It was the same with the penitential psalms which constitute the third division of the sacred literature of Babylonia. In many respects they resemble the psalms of the Old Testament. Like them they are intended for public use, in spite of their individualistic form; the individual represents the community, and at times it is the national calamity and the national sin to which reference is made. After the revolt and reconquest of Babylon by Assur-bani-pal, when the city was still polluted by the corpses of those who had perished by famine or the sword, the prophets(324) ordered that its shrines and temple-roads should be purified, that its “wrathful gods and angry goddesses” should be “appeased by prayers and penitential psalms,” and that then, and only then, the daily sacrifices in the temples should be offered once more.(325) Doubtless the penitential psalms were in the first instance the spontaneous outpouring of the heart of the individual; it was his sufferings that they depicted, and his sins that they deplored; but as soon as they had been introduced into the worship of the temple, and become part of the public cult, the individual element in them fell into the background, and in the sins and sufferings of the individual both priest and laity saw those of the whole community. Like the Hebrew psalms, again, they express the belief that sin is the cause of suffering and calamity, and that it can be removed by penitence and prayer to the offended deity. But whereas the Hebrew monotheist knew of one God only who could inflict punishment and listen to the repentant words of the sinner, the Babylonian polytheist was distracted by the uncertainty as to what particular divinity he had offended, and to whom, therefore, his penitent appeal should be addressed. In the penitential psalms, accordingly, it is the vague and general “god” and “goddess” that are invoked, rather than a particular deity. It is only occasionally that the names of special gods are introduced, and then a long list of them is sometimes given, in the hope that among them might be the divinity whose anger had been excited, and whose wrath the sufferer was eager to appease.