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ENDPAPER
God, the Extraterrestrial
So, who was Yahweh?
Was He one of them? Was He an extraterrestrial?
The question, with its implied answer, is not so outrageous. Unless
we deem Yahweh - "God" to all whose religious beliefs are founded on
the Bible - to have been one of us Earth-lings, then He could only be
not of this Earth - which "extraterrestrial" ("outside of, not from
Terra") means. And the story of Man’s Divine Encounters, the subject
of this book, is so filled with parallels between the biblical
experiences and those of encounters with
the Anunnaki by other
ancient peoples, that the possibility that Yahweh was one of "them"
must be seriously considered.
The question and its implied answer, indeed, arise inevitably. That
the biblical creation narrative with which the Book of Genesis
begins draws upon
the Mesopotamian Enuma elish is beyond dispute.
That the biblical Eden is a rendering of the Sumerian E.DIN is
almost self-evident. That the tale of the Deluge and Noah and the
ark is based on the Akkadian
Atra-Hasis texts and the earlier
Sumerian Deluge tale in
the Epic of Gilgamesh, is certain. That the
plural "us" in the creation of The Adam segments reflects the
Sumerian and Akkadian record of the discussions by the leaders of
the Anunnaki that led to the genetic engineering that brought Homo
sapiens about, should be obvious.
In the Mesopotamian versions it is Enki, the Chief Scientist, who
suggests the genetic engineering to create the Earthling to serve as a Primitive Worker, and it had to be Enki whom the
Bible quotes as saying "
Let us make the Adam in our likeness and
after our image." An Epithet of Enki was NU. DIM.MUD, "He who
fashions;" the Egyptians likewise called Enki Ptah - "The Developer,"
"He who fashions things," and depicted him as fashioning Man out of
clay, as a potter. "The Fashioner of the Adam," the Prophets
repeatedly called Yahweh ("fashioner," not "creator"!); and
comparing Yahweh to a potter fashioning Man of clay was a frequent
biblical simile.
As the master biologist, Enki’s emblem was that of the Entwined
Serpents, representing the double-helixed DNA - the genetic code that
enabled Enki to perform the genetic mixing that brought about The
Adam; and then (which is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of
Eden) to again genetically manipulate the new hybrids and enable
them to procreate. One of Enki’s Sumerian epithets was BUZUR; it
meant both "He who solves secrets" and "He of the mines," for the
knowledge of mineralogy was considered knowledge of Earth’s secrets,
the secrets of its dark depths.
The biblical tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden - the tale of
the second genetic manipulation - assigns to the serpent the role of
triggering their acquisition of "knowing" (the biblical term for
sexual procreation). The Hebrew term for serpent is Nahash; and
interestingly, the same word also means soothsayer, "He who solves
secrets" - the very same second meaning of Enki’s epithet.
Moreover,
the term stems from the same root as the Hebrew word for the mineral
copper, Nehoshet. It was a Nahash Nehoshet, a copper serpent, that
Moses fashioned and held up to stop an epidemic that was afflicting
the Israelites during the Exodus; and our analysis leaves no
alternative but to conclude that what he had made to summon divine
intervention was an emblem of Enki. A passage in II Kings 18:4
reveals that this copper serpent, whom the people nicknamed
Nehushtan (a play on the triple meaning serpent-copper-solver of
secrets) had been kept in the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem for
almost seven centuries, until the time of King Hezekiah.
Pertinent to this aspect might have been the fact that when Yahweh
turned the shepherd’s crook that Moses held into a
magical staff, the first miracle performed with it was to turn it
into a serpent. Was Yahweh, then, one and the same as Enki?
The combination of biology with mineralogy and with the ability to
solve secrets reflected Enki’s status as the God of knowledge and
sciences, of the Earth’s hidden metals; he was the one who set up
the mining operations in southeastern Africa.
All these aspects were
attributes of Yahweh.
"It is Yahweh who giveth wisdom, out of His
mouth cometh knowledge and understanding," Proverbs asserted (2:6),
and it was He who granted wisdom beyond comparison to Solomon, as
Enki had given the Wise Adapa.
"The gold is mine and the silver is
mine," Yahweh announced
(Haggai 2:8);
"I shall give thee the
treasures of the darkness and the hidden riches of the secret
places," Yahweh promised Cyrus
(Isaiah 45:3).
The clearest congruence between the Mesopotamian and biblical
narratives is found in the story of the Deluge. In the Mesopotamian
versions it is Enki who goes out of his way to warn his faithful
follower Ziusudra/Utnapishtim of the coming catastrophe, instructs
him to build the watertight ark, gives him its specifications and
dimensions, and directs him to save the seed of animal life. In the
Bible, all that is done by Yahweh.
The case for identifying Yahweh with Enki can be bolstered by
examining the references to Enki’s domains. After Earth was divided
between the Enlilites and the Enki’ites (according to the
Mesopotamian texts), Enki was granted dominion over Africa. Its
regions included the Apsu (stemming from AB.ZU in Sumerian), the
gold-mining region, where Enki had his principal abode (in addition
to his "cult center" Eridu in Sumer).
The term Apsu, we believe,
explains the biblical term Apsei-eretz., usually translated "the
ends of earth," the land at the continent’s edge - southern Africa, as
we understand it. In the Bible, this distant place, Apsei-eretz, is
where "Yahweh shall judge" (I Samuel 2:10), where He shall rule when
Israel is restored (Micah 5:3). Yahweh has thus been equated with
Enki in his role as ruler of the Apsu.
This aspect of the similarities between Enki and Yahweh becomes more
emphatic - and in one respect perhaps even embarrassingly so for the
monotheistic Bible - when we reach
a passage in the Book of Proverbs in which the unsurpassed greatness
of Yahweh is brought out by rhetorical questions:
Who hath ascended up to Heaven,
and descended too?
Who hath cupped the wind in his hands,
and hound the waters as in a cloak?
Who hath established the Apsei-eretz -
What is his name,
and what is his son’s name -
if thou can tell?
According to the Mesopotamian sources, when
Enki divided the
African continent among his sons, he granted the Apsu to his son
Nergal. The polytheistic gloss (of asking the name of the Apsu’s
ruler and that of his son) can be explained only by an editorial
inadvertent retention of a passage from the Sumerian original
texts - the same gloss as had occurred in the use of "us" in "let us
make the Adam" and in "let us come down" in the story of the Tower
of Babel. The gloss in Proverbs (30:4) obviously substitutes
"Yahweh" for Enki.
Was Yahweh, then, Enki in a biblical-Hebrew garb?
Were it so simple ... If we examine closely the tale of Adam and Eve
in the Garden of Eden, we will find that while it is the
Nahash - Enki’s serpent guise as knower of biological secrets - who
triggers the acquisition by Adam and Eve of the sexual "knowing"
that enables them to have offspring, he is not Yahweh but an
antagonist of Yahweh (as Enki was of Enlil). In the Sumerian texts
it was Enlil who forced Enki to transfer some of the newly fashioned
Primitive Workers (created to work in the gold mines of the Apsu) to
the E.DIN in Mesopotamia, to engage in farming and shepherding.
In
the Bible, it is Yahweh who "took the Adam and placed him in the
garden of Eden to tend it and to maintain it." It is Yahweh, not the
serpent, who is depicted as the master of Eden who talks to Adam and
Eve, discovers what they had done, and expels them. In all this, the
Bible equates Yahweh not with Enki but with Enlil.
Indeed, in the very tale - the tale of the Deluge - where the
identification of Yahweh with Enki appears the clearest,
confusion in fact shows up. The roles are switched, and all of a
sudden Yahweh plays the role not of Enki but of his rival Enlil. In
the Mesopotamian original texts, it is Enlil who is unhappy with the
way Mankind has turned out, who seeks its destruction by the
approaching calamity, and who makes the other Anunnaki leaders swear
to keep all that a secret from Mankind.
