se of some
peoples, the number of such offences probably increased rather than
diminished as time went on. The _Surpu_ tablets of the cuneiform
inscriptions, which are directed towards the removal of the _mamit_,
the ban or taboo, consequent upon such offences, are an example of
this. Adultery, murder and theft are included amongst the offences,
but the tablets include hundreds of other offences, which are purely
ceremonial, and which probably took a long time to reach the luxuriant
growth they have attained in the tablets. For ceremonial offences a
ceremonial purification was felt to suffice. But there were others
which, as the Babylonian Penitential Psalms testify, were felt to go
deeper and to be sins, personal sins of the worshipper against his
God. The penitent exclaims:

'Lord, my sins are many, great are my misdeeds.'

The spirit, in which he approaches his God, is expressed in the words:

'I thy servant, full of sighs, call upon thee.
Like the doves do I moan, I am o'ercome with sighing,
With lamentation and groaning my spirit is downcast.'

His prayer is that his trespasses may be forgiven:

'Rend my sins, like a garment!
My God, my sins are unto seven times seven.
Forgive my iniquities.'

And his hope is in God:

'Oh, Lord, thy servant, cast him not away,
The sins which I have committed, transform by thy grace!'

The attitude of mind, the relation in which the worshipper finds
himself to stand towards his God, is the same as that revealed in the
Psalm of David:

'Wash me throughly from mine iniquity,
And cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my transgressions:
And my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned.
Cast me not away from thy presence.'

The earliest prayers offered by any community probably were, as we
have already seen, those which were sent up in time of trouble and
inspired by the conviction that the community's god had been justly
offended. The psalms, from which quotations have just been given, show
the same idea of God, conceived to have been justly offended by the
transgressions of his servants. The difference between them is that,
in the later prayers, the individual self-consciousness has come to
realise that the individual as well as the community exists; that the
individual, as well as the community, is guilty of trespasses; and
that the individual, as well as the community, needs forgivenes