The Great Inception Part 12: From Baal to Zeus to Satan

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT set to air on network television mid February (2017) through mid-March. This series and the forthcoming programs will center on two groundbreaking books (to be released Match 7) — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert.


 These reports and entries will unveil what most in the modern Church have never heardregarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods, the Titans, and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.





The long war between God and the lesser gods who rebelled began on a mountain, and it will end on a mountain.


First things first: The rebel gods are real. That’s not something you’re likely to hear in church. Not only have we been taught that the pagan deities of the ancient world were imaginary, most American Christians today don’t even believe in Satan or the Holy Spirit.


That’s not an exaggeration. The Barna Group found in a 2009 survey of American Christians that only about one in three believes Satan is real and not just a concept.


 Likewise, nearly 60% of American Christians said they didn’t believe the Holy Spirit is living entity. So it’s not surprising that when we think of Baal, Asherah, Moloch, Dagon, Chemosh, Marduk, and the rest of the pagan pantheon mentioned in the Bible, if we think of them at all, we tend to assume they were nothing more than lifeless blocks of wood and stone.


We couldn’t be more wrong.


The true story begins on a mountain: Eden.


But wait, you say. Eden was a garden! Yes, it was. A garden on a mountain. In Ezekiel 28, God tells the divine rebel from Eden:

Quote :

You were an anointed guardian cherub.
I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God;
    in the midst of the stones of fire you walked.
Ezekiel 28:14 (ESV), emphasis added

If you read the Old Testament carefully, you’ll notice many references to God’s holy mountain. The prophets knew that the war between the rebellious fallen gods and the Creator was all about who would establish their holy mountain—the “mount of assembly” or “mount of the congregation”—as supreme. The most obvious reference is in Isaiah 14, a section of scripture that scholars generally agree is a parallel to Ezekiel 28:

Quote :

“How you are fallen from heaven,
O Day Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!
You said in your heart,
‘I will ascend to heaven;
above the stars of God
I will set my throne on high;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
in the far reaches of the north;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.’
But you are brought down to Sheol,
to the far reaches of the pit.
Isaiah 14:12-15 (ESV), emphasis added

Over the course of this special five-week series, we’ll dig deeper into the conflict between God and the rebels and explore the importance of cosmic mountains. We’ll identify key battles in the long war and lay out a prophetic scenario for the final battle of this age.


Above all, we’ll show you a glimpse of this long war in the heavenlies, and where you can find it in the Bible. It’s a conflict that the prophets and apostles knew was real, but over the last two thousand years our churches have teaching us about it. With this war stripped out out of the Bible, we’re left with an incomplete story of God’s plan to save us from the gods who want to kill us and destroy everything we love.





So let’s start at the beginning. What do we know about the enemy? Was it a talking snake?


In a word, no.


So who or what was the serpent? Most of us assume it was Satan, but maybe not. The serpent isn’t named in the book of Genesis. In fact, Satan wasn’t even a personal name in the Old Testament.


Satan means “accuser,” written ha-shaitan in the OT. It’s a title, the satan, so it really means “the accuser.” Think of it as a job title, like prosecuting attorney.


The adversary in the Garden is the nachash, which is the word translated into English as “serpent.” It’s based on an adjective that means bright or brazen, like shiny brass.


 The noun nachash can mean snake, but it also means “one who practices divination.”


In Hebrew, it’s not uncommon for an adjective to be converted into a noun—the term is “substantivized.” If that’s the case here, nachash could mean “shining one.” And that’s consistent with other descriptions of the satan figure in the Old Testament.


For example, in Isaiah 14, the character called Lucifer in the King James translation, based on the Latin words chosen by Jerome (lux + ferous, meaning “light bringer”), is named in Hebrew Helel ben Shachar—”shining one, son of the dawn.” (Interestingly, Šahar was a Canaanite deity, so a better translation of the verse is “Day Star, son of Dawn.” And that leads to some interesting speculation about the nature and origin of Helel. Were Helel and Šahar two of the fallen gods? But I digress.)


Now, consider this in Daniel 10:

Quote :

I lifted up my eyes and looked, and behold, a man clothed in linen, with a belt of fine gold from Uphaz around his waist. His body was like beryl, his face like the appearance of lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze, and the sound of his words like the sound of a multitude.
Daniel 10:5-6 (ESV), emphasis added

Obviously, “shining one” is a pretty good description of the angel who battled the prince of Persia, another supernatural being, to bring his message to Daniel.


