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Panbabylonianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

Crawford H. Toy
Crawford H. Toy
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

In the year 1794 Charles François Dupuis brought out his Origine de tous les cultes, ou religion universelle, a work that made a great stir in its day. His object, he explains, was not to express his own religious views, but simply to describe the opinions of the ancients. The religion of antiquity he represents as the recognition of the divinity of the universe, the heavenly bodies playing the chief rôle; all ancient cosmogonies, with heaven and earth, all the apparatus of religion (ritual, processions, images), and all myths were derived from sun, moon, planets, and constellations. The beast-forms and plant-forms of the Egyptian deities, for example, were copied from the constellations into which men had divided the starry sky; the zodiac was associated with the sun as a cause of mundane phenomena, and the division of the sky into twelve parts gave vogue and sacredness to the number twelve among Egyptians, Hebrews, and Greeks; the sun was the chief god—it was called the right eye of the world, and the moon the left eye; from the victory of the sun over darkness and winter sprang the idea of a Restorer of the world, a Saviour. He remarks also that the ancient Chaldeans were distinguished for their achievements in astronomy, and that from them the knowledge of these sciences was carried to the West. They taught that the heavenly bodies controlled mundane destinies, and, according to Diodorus, that the planets were the interpreters of the will of the gods.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , January 1910 , pp. 47 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1910

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References

1 He drew his material from all the sources available in his day—from Chaeremon, Plutarch, and Macrobius, from Athanasius Kircher, Content d'Orville, and others; he cites Anquetil's translation of the Avesta, but does not mention Sanskŕit.

2 He regards Egypt, however, as the leader of ancient civilization.

3 A similar attempt at unification is Professor Jensen's derivation of all ancient myths from the Babylonian Gilgamesh story.

4 Astralmythen der Hebraeer, Babylonier und Aegypter. The five parts, devoted respectively to Abraham, Lot, Esau, Jacob, Moses, appeared 1896–1907.

5 “Babylon” is taken by Jeremias to mean the historical Semitic civilization of the Euphrates valley, without reference to the question whether or notit was preceded and influenced by a non-semitic (Sumerian) civilization.

6 Astralmythen, pp. 189 f.

7 Himmels- und Weltenbild der Babylonier, pp. 13 ff.

8 The Zoroastrian septad appears in the Avesta and may be very early; it is, however, not 2+5 (sun, moon, and five planets), but 1+6, which is not an astral combination.

9 Described by Mannhardt and Frazer.

10 Das Alte Testament im Lichte des Alten Orients, 1904, pp. 114 ff.Google Scholar

11 For the Babylonian see Jastrow, , Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, pp. 373 ff.Google Scholar; for the Egyptian, Maspero, Études égyptiennes, i. pp. 28 ff., Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, chap. 10.

12 See my article in Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. xviii, 1899, pp. 190 ffGoogle Scholar.

13 But new-moon was a day of abstinence, and the number sevenappears in the sabbatical year and the year of jubilee; in these the motives were economic.

14 Erman, , Handbook of the Egyptian Religion, p. 27;Google ScholarMaspero, , in Revue de l'histoire de religions, 1892;Google Scholar Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, chap. 5.

15 Jeremias, , Das Alte Testament, pp. 24 ff.Google Scholar

16 Jeremias (op. cit. p. 92, n. 2) remarks that the question why the constellations were given beast-forms belongs to prehistoric times. It might have been well for him to look into this question. Compare Dupuis, Origine, i, pp. 117, 131.

17 Jeremias, , Die Panbabylonisten, p. 32, n. 2.Google Scholar

18 Die Panbabylonisten, pp. 16 f., 10 f.

19 The gods show great facility in changing their relations to the heavenly bodies; thus Marduk may be the sun or the moon or Jupiter, as the exigencies of the case may require.

20 Das Alte Testament, p. 71.

21 Thus we have the ages of Abraham, Confucius, and Pericles,the Augustan, Elizabethan, and Victorian ages, the period of the Reformation, the Romantic period, and the like, and we speak of the “golden age” of some history or movement.