In the biblical version
(chapter 6 of Genesis) it is Yahweh who voices his unhappiness with
Mankind and makes the decision to wipe Mankind off the face of the
Earth. In the tale’s conclusion, as Ziusudra/Utnapishtim offers
sacrifices on Mount Ararat, it is Enlil who is attracted by the
pleasant smell of roasting meat and (with some persuasion) accepts
the survival of Mankind, forgives Enki, and blesses Ziusudra and his
wife. In Genesis, it is to Yahweh that Noah builds an altar and
sacrifices animals on it, and it was Yahweh "who smelted the
pleasant aroma."
So was Yahweh Enlil, after all?
A strong case can be made for such an identification. If there had
been a "first among equals" as far as the two half brothers, sons of
Anu, were concerned, the first was Enlil. Though it was Enki who was
first to come to Earth, it was EN.LIL ("Lord of the Command") who
took over as chief of the Anunnaki on Earth. It was a situation that
corresponds to the statement in Psalms 97:9: "For thou, O Yahweh,
art supreme over the whole Earth; most supreme art Thou over all the
Elohim."
The elevation of Enlil to this status is described in
the Atra-Hasis Epic in the introductory verses, prior to the mutiny of
the gold-mining Anunnaki:
Anu, their father, was the ruler;
Their commander was the hero Enlil.
Their warrior was Ninurta;
Their provider was Marduk.
They all clasped hands together,
cast lots and divided:
Anu ascended to heaven;
The Earth to Enlil was made subject.
The bounded realm of the sea
to princely Enki they had given.
After Anu had gone up to heaven,
Enki went down to the Apsu.
(Enki, interchangeably called in the Mesopotamian texts E.A. - "Whose
home is water" - was thus the prototype of the sea God Poseidon of
Greek mythology, the brother of Zeus who was head of the pantheon).
After Anu, the ruler on Nibiru, returned to Nibiru after visiting
Earth, it was Enlil who summoned and presided over the council of
the Great Anunnaki whenever major decisions had to be made. At
various times of crucial decisions - such as to create The Adam, to
divide the Earth into four regions, to institute Kingship as both
buffer and liaison between the Anunnaki Gods and Mankind, as well as
in times of crisis between the Anunnaki themselves, when their
rivalries erupted into wars and even use of nuclear weapons - "The
Anunnaki who decree the fates sat exchanging their counsels."
Typical was the manner in which one discussion is described in part:
"Enki addressed to Enlil words of lauding: ‘O one who is foremost
among the brothers, Bull of Heaven, who the fate of Mankind holds.’
" Except for the times when the debate got too heated and became a
shouting match, the procedure was orderly, with Enlil turning to
each member of the Council to let him or her have a say.
The monotheistic Bible lapses several times into describing
Yahweh
in like manner, chairing an assembly of lesser deities, usually
called Bnei-elim - "sons of Gods." The Book of Job begins its tale of
the suffering of a righteous man by describing how the test of his
faith in God was the result of a suggestion made by Satan,
"one day,
when the sons of the Elohim came to present themselves before
Yahweh."
"the Lord stands in the assembly of the Gods, among the Elohim He judges," we read in Psalms 82:1.
"Give unto Yahweh, o sons
of Gods, give unto Yahweh glory and might," Psalms 29:1 stated, "bow
to Yahweh, majestic in holiness."
The requirement that even the
"sons of the Gods" bow to the Lord paralleled the Sumerian
description of the status of Enlil as the Commander in Chief: "The
Anunnaki humble themselves before him, the Igigi bow down willingly
before him; they stand by faithfully for the instructions."
It is an image of Enlil that matches the exaltation in the Song of
Miriam after the miraculous crossing of the Sea of Reeds:
"Who is
like thee among the Gods, Yahweh? Who is like thee mighty in
holiness, awesome in praises, the maker of miracles?"
(Exodus
15:11).
As far as personal characters were concerned, Enki, the fashioner of
Mankind, was more forebearing, less stringent with both Gods and
mortals. Enlil was stricter, a "law and order" type, uncompromising,
unhesitant to mete out punishments when punishment was due. Perhaps
it was because while Enki managed to get away with sexual
promiscuities, Enlil, transgressing just once (when he date-raped a
young nurse, in what turned out to be his seduction by her), was
sentenced to exile (his banishment was lifted when he married her as
his consort Ninlil).
He viewed adversely the intermarriage between Nefilim and the "daughters of Man." When the evils of Mankind became
overbearing, he was willing to see it perish by the Deluge. His
strictness with other Anunnaki, even his own offspring, was
illustrated when his son Nannar (the Moon God Sin) lamented the
imminent desolation of his city Ur by the deathly nuclear cloud
wafting from the Sinai. Harshly Enlil told him: "Ur was indeed
granted Kingship; but an everlasting reign it was not granted."
Enlil’s character had at the same time another side, a rewarding
one. When the people carried out their tasks, when they were
forthright and God-fearing, Enlil on his part saw to the needs of
all, assured the land’s and the people’s well-being and prosperity.
The Sumerians lovingly called him "Father Enlil" and "Shepherd of
the teeming multitudes." A Hymn to Enlil, the All-Beneficent stated
that without him "no cities would be built, no settlements founded;
no stalls would be built, no sheepfolds erected; no king would be
raised, no high priest born." The last statement recalled the fact
that it was Enlil who had to approve the choice of kings, and by
whom the line of Priesthood extended from the sacred precinct of the
"cult center" Nippur.
These two characteristics of Enlil - strictness and punishment for
transgressions, benevolence and protection when merited - are similar
to how Yahweh has been pictured in the Bible. Yahweh can bless and
Yahweh can accurse, the
Book of Deuteronomy explicitly states (11:26). If the divine
commandments shall be followed, the people and their offspring
shall be blessed, their crops shall be plentiful, their livestock
shall multiply, their enemies shall be defeated, they shall be
successful in whatever trade they choose; but if they forsake Yahweh
and his commandments, they, their homes and their fields shall be
accursed and shall suffer afflictions, losses, deprivations, and
famines (Deuteronomy 28).
"Yahweh thy Elohim is a merciful God,"
Deuteronomy 4:31 stated; He is a vengeful God, the same Deuteronomy
stated a chapter later (5:9) . . .
It was Yahweh who determined who shall be the priests; it was He who
stated the rules for Kingship (Deuteronomy 17:16) and made clear
that it will be He who chooses the king - as indeed was the case
centuries after the Exodus, beginning with the selection of Saul
and David. In all that, Yahweh and Enlil emulated each other.
Significant, too, for such a comparison was the importance of the
numbers seven and fifty. They are not physiologically obvious
numbers (we do not have seven fingers on a hand), nor does their
combination fit natural phenomena (7 x 50 is 350, not the 365.25
days of a solar year). The "week" of seven days approximates the
length of a lunar month (about 28.5 days) when multiplied by four,
but where does the four come from? Yet the Bible introduced the
count of seven, and the sanctity of the seventh day as the sacred
Sabbath, from the very beginning of divine activity.
The accursation
of Cain was to last through seven times seven generations; Jericho
was to be circled seven times so that its walls would fall down;
many of the priestly rites were required to be repeated seven times,
or to last seven days. Of a more lasting commandment, the New Year
Festival was deliberately shifted from the first month Nisan to the
seventh month Tishrei and the principal holidays were to last seven
days. The number fifty was the principal numerical feature in the
construction and equipping of the Ark of the Covenant and the
Tabernacle and an important element in the future Temple envisioned
by Ezekiel.
It was a calendrical count of days in priestly rites;
Abraham persuaded the Lord to spare Sodom if fifty just men would be
found there. More important, a major social and
economic concept of a Jubilee Year in which slaves would be set
free, real property would revert to its sellers and so on, was
instituted. It was to be the fiftieth year: "Ye shall hallow the
fiftieth year and proclaim freedom throughout the land," was the
commandment in Leviticus chapter 25.
