Bel, the Christ of Ancient Times
BEL, THE CHRIST OF ANCIENT TIMES. Downloaded from T is admitted by every one who has studied the religion of the I Babylonians, that it is from the first to the last polytheistic. If we were to take the trouble of counting together the Babylonian divinities occurring in the inscriptions and especially in the several http://monist.oxfordjournals.org/ "lists of gods," we would get nearly as many as 500-1000. different gods. This state of affairs is indeed annoying for one who tries to understand such a "theological system." The difficulty is, how ever, still more increased, not only by the various identifications of one god with another, but especially by the so-called different gene alogies of one and the same divinity. Take, e. g., the goddess ISHTAR! She appears in one inscription as the daughter of the moon-god, 1 7 Sin ; in another as that of the god Anu, in a third as a child of An- by guest on June 10, 2016 shar or Ashshur,3 in a fourth as that of Bel,* in a fifth as a child of iW»-#,Bthus being considered not only as a daughter of Bel, but also "'«Ishtar (SUCH) mArat (dumu-sal) H" Sin (ESH), Ishtar's descent, Keilin- schriftliche Bibliothek (=K. B.) VI1. p. 80, 2 et fassim. 2illik mdrat Anim ana $An Bel abtsha = the daughter of Anu went to BS1 her father. IV. R. 65, col. II. 32; Jensen, Kosmologie, p. 273. 3 Anshar (= Ashshur)... .ba-nu-ii il&nit' mu-al-lid il"Ish-tar = Anshar, the creator of the gods, the begetter of Ishtar.
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