The hard fact that some misfortune had befallen the suppliant irresistibly argued the anger of the deity as the cause thereof; hence the necessity of appeasing that anger in order to avert further disaster. To accomplish this end the mediation of the priest is required to support and reinforce the petitioner's appeal. Thus we find that, as in the incantation texts it was the duty and privilege of the priest to instruct the layman as to the appropriate formula to be used, the recitation of which was accompanied with an appeal of the priest, so in the psalms the priest instructs the penitent what to say, and himself supplements the confession with an assurance of his client's sincerity, and an earnest request that the prayer for forgiveness be granted.
So pronounced, indeed, was this idea in regard to the necessity of a mediator among the Babylonians and Assyrians that sometimes the son or servant of the god himself played that essential part in the drama.
In the penitential psalms the suppliant, in many cases, was probably the king, as the disasters and misfortunes to which reference is made are of a national rather than personal character, and thus incidentally these texts form an exception to the otherwise more or less true generalisation that the Babylonian and Assyrian kings of those days, according to their own annals, never sustained a check or suffered a defeat.
P. H.