About 900 years before Daniel, when the Israelites started complaining on their way out of Egypt (see Numbers 21:4-9), God sent saraph nachash (“fiery serpents”), to bite them. Saraph is the root word of seraphim, which roughly means “burning ones.”


 But the key point of these verses in Numbers 21 is that the Hebrew words saraph and nachash are used interchangeably. So rather than “fiery serpents,” the translation should read “saraph serpents”.


Deuteronomy 8:15 praises Yahweh for bringing Israel through “the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents,” reinforcing the interchangeability of saraph and nachash.


Now, if the mental image of flaming snakes isn’t weird enough, the prophet Isaiah twice referred to flying serpents (saraph `uwph, in Isaiah 14:29 and 30:6). And in his famous throne room vision, Isaiah saw:

Quote :

…the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
Isaiah 6:1-2 (ESV), emphasis added

Again, the root word of seraphim is saraph, the same word translated “serpent” in Numbers and Deuteronomy. In fact, aside from the Isaiah 6 passage above, every single mention of seraphim in the Old Testament refers to serpentine beings!


The flying serpent was a well-known symbol in the ancient Near East, especially in Egypt. It would have been very familiar to the Israelites. The uraeus, a cobra standing on its coil with its hood extended, was a royal symbol of protection used by pharaohs and Nubian kings. Tutankhamun’s death mask is an excellent example; the uraeus’ hood is depicted with six distinct sections that look a lot like wings.


Of course, some scholars cite this as evidence that the Hebrews’ understanding of seraphim was influenced by, or borrowed from, Egyptian cosmology. That’s a common message from skeptics—Israel copied its religion from its neighbors. We’ll deal with that later.


The bottom line is this: What Adam and Eve saw in the Garden wasn’t a talking snake, but a nachash—a radiant, divine entity, very likely of serpentine appearance.


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Now, since you’re paying attention, you’ll remember that the divine rebel in Eden, the nachash of Genesis 3, was called a guardian cherub in Ezekiel 28. As we just showed you, nachash and saraph, the singular form of seraphim, are interchangeable terms. But if the rebel in Eden was one of the seraphim, how could he also be one of the cherubim?


Good question. Cherubim are mentioned more frequently in the Old Testament than the seraphim. They are usually referenced in descriptions of the mercy seat on top of the Ark of the Testimony or carved decorations in the Temple built by Solomon. The exceptions are the cherubim who guard the entrance to Eden and the four cherubim Ezekiel saw in his famous “wheel within a wheel” vision by the Chebar canal.


The modern image of cherubim has been shaped by artists in the Middle Ages—cute, chubby little boys with dinky wings who filled up the empty space in religious paintings. Nothing could be further from the biblical and archaeological truth.


 Cherubim are seriously bad dudes you do not want to mess with. For more, see Josh Peck’s book Cherubim Chariots.


The cherubim of the mercy seat are usually shown as a matched pair of plainly recognizable angels perched on top of the ark with their outstretched wings touching in the middle. The Bible doesn’t describe these cherubim, telling us only that they have wings and faces. Why? Apparently, everybody in the 15th century B.C. was familiar with what a cherub looked like, and they knew it was right and proper for them to serve as Yahweh’s throne-bearers. You see, God appeared to men above the mercy seat “enthroned on the cherubim.”  (See Numbers 7:89; 1 Samuel 4:4; 2 Samuel 6:2: Psalms 80:1 and 99:1; and Isaiah 37:16.)


But the cherubim that Ezekiel saw looked like something from a nightmare:

Quote :

…this was their appearance: they had a human likeness, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot. And they sparkled like burnished bronze.
Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. And the four had their faces and their wings thus: their wings touched one another. Each one of them went straight forward, without turning as they went.
As for the likeness of their faces, each had a human face. The four had the face of a lion on the right side, the four had the face of an ox on the left side, and the four had the face of an eagle.
Such were their faces. And their wings were spread out above. Each creature had two wings, each of which touched the wing of another, while two covered their bodies. And each went straight forward. Wherever the spirit would go, they went, without turning as they went.
As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire, like the appearance of torches moving to and fro among the living creatures. And the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning.
And the living creatures darted to and fro, like the appearance of a flash of lightning.
Ezekiel 1:5-14 (ESV), emphasis added

While these living creatures aren’t identified as cherubim in these verses, they are specifically called cherubim in Ezekiel 10.


