hipped.
What may be the date of this document is uncertain, but as the
colophon seems to describe it as a copy of an older inscription, it
may go back as far as 2000 years B.C. This is the period at which the
name /Yaum-ilu/ "Jah is God," is found, together with numerous
references to /ilu/ as the name for the one great god, and is also,
roughly, the date of Abraham, who, it may be noted, was a Babylonian
of Ur of the Chaldees. It will probably not be thought too venturesome
to say that his monotheism was possibly the result of the religious
trend of thought in his time.

Dualism.

Damascius, in his valuable account of the belief of the Babylonians
concerning the Creation, states that, like the other barbarians, they
reject the doctrine of the one origin of the universe, and constitute
two, Tauthe (Tiawath) and Apason (Apsu). This twofold principle,
however, is only applicable to the system in that it makes of the sea
and the deep (for such are the meanings of the two words) two
personages--the female and the male personifications of primaeval
matter, from which all creation sprang, and which gave birth to the
gods of heaven themselves. As far as the physical constituents of
these two principals are concerned, their tenets might be described as
having "materialistic monism" as their basis, but inasmuch as they
believed that each of these two principals had a mind, the description
"idealistic monism" cannot be applied to it--it is distinctly a
dualism.

And Monism.

Divested of its idealistic side, however, there would seem to be no
escape from regarding the Babylonian idea of the origin of things as
monistic.[*] This idea has its reflection, though not its
reproduction, in the first chapter of Genesis, in which, verses 2, 6,
and 7, water is represented as the first thing existing, though not
the first abode of life. This divergency from the Babylonian view was
inevitable with a monotheistic nation, such as the Jews were,
regarding as they did the Deity as the great source of everything
existing. What effect the moving of the Spirit of God upon the face of
the waters (v.2) was supposed by them to have had, is uncertain, but
it is to be noted that it was the land (vv. 11, 12) which first
brought forth, at the command of God.

[*] Monism. The doctrine which holds that in the universe there is
only a single element or principle from which everything