22 He takes his material from Erman's well-known work on the religion of Egypt, but rejects Erman's interpretation of the facts, which is the more generally received one of development from crude beginnings. He rejects also Hommel's attempt to prove by philological methods the identity of the Egyptian and Babylonian cults, preferring to rest his thesis on the similarity of ideas.

23 Here it is obvious to remark that social identity and identity of thought do not prove borrowing; or, if there be borrowing, they do not show in which direction the borrowing was.

24 See Spiegelberg's, paper in Orientalische Literaturzeitung, 1904.Google Scholar

25 This doctrine is termed by Jeremias and others a “mystery.” It was not a mystery, however, in the proper sense of this term; there was no body of initiates and no intention to keep knowledge from outsiders; the fact was simply that the higher thoughtof the educated, priests and others, was not intelligible to the masses.

26 Jeremias explains that the reason why the heavenly goddess (Hathor = Isis = Venus) is pictured in the form of a cow is that she is the female principle corresponding to the moon-deity represented as a bull. The first station of the moon was in Taurus.

27 As is remarked above, the part played by natural mundane phenomena is recognized, but these are treated as relatively unimportant adjuncts to the stellar powers.

28 The restoration of Tammuz to upper earth by Ishtar signifies the revivification of nature after the winter decay; but this is not a general doctrine of resurrection, and neither Ishtar nor Tammuz is the moon.

29 Die Panbabylonisten, p. 59.

30 Breasted, , History of Egypt, pp. 203 ff., 355 ff.Google Scholar

31 For other early examples see Tylor, , Primitive Culture, i, pp.288 ff., 356Google Scholar.

32 Jeremias, , Das Alte Testament, p. 69.Google Scholar

33 Hopkins, , Religions of India, pp. 418 ff.Google Scholar

34 The number twelve in this scheme may be connected with zodiacal signs, but not in the way supposed by the astralist theory.

35 Given in the Bundahish, a work regarded by E. W. West as later than the seventh century of our era; comp. Spiegel, , Eranische Alterthumskunde, i, pp. 502ff., ii, 151 ffGoogle Scholar.

36 Die Panbabylonisten, p. 49.

37 Taken from Erman, , ‘Die ägyptische Literatur,’ in Die Kultur der Gegenwart, I, 7, pp. 31 fGoogle Scholar.

38 In a Babylonian inscription (4 Rawl. pls. 32, 33) the kingis called “the shepherd of many nations”; see Jastrow, , Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 377Google Scholar.

39 Just such predictions the Hebrew prophets make.

40 See Winckler, Geschichte Israels, ii, and the first half of Schrader's Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, ed. 3, and Jeremias's Das Alte Testament. The two protagonists differ in some minor points, but agree in fundamentals. See also H. Zimmern,in Schrader, op. cit. second half.

41 Das Alte Testament, p. vi.

42 But it is found only in later writings, in none before the sixth century B.O.

43 Jeremias, , Das Alte Testament, p. 333,Google Scholar n. 1, thinks that the Jewish and Islamic legend of the persecution of Abraham by Nimrod is not a bare fancy but a religious and historical truth, legendary in form and dressed out with mythological motifs.

44 The Nimrod legend may be safely ignored.

45 This is, to say the least, very doubtful.

46 His connection with Beersheba, Winckler holds, ‘thewell of Sheba,’ points to a Canaanite god Sheba, the ‘seven-god.’

47 Why only eleven? asks Jeremias,—because one is hid behind the sun, or did they reckon only eleven? This question only the Hebrew writer could answer, and perhaps not even he.

48 A parallel is the allegorical hermeneutic applied by the Alexandrian grammarians to Homer and by Christian writers to the Old Testament.

49 Such a cult seems to have continued long; see 2 Kgs. 21 5, 23 11, Ezek.6 4, Job 31 26.