So how do we read this? These creatures sound nothing like the shining serpentine seraphim. What’s even more confusing is the description Ezekiel gives of another type of angelic being, the ophanim—the wheels that UFO hunters love to call spacecraft.


 They seem to be related somehow to the cherubim:

Quote :

And I looked, and behold, there were four wheels beside the cherubim, one beside each cherub, and the appearance of the wheels was like sparkling beryl. And as for their appearance, the four had the same likeness, as if a wheel were within a wheel. When they went, they went in any of their four directions without turning as they went, but in whatever direction the front wheel faced, the others followed without turning as they went. And their whole body, their rims, and their spokes, their wings, and the wheels were full of eyes all around—the wheels that the four of them had. As for the wheels, they were called in my hearing “the whirling wheels.”
And every one had four faces: the first face was the face of the cherub, and the second face was a human face, and the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.
Ezekiel 10:9-14 (ESV), emphasis added

Wait—the ophanim had the face of a cherub and the face of a human? What’s the difference? Why a cherub instead of an ox for the fourth face? Is there some connection between the cherub and the ox?


Well… maybe. The word cherub probably comes from the Akkadian karibu (the “ch” should be a hard “k” sound, although we English speakers don’t usually say it that way). It means “intercessor” or “one who prays.” The karibu were usually portrayed as winged bulls with human faces, and huge statues of the karibu were set up as divine guardians at the entrances of palaces and temples. This is like the role of the cherubim placed “at the east of the garden of Eden… to guard the way to the tree of life.” 
(Genesis 3:24, ESV)


This is speculation, but the divine rebel in Eden, the anointed guardian cherub, might have protected the tree of life once upon a time.


Cherubim were the gold standard for guarding royalty in the ancient Near East. In Assyria they were called lamassu, and the Akkadians called them shedu. They were sometimes depicted as winged lions rather than bulls and they were often incorporated into the thrones of kings.


So the function of the biblical cherubim, guarding the tree of life and carrying the throne of God, was entirely consistent with what the neighbors of the Israelites knew about these beings. Based on archaeological finds in the Levant (modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel), the cherub was probably more like a winged sphinx than a humanoid with wings.


In other words, the presence of the cherubim in the Bible wasn’t something the Hebrew prophets just made up. The cherubim were known by different names by the other cultures of the ancient Near East, but they served a similar role in all of them.


 The cherubim were supernatural bodyguards for the throne of Yahweh, and their imagery was appropriated by earthly kings. A bit of hubris, no doubt encouraged as a PSYOP by the Enemy. Remember, “you shall be as gods.”
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The consequences of the rebellion in Eden were immediate and harsh:

Quote :

The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.
I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” […]
Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—”
[T]herefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
Genesis 3:14-15, 22-24 (ESV)

For centuries, well-meaning Christians have pointed to Genesis 3:14 as the moment in history when snakes lost their legs. That misses the mark entirely by desupernaturalizing the story. God didn’t amputate the legs of snakes; He was describing the punishment the nachash would suffer in figurative language. Even casual observers of the animal kingdom know that snakes don’t eat dust.


What happened was this:  The nachash was cast down from the peak of the supernatural realm, “full of wisdom and perfect in beauty,” to become lord of the dead.


What a comedown! Isaiah 14 makes a lot more sense when you keep a supernatural worldview in mind:

Quote :

Sheol beneath is stirred up
to meet you when you come;
it rouses the shades to greet you,
all who were leaders of the earth;
it raises from their thrones
all who were kings of the nations.
All of them will answer
and say to you:
‘You too have become as weak as we!
You have become like us!
Isaiah 14:9-10 (ESV)

Remember these verses because we’ll come back to them later in this series. The “shades” referenced by Isaiah are the Rephaim (root word rapha), a mysterious group mentioned several times in the Old Testament. The Rephaim weren’t an invention of the Hebrews, either. They were well known to their neighbors. We’ll examine them more closely a forthcoming article in this series.


For Adam and Eve, the banishment affected the two of them and all their descendants through the present day. Instead of living with God as members of His council, we humans have struggled for millennia to make sense of a world that often seems to make no sense. The memory of our brief time in the garden of God has echoed down the centuries, and it may be the source of our belief that mountains are somehow special, reserved for the gods.


