Testament are in urgent need of change. But questions and disputes will arise chiefly in connection with two convictions expressed by his majesty: the theory of a twofold revelation, and the divinity of Christ. And the two are closely con nected. 128 BABEL AND BIBLE. The difference between faith and science in connection with religion becomes clear immediately on the mention of the word "revelation." Science in the strictest sense cannot admit the no tion at all, finding it too transcendental. On the other hand, faith cannot permit itself to be deprived of revelation. But in the course of development there has been an approach between the two sides. Aside from the reverent contemplation of the universe the Evan gelical faith has ceased to recognise revelation through any medi ums but persons. The whole lower series of alleged revelations has been put aside. There are no revelations by means of things. The Emperor's letter also took this ground : the revelations of God in his humanity are persons, especially great persons. Now in so far as great personages have their mystery even for science in their individuality and power, in so far harmony is established between faith and science. But the recognition by me and others of these personages as revelations of God is an act of subjective experience which no science can either create or prevent. But upon this common ground the Emperor's letter distin guishes two sorts of revelation : a general one, and a peculiarly re ligious one. There is a great element of strength in this distinc tion, for it brings out vigorously the fact that there is no more seri ous concern for man than his relation to God, and that everything is dependent on this relationship. But on the other hand, the thinking mind cannot possibly repose in the assumption of two revelations running, as it were, parallel with each other, and the imperial letter has given utterance to this observation by putting Abraham into both categories. Accordingly there cannot be two revelations, — for religion, moral force, and knowledge stand in most intimate union, — but one revelation, the bearers of which were, and still are, very different in nature and greatness, calling and function. If Jesus Christ loses nothing of his individuality and uniqueness when he is placed in the series with Moses, Isaiah, and the psalm ists, neither does he suffer by the comparison when we see him in the line with Socrates and Plato and the others who are mentiond in the Emperor's letter. The religious conception of history must in the last analysis be one and the same : it must be mankind led forth by God out of the state of primitive nature, out of error and sin, and saved and brought into the estate of the children of God. Here, however, we make reservation of the fact that the divine his tory finds its specific line in ancient times in Israel. The Christian Church must reject every estimate of Christ BABEL AND BIBLE. 129 which ignores the difference between him and other masters. He himself, his disciples and the history of the world have spoken so distinctly on this point that there should be no room for doubt, and he still speaks to us in his word as distinctly as to his disciples of old. But it may and must be questioned whether the inflexible formula "divinity of Christ" is the correct one. He himself never used it, but chose other designations, and it is at least very doubt ful whether any of his disciples ever uttered it. And the early Church, too, did not speak directly of the divinity of Christ, but always of his divinity and humanity. "God-man," therefore, is the only correct formula even in the intent of the ancient dogma. In this phrase we have almost restored the mystery which according to the will of Christ himself was to remain in this matter. He made no secret of the fact that he was the Lord and Saviour, and his disciples were expected to observe and experience the fact in his words and deeds. But how his relation to the Father arose, he withheld from us and kept to himself. In my historical opinion, therefore, and according to my feeling in the matter, even the for mula "man and God" (God-man-hood) is not beyond criticism, inasmuch as it has already begun to intrude upon a mystery into which we are not permitted to look. But the formula may be allowed to stand, because at bottom it does not pretend to explain anything, but only protects the extra ordinary from profanation, just as does the expression "Son of God." The Pauline expression "God was in Christ" seems to me to be the last word that we are permitted to speak in this matter, now that we have liberated ourselves slowly and painfully from the erroneous notion of ancient philosophers that we can penetrate the mysteries of God and Nature, "humanity and history. "If ye love me, keep my commandments;" "In this shall every one recognise that ye are my disciples, that ye love one an- another," — it is more important to meditate upon these words and try to live up to them than to put the incomprehensible and the venerable into formulas. The time is coming and even now is near when Evangelical Christians will join hands sincerely in the con fession of Jesus Christ as their master and in the determination to follow his words, and our Catholic brethren will then be obliged to join with us to the same end. The burden of a long history of mis understandings, of formulas that bristle like swords, of tears and blood, weighs upon us, but in it there is also preserved to us a pre cious inheritance. The two seem to be united inextricably, but 130 BABEL AND BIBLE. nevertheless they are gradually separating, although the "Let there be light" has not yet been spoken across this chaos. Frankness and courage, honesty with ourselves, freedom and love, — these are the levers which will lift the burden. And the Emperor's letter also is intended to aid in this lofty undertaking. M. HALB-VY'S OPINION. M. Joseph Halevy, the French coryphaeus of Oriental research, born December 15, 1827, says about Babel and Bible: "Sincerity nevertheless compels me to point out certain inept, inaccurate, and redundant statements which disfigure this otherwise beautiful lec ture. The meaning of Numbers vi. 26 (page 29, Babel and Bible) is perfectly clear in itself and parallel to the passage in Job xxii. 26. The Babylonian form of expression adds absolutely nothing new. There is not a vestige of a proof that the Ur of Kasdi'm, the home of Abraham, is identical with the city of Ur of Babylonia (page 4); the appellation Kasdi'm designates in the Pentateuch 'territory which is exclusively Aramean' ; Babylonia is called there 'the land of Sincar.' To make a princess of Aryan blood and blond complexion out of the wife of Sardanapalus, of whom we have only an old and hastily executed sketch; to call the converted Jew Jean Astruc 'zealously orthodox' (page 41); to attribute to the Koran the beautiful legends of the Talmud, and to pass over almost in silence the magnificent results of the French excavations in Assyria and Babylonia, is carrying cleverness to an unjustified extreme. The picture (page 48) of the First Sin, borrowed from Mdnant, and the comparison of the destruction of Rahab, a name for Egypt (Psalms lxxiv. 13, Ixxxix. 11; Job xxvi. 12), with the splitting in twain of the body of the chaotic goddess Tiamat by Marduk, who made of it the earth and the heavens, will not stand before exami nation. In the first picture, the man and the woman who are seated opposite each other on the two sides of the tree are extending toward each other their hands and are not gathering the fruit that hangs upon the lower branches of the tree near their feet. And furthermore, the undulating line behind the woman is not beyond all doubt a serpent. The same disposition to rest content with superficial appearances shows itself in the interpretation which is put upon Figure 58, page 64, which has no points of resemblance with the chariot of Ezekiel. "Must it be repeated for the tenth time that the institution of BABEL AND BIBLE. 131 Sunday rest is nowhere mentioned in cuneiform literature? The abstinences prescribed for the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth (an awkward date omitted by the lecturer), twenty-first, and twenty- eighth days of the second Elud, which is an exceptional month, have nothing whatever to do with the Jewish Sabbath? "Absolutely fantastical also is the attribution of the head of a palest or priest-king preserved in the Berlin Museum to the imagi nary and undiscoverable race of Sumerians who, although the origi nators of the great Babylonian civilisation, are said to have been unable to count beyond 60 ! This error is an old one ; the number 6 could never have formed a primitive multiple ; the first series obtained by actual counting, which is based on the fingers of the hand, finds its natural termination at the number 3 ; Delitzsch has confounded instinctive counting with the artificial or scientific mode of computation by 6o's, which has its advantages. We must deplore indeed the sad lot of these great allophylian creators of the most ancient civilisation who have left as a witness of their vanished glory only a single head of stone, fac-similies of which can be found by the hundreds in real flesh and blood in the ghettos of Podolia and Morocco. "But the acme is reached in the following. Delitzsch affirmed in his Paradise that the name Yahveh came from the Sumerian Y and the consonants hvh. He now declares, — and this is the culmi nation of his lecture, — that he has found on three Babylonian tab lets names belonging to Canaanites established in Babylon, and com posed of the element Yahveh (page 61). Now, the spelling of the second form, ya-u-um-il (written an), signifies in good Babylonian 'Yaum [with mimmation for iau-=iam-mu, Okeanos, god of the sea] is god.' The first form, written ia-ah-pi-il, exhibits a general Se mitic name Yahpeel (El covers, protects, ?85rC analogous to 58STC). The possible reading Yahveh-ill would be equivalent to the Aramean 58W-> 'God exists,' and would not necessarily signify 'Yahveh is god.' In no case could a name like Yahveh-el be Canaanite-Phce- nician ; for these people express the verb to be by vo, and not by nin. "With so alluring a subject and before an audience chosen from among the highest intellects of the nation, it would have been more prudent to limit oneself to established facts, and not to offer ephemeral conjectures which can serve no other purpose than to dazzle superficial and inquisitive minds." 132 BABEL AND BIBLE. CORNILL ON "BABEL AND BIBLE." " Babel and Bible offers nothing essentially new to Old Testa ment scholars. There is doubtless not a single professor of Old Testament research in any German university that has not already told all these things to his students in his lectures on Genesis. And Delitzsch does not gainsay this. He maintains only that the world at large has as yet heard very little of the silent labors of the As- syriologists and that it is now time for this knowledge to burst the barriers of the scholars' study and enter the broad path of life. "If this is to be interpreted as an aspersion upon us scholars, it may be answered that we have never treated this knowledge as an esoteric doctrine, and that any one who desired any information about it had ample opportunity to obtain such, and further that there are matters and problems in science concerning which exces sive discretion is the lesser evil. Now, in the exercise of this nec essary discretion Delitzsch has been extremely chary. The im pression that the lecture is apt to make on unprofessional readers is that the Bible and its religion is to a certain extent a mere off shoot of Babylonian heathendom which we have 'in purer and more original form' in Babel; and this impression is intensified by the fact that Delitzsch by his own statements actually expects from the results of the Assyrio-Babylonian excavations the advent of a new epoch in the interpretation as well as in the understanding of the Old Testament. I shall consider Delitzsch's statements under this point of view. "The Babylonians also had their shabattu, he says, and 'there can therefore be scarcely the shadow of a doubt that in the last re sort we are indebted to this ancient nation on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris for the plenitude of blessings that flows from our day of Sabbath or Sunday rest.' What now was this Babylonian shabattu? Not the seventh day of each week, for the Babylonians regarded the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth, twenty- first, and twenty-eighth calendar days of every month as days in which no work could be done; and for what reason? For fear of the wrath of the gods. These were the days that the Romans called dies atri, and are we now to believe that these dies atri of the Babylonians, which were inseparably linked with the dates of the calendar, are our Biblical Sabbath? Never! The Sabbath as the 'day of the Lord,' the view that on one day in every week we BABEL AND BIBLE. 