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J. D. Parsons: To commence with, it is well known to those acquainted with the remains of the Assyrian and Babylonian civilisations that the stories of the creation, the temptation, the fall, the deluge, and the confusion of tongues were the common property of the Babylonians centuries before the date of the alleged Exodus under Moses... Even the word Sabbath is Babylonian.
It will be recalled that both in the Ishtar hymn and in the one to Marduk above quoted, great stress is laid upon pacifying the deity addressed. Starting from the primitive conception that misfortunes were a manifestation of divine anger, the Babylonians never abandoned the belief that transgressions could be atoned for only by appeasing the anger of the deity.
Are not the Assyrians a much more ingenious people, likely to have done the same, at any rate to some extent? There is no direct evidence by which these questions can be determinately answered. No document on any of the materials suggested has been found. No ancient author states that the Assyrians or the Babylonians used them.
It was the kings of Assyria, issuing from their palaces in Nineveh, who dominated the civilization of Western Asia during the heyday of Hebrew history, and whose deeds are so frequently mentioned in the Hebrew chronicles. Later on, in the year 606 B.C., Nineveh was overthrown by the Medes and Babylonians. The famous city was completely destroyed, never to be rebuilt.
Similarly among the Babylonians, there is a freshness about the story of the adventures of a great hero of the past that presents a contrast to the rather abstruse speculations embodied in the creation epic.
Of such mettle normally were the New Babylonians who took their leisured way beneath the fluted columns of the court-house into Shelby's rally; but this audience felt itself more than normally temperate and judicial. Despite Mrs. Hilliard, despite the Hon. Seneca Bowers, despite Shelby's own striving, it had come less to encourage than to try and weigh. The high places were immutably fixed.
Employing, indeed, almost the very same phrase that we find in the Old Testament, they boast of having made the tops of their sacred edifices as high as 'heaven. The temple was to be in the literal sense of the word a 'high place. But, apart from the factor of natural growth, there was a special reason why the Babylonians aimed to make their sacred edifices high.
As with baptism, the imitation is older than the original! They had both a most pompous and splendid ritual. The idea of angels and devils has also spread from the far East; the Jews learned it from the Babylonians, and from the Jews and the Egyptians it passed into Christianity.
Armenia first comes before us in Genesis, where it is mentioned as the country on whose mountains the ark rested. A recollection of it was thenceforth retained in the semi-mythic traditions of the Babylonians.
How long Syria remained a part of the empire of Sargon of Akkad we do not know. But it must have been long enough for the elements of Babylonian culture to be introduced into it. The small stone cylinders used by the Babylonians for sealing their clay documents thus became known to the peoples of the West.
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