ANCIENT BABYLONIAN ASTROGONY. 401 



in their origin, were apparently too thoroughly established 

 to be discarded by Moses ; nay, he was even obliged to 

 permit the continuance of many observances which suspi- 

 ciously resembled the old offerings of sacrifice to the moon as 

 a deity. He had also to continue the sacrifice of the pass- 

 over, the origin of which was unmistakably astronomical, 

 corresponding in time to the sun's passage across the 

 equator, or rather to the first lunar month following and 

 including that event But he carefully dissociates both the 

 lunar and the lunisolar sacrifices from their primary Sabaistic 

 significance. In fact, the history of early Hebrew legislation, 

 so far as it related to religion, is the history ot a struggle 

 on the part of the lawgivers and the leaders of opinion against 

 the tendency of the people to revert to the idolatrous worship 

 of their ancestors and of races closely akin to them especi- 

 ally against the tendency to the worship of the sun and moon 

 and all the host of heaven. 



In the very tact, however, that this contest was main- 

 tained, while yet the Hebrew cosmogony, and in particular 

 the Hebrew astrogony, contains indubitable evidence of its 

 origin in the poetical myths of older Babylonia, we find one 

 of the strongest proofs of the influence which the literature 

 of Babylon, when at the fulness of its development, exerted 

 upon surrounding nations. This influence is not more 

 clearly shown even by the fact that nearly 2000 years after 

 the decay of Babylonian literature, science, and art, a nation 

 like the Assyrians, engaged in establishing empire rather 

 than in literary and scientific pursuits, should have been at 

 the pains to obtain copies of many thousands of the tablet 

 records which formed the libraries of older Babylonia. In 

 both circumstances we find good reason for hoping that 

 careful search among Assyrian and Babylonian ruins may 

 not only be rewarded by the discovery of many other portions 

 of the later Assyrian library (which was also in some sense a 

 museum), but that other and earlier copies of the original 

 Babylonian records may be obtained. For it seems unlikely 

 that works so valuable as to be thought worth recopying after 



2 D 



