                14 page printout, page 140 - 153
                          CHAPTER VIII

             Religion and Morals in Ancient Babylon

          Babylon and Its People -- The Code of Laws --
          Babylonian Prayer Books -- The Land of Devils

                     BABYLON AND ITS PEOPLE

     THE first great historian, Herodotus, a Greek who traveled
widely over the ancient world several centuries before the birth of
Christ, has left us a description of the city of Babylon. It is
believed by many scholars that he personally visited the mighty
city in its decline; though we hardly need the warning that, even
if he passed through Mesopotamia, he would not speak the language,
and his remarkable statements must come largely from the lips of
"guides." However that may be, this Greek description represented
almost all that we knew about Babylon until recent times.

     And we can understand the Greek's enthusiasm. The city was
built in a perfect square, one-half on each side -- of the river
Euphrates, and the streets ran in straight lines, north to south
and east to west; as in a modern American city. Two vast walls,
three hundred and thirty-five feet in height and eighty-five feet
broad at the top, enclosed the city; and they were, he says, fifty-
six miles in circumference, so that the entire enclosed area would
comprise nearly two hundred square miles! A hundred magnificent
bronze gates pierced the walls; and smaller walls, each pierced by
twenty-five bronze gates at the end of the streets, shut the city
from the river.

     "In magnificence," Herodotus goes on, "there is no other city
that approaches it." The walls and public buildings, constructed
generally of sun-dried bricks -- for there is little stone in the
region -- were faced with glazed or enameled tile of brilliant
colors. Nor was this artistic coating, which shone in the
Mesopotamian sun, a monotonous surface of blue or yellow or white.
The Babylonian artisans attained so high a pitch of art in
enameling their clay that huge figures of bulls or lions or
legendary animals stood out in relief from the bright surface.
Great bronze figures of bulls and serpents guarded the gates. The
houses which lined the streets were "mostly three or four stories
high." The palaces of the rich added to the splendor; and one of
the "seven wonders of the world" were certain "hanging gardens,"
which seem to have been beautiful parks of trees and flowers in the
topmost of a series of super-imposed arches rising seventy-five
feet above the ground, and irrigated by an ingenious apparatus
which brought up water from the river.

     We can well believe that, as he vaguely says, the king's
palace was a stupendous building; for the mound of clay into which
it has sunk in the course of time is seven hundred yards, or nearly
half a mile, in circuit. But the most impressive edifices were the
great temples. That of the chief god, Marduk, rose about three
hundred feet above the level of the city; and its seven stages were
(at the lowest level) coated with pitch and above faced with red,
blue, orange or yellow enameled tile, or faced with gold or silver,
in honor of the sun (gold), the moon (silver), and the five large
known planets, with which the chief Babylonian gods were
associated.

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     The furniture was as magnificent as the structure was
imposing. Three great courts enclosed the area round the temple,
and on the west side of the inner court, opposite the vast pyramid,
was the temple of the god Marduk and his wife. Here was a gold
statue of the god forty feet high, with a gold table, a gold chair,
and a gold altar, Outside was a stone altar on which animals were
sacrificed, and an incredible quantity of incense was burned. Up
the side of the seven-staged temple ran a winding stair, and at the
top was the symbolical chamber of the god, with furniture of solid
gold, awaiting the hour when he would descend to visit his
priestess.

     From the summit of the temple one would look for many miles
over the great plain (in Babylonian, "Edin") which sustained the
millions of humbler folk who in turn sustained all this splendor.
But even the soil was a prodigy. The harvest was, Herodotus says,
twice or thrice as bountiful as in other lands, the ears of wheat
and barley growing to a phenomenal size. Rich groves of palm trees
waved in the breeze all over the plain; and so expert were the
food-growers that from the fruit of the palm they got "bread, wine,
and honey." From their scattered villages they looked with pride
toward Babel -- it is the Greeks who made the name "Babylon" -- or
"The Gate of the God" -- a name which ignorant Hebrew scribes long
afterwards connected with their own word for to confuse" and turned
into a myth.

     Herodotus brings the very people before us in this
enthusiastic account of Babylon in the First Book of his history.
They were clad in white linen tunics to the feet. Over this they
wore a woolen tunic or robe and a white mantle. They had the full
beards of the Semite, and wore their hair long; and both men and
women copiously bathed themselves with perfumes. Men carried
walking sticks, with fancily carved heads; and they had seals, to
seal the clay envelopes of their clay letters, dangling from their
girdles. Women had strings of beads on their heads.

