[463] _I.e._, house of heaven. Name of Ishtar's temple at Erech. [464] _I.e._, court of the universe. Name of one of Ishtar's temples. CHAPTER XVIII. PENITENTIAL PSALMS. It will be recalled that both in the Ishtar hymn and in the one to Marduk above quoted, great stress is laid upon pacifying the deity addressed. Starting from the primitive conception that misfortunes were a manifestation of divine anger, the Babylonians never abandoned the belief that transgressions could be atoned for only by appeasing the anger of the deity. But within this limitation, an ethical spirit was developed among the Babylonians that surprises us by its loftiness and comparative purity. Instead of having recourse merely to incantation formulas, the person smitten with disease or pursued by ill fortune would turn in prayer to some god at whose instigation the evil has come and appeal for the pacification of the divine wrath. But while the origin of the so-called penitential psalms is thus closely bound up with the same order of thought that gave rise to the incantation texts, no less significant is the divorce between the two classes of compositions that begins already at an early stage of the literary period. The incantations, it is true, may be combined with compositions that belong to a higher order of religious thought. We have seen that they have been so combined, and yet the dividing line between the two is also sharply marked. Zimmern, to whom, more than to any one else, the interpretation of these penitential psalms is due, has suggested[465] that national misfortunes rather than private grievances may have given an impetus to this class of literary productions. It is true that historical references are found in some of the hymns, and it is also significant that not only do these psalms occasionally embody a prayer for the king,--thus giving to them a national rather than a personal character,--but the kings are called upon in times of distress to accompany their libations to the gods with the recitation of a 'lament to quiet the heart,'[466] as the Babylonians called this class of hymns. One can easily see how such events as defeat in war would be ascribed to divine wrath, and not to the workings of evil spirits or witches; and while the personal tone that pervades most of the penitential psalms makes them applicable to conditions affecting the individual as well as the nation, the peculiar fitness of such psalms for occasions of national importance was a powerful factor in bringing about their sharp separation from the incantation formulas.