More important, however, for its influence upon the development of religious thought than the question which deity was to be regarded as the head, was the establishment, among the masses, of the view that one particular deity deserved to be pogatded as superior to the rest ; and it is reasonable to suppose that in the course of time such a view would lead to considering Marduk as concentrating in his person the powers and attri- butes possessed by the members of his court. In Assyria, less influenced by persistent traditions than Babylonia, this view gave to the chief of the northern pantheon, Ashur, a position entirel unique ; and, even to a larger degree than Marduk in the south, Ashur was regarded as the one god with whom practically the fate of the country and of individuals rested. Had the Babylonian and Assyrian theologians been able to conceive of the head of the pantheon as a distinctively ethical power, governing the Universe by laws based upon Justice and profound distinctions of right,—nay, as the very source of righteousness and of the moral order of the Universe,—Ashur or Marduk might have developed, as did the national Jahweh of the Hebrews, into the one universal Power. That step, however, was not taken either in Babylonia or in Assyria. The limitation of the religious thought of the leaders and of the masses is marked by the circumstance that, while the attributes of the chief gods are concentrated in one, who thus becomes stronger, more powerful than the others, he is not invested with any traits of a more spiritual character. Ashur, indeed, becomes nothing more than a great war-lord of irresistible force, who protects his lands and sub-
' jects, but whose mercy and interest are not ex- tended to nations that do not come within his sphere. Marduk, again, though showing milder traits, remains merely the greatest ‘among the gods of Babylonia, and gradually disappears as his great sanctuary E-sagila crumbles to pieces. The God of the Hebrew prophets alone survives the de- cline and destruction of His central seat of worship,
But, while these limitations in the Babylono- Assyrian conception of Divine government are to be recognized, it must not be supposed that ethical traits were entirely wanting in the views formed of the gods, and more particularly of Marduk and Ashur. <A great civilization can be produced only by a people imbued with an ethical as well as an intellectual spirit. Itis no accidental circumstance
that Hammurabi, the founder of the Babylonian empire in the full sense of the term, was also the
one to gather the laws of the country into a great Code,* and he bases his claim to the gratitude of posterity upon his desire to diffuse righteousness throughout his land. This Code itself, dating from c. 2250 B.C., is the most striking evidence of the ethical soundness and moral aspirations of the Babylonians ; and, if it be borne in mind that the predecessors of Hammurabi also emphasize their ambition to promote the happiness of their sub- jects, it will be apparent that we cannot form too high an estimate of the ethical spirit pervading the population of the Euphrates Valley from the earliest historical period known to us. of
Taking Hammurabi’s Code as a basis, it is im- portant to observe that it provides for the rights of women as well as of men, that throughout it seeks to protect the weak against the tyranny of the strong, that it not only provides for punishment of crimes according to certain principles of equity (even though these are different from those which a modern nation would adopt), but takes into con- sideration the motives that prompt to acts in them- selves illegal. Thus illegal claims are punished with a fine, but, if it can be proved that the claimant had the intention to defraud, a severer punishment, and, as a general rule, the death penalty, was imposed. The rights of the father over his wife and children, and of the master over his slave, are so regulated as to prevent tyranny and cruelty. The lex talionis is applied with a logical severity which does not stop short at apparently absurd conclusions,—as when it is provided that a physician, who instead of curing brings about the death of a patient or the loss of an organ, is held responsible for the result, and punished according to the position occupied by the victim of his lack of skill The thousands of commercial and legal tablets found in the archives of Babylonian and Assyrian temples, and dating from the days of Sargon and Gudea down to the era of the Greek occupation, prove that the provisions of the legal codes, of which that of Hammurabi is only one instance of several that were compiled, were also carried out. Those tablets show the great care exercised in drawing up agreements between parties, and the endeavours of the judges to decide disputed cases brought before them by a careful sifting of the evidence and by strict standards of equity. In the religious literature, likewise, stress is laid upon right conduct as a preliminary to securing the favour and help of the gods, and the ‘Penitential Psalms’ furnish a further proof, if such were needed, of the intensity of the sense and consciousness of guilt.
Even among the Assyrians, despite the mar- tial spirit shown by their kings and the cruelties practised by them in their incessant warfare, the ethical spirit was not lacking. Such kings as Sargon, Sennacherib, and Assurbanipal, who stand forth as the exponents of Assyria’s ambition te extend her dominion by force of arms over distant lands, pride themselves upon having instituted righteous enactments, and claim to be the estab- lishers of law, order, and justice; and, while the desire for self-glorification may have been one of the factors prompting Assurbanipal to gather within his palace walls copies of the literary pro- ductions of the south, the fact that he did this for the benefit of his subjects, as he expressly tells us,