The main takeaway of this article is this:  Eden was a lush, well-watered garden “on the holy mountain of God,” which was where Yahweh presided over His divine council.


 The council included the first humans. They walked and talked with the supernatural “sons of God” who, based on clues scattered throughout the Bible, were beautiful, radiant beings. At least some of them were serpentine in appearance.


The long war between Yahweh and the sons of God who rebelled is not just about control of the spirit realm, it’s also about whether humanity will be restored to its rightful place in the seat of the gods—among the divine council on the Holy Mountain of God.


COMING UP NEXT: Was Eden on Mt. Hermon!?

This is a good one! Can't wait to hear the rest.

Mount Hermon


While the early Sumerians were figuring out how to grow crops without rain, interesting things—historic things—were happening far to the northwest. The second peak in the chronological list of spiritually strategic holy mountains is Mount Hermon.


Hermon is the highest, most majestic peak in the Levant. At 9,200 feet above sea level, it dominates the Golan Heights on the border between Israel and Syria, anchoring the southern end of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. It has been considered sacred for most of human history.


Mount Hermon was a holy site as far back as the old Babylonian period, nearly two millennia before Christ, and probably even earlier. In the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic, which dates to the 18th century B.C. (roughly the time of Jacob), “Hermon and Lebanon” were called “the secret dwelling of the Anunnaki.” The Ninevite version of the poem, written about 600 years later, describes the monster slain by Gilgamesh, Humbaba (or Huwawa), as the guardian of “the abode of the gods.”[i]
The Anunnaki were the seven chief gods of the Sumerian pantheon: Anu, the sky god; Enlil, god of the air; Enki, god of the earth; Ninhursag, mother goddess of the mountains; Inanna (Babylonian Ishtar), goddess of sex and war; Sîn, the moon god; and Utu, the sun god. They are mentioned in texts found in what is today southeastern Iraq that date back to the 27th century B.C. So the more recent versions of the Gilgamesh story from Babylon and Nineveh may remember more ancient traditions.


The name Hermon appears to be based on a root word that means “taboo,” similar to the Hebrew word kherem, or “devoted to destruction.” The word is often translated into English as “under the ban.”


The first appearance of the word in the Bible is Exodus 22:20: “Whoever sacrifices to any god, other than the Lord alone, shall be devoted to destruction (kherem).” But the ban wasn’t just invoked against disobedient Israelites. Some of the inhabitants of Canaan were also declared kherem by Yahweh—specifically those that were known to be giants, or at least descended from giants.


That begs the question:  Where did the giants come from?  A curious episode is recorded in the first four verses of Genesis chapter 6:

Quote :

When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.”
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
Genesis 6:1-4 (ESV)

Scholars have debated the meaning of the term “Nephilim” for millennia. Most believe it comes from a Hebrew root, napal, meaning “to fall” or “cast down”—literally, “fallen ones.”


However, Bible and ancient language scholar Dr. Michael S. Heiser, author of the excellent book The Unseen Realm (highly recommended) and the new book Reversing Hermon (ditto), contends that this cannot be correct:

Quote :

The form nephilim cannot mean “fallen ones” (the spelling would then be nephulim). Likewise nephilim does not mean “those who fall” or “those who fall away” (that would be nophelim). The only way in Hebrew to get nephilim from naphal by the rules of Hebrew morphology (word formation) would be to presume a noun spelled naphil and then pluralize it. I say “presume” since this noun does not exist in biblical Hebrew — unless one counts Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33, the two occurrences of nephilim — but that would then be assuming what one is trying to prove! However, in Aramaic the noun naphil(a) does exist. It means “giant,” making it easy to see why the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) translated nephilim as gigantes (“giant”).[ii]

In short, the Jewish scholars who translated the Old Testament into Greek about two hundred years before the birth of Jesus clearly understood that the Nephilim were giants, not just men who “fell away” from God.


Likewise, the Hebrew words translated “sons of God” in the passage, bene elohim, refer to divine beings, not mortal men. Now, that hasn’t been the consensus among Christian scholars since about the 5th century, thanks to the great theologian Augustine. He popularized the “sons of Seth” theory to explain away the weird supernatural element of the passages above. In short, the Sethite view is that the sons of God were men from the godly, righteous line of Seth who began intermarrying with women from the corrupt, wicked line of Cain.