     But how did they live? Here the historian begins to tell
stories which, considering the high civilization of the
Babylonians, are less easy to believe than his descriptions of the
city.

     They had no physicians, he says. The sick man was laid in one
of the public squares with which the city abounded, and every
passerby was compelled to ask his symptoms or his malady. If any
had had the same malady, or knew another person who had been
similarly afflicted, he told the patient what to do. And if the
sick man died, he was buried in honey!

     Marriage, he says, was by purchase or auction sale. On a
certain day all the maids of a place were assembled and put up to
the highest bidder. No parent was permitted otherwise to dispose of
his daughter; and assuredly no daughter to dispose of herself. The
price was pooled and equally divided in dowries, so that the
prettier girls helped to endow the less favored.





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     This is bad enough, as we shall see, but I will conclude this
sketch from the pages of Herodotus with his account of their "one 
most shameful custom"; for the whole evil reputation of Babylon for
more than two thousand years, and its reputation for vice in the
minds of most people today, is based almost entirely upon this
passage. A religious reader might remind me that the "prophet"
Baruch makes precisely the same statement (vi, 43), but I invite
him to learn that "Baruch" is the latest and most shameless of the
Jewish forgeries, and was almost certainly written in the first
century of the present era. The writer of it does not confirm, but
he drew his own information from, the Greek historian.

     This famous statement about the morals of ancient Babylon is
to the effect that every woman had "once in her life" to prostitute
herself in what Herodotus calls "the court of Venus": meaning no
doubt, the court of the temple of the goddess Ishtar. There she was
compelled to stand until some man threw her a coin, saying, "The
goddess Mylitta prosper thee," and taking her away to his couch.
The ordeal -- Herodotus is kind enough to represent it as an ordeal
to them -- was over at once for the prettier maids of Babylon; but
the plainer, he calmly says, had to "wait three or four years in
the precinct. And even Sir J.G. Frazer has not been intimidated by
the absurdity of the latter sentence, or by the almost unanimous
rejection of the whole story by modern scholars, and has given
further currency and the weight of his own authority to it in his
great work "Adonis, Attis, Osiris."

     Herodotus -- most of the preachers who quote the legend do not
seem to know -- not only represents Babylonian women as shrinking
from the affront to which their religion and their priest exposed
them, but he graciously adds that, once a woman has accepted the
coin and discharged her debt, "no gift, however great, will prevail
with her." A modern Herodotus would hardly say that of the entire
body of women of one of our modern cities! And there is a third
passage of the historian which represents the Babylonians as
singularly delicate in regard to sex. When. a husband and wife have
had intercourse at night, be says, they must sit on either side of
a burning censer until dawn, and they must then purify themselves
by washing before they are allowed to touch anything.

     I reproduce this medley of incredible stories so that the
reader may see for himself the very feeble foundation for the
common opinion of ancient Babylon; the source of the myth that is
still treasured in the religious literature of the world. That
Herodotus ever visited Babylon seems to me almost as incredible as
that Sir J.G. Frazer ever read Herodotus. In any case, modern
scholars have long suspected that the legend about the women of
Babylon is an absurdity, and recent archeological research has
completely discredited it. This chapter will establish beyond cavil
that the men and women of Babylon were at least as moral in sexual
matters as, and probably more moral than, the inhabitants of any
metropolis of our time. But let us at once correct some of the
errors of the historian.

     Babylon was a mighty city, and all that Herodotus says about
its beauty is confirmed by our discoveries. I am speaking of the
city of Babylon which was known to the ancient Jews in the sixth 


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century B.C.; for it had earlier been destroyed by the Assyrians
and had then, as the curse of the great god Marduk clung to the
destroyers, been rebuilt on a larger scale, and lavishly decorated
in the seventh century. This new and grander Babylon is the city of
Herodotus and of the Old Testament.

     Singularly enough, though its circuit seems to have been
nearer twelve miles than the fifty-six miles of the Greek
historian, its famous walls were actually about ninety feet broad
at the top. Several automobiles, had there been such things, could
have raced abreast along the lofty summit of the walls. Except in
regard to the area of the city Herodotus was well informed.

     But in regard to its morals and its women he totally
misunderstood his informants. There was no auction of wives in
Babylon, and there was no such law as the prostitution of every
woman at the temple of Ishtar. By that time, as we shall see,
Ishtar was actually a patroness of virtue and the chief "refuge of
sinners." Women had in ancient Babylon a position of respect and
prestige scarcely lower than they have won in modern times; and the
law of sexual purity was most drastically enforced upon both sexes.

