Lecture VII. The Sacred Books.
Every organised religion has had its sacred books. They
have been as indispensable to it as an organised priesthood;
indeed, Mohammedanism is a proof that the sacred book is more
necessary to its existence than even a priesthood. The sacred
book binds a religion to its past; it is the ultimate authority to
which, in matters of controversy, appeal can be made, for it
enshrines those teachings of the past upon which the faith of the
present professes to rest. It remains fixed and permanent amid the
perpetual flow and ebb of human things; the generations of men
pass quickly away, rites and ceremonies change, the meaning
of symbols is forgotten, and the human memory is weak and
deceitful; but the written word endures, and the changes that pass
over it are comparatively few and slight.
Babylonia possessed an organised religion, a religion that was
official, and to a large extent the result of an artificial combination
of heterogeneous elements; and it too, therefore, necessarily
possessed its sacred books. But they differed essentially from the
sacred books of ancient Egypt. The Egyptian lived for the future
life rather than for the present, and his sacred books were Books
of the Dead, intended for the guidance of the disembodied soul in
its journey through the other world. The interest and cares of the
Babylonian, on the contrary, were centred in the present life. The
other world was for him a land of shadow and forgetfulness; a [399]
dreary world of darkness and semi-conscious existence to which
he willingly closed his eyes. It was in this world that he was
rewarded or punished for his deeds, that he had intercourse with
the gods of light, and that he was, as is often said in the hymns,
“the son of his god.”What he needed, accordingly, from his
sacred books was guidance in this world, not in the world beyond
the grave.
The sacred books of Babylonia thus fall into three classes.
We have, first, the so-called magical texts or incantations, the