Frankly, this defies logic on several points:


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[*]How likely is it that all the Sethite men were good while all the Cainite women were bad?
[/list]

• We’re supposed to believe Cainite men never married Sethite women?
  

• Why would these unions produce Nephilim, understood to be giants by Jewish rabbis and early Christians alike?
  

• Why would these unions lead to wickedness so great that God had to wipe out everything that walked the earth except Noah, his family, and the creatures in the ark?
  

• Every other use of bene elohim in the Hebrew scriptures refers to divine beings.
  

Problems with the supernatural understanding of the text usually focus on whether angels and humans could successfully produce children.  Proponents of the Sethite view often point to Jesus’ teaching on the resurrection of the dead:

Quote :

For in the resurrection [people] neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
Matthew 22:30 (ESV)

The key words are “in the resurrection” and “in heaven.” Noah’s neighbors were flesh and blood, not resurrected, and the angels who “came in to the daughters of man” were most definitely not in heaven.


There are several examples in the Bible of divine beings interacting with humans in physical ways—eating, drinking, and even engaging in a dustup in front of the house of Lot (Genesis 19:5-11). Why couldn’t they procreate as well?


The final nails in the coffin of the Sethite view are the references to this event in the New Testament. Both Peter and Jude refer to the only example in scripture where angels transgressed:

Quote :

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly;
2 Peter 2:4 (ESV), emphasis added
 
And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day—just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.
Jude 6-7 (ESV), emphasis added

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If there was any doubt about what the angels did that deserved punishment, Peter and Jude clarified things by specifically identifying the sin of the angels as sexual by linking it to the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah. Crossing the species barrier between angel and human is just as taboo as the barrier between human and animal.


It is significant that the phrase translated “cast them into hell” in 2 Peter 2:4 is the Greek word tartaroo, a verb meaning “thrust down to Tartarus.” This is the only time in the New Testament that the word is used, meaning it requires special attention. 


Tartarus was separate from Hades, a place of torture and torment even lower than Hades in Greek cosmology. It was believed to be as far below Hades as Earth is below Heaven. And Peter, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, chose that word to describe the punishment reserved for the angels who had engaged in illicit sexual relations with human women. Stick a mental bookmark there because we’ll have to come back to this.


The extra-biblical books of Enoch and Jubilees expand on the story, adding detail and context that’s not in the Bible. Mount Hermon is where two hundred Watchers, a class of angelic being mentioned in chapter 4 of the book of Daniel, descended and began cavorting with human women. From these unions came the Nephilim, the giants of Genesis 6.


The Watchers, according to Enoch, were led by Semjâzâ, who was apparently worried that he’d take the fall for what they were about to do:

Quote :

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And Semjâzâ, who was their leader, said unto them: ‘I fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed, and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin.’  And they all answered him and said: ‘Let us all swear an oath, and all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan but to do this thing.’  Then sware they all together and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. And they were in all two hundred; who descended ⌈in the days⌉ of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon…

The Book of Enoch 6:3-6a (R.H. Charles translation)

The trade offered by the Watchers was knowledge, just as it was in Eden. In exchange for the pleasures of the flesh, Semjâzâ and his minions offered charms and enchantments, astrology, the art of making weapons, cosmetics, and writing, among other things—presumably arts humans would have developed or discovered over time rather than downloaded on society all at once.


However, the giant offspring of these unholy unions, the Nephilim, pillaged the Earth and endangered humanity. They consumed everything men had. When that wasn’t enough, they began eating people and even each other. Enoch describes the giants as creatures of insatiable desire who threatened to terminate the bloodline of the future Messiah by violence—and, apparently, by corrupting the human genome.


The Book of Jasher suggests that the transgression of the Watchers and the Nephilim went beyond corrupting humankind, including “the mixture of animals of one species with the other” (Jasher 4:18).


We can only speculate what that was about. Was this where the legends of chimeric beings like centaurs and satyrs began?  Or were they legends at all?  But we do know that Yahweh sent a flood that rid the earth of all flesh except for the eight people and the animals aboard the ark. The Watchers who started it all, according to Peter and Jude, are chained in Tartarus, and they’ll stay there until “the judgment of the great day.”


But Mount Hermon’s role in history didn’t end with the flood of Noah. Another group of fallen bene elohim set up shop on the mountain after the showdown at Babel.


According to Belgian scholar Edward Lipinski, Hermon was known to the ancient world not only as the secret dwelling place of the Anunnaki, it was the mountain of the divine assembly of the northwest Semitic god El, the creator god of their pantheon.

