It is now universally recognized by scholars that the Hebrew nation came late upon the stage of history, and that when the Hebrew Bedouin passed over out of the desert into the land of Canaan, they entered a land that had already experienced millenniums of civilization. In successive decades and centuries the Hebrew conquerors took over not only the land with its walled cities and its cultivated fields, but they took over also the land’s sanctuaries, and in large measure its religious and moral ideas.

One civilization among others that exerted very great influence for many centuries over Canaan came from the Tigris Euphrates valley. It brought to Canaan its language, its literary forms, its myths and legends, its legal statutes; it brought also in some degree the knowledge of its gods, and the hymns and prayers with which those gods were worshipped. The Hebrews were inevitably directly and indirectly influenced by Assyrian culture and religion.

It is of some importance to recognize, although the fact is by no means surprising, that the situations in life out of which the hymnal literatures grew were quite similar in Assyria and in Israel. Both peoples had a certain number of hymns, which can best be characterized as Nature hymns; but both peoples had also hymns which belong very clearly to the sanctuary. Some of these are processional hymns: the procession bringing the god to his sanctuary as in Psalm 24 and Hymn to Marduk No. 13; or the procession entering the sanctuary to bring gifts to the god as in Psalm 95 and the Hymn to Enlil; or the procession passing out from the sanctuary in solemn procession through the sacred city as in Psalm 48 and a number of the Assyrian hymns. The great majority of hymns, however in both literatures, just as one would expect, offer praise to the deity in the sanctuary.

Not only is the background of the hymns relatively similar in both civilizations, but the principal features of Hebrew poetry, the rhythm, the uniform length of lines, parallelism, arrangement in strophes, the rhetorical question, the refrain, the antiphonal responses, the introduction into the hymn of the divine oracle, all belong to the literature of the older civilization. Israel did not invent, but rather found already in existence, its literary forms.

Moreover Israel undoubtedly found in the older civilization much of its hymnal phraseology and many of its basic religious ideas. The conception of God as creator of heaven and earth did not first emerge with Israelitic monotheism, but is expressed in more than one Assyrian hymn. The thought of God as king, and as exerting authority above and below, did not wait for the establishment of the Israelitic monarchy under Saul, David, and Solomon, but was familiar to the Assyrian hymnist. Certainly the thought of the God of heaven, as making his earthy dwelling in a sacred sanctuary on holy ground, is many centuries older than Solomon’s temple. Finally the conception of God as wise, powerful, righteous, and merciful found frequent expression in the Assyrian hymns long before the Hebrews attributed those attributes to Yahwe.

However, this certainly does not mean that the Hebrews were merely passive recipients of Assyrian Culture. They did obviously take over certain literary forms and devices, but they created a new and distinct type of hymn, which begins and ends with the exhortation to praise Yahwe. What is even more important Hebrew genius has employed such simplicity, variety, beauty, and power of expression as to create such masterpieces of literature as Psalms 8; 24; 29; 47; 67; 100; 96 and 150.

Again, Israel did undoubtedly take over, as has been indicated, certain basic conceptions of God, but Hebrew religious genius purified and exalted those conceptions. The Assyrian could conceive of one god as supreme among the gods; the Hebrew came to think of Yahwe as the only God, the altogether Spiritual Being, freed from the contamination of polytheism. The Assyrian exalted his god to the high heavens; the Hebrew emancipated Yahwe from any possibility of identification with sun, moon, or star, or any natural force. The Assyrian attributed to his god great power to bless or curse; the Hebrew attributed power to Yahwe, but dissociated him from all magical practise. The Assyrian does indeed ascribe to his god righteousness and mercy, but the Hebrew makes righteousness and mercy the essential attributes of Yahwe. In a word the hymnists of Israel at their highest and best reflect the influence of the prophets, to which there was nothing comparable in Assyria.

One very important fact to be recognized is the emergence or development of the genuine hymn in Israel. It has been suggested that the great majority of so called Assyrian hymns are really only hymnal introductions to prayers or ceremonies; and furthermore that there may well be a line of development from the hymnal introduction to the independent hymn. There are two examples of hymnal introductions in the Old Testament Psalter, Psalms 89 and 144; and there is some justification for selecting Psalms 104 and 8 as hymns which represent the completion of the process of development. Praise has thus attained to a much greater place in the Hebrew religion than in the religion of Assyria. Praise is no longer subordinate to any other goal; it has become an end in itself, profitable to man, and pleasing to God.

The Hebrew religion carries the hymn to its highest pitch of development in the eschatological hymn, which is sung in anticipation of Yahwe’s complete and final triumph upon earth. The eschatological hymn owes its origin to the strong national spirit of the Hebrews, the strength of their conviction that a moral order exists in the world, and their faith in Yahwe as the wise and good, and powerful God who will bring justice and righteousness to triumph in the earth. There was in Assyria also, as we have seen, the thought of god as exalted king, but the Assyrians never attained to the conception of a god establishing complete and final ethical sovereignty over the earth.

The study of the Assyrian psalms has value for the Old Testament student in widening his field of knowledge, and thus saving him from the danger of setting up false standards. It is enlightening for him to observe in the Assyrian hymns the very frequent fact of irregularity, in the length of lines, in the number of lines in the strophe, in the type of parallelism employed. This suggests that often it may be variety and not uniformity that the poet is seeking, and that extreme caution ought to be observed in altering the Hebrew text, to make it conform to a Western conception of order and regularity.

One is impressed also by the prominence of the individual in the Assyrian hymn, and in the Assyrian cult, and is thus warned against the highly artificial assumption that the individual of the Hebrew psalms is a personification of the Hebrew nation. The individual may well have played a much larger part in the early religion of Israel than has been commonly supposed.

The study of the Assyrian hymns will have value at various other points. The consideration of the place of the refrains, the antiphonal renderings, the divine oracles will help us to understand the use of the hymn in the Hebrew cult. Acquaintance with the Assyrian hymnal phraseology will undoubtedly be of assistance in the interpretation and clearer understanding of many phrases in the Hebrew hymns. The Assyrian hymns make however their indispensable contribution in that practically all the religious ideas of the Hebrew hymns exist in cruder form in the Assyrian hymns. They help us to reconstruct the polytheistic background of the Hebrew religion. They leave us with a clearer perception that Yahwe was primarily a god of heaven, and with a fuller knowledge of just what that means. They help us to understand the prominence given to the attributes of Yahwe as a mighty god of war. They prove the antiquity of the conception of God as king and judge, shepherd and father. They reflect crude and crass ideas of the divine wisdom, power, and mercy. Against the background of the Assyrian hymns one gains a juster appreciation of the developed Hebrew doctrine of God, the omnipresent, the omniscient, the omnipotent, whose eternal plan is to be fulfilled, who will cause truth and righteousness to prevail in the earth, who is to be universally and eternally adored.