458 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and BabyloniaHebrew Scriptures, while it was at Babylon that the dispersal of
mankind took place. The background of Hebrew history is as
purely Babylonian as the background of Hebrew ritual.
And, as Gunkel has shown,^404 the old Babylonian traditions
embodied in the Book of Genesis must have made their way to
the West at the very beginning of Hebrew history. They enter
into the web of the earliest Hebrew thought, and are presupposed
by Hebrew literature. The cosmology which saw the primordial
element in the watery deep, and told of the victory that had been
won over Tiamât, the dragon of chaos, must have been already
known in Canaan when the language and script of Babylonia
were taught in its schools, and Babylonian literature studied in
its libraries. Long before the Mosaic age, the literary culture of
Babylonia had profoundly affected the peoples of Syria, and had
penetrated even to the banks of the Nile. Need we be surprised,
then, if we find a“sea”in the temple of Solomon, the symbol of
beliefs which had their origin on the shores of the Persian Gulf,
or priestly ordinances which recall those of ancient Chaldæa?
The ordinances and temples were but the outward symbols
of the ideas that had created them. The anthropomorphism of
Semitic Babylonia is reflected in the anthropomorphism of the
Israelites. The sense of sin and of the overwhelming power of the
deity, the efficacy of penitence and the necessity of a mediator,
[500] are common to both Babylonia and Israel. Hence it is that the
penitential psalms of the Babylonian ritual bear so striking a
resemblance to the psalms of the Old Testament; hence, too, the
individual element and deep spirituality that characterise them.
Israel was indebted to Babylonia for something more than the
seeds of a merely material civilisation.
It is true that there is a gulf, wide and impassable, between the
Babylonian religion as we decipher it in the cuneiform tablets, and
the religion of Israel as it is presented to us in the Old Testament.
(^404) H. Gunkel,Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit(1895).