133 should cast aside all the trials and tribulations of- our earthly life and live for God alone and be happy in communion with Him, is exclusively the property of the Bible, and for the 'plenitude of blessings' contained in it the world is indebted, not to Babel, but to Bible. "We have long known that the Biblical story of the Creation (Genesis. i.) reposed on a Babylonian foundation; but the only genuinely religious and imperishable fact of this history, the al mighty God, creator of heaven and earth, who speaks and it comes to pass, who commands and it is so, the holy personal God, who created man in his own image and entrusted him with the duties attendant upon morality and a religious life, was given to the world, not by Babel, but by Bible. "And how is it with the story of Paradise and the Fall of Man (Genesis ii. and iii.)? Delitzsch reproduces on page 48 the well- known ancient Babylonian clay cylinder which is said to contain a pictorial representation of this story. Assyriologists of the stand ing of Oppert, M£nant, Hal6vy, and Tiele vigorously contest this interpretation, even explaining the figures on the cylinder as two men, and are absolutely unable to recognise a serpent in the undu- latory line in this picture. No Babylonian text corresponding to Genesis iii. has yet been discovered, and if the reader of page 38 of Delitzsch's book imagines that the clay tablet there mentioned containing 'the Babylonian legend of how it came to pass that the first man forfeited the boon of immortality' is the Biblical story of Genesis iii., 'in much purer and more primitive form,' I have only to say that he is sorely mistaken. But even granting that such is the case and that it has been proved that the Babylonians had a story according to which the first woman, tempted by the serpent, ate of the forbidden fruit and thereby brought sin and death into the world, it will be distinctly seen from the picture that, leaving everything else out of account, the Babylonian pair are clothed, and that therefore what is perhaps the profoundest and most significant feature of the story of Genesis iii. belongs to Bible, and not to Babel. "The conception of angels is without doubt 'characteristically Babylonian.' But whether they are also such in the Biblical sense as so grandly expressed in Psalms xci, verses 11 and 12, and in the utterance of Jesus, Matthew xviii. 10, is another question. In the Biblical representations Babylonian angels and eunuchs surround only the throne of the great king. And before Delitzsch wrote 134 BABEL AND BIBLE. (page 55) his remarks concerning the demons and the devils which he says were possible only for the ancient Persian dualism, and were so destined to be committed forever and aye to the obscurity of the Babylonian hills from which they rose, he should have re called to mind the important role which these concepts played in the religious life of Jesus, so that we might be justified in saying that there are 'still many Babylonian traits clinging even io the re ligious thoughts' of Jesus. But these concepts in the Bible are no Parsee importation; for the Bible can think of Satan and his an gels under no other form than that of creatures of God who had fallen through their own sins and who stand thus on the most essen tial point in the sharpest imaginable contrast with the afore-men tioned Persian dualism. And does Delitzsch mean to say, when he affirms that the 5th, 6th, and 7th commandments occur 'in pre cisely the same order' in the Babylonian records, that Moses, or whoever else composed the Decalogue, sought advice from Babel, in the face of the fact that the order of the treasures which man seeks to protect, namely, life, family, and property, could not pos sibly be more natural and obvious, and that the humane Baby lonian commandments have also their parallel in the Egyptian Book of the Dead? "And how do matters stand with the Biblical problems con cerning which we are led to believe that Babel only can explain Bible? Delitzsch sees in the Bible Amraphel of Genesis xiv. the great Babylonian king Hammurabi, the founder of the old Baby lonian kingdom. I shall not gainsay that this identification is pos sible ; and since Amraphel was 'the contemporary of Abraham' we shall certainly be glad to reckon the period of Abraham by that of Hammurabi. But if we consult the Assyriologists we shall find that in fixing the chronological place of the fifty-five years of the reign of this king they vary between 2394-2339 B. C. and 1923- 1868 B. C, with all the intermediate possibilities. From the point of view of method, therefore, is it not better to follow the plan of the Assyriologist Hommel, who, convinced of the correctness of the equation Amraphel = Hammurabi, as of the historical authen ticity of the events narrated in Genesis xiv., starts, contrariwise, from the Bible and moulds the Babylonian chronology until it ac cords with the Biblical? "Delitzsch's statements (page 61) concerning the three clay tablets containing the name of Yahveh are quite new. I cannot revive here, much less resolve, the question of the original mono- BABEL AND BIBLE. 135 theism of the Semites, or at least of 'the old Canaanite races which settled in Babylonia 2500 years before Christ, and to whom Ham murabi himself belonged'; but I have to confess that I cherish the gravest doubts concerning the correctness of the meaning of these tablets, or at any rate of the interpretation of the names Ya-ah-ve- ilu and Ya-hu-um-ilu. Of names containing the proper names of a god, and asserting additionally that this god is God, there are no instances whatever among the thousands of Semitic proper names which we know. Even the well-known Biblical Joel does not mean 'Yahveh is God.' But even granting that these old 'Canaanites' did possess the theophorous name Yahu, is this any proof that they also possessed the Biblical concept of Yahveh? How does it hap pen that of these 'monotheistic' kings one is called Sinmu-ballit which means 'Sin gives life,' and another is Samsu-iluna, which means 'the sun is our god.' "There are also other evidences in Babel and Bible that De- litzsch's statements must be accepted with reserve. We read on page 50: 'In the Book of Job (xxiv. 18), which appears to be ex tremely conversant with Babylonian modes of thought, we find comparisons drawn (xxiv. 18 et seq. ) between the arid, waterless desert which is reserved for those that have sinned, and the garden with fresh, clear water which is reserved for the pious.' I believe that I also am tolerably well acquainted with the Book of Job, and I was consequently not a little astonished at reading these words, for as a matter of fact there is absolutely nothing of the kind in Job xxiv. 18, and if Delitzsch possibly introduced this meaning into the passage conjecturally, it was entirely inadmissible on his part to deal with it as with something that had been absolutely estab lished. "Again, the passage on pages 51-52 concerning Mahomet's Paradise, — namely: 'Two and seventy of these Paradisian maidens may every god-fearing man choose unto himself, in addition to the wives that he possessed on earth, provided he cares to have them (and the good man will always cherish desire for the good),' — is not to be found at all in the Koran, but has been taken from E. W. Lane's Customs and Manners, part I., page 59, of the German trans lation. "We are delighted and proud that Germany also is at last taking an independent part in the excavations in the valley of the Euphrates. But in entering upon this undertaking it is only ful filling a national obligation of honor toward the educated world, 136 BABEL AND BIBLE. and no one could entertain greater sympathy with these labors or wish them greater success than we theological investigators of the Old Testament, for we know the light which will be shed from that source upon the object of our studies. But we are far from be lieving that a new interpretation of the Old Testament will ever be brought to pass by these investigations, nay we are firmly con vinced that in the struggle between Babel and Bible the Bible will ultimately come out victorious. Gunkel spoke for us all when he said : " 'How incomparably superior the Hebrew legend is to the Babylonian ! Should we not really be delighted at having found in this Babylonian parallel a criterion for estimating the real sub limity of the conception of God in Israel, — a conception of so much intrinsic power that it can purge and recast in such a manner ma terial so repellent and outlandish? And this also we may say, that the Babylonian legend strongly impresses us by its barbaric charac ter, whereas the Hebrew legend is far nearer and more human to us. Even granting that we have been accustomed from childhood to the Hebrew legends, we yet learn from this example that in our whole world of ideas we owe far more to these Hebrews than to the Babylonians." The same theologian wrote to the editors of The Open Court after the appearance of Professor Delitzsch's First Lecture as fol lows : "You are to be commended for having made the American public acquainted with Delitzsch's Babel and Bible, for the little book contains an extraordinary amount of stimulating and instruc tive matter, and it has been cleverly constructed, so as to appeal at once to the great reading public. Yet while there is no direct polemical attack made in it against the Bible, you will nevertheless understand that we theologians have witnessed the appearance of this essay and the great sensation which it has made with solici tude, nay even with distress; for the impression which it is inevi tably destined to make on the unprepared reader is one that we could never wish to see." A ROMAN CATHOLIC VERDICT. The Catholic News of New York, a journal "recommended by the Catholic hierarchy and the clergy as a model family paper," takes the following view of the situation: "The school of which Professor Delitzsch is a distinguished member is by no means pre occupied about establishing the veracity of the Bible. The gene- BABEL AND BIBLE. 