Lecture IV. The Sun-God And Istar. 317
termination that had been added to her name.
Wherever, in fact, Semitic influence prevailed, the goddess,
as opposed to the god, tended to disappear. It was but a step from
the conception of a god with a colourless counterpart, whose
very existence seemed to be due to the necessities of grammar,
to that of a deity who absorbed within himself the female as
well as the male principles of the universe, and who stood alone
and unmated. A goddess who depended for her existence on
a grammatical accident could have no profound or permanent
hold on the belief of the people; she necessarily fell into the
background, and the prerogatives which had belonged to her
were transferred to the god. Istar herself, thanks to the masculine
form of her name, became a god in Southern Arabia, and was
identified with Chemosh in Moab, while even in Babylonia and
Assyria she assumed the attributes of a male divinity, and was [346]
adored as the goddess of war as well as of love.^267 In Assyria,
indeed, her warlike character predominated: she took the place of
the war-gods of Babylonia, and armed herself with the falchion
and bow.
I shall have hereafter to point out how this tendency on the
part of the goddess to vanish, as it were, out of sight, leaving the
god alone in possession, resulted in Assyria in raising its supreme
god Assur to something of the position occupied by Yahveh in
Israel. Assur is wifeless; now and again, it is true, a wife is
assigned to him by the pedantry of the scribes, but who it should
be was never settled; and that he needed a wife at all, was never
acknowledged generally. Like Chemosh in Moab, Assur reigns
alone; and though the immemorial influence of Babylonia kept
alive the worship of Istar by the side of him, it was Assur and
Assur only who led the Assyrian armies to victory, and in whose
name they subdued the disobedient. It was not until the kings of
(^267) Hoffmann remarks in regard to the Aramaic inscriptions of Zenjirli
(Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, xi. p. 253): “The most interesting fact is
that even the theological Hadad-stela makes no mention of a female goddess.”