     Modern learned commentators on Herodotus (such as How and
Wells, now the standard authorities) curtly dismiss both of these
statements of the historian. Marriage by auction was, they say, an
ancient custom that had been abandoned ages before the time of
Herodotus and of the Jewish Exile. The marriage mart is, or has
been, a real Oriental custom, but it obviously belongs to village
life or a low state of development. It is absurd to think of it in
connection with the vast city of more than a hundred square miles
area which we have described, In fact, How and Wells say that the
proper reading of Herodotus is that be represents it as a custom of
the past.

     As to the historian's vivid and detailed description of the
women at the temple, the commentators remark that such a thing was
not unknown in the ancient east, but Herodotus "is wrong in making
universal one single set of rites, those of the goddess Nana at
Erech." In plainer English, we know that there were certain parts
of the east in its decay where sacred prostitution was enjoined by
religion, and we discuss this in a later chapter, "Phallic Elements
in Religion." We have further some ground to believe that the
custom was in force at the old Babylonian provincial town of Erech.

     But we have no other trace of it in Babylonia, and in the
great city itself we can say positively that there was no such
custom. The law, as I will now describe it, is so severe in regard
to sexual offenses, and religious literature ascribes to the gods
and goddesses so stern a demand of sexual purity in their
worshipers, that the story is now generally abandoned. We have, in
fact, even more positive disproof in the marriage-tablets of the
women of Babylon, which habitually describe the bride as a virgin.
The few modern writers who think that there may have been one
temple on the out-skirts of Babylon with the custom have,
apparently, not weighed the evidence. It enormously outweighs the
words of Herodotus, who makes frequent mistakes.



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                        THE CODE OF LAWS

     We have in the previous section swept aside the oldest and
worst calumny of the ancient Babylonians. The absurd story told by
Herodotus -- absurd in connection with a city almost as large as
London -- is still repeated constantly in religious works, but it
is quite false and is generally relegated by scholars to the
department of ancient legends. We have now to get a more positive
knowledge of the Babylonian character, and again we shall find a
remarkable series of discoveries vindicating the old civilization
and actually showing us that Judaism and the Old Testament were
deeply indebted to it.

     One of these is the discovery of the Babylonian code of laws
compiled by King Khammurabi. The Mosaic code of law had hitherto
been regarded as, for its age, the most just and original in
history: so wonderful, in fact, that millions still believe it to
be the outcome of inspiration. Now we have the real source of at
least part of its inspiration in a Babylonian code hundreds of
years older than the supposed date of Moses, and sixteen centuries
older than the Mosaic laws as we have them! It is, moreover, far
more just than the Mosaic code, and implies a far higher degree of
civilization. To understand it and its significance let us glance
at the earlier history of Babylonia.

     In the dim light of the dawn of civilization, six or seven
thousand years ago, we find two very different races mingling on
the great plain of Mesopotamia. One was a race of beardless men, in
some respects like the Mongolians, whom we call the Sumerians or
Akkadians. The other was the Semitic race, a type like that of the
Jew, which in the end became predominant. The Sumerians seem to
have descended upon the plain from the mountains of the northeast
-- the direction of Asia -- and it is clear that they drained the
vast marshes, confined the rivers where necessary, irrigated the
dry land, and built the first cities.

     They also, like the Egyptians, Chinese, and Mexicans,
developed a picture-writing (hieroglyphics) which became in time
the scrawls on clay tablets which we call the "cuneiform" (wedge-
shaped) writing of the Babylonians and Assyrians. The "scribe," if
we may call him that, used a slender square wooden pencil, and with
this he made indentations on the clay. Thus what had originally
been a picture of a bird or a man became a few wedge-shaped lines
standing for the same object.

     It is interesting to learn that, as scholars have found, the
first cities of the Sumerians, such as Eridu and Nippur, the sites
of which are now some two hundred miles from the sea, were
originally sea-ports. This obviously means that the two great
rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, have formed two hundred miles
of land with their silt in the last six thousand years. The
interest of the fact is that it suggested to the ancient Sumerians
their version of the creation of the world, which is now summarized
in the first verses of Genesis. The beginning was a watery waste,
and the gods separated the land from the water.




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     The Sumerians were the great city-builders, agriculturists,
and engineers. But from the earliest age we find the Semitic
people, probably from Arabia, mingling with them and taking over
the work of civilization. I pass over the two thousand years of
what we may call elementary or evolving civilization. The people
were gathered in a number of city-states and these were generally
ruled by the priests. At last arose a Babylonian monarch, Sargon,
a Sumerian, who has a peculiar interest in connection with
religion.

