459
On the one side, we have a gross and grotesque polytheism; on
the other, an uncompromising monotheism. Babylonian religion
made terms with magic and sorcery, and admitted them in a
certain degree to its privileges; they were not incompatible with
polytheism; but between them and the worship of the one God
there could be no reconciliation. It was the same with the
sensualities that masqueraded at Erech in the garb of a religious
cult; they belonged to a system in which the sun-god was Baal,
and a goddess claimed the divided adoration of man. To Israel
they were forbidden, like the necromancy and witchcraft with
which they were allied.
But deep and impassable as may be the gulf which separated
the Mosaic Law from the official religion of Babylonia, different
as may have been the development of prophecy in Babylonia
and Israel, the primordial ideas from which they started were
strangely alike. The same relation that is borne by the religion of
ancient Egypt to Christianity is borne by the religion of Babylonia
to Judaism. The Babylonian conception of the divine, imperfect
though it was, underlay the faith of the Hebrew, and tinctured
it up to the end. The Jew never wholly freed himself from the
dominion of beliefs which had their first starting-point in the
“plain”of Babylonia; his religious horizon remained bounded [501]
by death, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continued
to be the God of the living and not of the dead. It was in this
world that the righteous were rewarded and the wicked punished;
the world to come was the dreary shadow-land of Babylonian
teaching, a land of darkness where all things are forgotten, but
also a land where“the wicked cease from troubling, and the
weary are at rest.”
[503]