137 ral purport of this lecture is to indicate that the Bible has borrowed almost all its religious and moral elements from the pagan Assyrians and Babylonians, and that it is merely a human compilation. The success which has attended the propagation of this view is to be seen in the total disintegration of all Protestant belief. It is the climax of irony that the sects which broke away from the Catholic Church with the cry, 'A free Bible; the Bible is the sole rule of faith,' are to-day giving up all supernatural belief because they have lost faith in the inspiration of the Bible, consequent upon the attacks of the higher criticism. Meanwhile the Catholic Church stands un disturbed on her old platform. The Catholic repeats the profession of St. Augustine: T would not accept the Bible except on the au thority of the Church.' He is confident that in the long run, when all facts have been garnered and after hasty theories shall have been tried and found wanting, the light thrown by science on all the complications of the Biblical question will serve to corroborate the authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church, whose more than human prudence is nowhere more conspicuous than in her few guarded but comprehensive declarations concerning the fact and the nature of inspiration. Students who may not have time to study larger volumes dealing with Assyriology will find this little book a handy one to consult for the interpretation given to many archaeological discoveries by the representatives of the higher criti cism." ALFRED JEREMIAS ON DELITZSCH.1 Alfred Jeremias, in an interesting pamphlet bearing the title Im Xampfe um Babel und Bibel, thoroughly reviews the situation and calls attention from another point of view to this very topic. Confuting the expressions of fear that Assyriological science is shaking the foundations of the sanctuary of Holy Scriptures, he remarks that it is strange the situation has been so completely re versed with years. In the first periods of Assyriological research, the inscriptions on the excavated monuments were stridently ad duced as evidence in corroboration of the traditional views of the Bible. It was triumphantly proclaimed that now (Luke xix. 40) the very bricks of Babylon cried out in confirmation of the Holy Scriptures, and the world should hold its peace. Exact copies of the writings of Moses and the children of Israel during their so- 1 Written by Thomas J. McCormack. Extracted from The Open Court, Vol. XVII., No. 3, pp. 130-132. 138 BABEL AND BIBLE. journ in the desert were supposedly recovered from Nabataean in scriptions; the historical existence of Abraham was confirmed by a brick ; and the wall was actually discovered on which Belshazzar saw written the fateful words, Mene mene tekel upharsin ! But in Herr Jeremias's opinion the use of Assyriology as a weapon of destructive criticism for the overthrow of the traditional Bible is just as wicked as the preceding specimens of its applica tion are stupid. One very advanced critic, cited by Jeremias, goes so far even as to wish for the time when the bricks of Babylon shall compel a more truthful view of the Old Testament, shall shatter in shards the doctrine of inspiration, and pave the way for a deeper, more spiritual, and more "pious" conception. Verily, Babel has "laid her mailed fist on the Old Testament." But we need have no fear. Orthodoxy and piety may yet lie down in harmonious union with Assyriology ; and Herr Jeremias, who takes both the strictly religious and the strictly scientific view, well expresses the terms of the compromise as follows : " In so far as the Old Testament as a document of God's education of the hu man race may lay claim to being a fides divina, it stands in no need of corroboration by any auxiliary science. Here Babel can never promote the comprehension of the Old Testament, nor put it to hazard in any way, be the philological and scientific imbroglio what it may. Any ten of the marked passages of Luther's Bible are suf ficient to demonstrate1 how superior the spirit of the Old Testa ment is to that of Babylon. But the Old Testament has also its human side, — a side so stupendously interesting that no literature of antiquity can be mentioned with it in the same breath. Much of this remained obscure so long as the historical and cultural framework in which the life of Israel was enacted was veiled. But now the world around about Canaan is flooded with light; we can contemplate the people of the Old Testament in their relationship with the political and cultural conditions out of which it evolved and which have exerted a determining influence upon its destinies. In this domain cuneiform research can perform important services for the comprehension of the Bible. But the imperishable jewel which Israel possesses will shine only more brilliantly under this illumination, and likewise the fides humana upon which this unique book of literature rests its claims will stand triumphantly the ordeal of fire to which it has been subjected." IThe most significant passages of the Bible are printed in Luther's translation in bold-faced type. BABEL AND BIBLE. 139 There has been little criticism of Delitzsch's book from the side of the Assyriologists proper. There are many points on which all Assyriological inquirers do not agree, but upon the whole it is the universal verdict of the Assyriologists that Delitzsch's lecture "gives, so far as the monuments are concerned, those facts that may be regarded as indubitably established results of cuneiform in quiry." And the advantage in the bout will doubtless also remain with Delitzsch. For in purely technical and Assyriological matters it is with him, as opposed to most of his theological critics, a case of Krupp guns against "halberds and blunderbusses." HIGHER CRITICISM AND THE EMPEROR. BY DR. PAUL CARUS. Manager of The Open Court Publishing Co. Emperor William criticises Delitzsch for "abandoning the standpoint of the strict historian" and "straying into religious and historical conclusions and hypotheses which are quite nebulous and bold." He says that "Delitzsch the theologian has run away with Delitzsch the historian." The Emperor means to say that in his historical research work Delitzsch is carried away by his liberal theological views ; but the case is probably just the reverse. Professor Delitzsch, the son of an equally famous Hebrew scholar and a pious Christian, was from the start an orthodox theologian, and his theology was modified under the influence of his historical investigations. The Emperor, who still clings to the old conception, concedes that "the Old Tes tament contains many sections which are of a purely human and his torical nature," and goes even so far as to add that they "are not God's revealed word." He declares "that the legislative act on Sinai, for example, can only be symbolically regarded as inspired of God." Apparently the Emperor makes a difference between the Jewish and. the Christian Scriptures, and in this sense he says: "Neither does it matter that much of the nimbus of the chosen people will thereby disappear." The Emperor's letter is an important document in the evolu tion of religion. He is a pronounced upholder of militant and pious Protestantism, and his views may be regarded as typical for large classes of all Protestant denominations. The struggle over Babel and Bible opens to the Christian laity a period of discussion concerning the nature of the Old Testament which is bound to. lead to an investigation of the New Testament. 140 BABEL AND BIBLE. The battle concerning the Old Testament is as good as ended. Whether or not Delitzsch is right in his sundry contentions as to the names "El" and "Yahveh," the identification of the Ruins of Mugheir with the home of Abraham, and his interpretation of Baby lonian seal-cylinders, is quite indifferent. The essential point lies deeper and there is no need to conceal it. No one who has investi gated the subject will any longer deny that the Old Testament is the product of an historical evolution. Of course, it is Jewish, not Babylonian ; nevertheless, the Babylonian civilisation forms the background, and many things which were formerly believed to have been dictated by the Holy Ghost are now seen to be the nat ural outcome of historical conditions. But on that account the nimbus of the chosen people will no more disappear than the glory of Homer, and Phidias, and Pericles, and Socrates can be dimmed because we can trace their greatness to conditions and understand how they naturally grew and rose into being. The old narrow view cannot be abandoned at once, and many intermediate steps are being taken which attempt compromises. So we read for instance in the interesting pamphlet of Alfred Jeremias that we must grant the prevalence of a monotheism among the pa gan nations long before the rise of Israel as a nation. Hammurabi, for instance, a contemporary of Abraham who lived more than half a millennium before Moses, introduces his code of laws with the invocation, "Thus speaketh ILU SIRU, i. e., God the Supreme." "But," adds Professor Jeremias, "there is this difference between the pagan monotheism which can be traced among all the nations, and Hebrew monotheism, that 'God himself filled the latter with his own revelation." In other words, when Plato speaks of God, we have to deal with a purely human speculation, but when David danced before the ark of the Lord we are expected to believe that then God was personally present. The truth is, we are familiar with the Hebrew view, for our own belief has developed out of it. We are not so familiar with pagan views. Therefore when Zarathustra speaks of Ahura Mazda, the Lord Omniscient, we admire his wisdom, but fail to find any connection with our own belief. The term sounds strange to our ears because it remains unassociated with our prayers and has no relation to the traditions that have become sacred to us. It ap pears as the natural product of human thought, while the Hebrew names Jehovah, Zebaoth, Elohim, even when the context betrays a pagan or even polytheistic conception, are filled with a sanctity BABEL AND BIBLE. 141 and a religious awe that is to us the evidence of a supernatural revelation. How true this is appears from the fact that the original and correct form Yahveh, which is not used in our churches, does not possess the same sacred ring to our ears as the corrupted form Je hovah. The name Yahveh is written in our brains, not in our hearts. Yahveh is the name of a deity with which we have become acquainted through the study of Hebrew literature, and we would deem it all but a sacrilege, a kind of paganism, to pray to Yahveh or to sing hymns to him. The word Jehovah, an unmeaning and positively nonsensical combination of the consonants of the word "Jahveh, " with the vowels of another, "Adonai," was invented in the days of Luther. It was unknown before the year 15 19; but having slipped into our prayers, we still sing the triumphal strain, "Jehovah is King." When we become acquainted with the monotheism of Ham murabi, we put him down as a philosopher, but the God of Moses is the same God to whom Christians bend the knee. That makes a difference. The associations with our own religious life, our forms of worship, our prayers, are important for obvious psycho logical reasons. Through Delitzsch, the Emperor became familiar with the re ligion of ancient Babylon, and he took a liking to the Assyrians. The Assyrian guards were so much like the Prussian grenadiers; their kings were generals enjoying the display of armies ; they be lieved in the religion of the mailed fist and bestowed much atten tion upon military attire, even as to the minute details of hair- dressing. While the Emperor's court barber patented the fashion of an upturned mustache under the name Es ist erreicht, which means "surpassing all," Delitzsch speaks of the official style of the Assyrian beard as Noch nicht erreicht, i. e., "still unsurpassed." Whether Delitzsch intended the joke or was serious in making this comparison we have no means to tell. Certainly the similarities were so many and so striking that the Emperor felt the thrill of kinship and showed himself willing to transfer the nimbus from the chosen people to the rulers of ancient Babylon. Truly, the Emperor is right when he says that "God reveals himself continuously in the race of men." It is a good old doc trine, and orthodox too, that "God spoke not to Moses alone," and St. John the Evangelist says that "that was the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." 