In these words we are brought very near to the Egyptian doctrine which transmuted one god into another, and saw in them only so many forms of the same divinity. But the stage of pantheism was never reached in Babylonia. The Semitic element in Babylonian religion was too strong to admit of it; the attributes and character of each deity were too clearly cut and defined, and the Semitic mind was incapable of transforming the human figures of the gods into nebulous abstractions. The god was too much of a man, moving in too well marked a sphere, to be resolved into a mere form or manifestation. Merodach might receive from the other gods their attributes and the power to exercise them, but it was delegation and not absorption. The other gods still retained the attributes that belonged to them, and the right to use them if they would. Merodach was their vicegerent and successor rather than themselves under another form. Hence it is that the human element in the Babylonian god predominated over the abstract and divine. His solar attributes fell into the background, and he became more and more the representative of a human king who rules his people justly, and whose orders all are bound to obey. He became, in fact, a Semitic Baal, made in human form, and consequently conceived of as an exaggerated or superhuman man. The other gods are his subjects, not forms under which he can reveal himself; they retain their individualities, and constitute his court. There is no nebulosity, no pantheism, in the religion of Semitic Babylonia; the formless divinity and the animal worship of Egypt are alike unknown to it. As is the man, so is the god, for the one has been made in the likeness of the other. Nevertheless the solar origin of Merodach left its impress upon the theology of the State. It had much to do with that process of identifying one god with another, which, as we have seen, tended to approximate the doctrines of Babylonia to those of Egypt. Though the individual gods were distinguished and marked off from one another like individual men, it was yet possible to get as it were behind the individual traits, and find in certain of them a common element in which their individual peculiarities were lost. The name, so the Babylonian believed, was the essence of the person or thing to which it was attached; that which had no name did not exist, and its existence commenced only when it received its name. A nameless god could not exist any more than a nameless man, and a knowledge of his name brought with it a knowledge of his real nature and powers. But a name was transferable; it could be taken from one object and given to another, and therewith the essential characteristics which had belonged to the first would become the property of the other.