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120 LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION. Hallelu-jah), may not Lydus by the Chaldæans have simply meant the Jews? We should be driven to a different conclusion, if Jahu did really occur as a divine name in the Assyrian inscriptions. Sir Henry Rawlinson, however, to whom I applied for information, declares himself to be doubtful, as yet, whether the Jahu who is mentioned in the Assyrian inscriptions is really an Assyrian name. He thinks it may be a Syrian word that found an entrance into Assyrian, like several other foreign words. Other scholars, on the contrary, such as Professoz Schrader, express themselves less doubtfully on this point, and claim Jahu as one of the old Assyrian gods. Nay, they now go even a step further, and trace his first beginning back to Accadian. Thus Professor Delitzsch maintains that the simple sound I signified in Accadian god' and “the supreme god,' just as ili, ila (Hebrew él) did; that the Assyrians pronounced this I with the nominative termination ia-u; that accordingly the character for I was called by the Assyrians ia-u; and that it can only be regarded as an accident that hitherto Ya-u, as the name of the deity, has not been met with in any Assyrian inscription?
It is difficult either to accept or to reject statements of facts put forward with so much authority, and it seems to me the most respectful attitude which we can assume with regard to the new evidence placed before us by Assyrian and Accadian scholars, if for the present we keep at a certain distance, and wait before finally recasting our received notions of Semitic religion. That the Babylonian and Assyrian docu
1 See Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures,' p. 311.