142 BABEL AND BIBLE. But it is natural that Christians raised in the traditional dog matism should shrink from the idea that the New Testament (as well as the Old) should be conceded to be the product of historical conditions. "Here," they argue, "Christ speaks himself," and (to use the Emperor's own words) "Christ is God, God in human form . . . .We have in Him God's revealed word, and He never lies." Certainly, God never lies. But do we have in the New Testa ment Christ's own words? We have reports about Jesus, and these reports are as human as are the Scriptures of the Old Testament. Christianity would be in a sad plight if the New Testament had in deed to be regarded as inspired verbatim by God. We cannot en ter here into details but would suggest only that the mere contra- victions in the Gospels alone force us to look upon them as human compositions. The difficulties of regarding the Bible as literally the word of God are almost greater in the New Testament than in the Old. Any one who has studied the Scriptures knows that the problem is grave and cannot be easily disposed of. The great question back of all these discussions is simply this • "Shall we, or shall we not, grant Science the right io modify Re ligion?" And the question need not be answered. Men of science know that whether or not we grant science the right to modify reli gion, science is shedding her light upon religious problems, and she is constantly and continuously modifying religion. Science (represented in physics, astronomy, physiology, psychology, his tory, text-criticism, etc., etc.) has enlarged our view of the world and deepened our conception of God. The scientific spirit of the age has begotten a new theology, a truly scientific treatment of the problems of God, inspiration, and revelation, which we call theon- omy, for it ranges as high above the antiquated theology as astron omy is superior to astrology.1 After all, Christians are not pledged to dogmas, but to the truth. Orthodoxy means the right doctrine, and the right doctrine is that which can stand the test of critique. Orthodoxy so called is a misnomer and ought to be called dogmatism. The truth can be found only by searching, and the methods of an exact search are called science. Science is not human ; science is divine, and the development lCf. the writer's articles "Theology as a Science " in The Monist, Vol. XII., No. 4, and Vol XIII., No. i. BABEL AND BIBLE. 143 of science is the coming of the spirit of God, — of the true God, of the God of Truth, who is "the light that lighteth every man." The dogmas of Christianity are formulations of the Truth as interpreted by our forefathers. Let no Athanasius with his limited knowledge bind the conscience of a Delitzsch. Had Delitzsch lived in the days of the Alexandrian church-father, he would most likely have acquiesced in the Nicene formulation of the Christian creed ; but new issues have arisen and some of the traditional beliefs have become untenable. Dogmas may be venerable on account of their antiquity, but they cannot stand against Truth. Truth alone is holy, and the Truth of Science will finally win the day. The struggle for Babel and Bible is important not on its own account but because it forces upon us in a new form the issue of Science versus Faith, and compels us to revise our conception of the nature of divine revelation. It is a mere skirmish which will soon be followed by the more important struggle over the Gospels. The issues at stake are graver there, and thus we anticipate that the latter will be a more bitter and obdurate battle. The main histor ical questions of Christianity lie in the New Testament, and though Assyriology contributes its goodly share toward the solution of the religious problem, it is after all a side issue only, which must be complemented by work along other lines of research. Delitzsch sums up his position in these words : " Do not let us blindly cling to dogmas which science has shown to be super annuated, merely for fear of abandoning them. Faith in God and the true religion may thereby be injured." Whatever the final result of the present discussion shall be, we may rest assured that the modification of our religious faith will not be for the worse. Christianity has again and again adapted it self to a more scientific conception of the world. How strong was the opposition of the so-called orthodox to the Copernican system, how fierce were their attacks on the doctrine of evolution ! But that is now a matter of the past, and religion has certainly been broadened as well as deepened by a broader and deeper insight into the constitution of nature. The task of the theology of to-day is a reconstruction of our conception of Christianity upon a strictly scientific basis. In the background of the several historical questions there is looming up the struggle for a scientific world-conception, and rightly considered, the philosophical problem is the main issue which over-shadows all others. 144 BABEL AND BIBLE. It is not difficult to foresee the final result of the whole move ment. It will not lead to a destruction of religion, but to its puri fication and reconstruction upon a more solid foundation. There fore let us have faith in the Truth. Says Esdras : "As for the truth, it endureth, and is always strong ; it liveth and conquereth for evermore. "With her there is no accepting of persons or rewards; but she doeth the things that are just, and refraineth from all unjust and wicked things; and all men do well like of her works. "Neither in her judgment is any unrighteousness; and she is the strength, kingdom, power, and majesty of all ages. Blessed be the God of Truth." (i Esdras iv. 38-40.) REPLY TO CRITICS OF THE FIRST LECTURE. THE ETHICAL ASPECT. In his Der Xampf urn Babel und Bibel, p. 20 ff., Professor Samuel Oettli says: "The materials transmitted to us in the Old Testament have been plunged into an atmosphere of ethical mono theism and purified by this bath from all ethically or religiously confused and confusing elements. We no longer find the deluge here as the product of the blind wrath of a god, but as the ethically warranted punishment sent by a just god upon a degenerate race." This is an error. Even the report of Berosus shows us that to <~he Babylonians also the world-flood was a sin-flood.1 Consider his words: "The others cried aloud when a voice commanded them to fear God, as Xisuthros had been translated to the gods because lie had been godfearing." While we may assure ourselves from this alone that the Babylonian Noah escaped from the judg ment of the deluge because of his piety and the remainder of man kind were destroyed because of their ever-increasing sinfulness, the inference is confirmed by the words in the cuneiform inscrip tion, spoken by Ea after the deluge to Bel who had caused it : "Lay up his sin against the sinner," etc. Professor Edward Konig, in his essay Bibel und Babel, p. 32, says: "The spirit of the two traditions (Babylonian and Hebrew) is totally different. This is shown by a single feature : The Baby lonian hero rescues his inanimate as well as his living property, while in both the Bible accounts we have the higher point of view represented by the rescue of the living creatures only." What blind zeal ! Even in the fragment of Berosus we read that Xisu thros was commanded to "take in winged and fourfooted animals," and the original cuneiform account says expressly: "I brought up into the ship the cattle of the field and the wild beasts of the field." 1 An untranslatable German pun and popular etymology (Sintflut = " universal flood ": Siind- flut= "sin-flood "). 146 BABEL AND BIBLE- Accordingly, the "higher point of view" must be conceded to the Babylonian account by Konig himself. THE PRIMORDIAL CHAOS. With reference to mythological features in the Biblical account of the creation something further may be said. Oettli remarks with much truth, p. 12, on the presumption of the existence of a chaos : "The notion of a primitive matter which was not derived from God's creative activity but which had rather to be overcome by it, cannot have grown up on soil of the Religion of Israel, which is strictly monotheistic in its thought, at least on the prophetic heights, and consequently excludes the dualistic conflict of two hostile primitive principles." I call attention here to the remark of Wellhausen also: "If we take Chaos for granted, everything else is developed out of this; everything else is reflection, syste matic construction, which we can figure out with little difficulty." TRACES OF POLYTHEISM. In the Elohistic account of the creation also there are traces of polytheistic elements. When we read (Genesis i. 26): "Let us make men in our1 own image, after our semblance," Oettli says with justice : "Moreover, that plural of self-appeal preceding the creation of man is not so easily to be reconciled with the later strict monotheism, nor the 'image of God' in which man is created, with the spirituality of Yahveh which is afterwards so strongly em phasised, when once, rejecting all exegetic arts, we give to words their simple and obvious meaning. And this, notwithstanding the fact that the Biblical author, in accordance with his religious posi tion, has given a higher value to these originally foreign elements." In fact, Genesis i. 26 and Isaiah xlvi. 5 are in irreconcilable opposition. The polytheistic coloring of Genesis i. 27 with its im plied distinction of gods and goddesses would appear peculiarly drastic if the three members of the sentence are thought of as quite closely connected : "And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him, male and female created He them " But we cannot regard this as sure. BABYLONIAN MONOTHEISM. It may be recalled that I said in my first lecture: "Despite the fact that free and enlightened minds publicly taught that Nergal 1 The assumption that we have here a case of pluralis majestaticus is not, indeed, precluded by general Hebrew usage, but it is far-fetched ; compare iii 2, the saying of Yahveh : " Lo, man has become as one of us." BABEL AND BIBLE. 147 and Nebo, moon-god and sun-god, the thunder-god Ramman and all the other gods were one in Marduk, the god of light, polytheism remained for three thousand years the state religion of Babylon." Jensen has felt warranted in accompanying this remark with the following observations, which have been carried further by Konig and others with much gratification, as was to be expected : "This would indeed be one of the most significant discoveries ever made in the realm of the history of religion, and therefore we must regret exceedingly that Delitzsch does not cite his source. I be lieve that I may declare with all positiveness that nothing of the sort can be derived from the texts that are accessible to me. There fore we beg urgently that he publish soon the text of the passage which deprives Israel of the greatest glory that has hitherto illu mined that race, — that of being the only one that worked its way out into pure monotheism." Very good, if indeed Jensen stands by his expression, Israel is now actually deprived of this its greatest glory, and this by the Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablet 81, 11-3, 111, known since 1895 and published in the Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Insti tute by Theo. G. Pinches, — a tablet which is indeed preserved only as a fragment, but the remaining portion of which shows us that upon it all the divinities of the Babylonian pantheon (or at least the chief ones) are indicated as being one with and one in the god Marduk. I quote only a few lines :J "The god Marduk is written and called Ninib as the possessor of power, Nergal or perhaps Zamama as lord of combat or of battle, Bel as possessor of dominion, Nebo as lord of business (?), Sin as illuminator of the night, Samas as lord of all that is right, as lord of rain." Accordingly, Marduk is Ninib as well as Nergal, moon-god as well as sun-god, etc., in other words, the names Ninib and Nergal, Sin and Samas are only various designations of the one god Mar duk; they are all one with him and in him. Is this not "indoger- manic monotheism, the doctrine of the unity which develops only out of variety"? 1 HNin-ib Marduk sa alii il N6rgal Marduk sa kablu ilZa-ma-ma Marduk sa tahazt ilBe'l Marduk sa bS'lutu u mitluktu HNabu Marduk sa nikasi ilSin Marduk munammir musi il Samas Marduk sa kfinSti HAddu Marduk sa zunnu 148 BABEL AND BIBLE. THE NAME "EL.' On il, *?