Samizdat

“Was Merodach himself an Accadian or a Semitic deity? The names of the kings belonging to the first dynasty of Babylon are mostly Semitic; it might therefore be supposed that the deity they worshipped was Semitic also.

And so undoubtedly was the Merodach of the historical age, the great Bel or Baal of Babylon. But we must remember that the foundation of Babylon went back into the dim night of the past far beyond the era of its first dynasty of Semitic kings, and that its very name was but a translation of the older Ka-dimira, “gate of the god.”

Large bas-relief of Marduk, Louvre.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elam_r_(30).JPG

The temple of Merodach, moreover, bore, up to the last, not a Semitic, but an Accadian designation. As we shall see, along with the older culture the Semitic settlers in Babylonia borrowed a good deal of the theology of the Accadian people, modifying it in accordance with their own beliefs, and identifying its gods and demons with their own Baalim.

Marduk.

It would not be surprising, then, if we found that Merodach also had once been an Accadian divinity, though his attributes, and perhaps also his name, differed very considerably from those of the Semitic Bel.

Even after the Romans had identified their Saturn with the Kronos of the Greeks, the essential characteristics of the two deities remained altogether different.”

A.H. Sayce, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, 5th ed., London, 1898, p. 105.