Note 132.2 — Chapter VII · The Deities as Social-Powers.

Apart from this great document, I do not know if further evidence is forthcoming of the precise influence of religion on the social system of Babylonia. The two spheres may once have been closely interdependent; but we can see from the earliest legal contracts that law had already freed itself from religion in the main; the judge is a secular authority;132.2 the scribe who draws up the contracts is a professional notary, and it is not clear that he had any necessary connection with the temples;132.3 we only hear of certain elders who assisted the judge, many of whom were temple officials or members of the guild of Shamash votaries;132.4 also, we find trials taking place in the temples, especially the temple of Shamash at Sippara, where the legal judgment was called “the judgment of Shamash in the house of Shamash.”132.5 Much light has yet to come, no doubt, from Babylon, and new light perhaps from Anatolia, to illuminate the part played by religion in the evolution of society. We would wish to know more concerning the religious side of family institutions, whether, for instance, there was any direct cult of the family hearth to which the Hellenes owed so much. Robertson Smith definitely denies that any of the Semitic races knew of such an institution; and he is very probably right, for it belongs more naturally to the colder climates, where the fixed and carefully placed hearth is a necessary centre of the dwelling-room, than to the hotter, where the inhabitants could be content in winter with a movable brazier. Yet one text at least may be cited to prove, if rightly interpreted, that the hearth could be occasionally deified in a Babylonian liturgy; for in a hymn to Nusku the fire-god, which contains a litany of absolution from sins, we find the phrase, “May the hearth of the house deliver you and absolve you,”133.1 but the same litany speaks also of the canals as deified. And we may value these two examples of that polydaimonism to which we could find parallels in early Hellas. But this evidence does not point to any established and regulated hearth-worship which might serve as the religious bond of family morality. More than one inscription, however, attests the worship of a family house-god (ilu-biti), to whom it seems a small domestic chapel was consecrated.133.2 Similarly, we have in Hellas Zeus Ἑρκεῖος and Ζεὺς Κτήσιος. And the Babylonian ilu-biti is mentioned, in association with a divinity of the street, ila-sûki,—a name which reminds us of Apollo Ἀγυιεύς. Only, these household and street-divinities in Babylon may have been mere “daimones” rather than θεοί; nor is it clear whether these family cults were ancestral, the heritage of a particular clan, or whether they were merely consecrated to the personal protective deity of the householder, or what part they played in the family organisation, for instance, in the marriage-ceremonies, births, and adoptions. So far as I have been able to study them, the Babylonian litanies and hymns seem rarely to reflect the religious side of the family life134.1; they are prompted by the needs of the city and the empire, or by the emotional crises of the individual soul. The legal contracts preserved on the brick tablets throw some light on the forms of the marriage ceremony, which appears to have been performed usually in a registration-office rather than a church. There must surely have been also some religious side to it; but the only evidence, so far as I am aware, is a very curious and doubtful document that has been published by Dr. Pinches, containing details of a religious ceremony which appears to be part of a bridal.134.2 I will not quote the quaint and bizarre formulae, as the renderings are said to be highly conjectural: if they prove correct, one may judge that the service belongs to a highly advanced religion; but I cannot adduce any parallel to it from other peoples. As for the ritual or religious feeling connected with adoption or birth, I am not aware that the documents have so far disclosed anything: it is stated vaguely by Peiser, in his sketch of Babylonian society, that adoption at Babylon might be prompted by a religious motive, namely, by the desire of the childless parents to have an heir who might continue the ancestor-worship of the family. But no document is quoted in proof of this; and it is very doubtful if we ought to speak of Babylonian ancestor-worship.134.3 We may suspect that the writer has been misled by the well-known facts of Vedic, Hellenic, and Roman family cult.