Identifier: babelbibl00deli (find matches)
Title: Babel and Bible;
Year: 1906 (1900s)
Authors: Delitzsch, Friedrich, 1850-1922 McCormack, Joseph, 1865- (from old catalog) tr Carruth, William Herbert, 1859-1924, (from old catalog) tr Robinson, Lydia Gillingham, b. 1875, tr
Subjects: Bible
Publisher: Chicago, The Open court publishing company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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Fig. 54. A Demon Supporting a Tablet.1(Assyrian bronze tablet. After Lenormant.) process of purification far truer and far more intensifiedthan ever they were before. I may be allowed finally a word with regard to thefeature that invests the Bible with its main significance 1 The two upper horizontal strips in the left-hand side of the figure representthe heavens (the celestial bodies and the celestial genii). The third strip exhibitsa funeral scene on earth. The fourth strip represents the Underworld bathed inthe floods of the ocean. BABEL AND BIBLE, 59 from the point of view of general history,—its monothe-ism. Here too Babel early opened a new and undreamt-ofprospect. It is remarkable, but no one can definitely say whatour Teutonic word God originally signified. Philologistsvacillate between inspiring timidity and delibera-tion.^ But the word which the Semitic Canaanite races,
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Fig. 55. Sagittarius and Scorpio.Signs of the Zodiac, as represented by the Babylonians. (Lenormant, V., p. 180.) to whom the Babylonians are most nearly related andfrom whom the Israelites afterward sprang, coined forGod, is not only lucid as to its meaning, but conceivesthe notion of divinity under so profound and exalted aform that this word alone suffices to shatter the legendthat the Semites were, time out of mind, amazinglydeficient in religious instinct; while it also refutes the 60 BABEL AND BIBLE. popular modern conception that the religion of Yahveh,and therefore also our Christian belief in God, is ulti-mately sprung from a species of fetishism and animismsuch as is common among the South Sea cannibals or theinhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. There is a remarkably beautiful passage in the Ko-ran, VI, 75 et seq., which so fascinated Goethe that heexpressed the desire to see it dramatised. Mahomet hasmentally put himself in the place of Abraham, and isendeavoring to realise the

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