-leads the writer to extol
the benign feelings of the god towards mankind. The sun-god, through the
glowing heat that he develops, becomes, as we have seen, the warrior and
even the destroyer, the consuming force. The moon-god is the benefactor
of mankind who restores the energies of man weakened from the heat of
the day. Nannar-Sin becomes the giver of life, whose mercies are
extended to all. The gods and the spirits follow the example of mankind
in prostrating themselves before the great orb of night. The
independence of the course that he pursues in the heavens places him
beyond the control of the great judge of the world, the mighty Shamash.
There is no one superior to Sin, no one to whose command he must bend.
With all this, there is a total absence of any allusion to his power of
removing the influence of demons and witches. We have here a hymn
purified from all association with the incantation texts, and there is
every reason to believe that it was composed for use in the great temple
at Ur, which is mentioned in the opening lines.

In the alternating question and answer we have also a valuable
indication of the manner in which the hymn was to be recited or sung.
The whole production appears to be arranged in a dialogue form, the
lines to be alternately read by the reciting priest and the chorus of
priests or worshippers. The same method is followed in other
productions, while in some, as we shall see, the dialogue does not
proceed in alternate lines, but is distributed among a varying number of
sections. We may see in this style of composition one of the natural
outcomes of the method pursued in the incantation texts, where, as will
be remembered, the priest first recites the formulas, and then calls
upon the individual before him to repeat it once, twice, or oftener, as
the case may be. Such a custom leads to recital and responses in the
hymns.

Not many of the hymns rise to such a height as the one just quoted.
There were certain gods only, and after all not many, whose nature was
such as to make an ethical development of the conceptions formed of them
possible. Besides Shamash and Sin, Ea as the god of humanity and Nebo as
the god of wisdom belong to this class. Of Ea, however, no hymns have as
yet been found. This may of course be accidental, and still, if one
bears in mind that in the later periods of Babylonian history Ea enjoyed
a theoretical popularity rather than a practical one, the absence of Ea
hym