     I have before me, as I am compiling the notes for this work in
the British Museum at London, a number of clay tablets, covered
with cuneiform writing of the Babylonians and Assyrians. One of
these tablets refers to Sargon, the great king. It seems that (for
reasons which are left to the imagination) his mother bore him in
secret. After the birth she made a little ark or boat of reeds or
rushes, coated it with pitch (which is common in that region) and,
placing the babe in it, she set it afloat on the great river. But
the child was destined to be a mighty leader, and the gods took
care of him. A water-carrier found the ark and reared the child,
until the goddess Ishtar saw and fell in love with the youth, and
made him king over the land.

     You have heard that story before. It is the original of the
story of the infancy of Moses! Sargon, who founded Babylon and
created the first Babylonian empire, lived thirty-eight hundred
years before Christ, or long before the date of the Flood and very
near the day of Creation. But we are not interested in his
primitive empire. It went to pieces, and there was again a clash of
ambitions, a series of small city-states, until about 2160 B.C.,
when King Khammurabi needed a uniform law to supersede all the
different laws of the various states, and be gathered the best of
the old Sumerian laws in one great code.

     A copy of this code, carved on a black diorite column seven
feet high, was found in the ruins of Susa in 1901. Some conqueror
of Babylon, apparently about 1100 B.C., had stolen it, and carried
it off to the hills. On the upper part of it is a figure of
Khammurabi in an attitude of worship before the sun-god Shamash.
H.G. Wells in his "Outline of History" says that it is "Hammurahi
receiving his code of law from the god." He cannot have read the
law very closely, as the king very emphatically says that he made
the code himself; and there is no doubt that it is a compilation of
the old Sumerian and Semitic laws of the region collected and
improved much as Napoleon I adjusted the old laws of Europe in his
famous Code Napoleon.

     The sentiment of justice which inspires the entire code is, in
view of its great antiquity, quite remarkable. People who imagine
that these old pagan nations lived "in darkness and the shadow of
death" will read the clauses of the code with astonishment; and
several good English translations are now available. Every
conceivable kind of injury or injustice has its separate clause,
and the fine or other punishment is assigned with almost
mathematical proportion to the delinquency. The relations of
husbands and wives are regulated, in a series of forty clauses,
with a sense of justice that wives never experienced under any code


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of laws in Christian Europe during the whole period of its
civilization. Slaves are protected against injury, and the rights
of the wife against a concubine are severely prescribed.

     One of the most astonishing discoveries was that four thousand
years ago the Babylonian law laid down a minimum wage for every
class of workers in the kingdom: a just enactment, which is in
superb contrast to the complete indifference of Christian law to
the workers during the last fourteen centuries (the fifth to the
nineteenth) of feudalism and exploitation. The boat builder, the
boatman, the agricultural laborer, the herdsman, the driver, the
potter, the tailor, the mason, the carpenter -- in short, every
manual worker, skilled or unskilled, had his wage fixed by law. The
agricultural workers were paid in corn, and the artisans had from
four to six grains of silver.

     But it is impossible to compare this with the modern wage, nor
would any economist dream of attempting it. It took the Papacy
eighteen hundred years to rise to the height of declaring that a
worker had a right to a "living wage" (which the Pope emphatically
declined to define more closely); and wicked Babylon, the most
calumniated of all the old pagan empires, had a definite wage fixed
by law two thousand years before Christ was born, and seven hundred
years before Moses. The "laws of Moses" are simply borrowed from
the Babylonian code, and are not as just as in that code.

     We are, however, chiefly interested here in the light which
the code throws upon Babylonian notions of sex-morality; though it
must not be supposed that I regard this as equal in importance to
the just settlement by law of the relations of employers and
employees or of husband and wife, master and slave.

     Here again we made an astonishing discovery. Babylon, your
religious neighbor will inform you, was "a sink of iniquity," and
chastity was unknown in it. One can imagine what his surprise would
be, if be could be induced to read such clauses as these in the
Khammurabi Code of four thousand years ago:

          129. If the wife of a man is found lying with another
     male, they shall be bound and thrown into the water [the
     Euphrates]; unless the husband lets the wife live, and the
     king lets his servant live.

     130. If a man has forced the wife of another man, who has not
     known the male [a child wife] and who still resides in the
     house of her father, and has lain within her breasts, and he
     is found, that man shall be slain.

