453
When thou makest a promise (to give), give and [hold] not
[back].”Already, in the age of Khammurabi, the author of the story
of the Deluge makes it the punishment inflicted on mankind for
their misdeeds, and the Chaldæan Noah is rescued from it by Ea
on account of his piety. The penitential psalms and ritual texts are
full of illustrations of the same fact. It is true that the misdeeds
are often merely involuntary violations of the ceremonial law or
offences against the ritual, but the sense of guilt attaching to them
is already profound. It required centuries before the Babylonian
was able to distinguish between moral and ceremonial sin,—if,
indeed, he ever succeeded in doing so,—but at an early period [494]
a consciousness of the heinousness of sin already lay heavily
upon him, as well as of the need of repentance. A profound
sense of his transgressions, and of the punishment they deserved,
had grown up within him long before he had learnt to confine
it to moral guilt. In this respect, again, he differed from the
Egyptian: penitence and the consciousness of sin belonged to
Babylonia; we look in vain for them in the valley of the Nile. The
light-hearted Egyptian was too contented to feel them; the gods
he worshipped were, like himself, kindly and easy-going, and the
pantheism of the upper classes offered no place to a reproachful
conscience.
But the gods of Babylonia, in the days when the Sumerian
and the Semite had become one people, were stern judges. The
theology of Eridu was coloured and darkened by that of Nippur;
Ea might save Xisuthros from the waters of the Flood, but En-lil
had doomed all men to destruction. And whether it was the
sun-god who was worshipped, or the moon-god of Ur, it was still
a judge who beheld and visited all the deeds of living men. In
the sun-god the judge predominated, in the moon-god the father,
but that was all. The father was also a judge, the judge was also
a father, and the same word might be used to denote both.