Lecture III. The Gods Of Babylonia. 293
and became the mere double of her husband. Samas absorbed
her attributes and worship, and gradually she sinks out of sight,
or survives only in the works of theological antiquarians or in
the literature of the past.^248
Hadad, the third in the second triad of the Babylonian State
religion, had no city which he could peculiarly call his own.
He had developed out of the Sumerian spirits of the storm, who
revealed themselves in the raging wind or the tempest of rain.
More than one elemental spirit or demon had gone to his making
and there was consequently no single sanctuary in which his cult
had been handed down from the beginning of time. Wherever
the storm raged or the deluge descended, Hadad was to be found,
like the spirits from whom he had descended.
Under the influence of Semitic ideas he gradually became the
god of the air. His old character, indeed never deserted him; up
to the last he remained the divine power, who not only gave the
fertilising rain in the thunder, and he carried the forked lightning [320]
in his hand. God of the air though he was, he continued to be the
storm-god as well.
The god of the storm was naturally the god of the mountains.
When the armies of Babylonia first made their way to the West,
they found themselves in a land of mountains, where the storm
burst suddenly upon them, and the streams flowed swollen with
rain into the sea. Here, therefore, in the land of the Amorites the
Babylonian seemed to have discovered the true home of the god
he worshipped. Hadad was an Amorite rather than a Babylonian,
and the title, accordingly, by which he was most frequently
addressed in early days was that of“the Amorite god.”
The title is Sumerian in origin, and must therefore have been(^248) The name of the Edomite king Â-rammu in the time of Sennacherib shows
that the name and worship of  had been carried to the West. Compare also
the name of Ehud (Judg. iii. 15). Â seems to have been a title signifying“the
father,”the actual Sumerian name of the deity being Sirrigam (see my Hibbert
Lectures, p. 178).