     Clause 131 says that if a woman is accused by her husband of
adultery and there is no evidence, "she shall swear by the name of
god and return into her house." Clause 132 says that if she is
accused by others of adultery, "she shall plunge for her husband
into the holy river, or clear herself by ordeal." Clause 133 enacts
that if a man is taken prisoner, and his wife goes off with another
man, though there is food for her in the house, she shall be
drowned. The next clause says that if she does this because there
is no food, "that woman bears no blame." If, says clause 136, a man


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who had deserted his wife returned and claimed her, though she had
married again, she need not go back. For incest with a daughter
(154), the sentence was exile. For adultery with one's daughter-in-
law, if the son had had relations with her, a man was drowned
(155). If the son had not yet had intercourse with the girl, the
man (156) was heavily fined, and the girl received her dowry back
and was free to remarry. In case of incest of mother and son, "both
of them shall be burned" (157).

     The reader will now perceive the full irony of the statement
that is constantly being made from pulpits that we "are returning
to the morals of ancient Babylon"! Any attempt in any modern
civilization to enforce even an approach to the Babylonian law
would result in rebellion. Every variety of sexual offense, which
is either not punished at all or only visited with a few months'
imprisonment in any Christian civilization, was in ancient Babylon
punished with death. I must, in fact, defend Babylon, not against
looseness in sex-matters, but against an apparently just charge of
savage puritanism. These old laws were, as one gathers from clause
129, probably not generally enforced in all their rigor. But they
are an eloquent testimony to the Babylonian's stern view of sexual
irregularities. Fancy Chicago or New York or London, to say nothing
of Rome, Paris, or Madrid, with such laws on its statute-books!

     On the other hand, there was a very easy and just law of
divorce or remarriage. When we read in one clause that a woman was
divorced by the husband merely saying, "she is divorced," we may be
inclined to suspect injustice. but other clauses restore the
balance. Clause 142 enacts that a woman has only to refuse conjugal
rights, which would lead to a judicial inquiry, and, if the man is
proven at fault, she takes her dowry and is free to marry again.
Many clauses regulate her right to her dowry and other property,
and protect her against the intrigues of concubines.

     In fine, there are clauses referring to priestesses and other
women serving the temples which throw light on the subject.
Chilperic Edwards, whose fine translation of this remarkable
Khammurabi Code can be bought for half a dollar, tells us that four
types of sacred women are mentioned. Two of these are married
priestesses, and the following two clauses show how irreproachable
their lives had to be:

          110. If a priestess who has not remained in the sacred
     building shall open a wine-shop, or enter a wine-shop for
     drink, that woman shall be burned.

          127. If a man has pointed the finger against a priestess
     or the wife of another man unjustifiably, that man shall be
     thrown before the judge, and his brow shall be branded.

The other two types of sacred women were, apparently, not married;
one is expressly called a "virgin." But, though the law regulates
their dowry (which the father should settle on them on devoting
them to the temples), it never contemplates the possibility of
their having children. I gather from the references that they were
"temporary nuns," leaving to marry after a time. Nowhere in the
whole law is there the least allusion to sacred prostitution.


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     Such were the laws which King Khammurabi and his successors
often administered in person at the gates of the temples. There
were, of course, other courts; and we find an enactment that a
judge who has given an unjust verdict shall suffer the same fine or
punishment increased twelve-fold, and then be deposed. Let us hear
no more about the iniquity of Babylon.

                     BABYLONIAN PRAYER BOOKS

     There are four or five sources from which we may derive a more
authoritative account of the ideals of the Babylonians than from
the pages of a traveler who, even if he visited Babylon, which is
not certain, did not speak the language, and has demonstrably
included many serious errors in his narrative.

     One source is the code of laws which we have just examined. A
second source is the collection of legal documents we have
recovered; and of these it is only necessary to say that the most
extraordinary engagements are sealed with religious oaths and the
marriage contracts habitually describe the bride as a virgin.
Another source is the collection of creation-myths and other
legends. But the main source is what is broadly called the "temple
literature," or ritual: a very large collection of written oracles
or forecasts, of magical texts and incantations, and of hymns and
prayers.

     How we happen to possess this large literature in connection
with so ancient a civilization the reader will already understand.
There was nothing of the nature of paper or papyrus or parchment in
Babylonia. But there was much clay, and, molded into convenient
form of small thick tablets (like tiles) or cylinders, it affords
a good surface for the scribe. It is increasingly thought that, as
I have often hinted, the Sumerians, the founders of Babylonian
civilization, came from the direction of Central Asia; and they
had, like the early Chinese, a kind of picture-writing. When clay
was adopted as the writing material, these figures or little
pictures of objects degenerated into the groups of wedge-shaped
marks - cuneiform characters -- with which most people will be
familiar.

