Lecture VI. Cosmologies. 363
that which inspires the cosmologies of Babylonia. Between the [396]
polytheism of Babylonia and the monotheism of Israel a gulf is
fixed which cannot be spanned.
The Babylonian Epic of the Creation, as we may continue
to call it, sums up and incorporates the various cosmological
systems and fancies that had been current in the country.
They are thrown into a mythological form with a philosophical
introduction. We may therefore regard it as embodying the
latest and most fully elaborated attempt of the Babylonian
mind to explain the origin of things. It is probably not much
older than the age of the Second Assyrian empire, though the
materials out of which it has been composed go back to the
earliest days of Babylonian antiquity. But it exemplifies the
three principles or fundamental ideas upon which Babylonian
cosmology rested—the belief that water is the primal element,
the belief in a lawless chaos from which the present world has,
as it were, been rescued after a long and fierce struggle between
the powers of darkness and light, and a belief in generation as the
primary creative force. The doctrine that in water we must see
the source of all things—a doctrine that made its way through
the cosmologies of Phœnicia and Israel into that of the Greek
philosopher Thales—can be traced back to the days when Eridu
was the seaport of Babylonia, and its inhabitants reclaimed the
marshlands from the sea, and speculated on the origin of the
soil on which they dwelt. The belief in the two creations of
darkness and light, of confusion and law, may have arisen from
the first contact between the teaching of Nippur and that of Eridu,
and the endeavour to reconcile the antagonistic conceptions that
underlay them, and the contrary systems of creation which they
presupposed. The belief, finally, in generation as a motive force
was part of the religious heritage that was common to the [397]
Semitic race. Semitic religion centred in a divine family which
corresponded to the family of the worshipper on earth; the gods
were fathers and mothers, and begat children like the human