[iii] Mount Hermon is where El held court with his consort Asherah and the “seventy sons of El.”


Remember that number. We will see it again.


El was a name that came to be used in Hebrew as a generic term for “god”—El, Elohim, El Elyon, etc. It’s possible that the epithet El Shaddai, possibly meaning “god of the mountain,” was applied first to El. Another Mesopotamian god, Amurru, was called “Bel Šade,” or “lord of the mountain.” (The š sounds like “sh.”) This was another PSYOP by the Fallen—appropriating a name by which Yahweh identified Himself to confuse things. In Exodus, Yahweh told Moses that it was by the name El Shaddai, usually rendered “God Almighty” in our English Bibles, that He introduced Himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Exodus 6:3). That’s why Jacob became Isra-el, not Isra-yahu.


Of course, skeptics take this to mean that Jews and Christians are confused about who we worship. It’s actually El, they claim, and the followers of Yahweh are so dense we’ve gotten it wrong for the last 3,500 years. In point of fact, however, it’s the skeptics who have fallen for another PSYOP by the Enemy, who don’t care what we believe as long as it’s not the one thing that’s true.


But make no mistake: El of the Canaanites was not Yahweh of Israel, and Yahweh was not El. In the Canaanite pantheon, El was a figurehead. Real power was wielded by Ba`al, the king of the gods. In the Canaanite myths, there was a power struggle between the gods over who would hold that title, and El didn’t seem to have the power or the will to just pick a winner. Neither did he seem all that interested in ruling himself. If you had to pick a word to describe El, it would be “semi-retired.”


That is definitely not the God of the Bible.


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One of the fascinating aspects of the story of Gilgamesh is that archaeologists generally consider him a real, historic character. In 2003, a team digging at the site of ancient Uruk believed they’d found the tomb of Gilgamesh beneath what was the former course of the Euphrates River—but their discovery came a month after the United States military invaded Iraq in 2003, which put a stop to the dig.


Scholars have known for years that there are parallels in Mesopotamian legend and the biblical accounts of the patriarchs. Enoch is similar to an antediluvian king named Enmeduranki, and Noah is variously called Utnapishtim (Babylon), Ziusudra (Sumer), and Atra-Hasis (Akkad), depending on which culture wrote the story. But even those accounts are part of a supernatural PSYOP. For example:  The accounts from Mesopotamia portray Gilgamesh as a mighty warrior, a hero, two-thirds god and one-third man. He has adventures and slays monsters, notably Humbaba, or Huwawa, the defender of the faraway cedar forest who’d been assigned to terrorize humans by the god Enlil.


Scholars believe Humbaba might also have been pronounced “huwawa.” Dr. David Livingston, founder of Associates for Biblical Research, points out that Huwawa sounds a lot like Yahweh. If he’s right, then it’s possible we’ve discovered another Enemy PSYOP:  The real mission of Gilgamesh, as the Fallen wanted Mesopotamians to understand it, was to kill the monstrous guardian of the secret home of the gods—Yahweh.


In our first article, we showed how the anointed guardian cherub of Eden, the nachash who lured Adam and Eve into sin, was cast down from God’s holy mountain to become lord of the dead. We will show in a future article in this series why Jesus chose Mount Hermon for several very specific incidents—strategic events aimed at the rebellious bene elohim. So to avoid repeating ourselves, we’ll hold some information back until later in this series. But we’ll share this: The people of the ancient world knew that Bashan, the kingdom of Og at the base of Mount Hermon, was the literal entrance of the netherworld.


Consider this: Is it possible that the foul reputation of Mount Hermon and the region of Bashan grew out of an historic event—the literal fall from Eden, God’s holy mountain, by the rebel who was cast down by God?


Many scholars have noted the similarities between Eden and the garden of the gods sought by Gilgamesh, the secret dwelling place of the Anunnaki. If Hermon was Eden, it could explain why the rebellious gods who want to establish their own mount of assembly have been drawn to it—to defile it—since the beginning of time.


COMING UP NEXT: Are YOU Ready for the Battle Royal!

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT set to air on network television mid February through mid-March (2017). This series and the forthcoming programs will center on two groundbreaking books (to be released Match 7) — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert.


 These reports and entries will unveil what most in the modern Church have never heard regarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.