     But clay, once baked, may last forever. As a brother-author
once remarked in taking the chair for me for a lecture on Babylon:
"These ancient authors had one advantage over us -- the more you
burned their books, the more immortal they became." Hence it is
that we have so plentiful a collection of what was written in
Babylonia during two thousand years or more: even letters from man
or wife, marriage tablets, business contracts, and so on, For the
sacred literature and the semi-sacred epics we have the further
advantage that great collections of these tablets were made in
libraries. Asurbanipal, the greatest king of Assyria, and a most
zealous patron of science and letters, formed (about 650 B.C.) an
enormous library of tens of thousands of tablets, and we have had
the good fortune to recover a large part of this.

     The reader must not for a moment suppose that the few
documents I can quote here are just isolated texts that may not
have been typical. Many volumes of translations of them have been 


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published, and I select only what is entirely representative; and,
for the convenience of the reader who wishes to verify these
remarkable sentiments, I take the translations mainly from
Professor M. Jastrow's admirable "Religion of Babylonia and
Assyria." A very much smaller work by Dr. T. Pincher, with the same
title, will be found a good summary of Babylonian religion.

     As a rule the incantations or exorcisms, the charms or spells
with which the priests drove out the devils or combated their
influence, are more interesting from the religious than the moral
point of view. But some of these incantations are closely allied to
prayers. The earliest are mere charms. God is invoked to drive out
the devil: the good spirit is asked, in semi-magical formulae, to
smite the evil spirit. But as time went on the idea grew that a
man's sins had brought the evil upon him, and confession of sin
became a condition of recovery.

     It is clear from the tablets that the priests came to draw up
lists of sins -- much like what you will find in Roman Catholic
prayer books today -- and one of these was read by the priest to
the worshiper, so that he might recognize and confess his
transgression. They therefore give us the Babylonian moral code.
One of them, translated by Professor Jastrow, begins as follows:

               Has he sinned against a god?
               Is his guilt against a goddess?
               Is it a wrongful deed against his master?
               Hatred towards his elder brother?
               Has he despised father and mother?
               Insulted his elder sister?
               Has he given too little? [short weight]
               Has he withheld too much?
               Has he for "no" said "yes"?
               For "yes" said "no"?
               Has he used false weights?
               Has be possessed himself of his neighbor's house?
               Has he approached his neighbor's wife?
               Has he shed the blood of his neighbor?
               Robbed his neighbor's dress?

     This code, the same entirely as ours, is couched in dry
official language. In the prayers and psalms it so closely
approaches ours, or corresponds so wholly to ours, that for use in
a modern church very little alteration would be needed. One class
of psalms, known as "the Penitential Psalms," and probably recited
by priest and penitent when the sin had been confessed, is of
particular interest. I reserve for the fourth section the petitions
addressed to the goddess Ishtar, and need give here only one or two
specimens of the language habitually used. Lines from one are:

               Oh that the wrath of my Lord's heart return to
                    its former condition!
               The sin I have committed I know not.
                    Food I have not eaten;
               Clean water I have not drunk.




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     This "fasting" of the penitent is very frequently mentioned.
It seems to have been a constant religious practice of the
"depraved" Babylonians; and the Roman Catholic may find that fact
as disturbing as the confession of sins to the priest, the
imploring of the intercession of "the Queen of Heaven," or the
annual celebration of the death and resurrection of a god.

     One of their hymns recalls to our minds the Lord's Prayer; and
it is still more strongly recalled by the following prayer which
King Nebuchadnezzar, on his accession to the throne of Babylon six
hundred years before the birth of Christ, or in 604 B.C., addressed
to the great sun-god Marduk:

     O eternal ruler, Lord of the universe!
     Grant that the name of the king whom thou lovest,
     Whose name thou hast mentioned, may flourish as seems good to
          thee.
     Guide him on the right path.
     I am the ruler who obeys thee, the creation of thy hand.
     It is thou who hast created me,
     And thou hast entrusted to me sovereignty over mankind.
     According to thy mercy, O Lord, which thou bestowest upon all,
          Cause me to love thy supreme rule.
     Implant the fear of thy divinity in my heart.
     Grant to me whatsoever may seem good before thee, Since it is
          thou that dost control my life,

     Had I the slightest interest in such matters, I would
recommend this prayer for the accession-service of the next king of
England! Seriously, if these Babylonian hymns and prayers had had
the good fortune to be translated into English by the poetic
generation which translated the Old Testament, we should hear no
more about the superiority of the latter.