Both numbers, seven and fifty, were associated in Mesopotamia with
Enlil. He was "the God who is seven" because, as the highest-ranking
Anunnaki leader on Earth, he was in command of the planet which was
the seventh planet. And in the numerical hierarchy of the Anunnaki,
in which Anu held the highest numeral 60, Enlil (as his intended
successor on Nibiru) held the numerical rank of fifty (Enki’s
numerical rank was forty). Significantly, when Marduk took over the
supremacy on Earth circa 2000 B.C., one of the measures taken to
signify his ascendancy was to grant him fifty names, signifying his
assumption of the Rank of Fifty.
The similarities between Yahweh and Enlil extend to other aspects.
Though he might have been depicted on cylinder seals (which is not
certain, since the representation might have been of his son
Ninurta), he was by and large an unseen God, ensconced in the
innermost chambers of his ziggurat or altogether away from Sumer.
In
a telltale passage in the Hymn to Enlil, the All-Beneficent it is
thus said of him:
When in his awesomeness he decrees the fates,
no God dares look at him;
Only to his exalted emissary, Nusku,
the command, the word that is in his heart,
does he make known.
No man can see me and live,
Yahweh told Moses in a similar vein;
and
His words and commandments were known
through Emissaries and
Prophets.
While all these reasons for equating Yahweh with Enlil
are fresh in
the reader’s mind,
let us hasten to offer the contrary evidence
that
points to other, different identifications.
One of the most powerful biblical epithets for
Yahweh is El Shaddai.
Of an uncertain etymology, it assumed an aura
of mystery and by medieval times became a code word for kabbalistic
mysticism. Early Greek and Latin translators of the Hebrew Bible
rendered Shaddai as "omnipotent," leading to the rendering of
El Shaddai in the King James translation as "God Almighty" when the
epithet appears in the tales of the Patriarchs (e.g. "And Yahweh
appeared unto Abram and said to him: ‘I am El Shaddai; walk before
me and be thou perfect’," in Genesis 17:1), or in Ezekiel, in
Psalms, or several times in other books of the Bible.
Advances in the study of Akkadian in recent years suggest that the
Hebrew word is related to shaddu, which means "mountain" in
Akkadian; so that El Shaddai simply means "God of mountains." That
this is a correct understanding of the biblical term is indicated by
an incident reported in I Kings chapter 20. The Arameans, who were
defeated in an attempt to invade Israel (Samaria), recouped their
losses and a year later planned a second attack. To win this time,
the Aramaean king’s generals suggested that a ruse be used to lure
the Israelites out of their mountain strongholds to a battlefield
in the coastal plains.
"Their God is a God of mountains," the
generals told the king, "and that is why they prevailed over us; but
if we shall fight them in a plain, we shall be the stronger ones."
Now, there is no way that Enlil could have been called, or reputed
to be, a "God of mountains," for there are no mountains in the great
plain that was (and still is) Mesopotamia. In the Enlilite domains
the land that was called "Mountainland" was Asia Minor to the
north, beginning with the Taurus ("Bull") mountains; and that was
the region of Adad, Enlil’s youngest son. His Sumerian name was
ISH.KUR (and his "cult animal" was the bull), which meant "He of the mountainland." The Sumerian
ISH was rendered shaddu in Akkadian; so that Il Shaddu became the biblical
El Shaddai.
Scholars speak of Adad, whom the Hittites called Teshub (see Fig.
80) as a "storm God," always depicted with a lightning, thundering,
and windblowing, and thus the God of rains. The Bible credited
Yahweh with similar attributes. "When Yahweh uttereth His voice,"
Jeremiah said (10:13), "there is a rumbling of waters in the skies
and storms come from the ends of the earth; He maketh lightnings
with the rain,
and blows a wind from its sources." The Psalms (135:7), the Book of
Job, and other Prophets reaffirmed Yahweh’s role as giver or
withholder of rains, a role initially expounded to the Children of
Israel during the Exodus.
While these attributes tarnish the similarities between Yahweh and
Enlil, they should not carry us away to assume that, if so, Yahweh
was the mirror image of Adad. The Bible recognized the existence of
Hadad (as his name was spelled in Hebrew) as one of the "other Gods"
of other nations, not of Israel, and mentions various kings and
princes (in the Aramean Damascus and other neighboring capitals) who
were called Ben-Hadad ("Son of Adad"). In Palmyra (the biblical
Tadmor), capital of eastern Syria, Adad’s epithet was Ba’al Shamin,
"Lord of Heaven," causing the Prophets to count him as just one of
the Ba’al Gods of neighboring nations who were an abomination in the
eyes of Yahweh. There is no way, therefore, that Yahweh could have
been one and the same as Adad.
The comparability between Yahweh and Enlil is further diminished by
another important attribute of Yahweh, that of a warrior. "Yahweh
goes forth like a warrior, like a hero He whips up His rage; He
shall roar and cry out and over His enemies He shall prevail,"
Isaiah (42:13) stated, echoing the verse in the Song of Miriam that
stated, "A Warrior is Yahweh" (Numbers chapter 15). Continuously,
the Bible refers to and describes Yahweh as the "Lord of hosts,"
"Yahweh, the Lord of hosts, a warring army commands," Isaiah (13:4)
declared. And Numbers 21:14 refers to a Book of the Wars of Yahweh
in which the divine wars were recorded.
There is nothing in the Mesopotamian records that would suggest such
an image for Enlil. The warrior par excellence was his son,
Ninurta,
who fought and defeated Zu, engaged in the Pyramid Wars with the
Enki’ites, and fought and imprisoned Marduk in the Great Pyramid.
His frequent epithets were "the warrior" and "the hero" and hymns to
him hailed him as "Ninurta, Foremost Son, possessor of divine powers
. .. Hero who in his hand the divine brilliant weapon carries."
His
feats as a warrior were described in an epic text whose Sumerian
title was Lugal-e Ud Melam-bi that scholars have called The Book of
The Feats and Exploits of Ninurta. Was
it, one wonders, the enigmatic Book of the Wars of Yahweh of which
the Bible spoke?
In other words, could Yahweh have been Ninurta?
As Foremost Son and heir apparent of Enlil, Ninurta too bore the
numerical rank of fifty, and could thus qualify no less than Enlil
to have been the Lord who decreed the fifty-year Jubilee and other
fifty-related aspects mentioned in the Bible. He possessed a
notorious Divine Black Bird that he used both for combat and on
humanitarian missions; it could have been the Kahod flying vehicle
that Yahweh possessed. He was active in the Zagros Mountains to the
east of Mesopotamia, the lands of Elam, and was revered there as
Ninshushi-nak, "Lord of Shushan city" (the Elamite capital).
At one
time he performed great dyking works in the Zagros mountains; at
another, he diked and diverted mountain rain channels in the Sinai
peninsula to make its mountainous part cultivable for his mother
Ninharsag; in a way he, too, was "God of mountains." His
association with the Sinai peninsula and the channeling of its
rainwaters, that come in winter bursts only, into an irrigation
system is still recalled to this day: the largest Wadi (a river that
fills up in winter and dries up in summer) in the peninsula is still
called Wadi El-Arish, the wadi of the Urash - the Ploughman - a nickname
of Ninurta from way back. An association with the Sinai peninsula,
through his waterworks and his mother’s residence there, also offers
links to a Yahweh identification.
Another interesting aspect of Ninurta that invokes a similarity to
the Biblical Lord comes to light in an inscription by the Assyrian
king Ashurbanipal, who at one time invaded Elam. In it the king
called him, "The mysterious God who lingers in a secret place where
no one can see what his divine being is about." An unseen God!
But Ninurta, as far as the earlier Sumerians were concerned, was
not a God in hiding, and graphic depictions of him, as we have
shown, were not even rare. Then, in conflict with a Yahweh-Ninurta
identification, we come across a major ancient text, dealing with a
major and unforgettable event, whose specifics seem to tell us that Ninurta was not Yahweh.
