Page 755 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

2.• J;> r ' ' · . CHALDEAN AND INDIAN VEDAS tO I

;:::rd~'l)dt~ee!tlilit you use the word Chaldean as a synonym of the
gon«ttlly~eived Babylonian. This I should feel inclined to· avoid
oWiq 't()~ the fact,· that the Chaldeans do not seem to have
~.n*eyf4 ~abylonia or at least to have attained prominence until
after the time of Moses. This naturally has a bearing upon the
nam~ Yahwah (an older form than Yahweh). It is gratifying to
~ 'l.iha.t i.my theory, that the name of the great God of the
JJ~J.,jew~ is 1ilOW regarded as having penetrated into Babylonian
uttdet~ the. form of Yawa or Yaawa ( = Yahawah ). My papers
d.ealing .'with this subject appeared in the Proceedings of the Soc.
,of )Jibl, Archaeology in 1885 and 1892. Fried Delitzsch can only
:be J!ight in: his contention that Yahwah appears in early Baby·
lQp..ian names if his reading be modified from Yahwe to Yahwa,
{Qr . a .latt~r form can hardly have preceded an early one. From
what you say, I should feel inclined to advance the theory, that
-~q~;, ,.~ry11n Yahve was adopted by the Babylonians and the
.Jieb.r~ws owing to its likeness to their own ( perhaps borrowed )
,[a~u; (Bah. Yau ), 'god', which appears in the bilingual sylla·
;l;l~:ri~s as a synonym of the common word £/u, with the same
\me~ng. ·
. . . rhe date of the use of Yau by the Akkadians (Semitic Baby·
loni~ns ) i.s a little before 2000 B. C., and Yaawa ( which may also
,b~ , read ya-a-pi ), occurs about the same date. Ya ( a ) ua occurs
in certain names of Jews during the period of the later Babylonian
kings ( 6th-5th cent. B. C. ). All the name in question are those
of Jews which, in the 0. T. end in jah or iahu (yah or yahu ).
In my opinion, there i little or no connection between the
story of the Creation in Genesis and that of the Babylonians.
The latter contain no direct tatement of the creation of the
'heavens and the earth; it has no systematic division of the things
created into groups and classes, such as is found in Genesis; it
has no .references to the days of Creation; and no appearance of
the Deity as the first and only cause of the existence of things.
Other differences are, the polytheism of the Babylonian account
and ttie' fact that it appears to be merely the setting of the legend
of Bel imd the Dragon, which was composed for the glorification
of Merodach, the patron deity of Babylon. As the Babylonian
account has no reference to the days of Creation, there is, in that
version, no mention of the 7-day week and the sabbath. That the
sabbath appears therein I freely admit, notwithstanding that the