Page:The Babylonian conception of heaven and hell - Jeremias (1902).djvu/15

 thoughts of life after death, and apparently the mythological fragments that have been preserved restore these somewhat persistent popular conceptions in their main outlines.

The reader will be struck by the surprising correspondence between the Babylonian ideas concerning death and Hades and Jewish notions of the same. The connection of Israel with Babylonia was indeed of the closest, and the Tell el Amarna tablets have proved that Babylonian thought had spread over the land of Canaan before it was conquered by the Hebrews. At the time these were written there stood in Jerusalem a temple of the Babylonian Storm-god, Ninib. In more than one traditional version of the Hebrew stories of patriarchs Babylonia is cited as the original home of the people of the Bible, and during both Monarchy and Exile Babylonian culture played among the Israelites a part similar to that played by French culture in Germany in the eighteenth century. It would seem as though the gloomy conception of life in the underworld was the common heritage of Babylonians and Israelites from primitive Semitic times. 