One of the most decisive actions attributed in the Bible to
Yahweh, with lasting effects and indelible memories, was the
upheavaling of Sodom and Gomorrah. The event, as we have shown in
great detail in
The Wars of Gods and Men, was described and recalled
in Mesopotamian texts, making possible a comparison of the deities
involved.
In the biblical version Sodom (where Abram’s nephew and his family
lived) and Gomorrah, cities in the verdant plain south of the Sea of
Salt, were sinful. Yahweh "comes down" and, accompanied by two
Angels, visits Abram and his wife Sarai in their encampment near
Hebron. After Yahweh predicts that the aged couple would have a
son, the two Angels depart for Sodom to verify the extent of the
cities’ "sinning." Yahweh then reveals to Abram that if the sins
would be confirmed, the cities and their residents would be
destroyed. Abram pleads with Yahweh to spare Sodom if fifty just men
be found there, and Yahweh agrees (the number was bargained by
Abram down to ten) and departs.
The Angels, having verified the
cities’ evil, warn Lot to take his family and escape. He asks for
time to reach the mountains, and they agree to delay the
destruction. Finally, the cities’ doom begins as,
"Yahweh rained upon
Sodom and Gomorrah sulfurous fire, coining from Yahweh from the
skies; and He upheavaled those cities and the whole plain and all
the inhabitants thereof, and all that which grew upon the ground... And Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had
stood before Yahweh, and gazed in the direction of Sodom and
Gomorrah, toward the land of the Plain, and he beheld vapor arising
from the earth as the smoke of a furnace"
(Genesis chapter 19).
The same event is well documented in Mesopotamian annals as the
culmination of Marduk’s struggle to attain supremacy on Earth.
Living in exile, Marduk gave his son Nabu the assignment of
converting people in western Asia to become followers of Marduk.
After a series of skirmishes, Nabu’s forces were strong enough to
invade Mesopotamia and enable Marduk to return to Babylon, where he
declared his intention to make it the Gateway of the Gods (what its
name, Bab-lli, implied). Alarmed, the Council of the Anunnaki met in
emergency sessions chaired by Enlil. Ninurta, and an alienated son
of Enki called Nergal (from the south African domain), recommended drastic action to stop Marduk. Enki vehemently
objected.
Ishtar pointed out that while they were debating, Marduk
was seizing city after city. "Sheriffs" were sent to seize Nabu, but
he escaped and was hiding among his followers in one of the "sinning
cities." Finally, Ninurta and Nergal were authorized to retrieve
from a hiding place awesome nuclear weapons, and to use them to
destroy the Spaceport in the Sinai (lest it fall into Mardukian
hands) as well as the area where Nabu was hiding.
The unfolding drama, the heated discussions, the accusations, and
the final drastic action -
the use of nuclear weapons in 2024 B.C. - are
described in great detail in a text that scholars call
the Erra
Epic.
In this document Nergal is referred to as Erra ("Howler") and
Ninurta is called Ishum ("Scorcher"). Once they were given the
go-ahead they retrieved "the awesome seven weapons, without
parallel" and went to the Spaceport near the "Mount Most Supreme."
The destruction of the Spaceport was carried out by Ninurta/Ishum:
"He raised his hand; the Mount was smashed; the plain by the Mount
Most Supreme he then obliterated; in its forests not a tree-stem was
left standing."
Now it was the turn of the sinning cities to be upheavaled, and the
task was carried out by Nergal/Erra.
He went there by following the
King’s Highway that connected the Sinai and the Red Sea with
Mesopotamia:
Then, emulating Ishum,
Erra the King’s Highway followed.
The cities he finished off,
to desolation he overturned them.
The use of nuclear weapons there broke open the sand barrier that
still partly exists in
the shape of a tongue (called
El Lissan), and
the waters of the Salt Sea poured south, inundating the low-lying
plain. The ancient text records that Erra/Nergal "dug through the
sea, its wholeness he divided." And the nuclear weapons turned the
Salt Sea to the body of water now called the Dead Sea:
"That which
lives in it he made wither," and what used to be a thriving and
verdant
plain, "as with fire he scorched the animals, burned its grains to
become as dust."
As was the clear-cut case of the divine actors in the Deluge tale,
so we find in this one concerning the upheavaling of Sodom,
Gomorrah, and the other cities of that plain astride the Sinai
peninsula, whom does and whom does not Yahweh match when the
biblical and Sumerian texts are compared. The Mesopotamian text
clearly associates Nergal and not Ninurta as the one who had
upheavaled the sinning cities.
Since the Bible asserts that it was
not the two Angels who had gone to verify the situation, but Yahweh
himself who had rained destruction on the cities, Yahweh could not
have been Ninurta.
(The reference in Genesis chapter 10 to Nimrod as the one credited
with starting Kingship in Mesopotamia, which we have discussed
earlier, is interpreted by some as a reference not to a human king
but to a God, and thus to Ninurta to whom the task of setting up the
first Kingships was assigned. If so, the biblical statement that
Nimrod "was a mighty hunter before Yahweh" also nullifies the
possibility that Ni-nurta/Nimrod could have been Yahweh).
But Nergal too was not Yahweh. He is mentioned by name as the deity
of the Cutheans who were among the foreigners brought over by the
Assyrians to replace the Israelites who were exiled. He is listed
among the "other Gods" that the newcomers worshiped and for whom
they set up idols. He could not have been "Yahweh" and Yahweh’s
abomination at one and the same time.
If Enlil and two of his sons, Adad and Ninurta, are not finalists in
the lineup to identify Yahweh, what about Enlil’s third son,
Nannar/Sin (the "Moon God")?
His "cult center" (as scholars call it) in Sumer was Ur, the very
city from which the migration of Terah and his family began. From
Ur, where Terah performed priestly services, they went to Harran on
the Upper Euphrates - a city that was a duplicate (even if on a
smaller scale) of Ur as a cult center of Nannar. The migration at
that particular time was connected, we believe, with religious and
royal changes that might have affected the worship of Nannar. Was he
then
the deity who had instructed Abram the Sumerian to pick up and
leave?
Having brought peace and prosperity to Sumer when Ur was its
capital, he was venerated in Ur’s great ziggurat (whose remains rise
awesomely to this day) with his beloved wife NIN.GAL ("Great Lady").
At the time of the new moon, the hymns sung to this divine couple
expressed the people’s gratitude to them; and the dark of the moon
was considered a time of,
"the mystery of the great Gods, a time of Nannar’s oracle," when he would send "Zaqar, the God of dreams
during the night" to give commands as well as to forgive sins. He
was described in the hymns as "decider of destinies in Heaven and on
Earth, leader of living creatures ... who causes truth and justice
to be."
It all sounds not unlike some of the praises of
Yahweh sung by the
Psalmist...
The Akkadian/Semitic name for Nannar was Sin, and there can be no
doubt that it was in honor of Nannar as Sin that the part of the
Sinai peninsula called in the Bible the "Wilderness of Sin" and,
for that matter, the whole peninsula, were so named. It was in that
part of the world that Yahweh appeared to Moses for the first time,
where the "Mount of the Gods" was located, where the greatest
Theophany ever had taken place. Furthermore, the principal habitat
in the Sinai’s central plain, in the vicinity of what we believe is
the true Mount Sinai, is still called Nakhl in Arabic after the
Goddess Ningal whose Semitic name was pronounced Nikal.
Was it all indicative of a Yahweh = Nannar/Sin identification?
The discovery several decades ago of extensive Canaanite literature
("myths" to scholars) dealing with their pantheon revealed that
while a God they called Ba’al (the generic word for "Lord" used as a
personal name) was running things, he was in fact not entirely
independent of his father El (a generic term meaning "God" used as a
personal name). In these texts El is depicted as a retired God,
living with his spouse Asherah away from the populated areas, at a
quiet place where "the two waters meet" - a place that we have
identified in
The Stairway To Heaven as the southern tip of the
Sinai peninsula, where the two gulfs extending from the Red Sea
meet.
