455
god's place.
The Semitic Baal was a lord or king of human shape and
passions. He thus stood in marked contrast to the Sumerian ghost
or spirit; and, as we have seen, the gulf between them is too
deep and broad to be spanned by the doctrine of evolution. For
the Sumerian the world outside man was peopled with spirits
and demons; for the Semite it was a human world, since man [496]
was made in the image of the gods. The triumph of the gods of
light and order over the monsters of chaos symbolised not only
the birth of the present creation, but also the theological victory
of the Semite over the Sumerian. And with the victory came
a conception of the divine which was modelled on that of the
organised State. As the human head of the State was himself
a god, delegating his authority from time to time to his human
ministers, so too in the world of gods there was a supreme Baal
or lord who was surrounded by his court and ministers. Foremost
among these were thesukkallior“angels,”the messengers who
conveyed the will of their lord to the dwellers upon earth. Some
of them were more than messengers; they were the interpreters
and vicegerents of the supreme deity, like Nebo“the prophet”of
Borsippa. And as vicegerents they naturally became the sons by
adoption of Bel; Asari of Eridu first takes the place of Ea, whose
double he originally was, and then in the person of Merodach
becomes his son; Nin-ip of Nippur, the messenger of En-lil,
is finally transformed into his son, and addressed, like Horus
in Egypt, as“the avenger of his father.”^401 The hierarchy of
the gods is modelled upon that of Babylonia, and the ideas of
mediation and vicegerency are transferred to heaven.
Repentance, the consciousness of sin, and mediation are thus
conceptions all of which may be traced back to Babylonia.
And each of them leads naturally, if not inevitably, to other
and cognate conceptions. Mediation, as I have pointed out, is
(^401) K 255,Obv.i. 19,Ablu dannu mutir gimilli Bili abi-su,“the mighty son,
the avenger of Bel his father.”