     There are hundreds of such hymns, scores to Shamash as well as
Marduk. Here is one that might have been taken as the very model of
the Lord's Prayer, yet the Rev. Professor Sayce, who translates and
reproduces it, tells us that it was chanted in the temple of Sin at
Ur as long ago as 2500 B.C.:

     Father, long-suffering and full of forgiveness, whose hand
          upholds the life of all mankind!
     First born, omnipotent, whose heart is immensity, and there is
          none who may fathom it!
     In heaven, who is supreme? Thou alone. ...
     On earth, who is supreme? Thou alone. ...
     As for thee, thy will is made known in heaven, and the angels
          bow their faces.
     As for thee, thy will is made known upon earth, and the
          spirits below kiss the ground.

     He is the source of all light and life and strength, the
creator and merciful farther of all. One prayer runs:

          The law of mankind dost thou direct.
          Eternally just in the heavens art thou;
          Of faithful judgment towards all the world art thou.


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     O Shamash, supreme judge of heaven and earth art thou.
     O Shamash, on this day cleanse and purify the king, the son of
          his God.
     Whatsoever is evil within him, let it be taken out.

     The constant reference in these prayers to the "supremacy" of
the one or the other god raises the question of Monotheism. It may
be said at once that there was never a time when the whole people
of Babylonia believed in the existence of only one god. One wonders
if there was ever such a time in Judea. Certainly during nearly the
whole period covered by the Old Testament the Jews did not deny the
existence of other gods. They merely insisted that Jahveh was
supreme and alone worthy of worship. So it was, at different
periods of Babylonian history, with Sin, Shamash, or Marduk. A god
becomes "unique" only when political circumstances enable his
priests to suppress his rivals. That was possible in the little
kingdom of Judea. It was not possible in a land where great cities,
three thousand years old, with special deities and powerful
priesthoods, rivaled the metropolis.

     But we have, fortunately, found positive proof that the
educated Babylonians were monotheistic four thousand years ago. We
have discovered a tablet of about 2000 B.C. -- the period when the
rise of Babylon made Marduk supreme -- in which the other gods are
represented as merely different aspects of Marduk. Thirteen of the
chief deities of Babylonia (Bel, Sin, Nebo, Nergal, etc.) are thus
explained, and the list goes no farther only because the tablet is
broken. Monotheism was thus the religion of educated Babylonians
seven centuries before Moses, and of educated Egyptians, not much
later.

                       THE LAND OF DEVILS

     We turn now to a very different, but equally interesting and
illuminating, aspect of Babylonian religious and moral life. We
have seen what a land of gods and goddesses it was. We shall now
see that it was a land of devils innumerable; and the very source
of the weird belief in legions of malignant spirits which, through
Judaism, passed on into Christianity. And this side of Babylonian
life must be considered here because it is intimately connected
with the virtue of the Babylonian people. No one who is acquainted
with it can doubt that if, as we saw, adultery was a vice in
ancient Babylon, there were more urgent incentives to avoid it than
there are in Christendom.

     Had, then, the Babylonians a worse hell than that of the
Christian Church? No: no other religion surpasses Christianity in
that respect, and very few approach it. The Babylonians seem in
their latest days -- I should think under Persian influence -- to
have partially adopted the belief in punishment and reward after
death. During practically the whole of their four thousand years'
history, they had no idea of reward and punishment beyond the
grave. They believed, however, more intensely than most Christians
believe in hell, that a man was punished in this world for his
sins; and, since there was no escape from the penalty before it was
felt (as there is in the case of hell), the deterrent was very
effective.


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     There were two foundations of the Babylonian belief. One was
their extreme vagueness about life after death. That the mental
part of a man survived the body they fully believed. This was the
oldest and most deeply ingrained of religious beliefs. But all that
the Babylonians knew, though their learned priest speculated much
on the subject, was that the dead passed into a dark, dim cave
under the earth, Arabu, or the House of Arabu. In the legend of
Ishtar, who (as we shall see) "descended into hell," it is said:

     to the land whence there is no return, the land of darkness,
     Ishtar, the daughter of Sin, turned her mind,
     The daughter of Sin turned her mind;
     To the home of darkness, the dwelling of Irhalla,
     To the house whence no one issues who has once entered it,
     To the road from whence there is no return, when once it has
          been trodden,
     To the house whose inhabitants are deprived of light,
     The place where dust is their nourishment, their food clay,
     They have no light, dwelling in dense darkness,
     And they are clothed, like birds, in a garment of feathers,
     Where, over gate and bolt, dust is scattered.

