Ezekiel 32

APPENDIX ON THE BABYLONIAN AND HEBREW UNDERWORLD.

The underworld of the Babylonians was pictured as a cold, dark, cheerless place “the land whence none return, a land of corruption, a city of darkness and dust, a house of chaos, the hostile land.” The cemeteries and the underworld were very closely connected in ancient imagery and thought. There was indeed at least some Assyriologists think so one spot in the future world, “a field of the blessed,” where there was water and health-giving food and cure for disease, whose inhabitants were “bright as the heavens,” holding communion with the gods; but only great heroes or special divine favorites could ever hope to enter. Mankind in general must sink down into a shadowy, ghostlike, feeble existence, where “their nourishment is dust and their food clay.” For yet others, whose bodies had been mutilated or for whom the funeral rites had been omitted, there was prepared a yet deeper depth of horror and torture by the lord of the underworld, who is called “the Destroyer” (compare Revelation 9:11), “the Devourer,” “the Terrifier,” “the Pitiless One.” One inscription reads:

He who was killed in battle,

Thou seest it, I have seen it,

His father and his mother hold his head,

His wife stands at his side

Whose corpse, however, lies upon the field,

Thou seest it, I have seen it

Whoso does not rest in the earth

His soul has no one to care for it.

* * * * * * * * *

What is thrown upon the streets he eats.

This explains the terrible threat of Ezekiel, that these Babylonians should die without being paid funeral honors. The heaviest curse upon an enemy that the cuneiform inscriptions reveal is this:

That his body may be cast aside,

No grave be his lot.

(See notes Ezekiel 27:29-36.) This also explains why the Assyrian and Babylonian kings mutilated the bodies and scattered the pieces “like thorns and thistles,” beyond all hope of future recovery. So Assurbanipal, when the king of Lydia broke his oath, cried out, “May his corpse be thrown before his enemies; may he have no burial;” and Sennacherib dug up the bones of the ancestors of one of his most hated enemies and scattered them far and wide. But even if one escaped this future torture, the world of the dead was a hopeless, comfortless abode of gloom, full of monsters and presided over by cruel lion-headed deities.

The day is but a sigh, a stream of tears the night,

Crying fills the months, and bitter woe the year.

A very pathetic appeal found in one of these cuneiform funeral texts shows the anxiety of a deceased sister to be remembered by her brother in annual gifts and songs:

My only brother, let me not perish.

On the day of Tammuz, play for me on the flute of lapis lazuli;

Together with the lyre of pearl, play for me.

Together let the professional dirge singers, male and female, play for me,

That the dead may arise and inhale the incense of offerings.

The Old Testament writers also conceive of Sheol, the subterranean world of the dead, as a place of silence, dust, and darkness. The very word Sheol ( Su-alu) means “hollow,” and zalmat, the Assyrian word for darkness, is exactly reproduced in the Hebrew zalmoth. (Compare Psalms 49:19; Job 3:5; Job 12:22; Job 16:16; Job 24:17; Job 33:18.) The Hebrews do not picture the future world as full of dangers, as do all other ancient nations, but nevertheless it is heavy with chill and painful negations. As Dr. Salmond has so well shown, the only important difference between the Hebrews’ thought of the future and the thought of other nations is found in their conception of the potentialities of God. The future world might be full of gloom and unknown foes, but God was there, still merciful and gracious, as truly Lord of Sheol as of earth. He was omnipotent, and his wings could shelter and his arm could as easily protect there as here. It was the Hebrew’s belief in a living omnipotent God that made him take it for granted that he would live on in the future and live on under the same divine protection which never failed him here. For this reason he cared nothing for charms and amulets or magical words to guard him from the perils of the long hard journey beyond the grave. For this reason he could confidentially write as the epitaph of his departed friend this hopeful word so full of prophecy concerning his eternal well-being “God took him” (Genesis 5:24). Jeremias, Die Babylonish-Assyrischen Vorstellung, vom Leben nach dem Tode, Leipzig, 1887; W. St. Chad. Boscawen, Sheol and other Essays; Salmond, The Christian Doctrine of Immortality, 1895; Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, Jastrow, 1898.