# God. — All Semitic prepositions were originally sub stantives. For the preposition "?S, which is originally il, "toward, to, at," the fundamental significance which from the start seems most probable, "aim, direction," is still preserved in Hebrew, al though this was until recently overlooked. It is found in the phrase, -"This or that is 17P8?," that is, "at the disposal of thy hand," "it is in thy control." The opinion that ^# in this phrase means "power" may have the support of tradition, like thousands of other errors in the He brew lexicography, but it has never been demonstrated, and there fore it is not true, as Konig declares (p. 38), that "el is surely equiv alent to 'power' or 'strength.'" The only meaning that can be demonstrated is "aim, direction," which carries with it as a matter of course the concrete significance "that toward which one directs himself, end, goal." The Sumerians conceived of their gods as dwelling up above where the eye of man is directed, in and over the sky ; we ourselves use "heaven" figuratively for "God" (comp. Daniel iv. 23); and furthermore, a Babylonian psalm calls the sun-god digit irsitim rapostim, the "goal of the wide world," that is, the end toward which the eyes of all the earth-dwellers are directed, and, finally, the poet of the Book of Job (xxxvi. 25), in harmony with an abun dance of other passages in Semitic literatures, glorifies God as the one "on whom all eyes hang, toward whom man looks from afar." And just so the earliest Semites called the "divine" being whom they conceived of as dwelling in the heavens above and ruling heaven and earth il, el, "that toward which the eye is directed,' (cp. the analogous application of ?J> to God and things divine in Hosea xi. 7). In my opinion the first and original meaning of the word is "goal of the eye," as is the case with the sun and the sky. Inasmuch as il is thus demonstrated to have the meaning "aim, goal," and as the designation of the deity by this word is perfectly in accord with the Semitic habit of thought, and it is therefore not permissible to assume another primitive noun il, my interpretation of el, the name of God, is established in every point. It is just as useless and impermissible to seek after a verb cor responding to such a primitive noun as il (see Konig, p. 38), as to seek after a verbal stem to match others of these most ancient bi- consonantal nouns, such as jim, " day," or mut, "man." BABEL AND BIBLE. 149 Besides, the etymology of the word il, el is not the most im portant consideration. The chief thing is rather the fact that those North-Semitic tribes which we find established about 2500 B. C. both north and south of Babylon, and whose greatest monarch in later times (about 2250) was King Hammurabi, conceived of and worshipped God as a unitary, spiritual being. Let it be observed that this applies to the North- Semitic tribes which had in part im migrated to Babylonia and afterwards established themselves there, not to Sumerian-Semitic Babylonians. A number of journals have represented it as my opinion that "even the Jewish conception of God was derived from the Baby lonian cosmology"; and Oettli (p. 4) says that in my view even "the name and the worship of Yahveh himself, united with a more or less definitely developed monotheism, was a primitive posses sion of Babylon." But these are misrepresentations. As to those names of persons which occur so frequently in the time of the first Babylonian dynasty, Konig is utterly mistaken in declaring (p. 40, 42) that among notorious polytheists the names must needs be translated and interpreted as "a god hath given"; and so is Oettli (p. 23) when he asks : "Who can prove that those names are not to be taken polytheistically, 'a god hath given,' 'a god be with me' "? To say nothing of other reasons, this interpre tation breaks down in the case of such names as Ilu-amranni, "God consider me!" Ilu-turam, "God, turn thee hither again!" and others. Or, on the other hand, are we to cease to render Bdb-ilu "Gate of God," and say "Gate of a god"? No! For the time of Hammurabi we hold fast to those beautiful names which signify so much for the history of religion : Ilu-ittia, "God be with me," Ilu- amtahar, "I called upon God," Ilu-abi, Ilu-milki, "God is my fa ther," or "my counsel," larbi-ilu, "Great is God," lamlik-ilu, "God sits in power," Ibsi-ina-ili, "Through God came he into be ing," Avel-ilu, "Servant of God," Mut{um)-ilu, "Man of God" (=Methuscha'el), Iluma-le'i, "God is mighty, " Iluma-abi, "God is my father," Iluma-ilu, "God is God," Summa-ilu- Id-ilia, "If God were not my God," and so on. The names must of course be judged collectively. In the case of certain of them (as in certain Assyrian names, like Na'id-ilu) we might certainly see in "God" merely an appellative, as perhaps in the phrase from the laws of Hammurabi : mahar-ili, to assert any thing "before God"; or in the phrase that occurs hundreds of times in the Babylonian contracts of that period, "to swear by God 150 BABEL AND BIBLE. (ilu) and the king" (cp. i Samuel xii. 3, 5 : "by Yahveh and the king "), but taking them all together it seems to me that they make it impossible to think that ilu means a "city or family god," or the "special tutelary deity." Precisely in "the endeavor of a people without philosophical development to be as concrete and specific as possible in its notions and expressions," we should inevitably expect to find in each case the name of the particular divinity intended, or on the other hand if the tutelary divinity of the family or of the infant was meant we should expect to find "my God," or "his God." An unprejudiced and unsophisticated consideration of all these and other names of the Hammurabi period leads rather to the renewed assumption that they are rooted in a religious conception different from the poly theistic views that were native in Babylon. What was the nature and value of that monotheism the contemporary sources do not enable us to determine, but only to infer them from the later de velopment of "Yahvism." THE NAME "YAHVEH." We must insist with all positiveness that in the two names Ya-a' -ve-ilu and Yave-ilu the reading Ya've is the only one that can be regarded as within the realm of possibility. The assault upon my reading — which in the light of our pres ent knowledge is irrefutable — has revealed a lamentable state of ignorance in the critics : this ignorance may account for the mis cellaneous insinuations which have been indulged in, as when Pro fessor Kittel ventures to speak of my reading as a "partisan ma neuver." In order to at least correct this ignorance, I beg to make the following brief and condensed exposition of the matter for the ben efit of my theological critics and of certain of the Assyriologists who have volunteered to advise them. The sign vu has the follow ing syllabic values : pi; tal; tu; tarn, and besides in Babylonian in particular: me/ve; md/vd; a; (vu), or as would be perhaps bet ter: ve; vd; d; (vu). But any one who has become measurably familiar with the style of writing of the Hammurabi period knows that, even if the reading Ya-'u-md be granted, this md cannot pos sibly be interpreted as the emphasising particle ma. Accordingly Konig (p. 48 f. ) and Kittel and others are mistaken; on the con trary, ma is without exception written with its customary sign. BABEL AND BIBLE- 151 Thus the interpretation of the names in question as "Ya, Ya'u is God " is absolutely precluded. Let him who denies this cite one single instance in which the emphatic particle ma is written with the character vu. And in the case of Ya-u-um ilu, I may remark incidentally, the m may be only mimation and not an abbreviated ma. Neither is the reading proposed by Bezold, Ya-'a-bi-ilu, pos sible, for in the time of Hammurabi the sign bi does perhaps rep resent also the syllable pi, but the reverse, sign vu for bi, is never the case. And on mature reflection the reading Ya- {a,y -pi-ilu can not be considered. It is true that the sign vu is found for pi in the time of Hammurabi, as frequently in the contracts published by Meissner in his Beitrdge zum allbabylonischen Privatrecht, and also in the Code of Hammurabi, but the regular sign ioi pi occurs much more frequently. For instance, in the 79 letters from this very period, published by King, pi is represented exclusively by its regu lar sign. Besides this, a "canaanitish" verb form ia'pi, iapi could be derived only from a stem nDH, which does not exist. Instead of Ya(')ve ilu we might then at most read Ya-(' a /w -)vd fu-ilu, with radical v, but by this very emendation we should expose ourselves to the dreaded recognition of a god nUT- Accordingly my reading Ya-a'-ve-ilu, Ya-ve-ilu remains the most obvious as well as the only one deserving serious consideration. , I venture on the interpretation of the name Ya(^)ve-ilu with less confidence than on the reading of it. The interpretation pro posed by Konig (p. 50), "May God protect" (why not, "Maya god protect"?), from Arabic hama, "to protect," as well as that of Barth (p. 19), "God gives life" (Ya-ah-ve-ilu), is highly improb able. As names from a foreign language they would needs appear as Yahve-ilu, not Ya've-ilu or even Ydve-ilu, and only in the last ex tremity would one be justified in the assumption that these foreign personal names had gradually been Babylonised in pronunciation, at the same time becoming wholly unintelligible. No, if we are to concede that there is a verb-form contained in ya've, ydve, then it is certainly the most obvious thing to think of the verb nin, the older form of ivn which is assumed in Exodus iii. 14, and to interpret it with Zimmern as "God exists." My interpretation, "Ja've is God," would accordingly remain by far the most probable in and of itself. 152 BABEL AND BIBLE. THE NAME "YAHUM-ILU." The name Ya ii-um-ilu is and remains a foreign name. It belongs among the North-Semitic tribes, more precisely Canaan- itic. Among these tribes there is no other god Ya-u but the god 1!fJ, Yahu, that god who is contained in the name Ya-u-ha-zi and others. Now this name of the divinity Yahu which is found at the be ginning and especially at the end of Hebrew names of persons, is the shorter form of Yahve, "the Existing," and consequently pre supposes the fuller form Yahve. Now even to the Jews of the exilic and post-exilic periods the name Yahveh was by no means a nomen ineffabile, as is shown by the many names of this later time : Ya-se'- va-a-va = Isaiah (VTjyifi!1), Pi-li-ya-a-va, and others. So much the less could it have been such to that primitive period in which the name of God, Yahveh, was very far from possessing the sanctity which it was to attain later in Israel. The name Yahum-ilu, therefore, presupposes a fuller equiva lent name Ya've-ilu. Now when such a name is really twice docu mented, in Ya'-z>e-ilu, Ya-ve ilu, should it not be recognised as such without reserve, and the more so as the refusal to recognise it will after all not obliterate the fact of the existence of the North-Semitic ("Canaanitic") name of the divinity Yah-u, which is perfectly iden tical with Yahveh, nor the existence of a name Yahu-ilu, "Yahu is God," similar to the Hebrew 5NV' (Joel), a thousand years before the prophet Elijah's utterance upon Carmel, "Yahveh is God" (i Kings xviii. 39)? It needs no demonstration to convince competent judges that Barth's interpretation (p. 19) of Ya-hu-um-ilu as abbreviated from Ya-ah-we-ilu must be rejected. Jensen too regards it as "certainly in the highest degree prob able that both composita contain the name of God Yaveh-Yahu," adding very correctly : " Now since the Ya'wa in the name cannot be of Assyrio-Babylonian origin, it is surely of foreign origin, and hence, in all probability, the whole name is 'Canaanitic,' and its wearers, or wearer, also 'Canaanites.' " But when he goes on to say: "But because a Midler or a Schultze is met with in Paris, we are not warranted in assuming that the Germans are the prevalent race in Paris; and just as little does an Ya'wa-il(u), appearing in Babylon 2000 years ago, need to prove anything more than that the bearers of this name occasionally came to Babylon," — when he BABEL AND BIBLE. 