When the first dwellers on the plains of Chaldea, after the Deluge, gathered themselves for the building of a common structure reaching God-ward,[275] they, in their phraseology, called that structure Bab-el, or Bâb-ilu, or Bâbi-ilu, the Door of God.[276] Ancient Egyptians called the sovereign head of their national family “_Per-ao_” (Pharaoh), the exalted House, or Gate, or Door;[277] as to-day the Sultan, who is spiritual father of the faithful Muhammadans, and autocrat of his realm, is widely known as the “Sublime Porte,” or the Exalted Door.[278] The modern Babists, in Persia and beyond, look up to their spiritual head as the “Bab,” or the “Door.”[279] “Throughout the East this word [‘Bab’] signifies the court of a prince [as a ruler by divine right].... The threshold of the gate is used in the same sense, and frequently it is qualified by some epithet of nobility, loftiness, or goodness.”[280]
Jesus Christ did not hesitate to say of himself as the Way to God: “I am the Door: by me if any man enter in he shall be saved.”[281]
In China, Japan, Korea, Siam, and India, a gate, or doorway, usually stands before Confucian and Booddhist and Shinto temples, but apart from the temple, and always recognized as of peculiar sacredness. These doorways, in many places, are painted blood-color.[282] They stand “at the entrance of temple grounds, in front of shrines and sacred trees, and in every place associated with the native _kami_”–or gods.[283] Yet, again, in all these countries, the temple gateway is a main feature, or a prominent one, in the chief sanctuaries.[284]
Swinging doors, or gates, are represented, in the religious symbolism of ancient Babylonia, as opening to permit the god Shamash, or the sun, to start out on his daily circuit of the heavens.[285] A door, or a doorway, appears as a shrine for a god in various cylinders from this region; and the god is shown standing within it, just beyond the threshold.[286] Indeed, the doorway shrine is a common form on the Babylonian and the Assyrian monuments, as a standing-place for the gods, and for the kings as representative of the gods.[287] Illustrations of this are found on the Balawat gates,[288] and the sculptures on the rocks at Nahr-el-Kelb[289]–which is itself a gateway of the nations, between the mountains and the sea, on the route between Egypt and Canaan, and both the East and the West.