The only valid recourse for the individual sufferer was to keep wailing and lamenting before his “personal” god, acknowledging his guilt, since no man is perfect, and asking that he might be shown his faults and transgressions so that he might confess them and be forgiven.16 Although conscious of sin, he did not have an absolute socio-ethical norm. Lacking a specifically revealed divine standard of sin and holiness, the Babylonian man received no impulse to strive for ethical perfection.17 Yet this