153 reasons thus I confidently leave it to the unprejudiced reader to decide whether, in view of all the names like Yarbi-ilu, Yamlik-ilu, and so on (not to mention Hammurabi, Ammi-zaduga, and other Canaanitish names), the delicate parallel of M filler and Schulze is even remotely justified. Furthermore, even Jensen is compelled, as we see, to admit that the evidence is good for the existence of the divine name Yahve ( Yahvu) before 2000 B. C. Moreover, Zim- mern makes this concession: "Even supposing that we have in ya-u-um the name of a divinity, which is not improbable, and even the name Yahu, Yahve, which is possible." That is enough for the present; the admission of the reading Ya-{a?)ve and of my inter pretation will probably follow. And accordingly, if Ya-ii-um holds its own as equivalent to VlJ, i^P, then the names of that same period: Ilu-idinnam, "God hath given," Sd-ili, "Belonging to God," Ilu-amtahar, "I called upon God," Ilu-turam, "God, turn to me," etc., may with double right be regarded as equivalent in their content to the correspond ing Hebrew names. . PROCESSIONS OF THE GODS. Jensen would not countenance my proposition that processions of Gods are mentioned in Isaiah. We read (xlv. 20): "They have no knowledge that carry their graven image of wood, and pray unto a God that cannot help," and again (xlvi. 1): "Bel has sunk down, Nebo is bowed down, their idols are fallen to the lot of the beasts and to the cattle, the things (i. e., fabrications) that ye car ried about are made a load, a burden to the weary beasts." There can be but few commentators here who do not think in connection with these passages of the Babylonian processions of the gods, in which Bel and Nebo were carried in ceremonious progress through the streets of Babel. AARON'S BLESSING.1 What I have said as to the significance of the phrase in the Aaronite blessing, "Yahveh lift up his countenance to thee," i. e., "turn his favor, his love, towards thee," holds good in spite of my critics. When spoken of men, "to lift the countenance to any one or to anything" means nothing more than "to look up at" (so it is used in 2 Ki. ix. 32). It is used in Job xxii. 26 (cf. xi. 15), as well as in 2 Sam. ii. 22, with reference to a man who, free from guilt INum. vi. 24 ff. 154 BABEL AND BIBLE. and fault, can look up God and to his fellow-men. This meaning, of course, is not appropriate if the words are spoken of God. Then it must mean precisely the same thing as the Assyrian, "to raise the eyes to anyone," that is to say, to find pleasure in one, to direct one's love towards him ; therefore not quite the same as to take heed of one (as in Siegfried-Stade's Hebrdisches Wdrierbuch, p. 441). If it were so, "the Lord lift up his countenance to thee" would be equivalent to "the Lord keep thee." When Jensen (op. cit., col. 491) insists that the Assyrian expression is literally, not to lift up "the face," but to lift up "the eyes," he might with equal justice deny that Assyrian bit Ammdn means the same thing as the He brew bene Amnion. In fact, whereas the prevailing Hebrew usage is "if it be right in thine eyes," the Assyrian says in every case, "if it be right in thy countenance" (ina pdnika; cfi. summa \ind\ ¦bdn sarri mahir); "eyes" and "countenance" interchange in such phrases as this. In Hebrew we find "to lift up the eyes to one" used as equiv alent to "to conceive an affection for one," only with reference to human, sensual love (Gen. xxxix. 7). The value of the Assyrian phrase, "to lift up the eyes to any one," in its bearing on the Aaronite blessing, rests in the fact that it is used with preference (though not exclusively, as Jensen thinks) of the gods who direct their love towards a favored person or some sacred spot. In reply to Jensen who claims (p. 490) that the choice of my example of the usefulness of Assyrian linguistic analogies is "a failure," I comfort myself with the thought that the recognition of our in debtedness as to a deepening of the meaning of the Aaronite bless ing to cuneiform literature, was many years ago publicly endorsed by no lesser one than Franz Delitzsch. J. Barth attacks on trivial grounds my statement that Canaan at the time of the Israelite Incursion, was a "domain completely pervaded by Babylonian culture." This fact, however, obtains ever wider recognition. Alfred Jeremias in the "Zeitgeist" of the Berliner Tageblatt, February 16, 1903, says: "Further, at the time of the immigration of the 'children of Israel,' Canaan was sub ject to the especial influence of Babylonian civilisation. About 1450 the Canaanites, like all the peoples of the Nearer East, wrote in the Babylonian cuneiform character, and in the Babylonian lan guage. This fact, proved by the literature of the time, forces us to assume that the influence of Babylonian thought had been ex erted for centuries previously. Of late Canaan itself seems to wish BABEL AND BIBLE. 155 to bear witness. The excavation of an ancient Canaanite castle by Professor Sellin has brought to light an altar with Babylonian genii and trees of life, and Babylonian seals." It may be briefly recalled here that the religion of the Cana- anites with their god Tammuz, and their Asherahs, bears unmistak able marks of Babylonian influence, and that before the immigration of the children of Israel a place in the neighborhood of Jerusalem was called Bit-Ninib (house of Ninib), after the Babylonian god Ninib. There may have been actually in Jerusalem itself a bit Ninib, a temple of the god Ninib. See Xeilinschriftliche Bibliothek, V., No. 183, 15, and cf. Zimmern, in the third edition of Schra- der's Die Xeilinschriften und das Alte Testament, second half, p. 411. Cf. also Lecture II. , p. 184. THE SABBATH. The vocabulary (II. R. 32, No. 1) mentions, among divers kinds of days, a um nuh libbi (1. 16, a, b), a day for the quieting of the heart (viz., of the gods), with its synonym sa-pat-tum, which word, in view of the frequent use of the sign pat for bat (e. g., su- iat, var. bat, "dwelling"; Tig. vi. 94), might be interpreted to mean sabattum, and on the authority of the syllabary (82, 9-18, 4159, col. 1, 24) where UD (Sumer. u) is rendered by sa-bat-tum, it must be so. The statement in the syllabary not only confirms the view that the word sabattum means a day, but it may also explain the sabat tum to be the day par excellence, perhaps because it is the day of the gods. Jensen in Z. A. iv., 1889, pp. 274 et seq. says that sabattu means "appeasement (of the gods), expiation, penitential prayer," and the verb sabdtu "to conciliate" or "to be conciliated" (Jensen in Christliche Welt, col. 492). But, neither from 83, 1-8, 1330, col. 1, 25, where ZUR is rendered sa-bat-tim (following immediately upon nuhhu), nor from IV. 8, where TE is rendered by sa-bat-tim [why not, as elsewhere, in the nominative?], may Jensen's propo sition be inferred with any degree of certainty. The verb sabdtu is hitherto only attested as a synonym of gamdru (V. R. 28, 14, e,f). Therefore, the only meaning that may be justifiably assumed for sabattu at present is "cessation (of work), keeping holiday." It seems to me that the compiler of the syllabary 83, 1-8, 1330, de rived his statement ZUR and TE = sabbatim from the equations UD. ZUR and UD. TE-^=um nuhhi or pussuhi=um sabattim. 156 BABEL AND BIBLE. Accordingly, the Babylonian sabattu is the day of the quieting of the heart of the gods and the rest day for human work (the latter is naturally the condition of the former). If in the well-known calendar of festivals (IV. R. 32/33) the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of a month are expressly characterised as days whereon every kind of labor should rest, should we not see in these days no other than the sa- batlu-da.y? The mooted words in the calendar of festivals run, according to our present knowledge, thus: "The shepherd of the great na tions shall not eat roasted or smoked (?) meat (variant : anything touched by fire), not change his garment, not put on white raiment, not offer sacrifice." [It is doubtful whether these prohibitions are of universal application, binding also the flocks of the shepherd. Then the particular prohibitions follow] ; "the King shall not mount his chariot, as ruler not pronounce judgment; the Magus shall not give oracles in a secret place [i. e., removed from pro fane approach], the physician shall not lay his hand on the sick, [the day being] unauspiscious for any affair whatever" (? ana kal sibuti; sibutu here, it seems used like 12¥, in Dan. vi. 18; "afffair, cause"). Accordingly we must acquiesce in the fact that the Hebrew Sabbath, ultimately is rooted in a Babylonian institution. More than this was not claimed. We need not quarrel with Konig who emphasises that the Israelite Sabbath received its specific consecration on account of its "humanitarian tendency towards servants, and animals." The setting apart of the seventh day as the day in which we are to refrain from labors of any kind finds its explanation, as I showed years ago, in the fact that the number seven was in this as in other instances to the Babylonians an 'evil' number, and this is the reason why the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, twenty- eighth days in the above-mentioned calendar are called UD. HUL. GAL., i. e., evil days. Alfred Jeremias (1. c, p. 25) aptly recalls the Talmudic story, according to which Moses arranged with Pharaoh a day of rest for his people, and when asked which he thought the most appropriate for the purpose, answered : "The seventh, dedicated to the Planet Saturn, labors done on this day will anyhow not prosper, in any BABEL AND BIBLE. 157 THE FALL. Any one who reads without bias my comments on the cylinder seal (Fig. 47) representing a Babylonian conception of the Fall, will grant that in comparing it to the Biblical story of the Fall, that I merely proposed to emphasise the circumstance that the serpent as the corrupter of the woman was a significant feature in either version. The dress of the two Babylonian figures, naturally prevented me also from regarding the tree as the tree "of knowl edge of good and evil." It seems to me that possibly there may loom back of the Bib lical story in Gen. chapters ii.-iii. another older form which knew of one tree only in the middle of the garden, the Tree of Life. The words in ii. 9, "and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," seem to be superadded, and the narrator, quite engrossed with the newly introduced tree of knowledge, and forgetful of the tree of life inadvertently makes God allow man to eat of the tree of life which is in contradiction with iii. 22. As to the tree, but that alone, I agree with the late C. P. Tiele who sees in the mooted Babylonian picture, "a god with his male or female worshippers partaking of the fruit of the tree of life," "a symbol of the hope of immortality," and also with Hommel, who says (p. 23): "It is most important that the original tree was ob viously conceived to be a conifer, a pine or cedar with its life and procreation promoting fruits. There is, accordingly, an unmistak able allusion to the holy cedar of Eridu, the typical tree of Para dise in the Chaldasan and Babylonian legends." Jensen (col. 488) argues as follows: "If the picture has any reference to the story of the Fall, it is likely to represent a scene in which a god forbids the first-created woman to partake of the fruit of the tree of life." That one of the figures is distinguished by horns, the usual symbol of strength and victory (see Amos vi. 13) in Babylonia as well as in Israel, is in my opinion a very ingenious touch on the part of the artist, in order to give an unmistakable indication as to the sexes of the two clothed human figures. Those who see in the serpent behind the woman a "meandering line " or "an ornamental division," may do so if they please, but they will find few that will concur. I do not stand alone with my opinion. Hommel, for instance, says (p. 23): "The woman and the writhing serpent behind her 158 BABEL AND BIBLE. express themselves clearly enough"; and Jensen (col. 488): "a serpent stands or crawls behind the woman. " As to the nature of this serpent, nothing definite can be said so long as we depend upon this pictorial representation alone. We might regard it as one of the forms of Tiamat, who, like Leviathan in Job iii. 8, and the old serpent in the Apocalypse, would be as sumed to be still in existence. But this is very uncertain. Haupt's Akkadische und sumerische Xeilschrifttexte, p. 119, con tain a bilingual text (D. T. 67) which may deserve a passing notice in this connection: It mentions a fallen hand-maid, the "mother of sin," who being severely punished, bursts into bitter tears — "in tercourse I learned, kissing I learned" — and we find her later on lying in the dust stricken by the fatal glance of the deity. LIFE AFTER DEATH. In the code of Hammurabi (xxvii. 