Lecture IV. The Sun-God And Istar. 303
name he became“the merciful one who brings back the dead to
life.”The ceremony was not concluded until he had received all
“the fifty names of the great gods,”whose virtues and essence
had thus, as it were, passed into himself. Not only was he their
heir, he also absorbed their whole being, and so became one with
his father, who is made to say:“He is become even as myself,
for Ea is (now) his name.”
In these words we are brought very near to the Egyptian [330]
doctrine which transmuted one god into another, and saw in
them only so many forms of the same divinity. But the stage
of pantheism was never reached in Babylonia. The Semitic
element in Babylonian religion was too strong to admit of it; the
attributes and character of each deity were too clearly cut and
defined, and the Semitic mind was incapable of transforming the
human figures of the gods into nebulous abstractions. The god
was too much of a man, moving in too well marked a sphere,
to be resolved into a mere form or manifestation. Merodach
might receive from the other gods their attributes and the power
to exercise them, but it was delegation and not absorption. The
other gods still retained the attributes that belonged to them,
and the right to use them if they would. Merodach was their
vicegerent and successor rather than themselves under another
form.
Hence it is that the human element in the Babylonian god
predominated over the abstract and divine. His solar attributes
fell into the background, and he became more and more the
representative of a human king who rules his people justly, and
whose orders all are bound to obey. He became, in fact, a Semitic
Baal, made in human form, and consequently conceived of as an
exaggerated or superhuman man. The other gods are his subjects,
not forms under which he can reveal himself; they retain their
individualities, and constitute his court. There is no nebulosity,
no pantheism, in the religion of Semitic Babylonia; the formless
divinity and the animal worship of Egypt are alike unknown to