This fact and other considerations have led us to the conclusion
that the Canaanite El was the retired Nannar/Sin; included in the
reasons upon which we had expounded is the fact that a "cult center"
to Nannar/Sin has existed at a vital crossroads in the ancient Near
East and even nowadays, the city known to us as Jericho but whose
biblical/Semitic name is Yeriho, meaning "City of the Moon God"; and
the adoption by tribes to the south thereof of Allah - "El" in
Arabic - as the God of Islam represented by the Moon’s crescent.
Described in the Canaanite texts as a retired deity, El as Nannar/Sin would indeed have been forced into retirement: Sumerian
texts dealing with the effects of the nuclear cloud as it wafted
eastward and reached Sumer and its capital Ur, reveal that Nannar/Sin - refusing to leave his beloved city - was afflicted by the
deathly cloud and was partly paralyzed.
The image of Yahweh, especially in the period of the Exodus and the
settlement of Canaan, i.e. after - not prior to - the demise of Ur,
does not sound right for a retired, afflicted, and tired deity as Nannar/Sin had become by then. The Bible paints a picture of an
active deity, insistent and persistent, fully in command, defying
the Gods of Egypt, inflicting plagues, dispatching Angels, roaming
the skies; omnipresent, performing wonders, a magical healer, a
Divine Architect. We find none of that in the descriptions of
Nannar/Sin.
Both his veneration and fear of him stemmed from his association
with his celestial counterpart, the Moon; and this celestial aspect
serves as a decisive argument against identifying him with Yahweh:
In the biblical divine order, it was Yahweh who ordered the Sun and
the Moon to serve as luminaries; "the Sun and the Moon praise
Yahweh," the Psalmist (148:3) declared. And on Earth, the crumbling
of the walls of Jericho before the trumpeters of Yahweh symbolized
the supremacy of Yahweh over the Moon God Sin.
There was also the matter of Ba’al, the Canaanite deity whose
worship was a constant thorn in the side of Yahweh’s faithful. The
discovered texts reveal that Ba’al was a son of El. His abode in the
mountains of Lebanon is still known as Baalbek, "The valley of
Ba’al" - the place that was the first destination of Gilgamesh in his
search for immortality. The biblical name for it was BeitShemesh - the
"House/abode of
Shamash;" and Shamash, we may recall, was a son of Nannar/Sin.
The
Canaanite "myths" devote much clay tablet space to the shenanigans
between Ba’al and his sister Anat; the Bible lists in the area of
Beit-Shemesh a place called Beit Anat; and we are as good as certain
that the Semitic name Anat was a rendering of Anunitu ("Ami’s
beloved") - a nickname of Inanna/Ishtar, the twin sister of
Utu/Shamash.
All that suggests that in the Canaanite trio El-Ba’al-Anat we see
the Mesopotamian triad of Nannar/Sin-Utu/Shamash-Inanna/Ishtar - the
Gods associated with the Moon, the Sun, and Venus. And none of them
could have been Yahweh, for the Bible is replete with admonitions
against the worship of these celestial bodies and their emblems.
If neither Enlil nor any one of his sons (or even grandchildren)
fully qualify as Yahweh, the search must turn elsewhere, to the
sons of Enki, where some of the qualifications also point.
The instructions given to Moses during the sojourn at Mount Sinai
were, to a great extent, of a medical nature. Five whole chapters in
Leviticus and many passages in Numbers are devoted to medical
procedures, diagnosis and treatment. "Heal me, O Yahweh, and I shall
be healed," Jeremiah (17:14) cried out:
"My soul blesses Yahweh . .
. who heals all my ailments," the Psalmist sang (103:1-3).
Because
of his piety, King Hezekiah was not only cured on Yahweh’s say-so of
a fatal disease, but was also granted by Yahweh fifteen more years
to live (II Kings chapter 19). Yahweh could not only heal and extend
life, he could also (through his Angels and Prophets) revive the
dead; an extreme example was provided by Ezekiel’s vision of the
scattered dry bones that came back alive, their dead resurrected by
Yahweh’s will.
The biological-medical knowledge underlying such capabilities was
possessed by Enki, and he passed such knowledge to two of his sons:
Marduk (known as Ra in Egypt), and Thoth (whom the Egyptians called
Tehuti and the Sumerians NIN.GISH.ZIDDA - "Lord of the Tree of Life").
As for Marduk, many Babylonian texts refer to his healing abilities;
but - as his own complaint to his father reveals - he was
given knowledge of healing but not that of reviving the dead.
On the
other hand, Thoth did possess such knowledge, employing it on one
occasion to revive Horus, the son of the God Osiris and his
sister-wife Isis. According to the hieroglyphic text dealing with
this incident, Horus was bitten by a poisonous scorpion and died. As
his mother appealed to the "God of magical things," Thoth, for help,
he came down to Earth from the heavens in a sky boat, and restored
the boy back to life.
When it came to the construction and equipping of the Tabernacle in
the Sinai wilderness and later on of the Temple in Jerusalem, Yahweh
displayed an impressive knowledge of architecture, sacred
alignments, decorative details, use of materials, and construction
procedures - even to the point of showing the Earthlings involved
scale models of what He had designed or wanted.
Marduk has not been
credited with such an all-embracing knowledge; but
Thoth/Ningishzidda was. In Egypt he was deemed the keeper of the
secrets of pyramid building, and as Ningishzidda he was invited to
Lagash to help orientate, design, and choose materials for the
temple that was built for Ninurta.
Another point of major congruence between Yahweh and Thoth was the
matter of the calendar. It is to Thoth that the first Egyptian
calendar was attributed, and when he was expelled from Egypt by
Ra/Marduk and went (according to our findings) to Mesoamerica, where
he was called "The Winged Serpent" (Quetzalcoatl), he devised the
Aztec and Mayan calendars there. As the biblical books of Exodus,
Leviticus, and Numbers make clear, Yahweh not only shifted the New
Year to the "seventh month," but also instituted the week, the
Sabbath, and a series of holidays.
Healer; reviver of the dead who came down in a sky boat; a Divine
Architect; a great astronomer and designer of calendars. The
attributes common to Thoth and Yahweh seem overwhelming.
So was Thoth Yahweh?
Though known in Sumer, he was not considered there one of the Great Gods, and thus not fitting at all the epithet "the God Most High"
that both Abraham and Melchizedek, priest of Jerusalem, used at
their encounter. Above all, he was a
God of Egypt, and (unless excluded by the argument that he was
Yahweh), he was one of those upon whom Yahweh set out to make
judgments.
Renowned in ancient Egypt, there could be no Pharaoh
ignorant of this deity. Yet, when Moses and Aaron came before
Pharaoh and told him, "So sayelh Yahweh, the God of Israel: Let My
people go that they may worship Me in the desert," Pharaoh said:
"Who is this Yahweh that I should obey his words? I know not
Yahweh, and the Israelites I shall not let go."
If Yahweh where Thoth, not only would the Pharaoh not answer thus,
but the task of Moses and Aaron would have been made easy and
attainable were they just to say, Why - "Yahweh" is just another name
for Thoth .. . And Moses, having been raised in the Egyptian court,
would have had no difficulty knowing that - if that were so.
If Thoth was not Yahweh, the process of elimination alone appears to
leave one more candidate: Marduk.
That he was a "God most high" is well established; the Firstborn of
Enki who believed that his father was unjustly deprived of the
supremacy on Earth - a supremacy to which he, Marduk, rather than
Enlil’s son Ninurta, was the rightful successor. His attributes
included a great many - almost all - the attributes of Yahweh. He
possessed a Shem, a sky-chamber, as Yahweh did; when the Babylonian
king Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt the sacred precinct of Babylon, he
built there an especially strengthened enclosure for the "chariot of
Marduk, the Supreme Traveler between Heaven and Earth."