34 et seq. ), the sinner is cursed in the words: "May God utterly exterminate him from among the living upon earth, and debar his departed soul from the fresh water in Hades." The last passage confirms the great antiquity of the Babylonian conception concerning the life of the pious after death. The Book of Job which shows a close acquaintance with Baby lonian views, describes the contrast in the underworld between a hot, waterless desert destined for the wicked, and a garden with fresh clear water for the pious. The passage is rendered in a phil- ologically unobjectionable translation in my book Das Buch Job, Leipzig, 1902: "Cursed be their portion on earth. Not does he turn to vineyards. Desolation and also heat will despoil them. Their prayer for snow-water will not be granted. Mercy forgets him, vermin devours him; no longer is he remembered." Thus in its right interpretation this passage forms a welcome bridge to the New Testament conception of a hot, waterless, and torture-inflicting Hell, and the garden which to the Oriental mind cannot be conceived of as lacking water, abundant, running, living water. The concluding verse of the prophetic book of Isaiah (ch. lxvi. 24): "and they shall go forth and look with joy upon the dead bodies of those that have revolted from me : how their worm dieth not, neither is their fire quenched : and they are an abomination to all flesh," means that those whose bodies are buried in the earth will forever be gnawed by worms, and those whose bodies are BABEL AND BIBLE. 159 burnt with fire shall forever suffer the death of fire. In two respects the passage is important : first, it shows that cremation is thought of as standing entirely on the same level with burial, and that, ac cordingly, not the slightest objection can be made to cremation on account of the Bible; secondly, it follows that the words, "where their worm dieth not," in Mark's account of the description of hell- fire as given by Jesus1 should not have been admitted; they are out of place. TIAMAT. Jensen (/. c, p. 489) observes with reference to Tiamat : "Be- rossus calls this being 'a woman,' she is the mother of the gods,' has a husband and a lover, and nowhere throughout Assyrian or Babylonian literature is there found even the slightest hint that this creature is regarded otherwise than as a woman." Nothing can be farther off the mark than this assertion, which contradicts not merely me, but also a fact recognised by all Assyri ologists. Or is it not true that a human woman gives birth to human beings, while a lioness brings forth young lions? Therefore, a creature which gives birth to sirmahhe, i. e., gigantic serpents {ittalad, see Creation-epic, III., 24 and passim), must itself be a great, powerful serpent, a Spa/«i>v /xe'yas or some serpent-like mon ster. As a matter of fact, Tiamat is represented in Babylonian art as a great serpent. (See, e. g., Cheyne's English translation of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah in Haupt's edition of the Bible, p. 206.) I see by no means in the scene reproduced in my First Lec ture (Fig. 46, p. 46) an exact portrayal of Marduk's fight with the Dragon, as described to us in the creation-epic ; on the contrary, I speak expressly and cautiously of a battle between "the power of light and the power of darkness" in general. The representation of this battle, especially of the monster Tiamat, naturally left a wide scope to the imagination of the artist. A dragon could be represented in various ways, such as we see in Figure 44, page 44. The beast which lies at the feet of the god Marduk has since been palpably proved by the German excavations to be, as explained by me, the dragon Tiamat. The relief of the sirrussu found on the Gate of Ishtar at Babylon unmistakably agrees with the figure familiar to us from our illustration. Oettli, following Gunkel (Schopfung und Chaos, pp. 29-114), 1 M k. ix. 44, 46, 48. 160 BABEL AND BIBLE. practically agrees with my conclusion when he says: "There are enough references in the prophetical and poetical books of the Old Testament to make it obvious that the old [Babylonian] creation- myth survived in the popular conceptions of Israel, and that in a highly-colored form." And again: "There are indeed enough cases where the original mythical meaning of the monsters Tehom, Leviathdn, Tannin, Rahab, is unmistakable."1 Isaiah proceeds (li. 10): "Art thou not it that dried up the sea, the water of the great Tehom, that made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?" Here the prophet actually couples "those mythical reminiscences " with the deliverance from Egypt, as another tri umph of Yahveh over the waters of Tehom. And when we con sider how in other passages (e. g., Ps. cvi. 9-11, Ixxviii. 13) Yah- veh's achievement of the passage of the children of Israel through the Red Sea is described and celebrated, we cannot apply to any but primaeval times the words in Ps. lxxiv. 13 sq. : "Thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters, thou didst dash to pieces the heads of the sea-monsters" (Leviathdn). Leviathan, according to Job iii. 8 also, is a personification of the dark chaotic primaeval waters, the sworn enemy of light. Even Konig reluctantly grants (p. 27) that the Book of Job2 "alludes, in all probability, to the conquest of the primaeval ocean ; " Jensen accordingly seems to stand quite alone when he says (/. c, p. 490): "Wherever the Old Testament mentions a struggle of Yahveh against serpents and crocodile-like creatures, there is no occasion to assume with Delitzsch and with a goodly number of other Assyriologists [add : also with Gunkel and most Old Testament theologians] a reference to the Babylonian myth of the struggle with Tiamat." Oettli is right when he declares (p. 17): 1 ' To submit the researches of Natural Science to the Biblical version of the creation is a wholly erroneous proceeding, which is the more unintelligible as the details of the second account of Genesis and many other passages in the Old Testa ment are quite incompatible with the first. Let us, therefore, unreservedly give to Science that which belongs to Science." Oettli proceeds : " But let us also give to God that which is God's; the world is a creation of God's omnipotence, which supports it as its law of life, — this the first page of Gen esis tells us." 1 Oettli cites Job ix. T3 and Isaiah li. g, where, moreover, "pierced" might be better than dishonored." 2 " God turns not his anger, the helpers of r&h&b brake in pieces under him * ' (is. 13), and in his power he smote the sea and in his wisdom he dashed rllh&b to pieces " (xxvi. 12). BABEL AND BIBLE. 161 In this I can no longer concur. Our faith claims, and many passages in the Old Testament assert, that God is the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth, but this truth is certainly not stated on the first page of Genesis, where we read: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, — and the earth was waste and desolate," etc. ; for this passage leaves unanswered the question, "Whence did chaos originate?" Besides, even among the Baby lonians the creation of the heavens and of the earth is ascribed to the gods, and the life of all animate creatures is regarded as rest ing in their hands. * * I will call attention to a passage in II. R. 51, 44a, where a canal is named after "the Serpent-god who bursts (or destroys) the house of life," apparently referring to some as yet unknown Babylonian myth. This, however, would upset Jensen's view, that we may perhaps see in the two figures, two gods dwelling by the tree of life, and in the serpent, its guardian. Zimmern1 regards the serpent-god as ultimately identical with the chaos-monster. ANGELS. Cornill (/. c, p. 1682), also, comes to the conclusion that "the conception of angels is genuinely Babylonian." When I spoke of guardian angels who attend on men (Ps. xci. n et seq., Matt. xviii. 10), I had in mind such passages as Apia's well-known letter of consolation to the queen-mother (K. 523). The Babylonian officer writes: "Mother of the king, my lady, be comforted (?) ! Bel's and Nebo's angel of mercy attends on the king of the lands, my lord." Further the writing addressed to Esarhaddon (K. 948): "May the great gods send a guardian of salvation and life to stand by the king, my lord ; " and also the words of Nabopolassar, the founder of the Chaldaean kingdom: "To lordship over land and people Marduk called me. He sent a Cherub of mercy (a tutelary god) to attend on me, and everything I undertook he sped" (see Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient- Gesellschaft, No. 10, p. 14 et seq.). In "the Old Serpent which is the Devil and Satan" is pre served the ancient Babylonian conception of Tiamat, the primaeval enemy of the gods, while Satan, who appears several times in the later and latest books of the Old Testament, and is always the enemy of man, not of God,2 owes his origin to Babylonian demon- 1 Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, 3rd ed., second half, p. 504 et seq. 2See Job, ch. i. et seq., 1 Chron. xxi. r, Zech. iii. r et seq. 162 BABEL AND BIBLE. ology in which we become acquainted with an ilu limnu or 'evil god' and a gallu or 'devil.' BABYLONIAN SUPERSTITIONS IN SWEDEN. How much Assyria intrudes into our own time can be seen from G. Hellmann's most interesting communion on the Chaldaean origin of modern superstitions about the understorms (in the Me- teorologische Zeitschrift, June, 1896, pp. 236-238), where it is proved that an ancient Babylonian belief survives even at the present day in the popular Swedish book, Sibyllae Prophetia, in which a chapter entitled "Tordons marketecken" treats of the prognostics of the weather and fertility as indicated by the thunder in the several months. CANAANITES. The term used by me in its usual linguistic sense (see, e. g., Kautzsch, Hebrdische Grammatik, 27th ed., p. 2), has been replaced in later editions by "North Semites," simply because the name was frequently misunderstood. That the kings of the first Babylonian dynasty, Sumu-abi and his successors, do not belong to that Semitic stock of Babylonian Semites who had become fused with the Sume rians, but rather to later immigrants, is proved by the ancient Baby lonian scholars, for they deemed the names of the two kings Ham murabi (also Ammurabi) and Ammisaduga (or Ammizaduga) to be foreign and stand in need of explanation, rendering the former by Kit?ita-rapastum, "wide-spread family" (cf. Q?3D"1, Rehoboam), and the latter by Ximtum-kettum, "upright family" (VR. 44, 21, 22, a, b). The replacement of the j> (in DJ, people, family) by h in the name Hammurabi shows that these Semites, unlike the older stock that had been settled for centuries in Babylonia, still pronounced the u as an y. Further, their pronunciation of sh as an s,1 no less than the preformative of the third person of the perfect tense with ia (not i2), proves that these Semitic tribes were quite distinct, which fact, first stated by Hommel and Winckler, is and remains true, in spite of Jensen's opposition (/. c, p. 491). Linguistic and his torical considerations make it more than probable than these im migrant Semites belonged to the Northern Semites and are most closely affiliated with the linguistically so-called "Canaanites" (i. e., the Phcenicians, Moabites, Hebrews, etc.). The knowledge of lSamsu in Sa-am-su-ilflna [cf. also Samu-abi) as contrasted with the older Babylonian Shamshu. 