306 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniahim; the supremacy of En-lil, the wisdom of Ea, the glory of
Anu, alike became his. The“tablets of destiny,”which conferred
on their possessor the government of the visible world, were
taken from the older Bel and given to his younger rival; the
wisdom of which Merodach had once been the interpreter now
became his own; and, like Anu, his rule extended to the farthest
regions of the sky. But in thus taking the place of the great
gods of earth and heaven, Merodach was at the same time the
inheritor and owner of their names. If the tablets of destiny had
passed into his possession, it was because he had assumed along
with them the name of Bel; if Ea and Anu had yielded to him
their ancient prerogatives, it was because he had himself been
transformed into the Ea and Anu of the new official theology.
The Babylonian hymn in honour of Merodach, when it declares
that the fifty names of the great gods had been conferred upon
him, only expresses in another form the conviction that he had
entered into the heritage of the older gods.
As time went on, and Babylon continued to be the sovereign
city of the kingdom, the position of its god became at once more
exalted and more secure. The solar features in his character
passed out of sight; he was not only the giver of the empire
of the world to his adopted son and vicegerent, the king of
Babylon, he was also the divine counterpart and representative
of the king in heaven. The god had made man in his own image,
and he was now transformed into the likeness of men. Two
ideas, consequently, struggled for the mastery in Babylonian
[334] religion—the anthropomorphic conception of the deity, and the
belief in his identification with other gods; and the result was an
amalgamation of the two. Merodach was the divine man, freed
from the limitations of our mortal existence, and therefore able
not only to rule over the other gods, but also, like the magician,
to make their natures his own. The other gods continued to
exist indeed, but it was as his subjects who had yielded up to
him their powers, and of whom, accordingly, he could dispose