When Marduk finally attained the supremacy on Earth, he did not
discredit the other Gods. On the contrary, he invited them all to
reside in individual pavilions within the sacred precinct of
Babylon. There was only one catch: their specific powers and
attributes were to pass to him - just as the "Fifty Names" (i.e. rank)
of Enlil had to.
A Babylonian text, in its legible portion, listed
thus the functions of other great Gods that were transferred to Marduk:
Ninurta = Marduk of the hoe
Nergal = Marduk of the attack
Zababa = Marduk of the combat
Enlil = Marduk of lordship and counsel
Nabu = Marduk of numbers and counting
Sin = Marduk the illuminator of the night
Shamash = Marduk of justice
Adad = Marduk of rains
This was not the monotheism of the Prophets and the Psalms; it was
what scholars term henotheism - a religion wherein the supreme power
passes from one of several deities to another in succession. Even
so, Marduk did not reign supreme for long; soon after the
institution of Marduk as national God by the Babylonians, it was
matched by their Assyrian rivals by the institution of Ashur as
"lord of all the Gods."
Apart from the arguments that we have mentioned in the cases of
Thoth that negate an identification with any major Egyptian deity
(and Marduk was the great Egyptian God Ra after all), the Bible
itself specifically rules out any equating of Yahweh with Marduk.
Not only is Yahweh, in sections dealing with Babylon, portrayed as
greater, mightier, and supreme over the Gods of the Babylonians - it
explicitly foretells their demise by naming them. Both Isaiah
(46:1) and Jeremiah (50:2) foresaw Marduk (also known as Bel by his
Babylonian epitheht) and his son Nabu fallen and collapsed before
Yahweh on the Day of Judgment.
Those prophetic words depict the two Babylonian Gods as antagonists
and enemies of Yahweh; Marduk (and for that matter, Nabu) could not
have been Yahweh.
(As far as Ashur is concerned, the God Lists and other evidence
suggest that he was a resurgent Enlil renamed by the Assyrians "The
All Seeing;" and as such, he could not have been Yahweh).
As we find so many similarities, and on the other hand crucial
differences and contradicting aspects, in our search for a matching
"Yahweh" in the ancient Near Eastern pantheons, we can continue
only by doing what Yahweh had told Abraham: Lift thine eyes toward
the heavens . . .
The Babylonian king Hammurabi recorded thus the legitimization of
Marduk’s supremacy on Earth:
Lofty Anu,
Lord of the Anunnaki,
and Enlil,
Lord of Heaven and Earth
who determines the destinies of the land,
Determined for Marduk, the firstborn of Enki,
the Enlil-functions over alt mankind
and made him great among the Igigi.
As this makes clear, even Marduk as he assumed supremacy on Earth
recognized that it was Anu, and not he, who was "Lord of the
Anunnaki." Was he the "God Most High" by whom Abraham and
Melchizedek greeted each other?
The cuneiform sign for Anu (AN in Sumerian) was a star; it had the
multiple meanings of "God, divine," "heaven," and this God’s
personal name. Anu, as we know from the Mesopotamian texts, stayed
in "heaven"; and numerous biblical verses also described Yahweh as
the One Who Is in Heaven.
It was "Yahweh, the God of Heaven," who
commanded him to go to Canaan, Abraham stated (Genesis 24:7).
"I am
a Hebrew and it is Yahweh, the God of Heaven that I venerate," the
Prophet Jonah said (1:9).
"Yahweh, the God of Heaven commanded me to
build for Him a House in Jerusalem, in Judaea," Cyrus stated in his
edict regarding the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem (Ezra
1:2).
When Solomon completed the construction of the (first) Temple
in Jerusalem, he prayed to Yahweh to hear him from the heavens to
bless the Temple as His House, although, Solomon admitted, it was
hardly possible that "Yahweh Elohim" would come to dwell on Earth,
in this House, "when the heaven and the heaven-of-heavens cannot
contain Thee" (I Kings 8:27); and the Psalms repeatedly stated,
"From the heaven did Yahweh look down upon the Children of Adam"
(14:2)
"From Heaven did Yahweh behold the Earth" (102:20)
"In
Heaven did Yahweh establish His throne" (103:19)
Though Anu did visit Earth several times, he was residing on Nibiru;
and as the God whose abode was in Heaven, he was truly an unseen
God: among the countless depictions of deities on cylinder seals,
statues and statuettes, carvings, wall paintings, amulets - his image
does not appear even once!
Since Yahweh, too, was unseen and unrepresented pictorially,
residing in "Heaven," the inevitable question that arises is, Where
was the abode of Yahweh? With so many parallels between Yahweh and
Anu, did Yahweh, too, have a "Nibiru" to dwell on?
The question, and its relevance to Yahweh’s invisibility, does not
originate with us. It was sarcastically posed by a heretic to a
Jewish savant, Rabbi Gamliel, almost two thousand years ago; and
the answer that was given is truly amazing!
The report of the conversation, as rendered into English by S.M.
Lehrman in The World of the Midrash, goes thus:
When Rabbi Gamliel was asked by a heretic to cite the exact location
of God, seeing that the world is so vast and there are seven oceans,
his reply was simply, "This I cannot tell you."
Whereupon the other tauntingly retorted:
"And this you call Wisdom,
praying to a God, daily, whose whereabouts you do not know?"
The Rabbi smiled:
"You ask me to put my finger on the exact spot of
His Presence, albeit that tradition avers that the distance between
heaven and earth would take a journey of 3,500 years to cover. So,
may I ask you the exact whereabouts of something which is always
with you, and without which you cannot live a moment?"
The pagan was intrigued. "What is this?" he eagerly queried.
The Rabbi replied: "The soul which God had planted within you; pray
tell me where exactly is it?"
It was a chastened man that shook his head negatively.
It was now the Rabbi’s turn to be amazed and amused. "If you do not
know where your own soul is located, how can you expect to know the
precise habitation of One who fills the whole world with His
glory?"
Let us note carefully what Rabbi Gamliel’s answer was:
according to
Jewish tradition, he said, the exact spot in the
heavens where God has a dwelling is so distant that it would
require
a journey of 3,500 years ...
How much closer can one get to the 3,600 years that it takes Nibiru
to complete one orbit around the Sun?
Although there are no specific texts dealing with or describing
Anu’s abode on Nibiru, some idea thereof can be gained indirectly
from such texts as
the tale of Adapa, occasional references in
various texts, and even from Assyrian depictions. It was a place - let
us think of it as a royal palace - that was entered through imposing
gates, flanked by towers. A pair of Gods (Ningishzidda and Dumuzi
are mentioned in one instance) stood guard at the gates.
Inside, Anu was seated on a throne; when Enlil and Enki were on Nibiru, or
when Anu had visited Earth, they flanked the throne, holding up
celestial emblems.
(The Pyramid Texts of ancient Egypt, describing the Afterlife
ascent of the Pharaoh to the celestial abode, carried aloft by an
"Ascender," announced for the departing king: "The double gates of
heaven are opened for thee, the double gates of the sky are opened
for thee" and envisioned four scepter-holding Gods announcing his
arrival on the "Imperishable Star").
In the Bible, too, Yahweh was described as seated on a throne,
flanked by Angels. While Ezekiel described seeing the Lord’s image,
shimmering like electrum, seated on a throne inside a Flying
Vehicle, "the throne of Yahweh is in Heaven," the Psalms (11:4)
asserted; and the Prophets described seeing Yahweh seated on a
throne in the Heavens. The Prophet Michaiah ("Who is like Yahweh?"),
a contemporary of Elijah, told the king of Judaea who had sought a
divine oracle (I Kings chapter 22):
I saw Yahweh sitting on his throne,
and the host of heaven were standing by Him,
on His right and on His left.
The Prophet Isaiah recorded (chapter 6) a vision seen by him "in the
year in which king Uzziah died" in which he saw God seated on His
throne, attended by fiery Angels:
I beheld my Lord seated on a high and lofty throne,
and the train of His robe filled the great hall.
