Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 2.djvu/225

 BABYLONIA

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BABYLONIA

the third place in the kingdom (i. e. after Nabonaid and Baltassar). That same night Baltassar was slain and the Semitic Empire of Babylon came to an end, for the ex-Iving Nabonaid spent the rest of his hfe in Carmania.

In one sense Babylonian history ends here, and Persian historj' begins, yet a few words are needed ■on the return of the Jewish captives after their sev- ■enty years of exile. It has long been supposed that ■QjTus, professing the Mazdean religion, was a strict monotheist and released the Jews out of s\Tnpathy for tlieir faith. But this king was, apparently, only unconsciously an instrument in God's hands, and the permission for the Jews to return was merely given out of political sagacity and a wish for popu- larity in his new domains. At least we possess m- ,scrip"tions of him in which he is most profuse in his homage to the Babylonian Pantheon. As Nabonaid had outraged the religious sentiments of his subjects bv collecting all their gods in Shu-anna, Cjtus pur- .sued an opposite policy and returned all these gods to their own worshippers; and, the Jews havmg no idols, he returned their sacred vessels, which Baltas- .sar had profaned, and gave a grant for the rebuildmg of their Temple. The very pliraseologj- of the decree given in I Esdras, i, 2 sqq., referring to "the Lord God of Heaven" shows his respectful attitude, if not inclination, towards monotheism, which was pro- fessed by so many of his Indo-Gerinanic subjects. Darius Hystaspes, who in 521 B. c, after defeatmg Pseudo-Smerdis, succeeded Cambyses (King of Baby- lon since 530 b. c.) was a con\-inced monotheist and adorer of Ahuramazda; and if it was he who ordered and aided the completion of the temple at Jerusalem, after the interruption caused by Samaritan inter- vention it was no doubt out of sympathy \\-ith the Jewish religion (I Esdr., vi. 1 sqq.). It is not quite certain, however, that the Darius referred to is this king- it has been suggested that Darius Nothus is meant, who mounted the throne almost a hundred years later. Zerubabel is a thorougUy Babylonian name and occurs frequently on documents of that time- but we cannot as vet trace any connexion be- tween the Zerubabel of Scripture and any name men- tioned in these documents. ,,^ „,, c ^ Some Speci.\l Bible References.— (1) I he first passage referring to Babylonia is Gen., x, 8-10: "Chus begat Nemrod, and the beginning of his kingdom was Babylon and Arach and Achad and Chalanne in the land ofSennaar." The great historical value of these genealogies in Genesis has been acknowledged by ^scholars of all schools; these genealogies are, however, not of per.sons, but of tribes, which is obvious from such a bold metaphor as: "Chanaan begat Sidon, his first born" (v, 15). But in many instances the names are those of actual persons whose personal names be- came designations of the tribes, just as in known instances of Scottish and Irish clans or Arab tribes. Chus begat Nemrod. Chus was not a Semite, accord- ing to the BibUcal account, and it is remarkable that recent discoveries all seem to point to the fact that the original ci\-ihzation of Babylonia was non-Semitic and the Semitic element only gradually displaced the aborigines and adopted their culture. It must be noted, also, that in v. 22 Assur is described as a son of Sem, though in v. 11 Assur comes out of the land of Sennaar. This exactly represents the fact that AssjTia was purely Semitic where Babylonia was not. Some see in Chus" a designation of the city of I^'S". mentioned above amongst the cities of early Baby- lonia, and certainlv one of its most ancient towns. Nemrod, on this supposition, would be none else than Nin-marad, or Lord of Marad, which was a daughter- city of Kish. Gilgamesh, whom mythology trans- formed into a Babylonian Hercules, whose fortunes are described in the (ilgainesh-cpos, would then be the person designated by t he Biblical Nemrod. Others

again see in Nemrod an intentional corruption of Amarudu, the Akkadian for Marduk, whom the Baby- lonians worshipped as the great God, and who, perhaps, was the deified ancestor of their city. This corruption would be parallel to Nisroch (IV Kings, xLx, 37) for Assuraku, and Nibhaz (IV Kings, xvu, 31) for Abahazu, or Abed Nego for Abdnebo. The description of "stout hunter" or hero-ent rapper would fit in well with the role ascribed to the god Marduk, who entrapped the monster Tiamtu in his net. Both Biblical instances, IV Kings, xvh, 31, and xix, 37, however, are very doubtful, and Nisroch has recently found a more probable explanation.

(2) "The beginning of his kingdom was Babylon and .\rach and Achad and Calanne". — These cities of Northern Babylonia are probably eniunerated in- versely to the order of their antiquity; so that Nippur (Calanne) is the most ancient, and Babylon the most modern. Recent excavations have shown that Nip- pur dates far back beyond the Sargonid age (3800 B. c.) and Nippur is mentioned on the fifth tablet of the Babvlonian Creation-story.

(3) The next Biblical passage w^hich requires men- tion is that dealing mth the Tower of Babel (Gen., xi, 1-9). This narrative, though couched in the terms of Oriental folklore, yet expresses not merely a moral lesson, but refers to some historical fact in the dim past. There was perhaps in the ancient world no spot on all the earth where such a variety of tongues and dialects was heard as in Babylonia, where Akka- dians, Sumerians, and Amorites, Elamites, Kassites, Sutites, Qutites, and perhaps Hittites met and left their mark on the language; where Assyrian or Sem- itic Babylonian itself only verj' gradually displaced the older non-Semitic tongue, and where for many centiu-ies the people were at least bilingual. It was the spot where Turanian, Semitic, and Indo-Gernianic met. Yet there remained in the national conscious- ness the memory that the first settlers in the Baby- lonian plain spoke one language. "They removed from the East", as the Bible says and all recent re- search suggests. When we read, "The earth was of one tongue", we need not take this word in its -nidest sense, for the same word is often translated "the land". Philologj- may or may not prove the unity of all human speech, and man's descent from a single set of parents seems to postulate original unity of language; but in any case the Bible does not here seem to refer to this, and the Bible account itself suggests that a vast variety of tongues existed pre- vious to the foundations of Babylon. We need but refer to Gen., x, 5, 21, 31: "In their kindreds and tongues and countries and nations"; and Gen., x, 10, where Babylon is represented as almost coeval with Arach, Achad, and Calanne, and posterior to Gomer, Magog, Elam, Arphaxad, so that the original division of languages cannot first have taken place at Babel. What historical fact lies behind the account of the building of the Tower of Babel is difficult to ascertain. Of course any real attempt to reach heaven by a tower is out of the' question. The mountains of Elam were too close by, to tell them that a few yards more or less were of no importance to get in touch ^^■ith the sky. But the wish to have a rallj-ing-point in the plain is only too natural. It is a striking fact that most Baby- lonian cities possessed a ziggurrat (a stage, or temple- tower), and these bore very significant Sumerian names, as, for instance, at Nippur, Dur-anki, "Link of heaven and earth" — "the summit of which reaches unto heaven, and the foundation of which is laid in the bright deep''; or, at Babylon, Esagila, "House of the High Head", the more ancient designation of which was Etemcnanki, "House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth"; or Ezida, at Borsippa, by its more ancient designation Euriminianki, or "House of the Seven Spheres of Heaven and Earth". The re- mains of Ezida, at present Birs Nimrud, are tradition-