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Updated: June 3, 2025
Gaga comes to Lakhmu and Lakhamu and delivers the message verbatim, so that altogether this portion of the narrative is repeated no less than four times. The same tendency towards repetition is met with in the Gilgamesh epic and in the best of the literary productions of Babylonia.
Tomkins is probably right in seeing in the name of Beth-lehem a reminiscence of the Babylonian god Lakhmu, who took part in the creation of the world, and whom a later philosophizing generation identified with Anu. But the theology of early Canaan is still but little known, and its pantheon is still in great measure a sealed book.
Beth-lehem, "the temple of Lehem," must, in fact, have been the sacred name of the city derived from the worship of its chief deity, and Mr. Tomkins is doubtless right in seeing in this deity the Babylonian Lakhmu, who with his consort Lakhama, was regarded as a primaeval god of the nascent world.
Rimmon or Hadad, the god of the air, whom the Syrians identified with the Sun-god, Nebo, the god of prophecy, the interpreter of the will of Bel-Merodach, Anu, the god of the sky, and Anat, his consort, all alike meet us in the names sometimes of places, sometimes of persons. Mr. Tomkins is probably right in seeing even in Beth-lehem the name of the primeval Chaldæan deity Lakhmu.
Lakhmu and Lakhamu are also found in the list. While some of the names are quite obscure, and the composition of the list is due to the scholastic spirit emanating from the schools of theology, the fact that some of the deities, as Alala, Belili, Lakhmu and Lakhamu, occur in incantations shows that the theologians were guided in part by dimmed traditions of some deities that were worshipped prior to the ones whose cult became prominent in historic times.
While there are references to Lakhmu and Lakhamu in the religious texts, particularly in incantations, these two deities play no part whatsoever in the active pantheon, as revealed by the historical texts. In popular tradition, Lakhmu survived as a name of a mythical monster.
While in the list above referred to, Lakhmu and Lakhamu are put in a class with Anshar and Kishar, in the creation epic they form a separate class, and Delitzsch has justly recognized, in this separation, the intention of the compilers to emphasize an advance in the evolution of chaos to order, which is the keynote of the Babylonian cosmology.
Their revolt at the ordered "way" of the gods was a necessary preliminary to the incorporation of the Dragon myths, in which Ea and Marduk are the heroes. Here they appear as entirely beneficent gods of the primaeval water, undisturbed by storms, in whose quiet depths the equally beneficent deities Lakhmu and Lakhamu, Anshar and Kishar, were generated.
The later 'theology' found a solution of the problem by assuming four series of deities represented by Apsu and Tiâmat, by Lakhmu and Lakhamu, by Anshar and Kishar, and by the triad Anu, Bel, and Ea. In a vague way, as we have seen, Apsu and Tiâmat are the progenitors of Lakhmu and Lakhamu.
In the time when the gods were not created, Lakhmu and Lakhamu were the first to appear and waxed great for ages." Then came Anu, the sunlit sky by day, the starlit firmament by night; Inlil-Bel, the king of the earth; Ea, the sovereign of the waters and the personification of wisdom.
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