Lecture IX. The Ritual Of The Temple. 433
a question whether the word is not a derivative from the verb
ahâru,“to send”or“direct,”from which the name of Aaron was
also formed. However this may be, even the technical words
of the Mosaic Law recur in the ritual texts of early Babylonia.
The biblicalkipper,“atonement,”is the Assyriankuppuru; and
theqorbân, as we have seen, is the Assyrianqurbannu. A
distinction was made between the offerings of the rich and of
the poor (muskînu),^373 and the sacrificial animal was required to [472]
be“without blemish”(salmu). The“right”thigh or shoulder of
the victim was given to the priest, along with the loins and hide,
the rump and tendons, and part of the stomach.^374 Still more
interesting is it to find in the ritual of the prophets instructions
for the sacrifice of a lamb at the gate of the house, the blood of
which is to be smeared on the lintels and doorposts, as well as
on the colossal images that guarded the entrance.^375 To this day
in Egypt the same rite is practised, and when my dahabiah was
launched I had to conform to it. On this occasion the blood of
the lamb was allowed to fall over the sides of the lower deck.
There are other parallels between Babylonia and Mosaic Israel
which have been brought forward by Professor Zimmern. In the
“Tabernacle of the Congregation,”or“Tent of meeting,”he sees
the place where“the proper time”(moêd, Assyr.adannu) for an
undertaking was determined by thebarûor seer; at any rate,“to
determine the proper time”(sakânu sa adanni) was one of the
functions of the Babylonian seer.^376 By the side of the rituals
for the seers and prophets, moreover, there was another for the
zammârior“singers.”The hierarchy of a Babylonian temple
was, in short, the same as that of Israel.
But in addition to the architecture of the temple and the
regulations of the ritual, there were yet other resemblances
(^373) Cp. Lev. v. 7, 11.
(^374) Haupt,Babylonian Elements in the Levitic Ritual, pp. 60, 61.
(^375) Zimmern,Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Babylonischen Religion, p. 127.
(^376) L.c., p. 88, note 2.