Lecture IX. The Ritual Of The Temple. 427
protection of Istar,“a seer slept and dreamed a prophetic dream;
a vision of the night did Istar reveal unto him; he repeated it to
me, saying:‘Istar, who dwelleth in Arbela, came down, and on
the right hand and on the left hung (her) quivers; in her hand she [465]
held the bow; she drew the sharp war-sword and held it before
her. Like a mother she speaketh with thee, she calleth thee; Istar,
the queen of the gods, appointeth for thee a doom: ...“Eat food,
drink wine, make music, exalt my divinity, until I march and this
work of mine be accomplished. I will give thee thy heart's desire;
thy face shall not grow pale, thy feet shall not totter.” ’ ”
Here the message of the seer passes into a prophecy, and his
office is distinguished from that of the prophet only through the
difference in the mode of revelation. The seer went back to the
earliest ages of Semitic Babylonia. The“seer”of the palace of
Sargon of Akkad is already mentioned on a contemporaneous
tablet by the side of“the king”and“the queen.”^363 Like the other
priests among whom he was reckoned, it was necessary that he
should be without bodily blemish. The leper, the blind, and the
maimed were excluded from the service of the gods.^364
How far the Babylonian prophet resembled the Hebrew
prophet it is at present impossible to say. But there were certainly
two important points in which they differed. The Babylonian
prophet was, on the one side, a member of the priestly body;
the mere peasant could not become an“utterer”of the will of
heaven without previous training and consecration. There was,
consequently, no such distinction between the prophet and the
priest as prevailed in Israel; Babylonia was a theocratic, not a
democratic State. On the other side, the prophet was closely
linked with the magician and necromancer. Magic had been [466]
taken under the protection of the State religion, not repudiated
(^363) Thureau-Dangin, “Tablettes chaldéennes inédites,” in the Revue
d'Assyriologie, iv. 3, pl. xiii. 40,Obv.
(^364) So too was a person of illegitimate birth, as has been pointed out by Haupt
(Journal of Biblical Literature(1900), p. 57).