Seraphs stood in attendance on Him,
each one of them having six wings:
with twain each covered his face,
with twain each covered his legs,
and with twain each one would fly.
And one would call out to the other:
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts!
Biblical references to Yahweh’s throne went farther: they actually
stated its location, in a place called Olam. "Thy throne is
established forever, from Olam art Thou," the Psalms (93:2)
declared; "Thou, Yahweh, are enthroned in Olam, enduring through the
ages," states the Book of Lamentations (5:19).
Now, this is not the way these verses, and others like them, have
been usually translated. In the King James Version, for example, the
quoted verse from Psalms is translated "Thy throne is established of
old, thou art from everlasting," and the verse in Lamentations is
rendered "Thou, O Lord, remainest for ever: thy throne from
generation to generation." Modern translations likewise render Olam
as "everlasting" and "forever" (The New American Bible) or as
"eternity" and "for ever" (The New English Bible), revealing an
indecision whether to treat the term as an adjective or as a noun.
Recognizing, however, that Olam is clearly a noun, the most recent
translation by the Jewish Publication Society adopted "eternity," an
abstract noun, as a solution.
The Hebrew Bible, strict in the precision of its terminology, has
other terms for stating the state of "lasting forever." One is
Netzah, as in Psalm 89:47 that asked, "How long, Yahweh, wilt Thou
hide Thyself - forever?" Another term that means more precisely
"perpetuity" is Ad, which is also usually translated "for ever," as
in "his seed I will make endure for ever" in Psalm 89:30. There was
no need for a third term to express the same thing.
Olam, often
accompanied by the adjective Ad to denote its everlasting nature,
was itself not an adjective but a noun derived from the root that
means "disappearing, mysteriously hidden." The numerous
biblical verses in which Olam appears indicate that it was deemed a
physical place, not an abstraction. "Thou art from Olam," the
Psalmist declared - God is from a place which is a hidden place (and
therefore God has been unseen).
It was a place that was conceived as physically existing:
Deuteronomy (33:15) and the Prophet Habakkuk (3:6) spoke of the
"hills of Olam." Isaiah (33:14) referred to the "heat sources of
Olam. " Jeremiah (6:16) mentioned the "pathways of Olam" and (18:5)
"the lanes of Olam," and called Yah-weh "king of Olam" (10:10) as
did Psalms 10:16.
The Psalms, in statements reminiscent of the
references to the gates of Anu’s abode (in Sumerian texts) and to
the Gates of Heaven (in ancient Egyptian texts), also spoke of the
"Gates of Olam" that should open and welcome the Lord Yahweh as He
arrives there upon His Kabod, His Celestial Boat (24:7-10):
Lift up your heads, O gates of Olam
so that the King of Kabod may come in!
Who is the King of Kabod?
Yahweh, strong and valiant, a mighty warrior/
Lift up your heads, O gates of Olam,
and the King of Kabod shall
come in!
Who is the King of Kabod?
Yahweh lord of hosts is the King
of Kabod.
"Yahweh is the God of Olam," declared Isaiah (40:28), echoing the
biblical record in Genesis (21:33) of Abraham’s "calling in the
name of Yahweh, the God of Olam." No wonder, then, that the Covenant
symbolized by circumcision, "the celestial sign," was called by the
Lord when he had imposed it on Abraham and his descendants "the
Covenant of Olam:"
And my Covenant shall be in your flesh, the Covenant of Olam.
(Genesis 17:13)
In post-biblical rabbinic discussions,
and so in modern Hebrew, Olam is the term that stands for "world." Indeed, the answer
that Rabbi Gamliel gave to the question regarding the Divine Abode
was based on rabbinic assertions that it is separated from Earth by
seven heavens, in each of which there is a different world; and that
the journey from one to the other requires five hundred years, so
that the complete journey through seven heavens from the world
called Earth to the world that is the Divine Abode lasts 3,500
years.
This, as we have pointed out, comes as close to the 3,600
(Earth) years’ orbit of Nibiru as one could expect; and while Earth
to someone arriving from space would have been the seventh planet,
Nibiru to someone on Earth would indeed be seven celestial spaces
away when it disappears to its apogee.
Such a disappearing - the root meaning of Olam - creates of course the
"year" of Nibiru - an awesomely long time in human terms. The Prophets
similarly, in numerous passages, spoke of the "Years of Olam" as a
measure of a very long time. A clear sense of periodicity, as would
result from the periodic appearance and disappearance of a planet,
was conveyed by the frequent use of "from Olam to Olam" as a
definite (though extremely long) measure of time: "I had given you
this land from Olam to Olam," the Lord was quoted as saying by
Jeremiah (7:7 and 25:5).
And a possible clincher for identifying Olam with Nibiru was the statement in Genesis 6:4 that
the Nefilim,
the young Anunnaki who had come to Earth from Nibiru, were the
"people of the Shem" (the people of the rocketships), "those who
were from Olam."
With the obvious familiarity of the Bible’s editors, Prophets, and
Psalmists with Mesopotamian "myths" and astronomy, it would have
been peculiar not to find knowledge of the important planet Nibiru
in the Bible. It is our suggestion that yes, the Bible was keenly
aware of Nibiru - and called it Olam, the "disappearing planet."
Does all that mean that therefore Anu was Yahweh? Not necessarily
...
Though the Bible depicted Yahweh as reigning in His celestial
abode, as Anu did, it also considered Him "king" over the Earth and
all upon it - whereas Anu clearly gave the command on Earth to Enlil.
Anu did visit Earth, but
extant texts describe the occasions mostly as ceremonial state and
inspection visits; there is nothing in them comparable to the active
involvement of Yahweh in the affairs of nations and individuals.
Moreover, the Bible recognized a God, other than
Yahweh, a "God of
other nations" called An; his worship is noted in the listing (II
Kings 17:31) of Gods of the foreigners whom the Assyrians had
resettled in Samaria, where he is referred to as An-melekh ("Anu the
king"). A personal name Anani, honoring Anu, and a place called
Ana-tot, are also listed in the Bible. And the Bible had nothing for
Yahweh that paralleled the genealogy of Anu (parents, spouse,
children), his lifestyle (scores of concubines) or his fondness for
his granddaughter Inanna (whose worship as the "Queen of
Heaven"-Venus was deemed an abomination in the eyes of Yahweh).
And so, in spite of the similarities, there are also too many
essential differences between Anu and Yahweh for the two to have
been one and the same.
Moreover, in the biblical view Yahweh was more than "king, lord" of
Olam, as Anu was king on Nibiru. He was more than once hailed as El
Olam, the God of Olam (Genesis 21:33) and El Elohim, the God of the
Elohim (Joshua 22:22, Psalms 50:1 and Psalms 136:2).
The biblical suggestion that the Elohim - the "Gods," the Anunnaki - had
a God, seems totally incredible at first, but quite logical on
reflection.
At the very conclusion of our first book in The Earth Chronicles
series (The 12th Planet), having told the story of the planet Nibiru
and how the Anunnaki (the biblical Nefilim) who had come to Earth
from it "created" Mankind, we posed the following question:
And if the Nefilim were the "Gods" who "created" Man on Earth, did
evolution alone, on the Twelfth Planet, create the Nefilim?
Technologically advanced, capable hundreds of thousands of years
before us to travel in space, arriving at a cosmological
explanation for the creation of the Solar System and, as we begin to
do, to contemplate and understand the universe - the Anunnaki must have pondered their origins, and arrived at what
we call Religion - their religion, their concept of God.
Who created the Nefilim, the Anunnaki, on their planet?
The Bible
itself provides the answer. Yahweh, it states, was not just "a great
God, a great king over all of the Elohim" (Psalms 95:3); He was
there, on Nibiru, before they had come to be on it: "Before the
Elohim upon Olam He sat," Psalm 61:8 explained. Just as the Anunnaki
had been on Earth before The Adam, so was Yahweh on Nibiru/Olam
before the Anunnaki. The creator preceded the created.
