Some of the Babylonians also believed in fearful demons and powers of evil, and it seems as if they imagined their gods to take much more notice of their behaviour, their good and bad conduct, than the Egyptians' gods were supposed to take. We saw that the Egyptian idea was that so long as they performed all the religious rites exactly, that was all that the gods cared about. But the Babylonians thought that their gods did interest themselves a great deal about the right or wrong conduct of the men over whom they ruled, and punished or rewarded them in this life accordingly. And through all this that I am telling you about the religion of the early Babylonians, I want you to bear in mind that Abraham, the founder of the Jewish nation, came from "Ur of the Chaldees," that is, from the south of Babylonia. That means that he {60} came carrying with him beliefs and customs that he and his clan (if I may call it so) had learnt in Babylonia. Telling you these Babylonian beliefs, I am really telling you the origins of the beliefs which have come down to us through the Israelites. That is what makes their story so particularly interesting for us. The Babylonians, then, had an idea of a deity who punished their wrong-doing by sending them illnesses and famine and so on. The Egyptians had not this idea nearly so clearly, but they had the idea that the man who did well in this life would have his reward in the life after death. The Babylonians did not have this idea of the life after death; we find, at least, no reason to think that they had it. Abraham, therefore, came from Ur without this belief in a life after death. It was only at a far later period--possibly, though by no means certainly, as something they learned from the Egyptians--that the belief in a future life came to the Jews and Israelites. But although Abraham brought traditions from Ur, so soon as we are allowed to know anything about the beliefs held by him and his people we find them to be very much more pure and free from superstitions than the Babylonian ones. The Babylonian idea of the creation was that there was at first a great dragon of prodigious size. Merodach, the chief of the gods, identified with the sun, then fought the dragon, killed him, cut him in two; of one half of his body made the firmament of heaven, of the other half made the earth. Then in the heavens, as stars, he set the lesser gods, with the moon. The moon ruled the night and regulated the division of the year into months (moon-eths). Mona is the old Anglo-Saxon word for moon. This account is inscribed on tablets, and so much is {61} readable, but there is much more which has crumbled away so that it cannot be read. The account of the Creation given in Genesis is, of course, free of all this fantastic account of the fight with the dragon. [Sidenote: The Flood]