They were here once before. Is the time of their return at hand?


Life after Eden must have been a crushing disappointment for early humans, especially the First Couple. Forget about the burden of living under the curse—toiling to coax enough food from the ground to survive, the pain of bringing new life into the world, and all the rest. The realization that they had disappointed their Creator and condemned their children and their children’s children until the end of time to lives apart from Yahweh must have been nearly unbearable.


The Bible gives us very little on the rest of their lives. We only know the names of three of their children: Cain, Abel, and Seth. There must have been others and at least two of them were girls, because Cain and Seth both married and had children of their own. (See? The old question, “Where did Cain find his wife?” isn’t that hard to answer.)


It’s understood that secular archaeologists and historians won’t agree with much of what we believe about human history. That’s okay. We Bible-believing Christians don’t reject science when we interpret data through a biblical lens. Science is the process by which we collect and record information to test theories about the way things are.


 Analysis is what we do with that information after it’s collected. It’s not the science we often question, it’s the analysis.


Scholars do agree, however, that civilization emerged in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 B.C. (Note: We’re using dates that are generally accepted by a consensus of scholars so we don’t get bogged down arguing about the timeline. That’s outside the scope of what we’re trying to do here.)  Agriculture, cities, writing, trade, science, and organized religion all developed in a broad arc that stretched from Egypt through the Levant and down into Mesopotamia.


This civilization is called the Ubaid culture by scholars. That’s not what the people who lived in it called it, of course; we don’t know what they called themselves because they never invented writing. The Ubaid civilization got its name from Tell al-`Ubaid, a small settlement mound in southeast Iraq where famous archaeologists Henry Hall and Sir Leonard Woolley dug up the first bits of pottery from those people between 1919 and 1924.





Map of Ubaid civilization sites in Sumer (credit John D. Croft / CC-BY-SA-3.0).


This happens a lot with prehistoric cultures. The names of their entire civilizations are accidents of discovery, coming from wherever the first archaeologist, bored shepherd, or greedy tomb raider found the first bit of evidence from people we’d never heard of before. Let’s just hope when archaeologists 8,000 years from now discover the remains of our civilization, it’s not by stumbling across the shell of a Wawa or a Piggly Wiggly.


Archaeologists who study the Ubaid culture agree that it spread from Eridu in southeast Iraq, eventually going as far as what is today northwest Iran, northern Syria, southern Turkey, and the Levant (Syria/Lebanon/Jordan/Israel). The Ubaid civilization was typified by large unwalled villages, rectangular multi-room mud-brick houses, high quality pottery, and the first public temples. Crop irrigation developed by about 5000 B.C., so cereals and grains could grow in the dry climate that again dominated the region. The first city in Mesopotamia, and therefore the oldest city in the world, appeared around 5400 B.C. Although agricultural settlements like Jericho (c. 9000 B.C.) and Jarmo, east of modern-day Kirkuk in Iraq (c. 7100 B.C.) are older, Eridu, located in what is today southeastern Iraq, was remembered by later Sumerians as the first city, with a degree of specialization among its citizens not seen before in other settlements.


The Sumerian King List, dated to about 2100 B.C., records it this way:

Quote :

After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu. In Eridu, Alulim became king; he ruled for 28,800 years.⁠1

Interestingly, the Bible may actually support this account.

Quote :

Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. When he built a city, he called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad, and Irad fathered Mehujael, and Mehujael fathered Methushael, and Methushael fathered Lamech.
Genesis 4:16-18 (ESV), emphasis added

Some scholars, such as Egyptologist David Rohl, believe it’s possible that the “he” in the second sentence refers to Enoch, not Cain. The last word, Enoch, might be a later addition. In that case the builder of the city was Enoch, and the city was named for his son, Irad—hence, Eridu.


To speculate a little further, we can apply a rudimentary translation to the name Alulim and come up with “fourth man” (A = prefix + lu = “man” + lim, a contraction of limmu = “four”). Again, this is speculative and it may be way off base so don’t take it as gospel. But if it’s correct, then Alulim might have been Irad, the “fourth man,” or fourth generation, after creation—Adam, Cain, Enoch, Irad—and the first king of the first city on Earth, Eridu—the city which bore his name.


