was annually killed at the Babylonian festival of the Sacæa on the sixteenth day of the month Lous may have represented Tammuz himself.' He also takes that _rôle_, with his sacred harlot, in iii. 178. It is, therefore, a little bewildering to find him appearing as Humman or Marduk, or some other god unknown, in iii. 159, 160. How many single gods are rolled into one, scourged, and hanged in this most unhappy condemned criminal? We have been told that Marduk presided over a council of the gods at the Zakmuk, which is the Sacæa.[49] But the hanged man[50] very probably personates Marduk. Mr. Frazer may think that, when the supreme god is presiding over the Olympian assembly in his Temple, it is a natural and pious compliment to whip and hang him in the person of his human representative. This, at least, is the result of his theory in iii. 159, 160. I do not feel sure that the supreme god, whether Marduk or Humman, would have taken the same favourable view of the tactless rite. VIII. NEW GERMAN THEORY OF PURIM I have hitherto but incidentally mentioned Marduk and Humman as competitors with Tammuz and the king for the glory of receiving a vicarious whipping and hanging. They are brought into this honourable position by an entirely new Teutonic theory of Purim: _not_ Mr. Frazer's. It was lately an old Jewish Tammuz rite, or quite a new adaptation of the Sacæa. But 'it is possible,' says Professor Nöldeke, 'that we have here' (in Purim) 'to do with a feast whereby the Babylonians commemorated a victory gained by their gods over the gods of their neighbours, the Elamites, against whom they had so often waged war. The Jewish feast of Purim is an annual merrymaking of a wholly secular kind, and it is known that there were similar feasts among the Babylonians.' From the Babylonians, then, the Jews borrowed Purim, a feast commemorative of a victory of the gods of Babylon over the Elamites. But, if that feast was religious, the Jews turned it into 'an annual merrymaking of a totally secular kind.'[51] Mr. Frazer, if I do not misunderstand him, does not accept the hypothesis of Nöldeke. He says, however, 'We can hardly deny the plausibility of the theory that Haman and Vashti on the one side, and Mordecai and Esther on the other, represent the antagonism between the gods of Elam and the gods of Babylon, and the final victory of the Babylonian deities in the very capital of their rivals.' But plausibility, we shall see, is remote from proof. And how can Mr. Frazer think this theory plausible if the Sacæa really is a King-Tammuz feast?