Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 77:305 (Jan 1920)
Article: The Position Of Women In Ancient Babylonia And Israel (I.)
Author: Franz M. Til. Böhl

BSac 77:305 (Jan 1920) p. 4

The Position Of Women In Ancient Babylonia And Israel (I.)1

Franz M. Til. Böhl

The Eastern woman is to the modern European mind a picture of degradation, shut up in the harem, the slave of her husband. Although her position is and remains one of the darkest pages in the history of Eastern peoples, yet her lot has not always been so unfavorable.

In very remote antiquity conditions were totally different. In the third millennium before the Christian era, the women in Ancient Babylonia enjoyed great independence and high esteem; many an ideal of the modern emancipation of women had even then been realized.

The Babylonian Semites (the Accadians, as they called themselves) took their civilization, their religious conceptions, their views of life, their writing and art, from the ancient Sumerians, a cultivated and peaceful nation of non-Semitic origin. Among this, the most ancient civilized people of the world, the women were free and honored,— a fact of which the inscriptions afford ample proof.

From these inscriptions appears, in the first place, the remarkable significance and power of the female deities, which we may of course consider as a reflection of earthly conditions. About 2600 B.C. the priestly ruler Gudea reigned in southern Babylonia. He was a very religions man in his way, and beautified his capital of Lagash by building numerous temples. The principal deity of the town excepted, he invoked especially female divinities, and consecrated his temples to them. The female element played first fiddle in this pantheon, as can be easily proved from some of the names and epithets2 : Ninharsag, the ruler, who

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rises in great splendor over the town, the mother of her children, Gudea’s dictatress; Nintud, the mother of the gods; Inninna, the mistress of the land, and Ninmar, her principal daughter; Ba’u, the gracious lady, daughter of Heaven, ruler of the holy city, dispenser of abounding mercy, who determines the fate of man, rules her city, and in the purity of her heart has elected her favorite, Gudea. Further her daughter, Gatumdug, daughter of the clear sky, the most honored deity in heaven, who awakens the country to life, the queen, the mother, the giver of good advice, the foundress of Lagash.

“The people on whom thou fixest thy glance, possesses abundant strength; the life of the pious man whom thou beholdest, is lengthened. I have no mother, thou art my mother; I have no father, thou art my father; thou hast borne me in the sanctuary. My goddess Gatumdug, ...