     Here again, we may note in passing, the Babylonians were the
teachers of the Jews. Through the greater part of the Old Testament
the Jews know only that the dead pass underground to Sheol, the
land of darkness"; and Sheol is only a variant of another
Babylonian name for the home of the dead, Shuala. It was only when
they came much later under Egyptian and Persian influence that the
Jews began to talk of "the spirit returning to God who made it." In
the end, when Greek influence fell on them, their educated men
began (like the writer of Ecclesiastes) to reject the very idea of
immortality. So little question is there of "revelation" in the
Hebrew religion; and, as to the "religious instinct," we need not
observe that it seems to have taught the early civilizations
entirely contradictory things about the most fundamental of
religious beliefs!

     The Babylonians dreaded this lower world. Their priests
avoided mention of it. It was felt that the dead were soured by
their gloomy prison underground, and would harm the living. This
was one of the primitive roots of the belief in malignant spirits;
and it leads us on to the next basis of Babylonian character -- the
belief that the gods allowed legions of devils to torment the
sinner in this life. One large class of the Babylonian devils has
the express title "shades of the dead." Other and more powerful
demons are clearly gods of an earlier generation whom a more
successful religion has turned into devils. Alongside of the
elaborate religion, the virtual Monotheism, of the priests and the
educated, Babylonia had plenty of religion in its more primitive
stages: spirits of the river, the tree, the field, etc., and
countless legions of evil spirits warring against men.

     If there is one thing that Christianity owes to Babylon more
plainly than another it is the belief in legions of devils, There
were countless numbers of them, arranged by the priests in classes
for the purpose of exorcism. They lurked by day in dark places, old
ruins or groves, or in the desert, at night they set out to torture


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

humanity. Every evil, from a tornado to a toothache, came from
them. Most dreaded of all were the "night spirits," Lilu and his
wife Lilitu: and it would be profoundly interesting to trace the
evolution of Lilitu into Lilith, the "screech owl," the "night
monster," of the Jews, the vampire or blood-sucker of the Arabs,
the fanciful creature of some of our modern novelists and mystics.

     But our material is too vast and our space too small. What we
have to notice here is that these immense armies of demons were
responsible for every disease and misfortune of the Babylonians.
Did a maid show the symptoms of anemia? Obviously Lilu or Lilitu
had been busy at night with her body. Did a man or woman have an
erotic dream leaving him or her excited and unsatisfied? It was
Ardat Lili. Headaches, toothaches, stomachaches -- every organ of
the body had its demonic tormentors. Fevers (from the marshes),
plagues and all pestilences were their work. Even "the evil wind,
the terrible wind, that sets one's hair on end" had its demon.
Pictorially they were represented as ferocious beings of animal
head and human body: the prototypes of our devil pictures. Some
were so powerful that they were next to gods. The book of Job is
thoroughly Babylonian.

     It followed that devil-dealers, sorcerers and witches, were
very common. They turned on or turned away the "evil eye": they
gave magical (and often poisonous) potions: they made little clay
or pitch images of your enemy and injured or killed him through
that. Dreadful, you say, for so high a civilization! Why, the whole
of Europe believed and did these things until modern times. Late in
the Middle Ages cardinals sought to kill a pope by getting a
sorcerer to make a wax image of him!

     What could a man do but appeal to the more powerful spirits,
the gods? Hence the immense number of priestly spells,
incantations, and exorcisms, to which I have referred. These were
at first merely magical formulae (much as you read in the first
part of Goethe's "Faust," which is thoroughly Babylonian). The gods
were conjured to drive out the devils. But, as we saw, the ethical
note gradually entered. The gods were the "fathers" of all men,
they were full of love and mercy, and so on. Why, then, did they
permit these demons to torture their children? The answer was as
natural as on the lips of a modern preacher. Men had offended the
gods by their "sins."

     It is curious how religious writers still boast that
Christianity invented the sense of "sin." Even if this were true,
we should be the reverse of grateful. It has so obscured the real
meaning of social law and character that it has actually led to far
more "sin," far more injury to men, than there would otherwise have
been. At the best it is a morbid illusion. At its commonest it is
a fear that the gods will punish a man, just as in ancient Babylon.
It is as old as civilization: that is to say, as old as the
priesthoods which invented it and profited by it.
                          ****     ****

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
                               by
                          Joseph McCabe

                          ****     ****
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