The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

446 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

could never be; they became the hosts that he marshalled in fight
against the enemies of light and order, the multitude that obeyed
his voice as the sheep follow their shepherd. The moon-god was
emphatically“the lord of hosts”!
The title was applied to other gods in later days.
[486] Nebuchadrezzar calls Nebo“the marshaller of the hosts of
heaven and earth,”^392 and Tiglath-pileserI. makes Assur“the
director of the hosts of the gods.”The kings transferred the title to
themselves, changing only“gods”into“men,”and so becoming
“kings of the hosts of mankind.”But the first signification of
the term was“the host of heaven,”the stars of El above whom
the king of Babylon sought to erect his throne. One of the
primeval divinities of the pantheon—a divinity, indeed, who
scarcely emerged from his primitive condition of a primordial
spirit—was En-me-sarra,^393 “the enchanter of the (heavenly and
earthly) hosts,”to whom in some of the old Babylonian cities
a feast of mourning was celebrated at the time of the winter
solstice in the month Tebet. A hymn entitles him“the lord of
the earth, the prince of Arallu, lord of the place and the land
whence none return, even the mountain of the spirits of earth
... without whom Inguriaa cannot produce prosperity in field or
canal, cannot create the crop ... he who gives sceptre and reign to
Anu and El-lil.”^394 He is invoked, like the moon-god, to establish
firmly the foundation-stone that it may last for ever. But it is not
only over the spirits of the underground world that he holds sway;
he reigns also in heaven, in the close vicinity of the ecliptic, and
“the seven great gods”who were his sons were stars in the sky.
His attributes, therefore, closely resemble those of the moon-god
of Ur: like the moon-god, he is at once lord of the sky and of the

(^392) WAI.i. 51. 1, 13.
(^393) Pronounced Ên-sarra, Ênu-sa-kissati in Semitic.
(^394) See the translation of the hymn in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 301. The text has
been commented on by Fr. Martin,Textes réligieux assyriens et babyloniens,
pp. 77-80.