We have already explained that the seeming immortality of the
Anunnaki "Gods" was merely their extreme longevity, resulting from
the fact that one Nibiru-year equaled 3,600 Earth-years; and that in
fact they were born, grew old, and could (and did) die. A time
measure applicable to Olam ("days of Olam" and "years of Olam") was
recognized by the Prophets and Psalmist; what is more impressive is
their realization that the various Elohim (the Sumerian DIN.GIR, the
Akkadian Ilu) were in fact not immortal - but Yahweh, God, was.
Thus,
Psalm 82 envisions God passing judgment on the Elohim and reminding
them that they - the Elohim! - are also mortal: "God stands in the
divine assembly, among the Elohim He judges," and tells them thus:
I have said, ye are Elohim, all of you sons of the Most High; But ye
shall the as men do, like any prince ye shall fall.
We believe that such statements, suggesting that the Lord Yahweh
created not only the Heaven and the Earth but also the Elohim, the
Anunnaki "Gods," have a bearing on a puzzle that has baffled
generations of biblical scholars. It is the question why the
Bible’s very first verse that deals with the very Beginning, does
not begin with the first letter of the alphabet, but rather with the
second one. The significance and symbolism of beginning the
Beginning with the proper beginning must have been obvious to the
Bible’s compilers; yet, this is what they chose to transmit to us:
Breshit bara Elohim
et Ha’Shamaim v’et Ha’Aretz
...which is commonly translated, "In the beginning God created the
Heaven and the Earth."
Since the Hebrew letters have numerical values, the first letter,
Aleph (from which the Greek alpha comes) has the numerical value
"one, the first" - the beginning. Why then, scholars and theologians
have wondered, does the Creation start with the second letter, Beth,
whose value is "two, second"?
While the reason remains unknown, the result of starting the first
verse in the first book of the Bible with an Aleph would be
astounding, for it would make the sentence read thus:
Ab-reshit bara Elohim,
et Ha’Shamaim v’et Ha’Aretz
The Father-of-Beginning created the Elohim, the Heavens, and the
Earth.
By this slight change, by just starting the beginning with the
letter that begins it all, an omnipotent, omnipresent Creator of
All emerges from the primeval chaos: Ab-Reshit, "the Father of
Beginning." The best modern scientific minds have come up with the
Big Bang theory of the beginning of the universe - but have yet to
explain who caused the Big Bang to happen. Were Genesis to begin as
it should have, the Bible - which offers a precise tale of Evolution
and adheres to the most sensible cosmogony - would have also given us
the answer: the Creator who was there to create it all.
And all at once Science and Religion, Physics and Metaphysics,
converge into one single answer that conforms to the credo of Jewish
monotheism: "I am Yahweh, there is none beside me!" It is a credo
that carried the Prophets, and us with them, from the arena of Gods
to the God who embraces the universe.
One can only speculate why the Bible’s editors, who scholars
believe canonized the Torah (the first five books of the
Bible) during the Babylonian exile, omitted the Aleph. Was it in
order to avoid offending their Babylonian exilers (because a claim
that Yahweh had created the Anunnaki-Gods would have not excluded
Marduk)? But what is, we believe, not to be doubted is that at one
time the first word in the first verse in the Bible did begin with
the first letter of the alphabet. This certainty is based on the
statements in the Book of Revelation ("The Apocalypse of St. John"
in the New Testament), in which God announces thus:
I am Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the
Last.
The statement, repeated three times (1:8, 21:6, 22:13), applies the
first letter of the alphabet (by its Greek name) to the Beginning,
to the divine First, and the last letter of the (Greek) alphabet to
the End, to God being the Last of all as He has been the First of
All.
That this had been the case at the beginning of Genesis is
confirmed, we believe, by the certainty that the statements in
Revelation harken back to the Hebrew scriptures from which the
parallel verses in Isaiah (41:6, 42:8, 44:6) were taken, the verses
in which Yahweh proclaims His absoluteness and uniqueness:
I, Yahweh, was the First And the Last I will also be!
I am the First
and I am the Last;
There are no Elohim without Me!
I am He,
I am the First,
I am the Last as well.
It is these statements that help identify the biblical God by the
answer that He himself gave when asked: Who, O God, are you? It was
when He called Moses out of the Burning
Bush, identifying Himself only as "the God of thy father, the God of
Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob."
Having been given
his mission, Moses pointed out that when he would come to the
Children of Israel and say, "the God of your forefathers has sent me
to you, and they will say to me: What is His name? - what shall I tell
them?"
And God said to Moses:
Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh -
this is what thou shall say
unto the Children of Israel:
Ehyeh sent me.
And God said further to Moses:
Thus shalt say unto the Children of Israel:
Yah wen, the God of your fathers,
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
and the God of Jacob,
hath sent me unto you;
This is my name unto Olam,
this is my appellation unto all generations.
(Exodus 3:13-15)
The statement, Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, has been the subject of
discussion, analysis, and interpretation by generations of
theologians, biblical scholars, and linguists. The King James
Version translates it "I am that I am ... I am hath sent me to you."
Other more modern translations adopt "I am, that is who I am ... I
am has sent you."
The most recent translation by the Jewish
Publication Society prefers to leave the Hebrew intact, providing
the footnote, "meaning of the Hebrew uncertain."
The key to understanding the answer given during this Divine
Encounter are the grammatical tenses employed here.
Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh is not given in the present but in the future
tense. In simple parlance it states: "Whoever I shall be, I shall
be."
And the Divine Name that is revealed to a mortal for the first
time (in the conversation Moses is told that the sacred name, the Tetragrammaton YHWH, had not been revealed even to Abraham) combines
the three tenses from the root meaning "To Be" - the One who was, who
is,
and who shall be. It is an answer and a name that befit the biblical
concept of Yahweh as eternally existing - One who was, who is, and who
shall continue to be.
A frequent form of stating this everlasting nature of the biblical
God is the expression "Thou art from Olam to Olam." It is usually
translated, "Thou art everlasting;" this conveys undoubtedly the
sense of the statement, but not its precise meaning. Literally taken
it suggests that the existence and reign of Yahweh extended from one
Olam to another - that He was "king, lord" not only of the one Olam
that was the equivalent of the Mesopotamian Nibiru - but of other
Olams, of other worlds!
No less than eleven times, the Bible refers to Yahweh’s abode,
domain, and "kingdom" using the term Olamim, the plural of Olam - a
domain, an abode, a kingdom that encompasses many worlds. It is an
expansion of Yahweh’s Lordship beyond the notion of a "national God"
to that of a Judge of all the nations; beyond the Earth and beyond
Nibiru, to the "Heavens of Heaven" (Deuteronomy 10:14, I Kings 8:27,
II Chronicles 2:5 and 6:18) that encompass not only the Solar System
but even the distant stars (Deuteronomy 4:19, Ecclesi-astes 12:2).
THIS IS THE IMAGE OF A COSMIC VOYAGER.
All else - the celestial planetary "Gods," Nibiru that remade our
Solar System and remakes the Earth on its near passages, the
Anunnaki "Elohim," Mankind, nations, kings - all are His
manifestations and His instruments, carrying out a divine and
universal everlasting plan. In a way we are all His Angels, and when
the time comes for Earthlings to travel in space and emulate the
Anunnaki, on some other world, we too shall only be carrying out a
destined future.
It is an image of a universal Lord that is best summed up in the
hymnal prayer Adon Olam that is recited as a majestic song in Jewish
synagogue services on festivals, on the Sabbath, and on each and
every day of the year:
Lord of the universe, who has reigned Ere all that exists had yet
been created. When by His will all things were wrought, "Sovereign"
was His name was then pronounced.
And when, in time, all things shall cease, He shall still reign in
majesty. He was, He is, He shall remain, He shall continue
gloriously.
Incomparable, unique He is, No other can His Oneness share. Without
beginning, without end. Dominion’s might is His to bear.
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