80 THEOPHILUS G. PINCHES^ ESQ.^ LL.D., M.R.A.S.^ ON 



Kested then the lord, looking upon her corpse ; 

 He divided her trunk (?), making therewith clever things. 

 He sundered her then, like a divided (?) fish, into two parts. 

 Half of her he placed, and covered therewith the heavens, 

 Pushed the bolt, set a watchman (there) : 



Her waters, those are not to be allowed to come forth, he bade. 



He traversed the heavens, examined the places, and 



Set the Abyss in front, the abode of Nudimmud. 



Then measured the lord the Abyss's extent : 



An edifice in its likeness he set — E-sarra. 



The edifice £l-sarra, which he built, is the heavens : 



(As for) Ann, Bel, and fia, he founded their strongholds." 



Thus, according to the legend, did Merodach, who was called 

 Bel, " the lord," attain to the position of king over the gods, 

 who, though throughout called " his fathers," are represented as 

 willingly consenting to be ruled by their son. This, as will be 

 seen farther on, has a certain amount of importance, not only 

 for the question of the composition of the poem, but also for the 

 history of the Babylonian religion, upon which point — a point 

 of exceeding interest — I shall touch, in the course of the 

 present paper. Fortunately, the tablet above translated is one 

 of the most complete of the series ; and it is well that it is so, 

 for this portion of the story, with its fulness of incident and 

 detail, contains many important and interesting facts, some of 

 them closely connected with religious thought even during the 

 Christian era. 



Y. 



The fifth tablet of the series continues the account of 

 Merodach's acts after the destruction of Tiamthu, when he 

 began his work of ordering the world anew. 



He erected the stations of the great gods, whose emblems are 

 the stars ; he set the Zodiac, designated the year, outlined the 

 constellations, giving to each of the twelve months three stars, 

 or, rather, groups — thirty-six in all, " from the day when the 

 year begins " — that is, from the month Nisan (March- April), and 

 these were to be for signs, for such was one of the uses of the 

 heavenly bodies, as is expressly stated in the first chapter of 

 Genesis. Next 



" He founded the station of Nibiru, to make known their limit. 

 That none might err, nor go astray." 



Nibiru means " the traverser," and has been identified by 

 Jensen with the planet Jupiter, Merodach's own star, and so 



