rent of day, and water of the earth. Out of darkness and death came
light and life. Life was also motion. When the primordial waters
became troubled, life began to be. Out of the confusion came order and
organization. This process involved the idea of a stable and
controlling power, and the succession of a group of deities--passive
deities and active deities. When the Babylonian astrologers assisted
in developing the Creation myth, they appear to have identified with
the stable and controlling spirit of the night heaven that steadfast
orb the Polar Star. Anshar, like Shakespeare's Caesar, seemed to say:

I am constant as the northern star, Of whose true-fixed and
resting quality There is no fellow in the firmament. The skies are
painted with unnumbered sparks; They are all fire, and every one
doth shine; But there's but one in all doth hold his place.[360]

Associated with the Polar Star was the constellation Ursa Minor, "the
Little Bear", called by the Babylonian astronomers, "the Lesser
Chariot". There were chariots before horses were introduced. A patesi
of Lagash had a chariot which was drawn by asses.

The seemingly steadfast Polar Star was called "Ilu Sar", "the god
Shar", or Anshar, "star of the height", or "Shar the most high". It
seemed to be situated at the summit of the vault of heaven. The god
Shar, therefore, stood upon the Celestial mountain, the Babylonian
Olympus. He was the ghost of the elder god, who in Babylonia was
displaced by the younger god, Merodach, as Mercury, the morning star,
or as the sun, the planet of day; and in Assyria by Ashur, as the sun,
or Regulus, or Arcturus, or Orion. Yet father and son were identical.
They were phases of the One, the "self power".

A deified reigning king was an incarnation of the god; after death he
merged in the god, as did the Egyptian Unas. The eponymous hero Asshur
may have similarly merged in the universal Ashur, who, like Horus, an
incarnation of Osiris, had many phases or forms.

Isaiah appears to have been familiar with the Tigro-Euphratean myths
about the divinity of kings and the displacement of the elder god by
the younger god, of whom the ruling monarch was an incarnation, and
with the idea that the summit of the Celestial mountain was crowned by
the "north star", the symbol of Anshar. "Thou shalt take up this
parable", he exclaimed, making use of Babylonian symbolism, "against
the king of Babylon and say, How hath the oppressor c