2 In the personal names of that age Yamlik-ilu, Yarbi-ilu, Yak-bani-ilu, etc BABEL AND BIBLE. 163 this we owe to the acumen of Hugo Winckler (see his Geschichie Israels), who thereby made a particularly important addition to his many other merits. The na of iluna (in Samsu ihlna), which is alleged to mean " our God, " is not sufficient to prove tribal rela tionship with Arabia, since, in view of the names Ammi-zaduga, Ammi-ditana, it is at least equally probable that iluna represents an adjective.1 However, zadug, "righteous," may indicate a " Cana anite" dialect, both lexically2 and phonetically;3 and the same may be said, too, of such personal names as Ya-su-ub-ilu belonging to the same age.4 Will Jensen be able ever to produce an unobjec tionable explanation from the Babylonian language of such names as Yasub-ilul INote the personal name I-lu-na in Meissner's Beitrage zum altbabyloniscken Privatrecht, No. 4; tf.|£>8? VZadflg must be the Hebrew pil^J; for the verbal stem, compare saduk, " he is righteous," in the Amarna tablets. 3 The vowel a is obscured to S, ft ; e. g.( in anilki, signifying the pronoun '' I " in the Amarna tablets, etc. iCt. Phoen. Ba-a-al-ia-su-bu, VR, z, 8*. REPLY TO CRITICS OF THK SECOND LEC TURE. That a discussion of these momentous theological or religio- historical questions, if they are but treated in the right spirit, could be considered an injury or even an insult to Judaism, least of all to the modern Jewish faith, is in my opinion absolutely ex cluded. Dispassionate, strictly objective inquiry into the origin of the Sabbath, of the position of woman in Israel as well as in Babylonia, and of kindred questions, can only sharpen our judg ment and promote the truth. In the same way we shall gradually witness in Jewish circles a unanimity regarding the worth of Old Testament monotheism, which at present is not yet attained. In contradiction to the universalism of the belief in God which several Jewish writers of open letters assume to prevail in the Old Testa ment (and they imagine they prove their case by quotations of Scrip tural passages), the opinion of other Israelites, authorities both for their general knowledge and Biblical scholarship, has been voiced, the purport of which appears in the following private letter of Jan uary 14, 1903 : " Irrefutable is your assertion that Jewish monotheism is egotistic, particular- stic, and exclusive ; equally irrefutable, however, in my opinion, is the fact that this rigorously particularistic monotheism alone could preserve Judaism for thou sands of years in the midst of all kinds of persecution and hostility. From the Jewish standpoint, the national theism is brilliantly justified; to give it up means to give up Judaism ; and though much can be said in favor of such a surrender, there are many points that militate against it." The divine character of the Torah, of course, will have to be excluded from scientific discussion, at least so long as a complete neglect of the results of Pentateuch-criticism on the Jewish side can be regarded as "exact science," and so long as reviews of Babel and Bible based on such a neglect are looked upon as "scien tific criticism." BABEL AND BIBLE. 165 A deep pain seizes me, who myself am sprung from a strictly orthodox Lutheran house, when I consider the abyss of obscurant ism, confusion, halfheartedness, contradiction, let alone worse fea tures, of the evangelical orthodoxy displayed towards the questions raised by Babel and Bible. From all quarters and corners the cry is raised that I have said "nothing essentially new": but, if that be so, why this extraordinary excitement? On the one hand, a deep lamentation and bitter accusation of Assyriology comes from Aix-la-Chapelle, because the Old Testa ment traditions, e. g., Nebuchadnezzar's madness, are arbitrarily assumed to be borrowed from Babylonian myths; on the other hand, an "orthodox pastor" exclaims in the columns of a journal of central Germany that I am fighting windmills, because the story of Balaam's ass, of the sun standing still, of the fall of the walls of Jericho, of the fish which swallows Jonah, of Nebuchadnezzar's madness, are not contained in the historical books of the Bible. "They are accounts," he says, "whose historical trustworthiness may be contested even according to orthodox views." Accordingly even evangelical orthodoxy set aside "revela tions" which are no longer deemed in accord with the spirit of the age : will not the orthodoxy once for all condescend to an open confession, and explain unequivocally which books and narratives of "Holly Scripture" they think proper to surrender? Professor Ernst Sellin of Vienna, one of the first and most meritorious among the positive Old Testament investigators, gladly acknowledges in his glosses on Babel and Bible (Neue Freie Presse, January 25, 1903) "the innumerable helps, elucidations, and cor rections which in grammatical and lexicographical questions as well as in the field of the history of civilisation and general history Old Testament investigation owes to the decipherment of the Baby lonian inscriptions. Yet, on the other, he is of opinion that if I dispose of the fact of a divine revelation in the Bible on account of the Songs of Songs and the amalgamation of tradition out of heterogeneous sources, I appear on the scene a hundred years too late. This is, to say the least, a gross exaggeration. When my dear father, Franz Delitzsch, towards the end of his life, found himself compelled by the weight of the facts of the Old Testament text criticism to make some, and indeed the smallest possible, con cessions for the book of Genesis, he was persecuted, even on his deathbed (1890), by the denunciation of whole synods. And the great commotion excited by my Second Lecture serves to show 166 BABEL AND BIBLE- convincingly enough that the circles which govern Church and school cherish a different conviction from that of my highly- esteemed critic. The several clergymen who have not wasted their time at the university adhere to freer views, but Church and School — especially the public schools — have remained unaffected, and this inconsist ency is no longer endurable, as stated in my First Lecture and also freely granted by Harnack. And this inconsistency produces an increasingly widening gulf. When, e. g., a theologian of no less authority writes (26th January, 4903): "You criticise a conception of Revelation that sensible Protestants no longer share ; it is that of the antiquated Lutheran Dogmatists. . . . All divine revelation is, of course, affected by the human medium, and must therefore have historically developed;" he describes exactly the standpoint that I myself advocate, only I regard the conceptions of "divine revelation" as held by the Church and as a historical, i. e., human, development to be irreconcilable contradictions. Either we take the one or the other. Tertium non datur. I hold the view that in the Old Testament we have to deal with a development effected or permitted by God like any other product of this world, but, for the rest, of a purely human and his torical character, in which God has not intervened through a "spe cial, supernatural revelation." The Old Testament monotheism plainly shows itself to be such a process marked by an advance from the imperfect to the perfect, from the false to the true, here and there indeed by occa sional retrogression. The modification of the original conception of revelation, deeply rooted in ancient Orientalism, by a surrender of the verbal inspiration, made by both, evangelical and Catholic theology, and even by the Church, irretrievably divests the Old Testament of its character as the "Word of God," ushering in, as it seems to me, the end of the theological and the beginning of the religio-historical treatment of the Old Testament. The present resurrection of the Babylonio-Assyrian literature has certainly not been accomplished without God's will.. It has suddenly taken its place by the side of the ancient Hebrew litera ture, the only one of Hither-Asia heretofore known to us, and com pels to revise our conception of revelation bound up with the Old Testament. Would that we might more and more become con vinced that only by a dispassionate reinvestigation of the docu- BABEL AND BIBLE. 167 ments we can reach our aim, and that in this controversy, neither now nor when its solution has been approached, our piety and the communion of our hearts with God can suffer the least. CONCLUSION. I shall endeavor to reply only to scientific criticisms, but I fear that, if I adhere to this maxim, I shall have little opportunity, if matters continue as heretofore, to concern myself with Evangelical Orthodoxy. Their method of warfare, especially that of the Evan gelical Orthodox Press, fills me with profound disgust. In the Evangelische Xirchenzeitung, founded by the venerable Hengsten- burg, Pastor P. Wolff, of Friedensdorf, Seelow, one of its regular contributors, writes (No. 4, January 25, 1903) as follows: "Judging from the proofs given by Delitzsch, we must expect him in his next Lecture to point out, how much lower the views of Christianity regarding marriage are than those of the Babylonians by a reference to the elopment of the Saxon Crown-Princess. No Babylonian princess ever ran away with the tutor of her children." And again : "Delitzsch intends to deliver another lecture on Babylon and the New Testa ment; perhaps he will also treat the subject ' Babel and Berlin ' : and therein will discover many points of contact. A small contribution I could offer myself. By the latest discoveries it has been proved that even the Prussian decorations are de rived from Babylon. On a monolith preserved in the British Museum, King Samsi- Ramman IV., is represented wearing upon his breast, on a ribbon round the neck, a cross, which appears to be exactly like a modern cross such as is used for orders What a new light is shed by this last discovery upon our comprehension of the real meaning of orders ! Even in Babylon the order of the Red Eagle of the fourth class was already bestowed ! Since our orders are unquestionably derived from Babel, it is evident that our modern civilisation is steeped through and through with Babylonian ideas." What a slough of mental and moral depravity in a German clergyman these words bespeak ! And samples like this could be multiplied tenfold ! In contrast to this, I, as an Evangelical Christian, greet with gratitude Rev. Dr. Friedrich Jeremias of Dresden, whose discus sion of my lecture (Dresdner Journal, February 4, 1903), though according to his standpoint he naturally rejects my position, is truly noble both in diction and substance. A third lecture on "Babel and Bible" will be delivered as as soon as the views on these two lectures shall have become clear and settled. THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO., CHICAGO. History of Religion, and Oriental Works Babel and Bible A lecture Delivered before the German Emperor. By Friedrich Delitzsch, Professor of Assyriology in the University of Berlin. From the German by T. J. McCormack. A brilli ant exposition by a master of the light thrown on the Bible by Assyriological research. Pro fusely illustrated Pp. 66. Boards, 50 cents net. 2nd edition. History of the People of Israel From the Earliest Times to the Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. By Prof. C. H. Cornill, of the University of Breslau, Germany. Translated by Prof. W. H. Carruth. Pages, 325 — vi. 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