Note 100.1 — Chapter VI · The Deities as Nature-Powers.

First, in regard to the general concepts or characters of the divinities, the same formula seems mainly applicable to the Mesopotamian as to the Hellenic facts: the leading divinities have usually some distinct association with the world of nature; but the natural phenomenon or elemental fact that may be there in the background of their personality, becomes overlaid and obscured by the complex ethical and mental traits that are evolved. Therefore the mere nature-fact rarely explains the fully-developed god, either of Babylon or of Hellas. A few salient examples will make this clear. It is only perhaps Shamash the sun-god of Sippar, and Sin the moon-god of Ur, that retain their nature-significance rarely obscured. The hymn to Sin in Dr. Langdon’s collection reveals an intelligible lunar imagery throughout; but in another published by Zimmern,100.1 his personality becomes more spiritual and mystical; he is at once “the mother-body who bears all life, and the pitiful gracious father,” the divinity who has created the land and founded temples; under the Assyrian régime he seems to have become a god of war.100.2 Shamash even surpasses him in grandeur and religious value, so far as we can judge from the documents; but his whole ethical and spiritual character, clearly articulated as it is, can be logically evolved from his solar. But in studying the characters of Marduk and Nergal, for instance, we feel that the physical theories of their origin help us but little, and are at times self-contradictory; and it might be well for Assyriologists to take note of the confusion and darkness that similar theories have spread in this domain of Hellenic study. Thus we are told that the Sun in the old Sumerian-Babylonian system gave birth to various special personalities, representing various aspects of him: Marduk is the spring-sun, rejoicing in his strength, although his connection with Shamash does not seem specially close; yet Jeremias, who expresses this opinion,100.3 believes also that Marduk is a storm-god, because “his word can shake the sea.” Shall we say, then, that Jahwé is a storm-god “because the voice of the Lord shaketh the cedar-trees”? The phrase is quite innocent if we only mean by it that any and every personal God could send a storm; it becomes of doubtful value if it signifies here that Marduk is an impersonation of the storm. The texts seem sometimes to contradict each other; Ninib, for instance, is regarded by Jeremias101.1 as the rising sun, on the ground of certain phrases in his hymn of praise; but the concept of him as a storm-god is more salient in the oldest texts, and thus he is pre-eminently a deity of destruction and death, and becomes specially an Assyrian war-god. Does it help us if we imagine him originally as the Storm-Sun, as Jensen would have us? or is it not allowable to suspect that solar terms of religious description became a later Babylonian convention, and that any deity might attract them? Nergal, again, the god of Kutha, has been supposed to have had a solar origin, as the god of the midday and destructive sun;101.2 yet his special realm is Hades, where he ruled by the side of the goddess Allatu, and his name is doubtfully interpreted as the Lord of the Great Habitation, and thus he is regarded as a god of disease and death. This did not hinder him from becoming with Ninib the great war-god of the Assyrians and their god of the chase, nor a pious Babylonian poet from exalting him as “God of the little ones, he of the benevolent visage.”101.3 In one of the Tel-El-Amarna texts he is designated by an ideogram, that almost certainly means “the god of iron.”101.4 This last fact, if correct, is an illustration of that which a general survey of the Babylonian texts at last impresses upon us: the physical origin of the deity, if he had one, does not often shape and control his whole career; the high god grows into manifold forms, dilates into a varied spiritual personality, progresses with the life of his people, reflects new aspects of life, altogether independently of any physical idea of him that may have originally prevailed. Adad, the god of storms, becomes a god of prophecy, and is addressed as a god of mercy in the fragment of a hymn.102.1 Ea the god of waters becomes par excellence the god of wisdom, not because waters are wise, but probably because Eridu, the seat of his cult, was an immemorial home of ancient wisdom, that is to say, magic. As for the great Nebo of Borsippa, Jeremias,102.2 who is otherwise devoted to solar theories, has some good remarks on the absence of any sign of his nature-origin: his ideogram designates “the prophet,” in his earliest character he is the writer, his symbol is the “stilus” of the scribe. Yet he does not confine himself to writing: he is interested in vegetation, and eulogised in one hymn as “he who openeth the springs and causeth the corn to sprout, he without whom the dykes and canals would run dry.” Surely this interest comes to him, not from the planet Mercury,102.3 but from his wisdom and his concern with Babylonian civilisation, which depended upon dykes and canals. We are presented here with a progressive polytheism, that is, one of which the divinities show the power of self-development parallel with the self-development of the people.