Regardless of its origins, what is most interesting about Eridu is that besides being the oldest city in Mesopotamia, and possibly the world, is that was also the home of the oldest and largest ziggurat in Mesopotamia. This was the temple of one of the most important gods of the ancient Near East. He was known as Enki to the Sumerians and Ea to the later Akkadians and Babylonians. Enki was the god of the sweet waters needed for life. He was depicted with two streams of water flowing from his shoulders that represented the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the main sources of fresh water in Mesopotamia.


Along with An (or Anu) the sky god and Enlil, the god of the air, Enki was one of the three most important gods in Sumer. He arrived very early in Sumer from Dilmun, probably the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. In fact, the Sumerians believed Enki personally created Eridu, elevating it from the marshy ground on what was then the shore of the gulf.


Enki was the god of magic, craftsmanship, and wisdom. Although Enlil was the king of the gods, Enki was the keeper of the mes (sounds like “mezz”), decrees of the gods that formed the fundamental concepts and gifts of civilization—everything from religious practices to social interaction to music.


The Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, describes how everything on Earth came into being through the defeat of the chaos goddess Tiamat by Marduk, son of Enki/Ea, the chief god of Babylon. However, the older Sumerian story credits Enki with giving life to all things, including mankind, and names Enlil the slayer of Tiamat.


The differences in the story are at least partly due to the ebb and flow of power over the centuries. Each city in Mesopotamia had a patron god or goddess. The importance of a deity was, as you’d guess, tied to the fortunes of its city. Just as Eridu was the home of Enki, Enlil was chief deity at Nippur, Inanna (Ishtar) was supreme at Uruk, the sun god Utu was the patron deity of Sippar, and so on. To give you an idea of the incredible amount of time we’re dealing with, Enki ruled in Eridu for about 3,500 years before Marduk replaced Enlil at the head of the Mesopotamian pantheon, an event linked to Babylon’s emergence as the region’s dominant power in the 18th century B.C.


That’s about the same amount of time that’s passed between Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt and you reading this sentence.


This essay is not in any way a thorough review of life, culture, or religion in ancient Mesopotamia, but there is one more aspect of life in the ancient Near East to call to your attention. It’s something we usually only hear about from fringe pseudo-scholars who blame the phenomenon on extraterrestrials. Scholars—archaeologists and sociologists—have known at least since the late 1940s that people throughout Mesopotamia, before they learned how to write, figured out how to turn their children into coneheads.


It appears, based on human remains dated to between about 10,000 B.C. and 3500 B.C., that cranial deformation was widespread in the Ubaid culture, and Eridu—the world’s first city, possibly built by Cain or his son—was Ground Zero for head shaping. An archaeological dig at Eridu just after World War II discovered about a thousand bodies that were buried during the Ubaid. Of the 206 sets of remains the archaeologists exhumed, “all of the crania had been deformed in one fashion or another.”⁠2


Got that? 206 out of 206. Not a few, and not just the elites. It appears that everybody from every strata of the Eridu culture had a deformed skull.


Now, instead of asking why, the lead archaeologist decided “earth pressure” after burial was the cause—even though none of the skulls were cracked or broken, which would be expected if the deformations had occurred after death.


Evidence of head shaping has been found at sites all over Iraq, southwestern Iran, eastern Turkey, the valleys of the Zagros mountains, and the western shores of the Persian Gulf, dated from 7500 B.C. to about 4000 B.C. After that, the practice seems to disappear.


Hmm. If we place a global flood sometime between 4000 and 3500 B.C….





Deformed crania from the Ubaid site at Seyh Höyük in Turkey (photo by Kirsi O. Lorentz).
 
The big question is why this was even a thing. Please understand that we’re not suggesting that these were genetic mutations or part-human Nephilim, the angel-human hybrids mentioned in Genesis 6 (although the Nephilim would have been around during at least part of this time). But who wakes up one morning in 7000 B.C. and decides to wrap something around baby’s skull to see if it makes his head pointy?
What inspires that? And why was Eridu the starting point for this?


A study published in the academic journal Paléorient in 1992 concluded that the practice of head-shaping, which is found around the world, must have originated in the Near East because it was so widespread there. However, the researchers believed the deformation was not necessarily intentional, but probably “incidental to patterns of head-gear.”⁠3


Really? For more than six thousand years our ancestors accidentally forced their babies to wear head-gear so tight it deformed their skulls?


Here’s another bit of data to chew on. At Eridu and nearby sites in ancient pre-flood southern Sumer, and only there, archaeologists have found about 120 terracotta figurines scholars call “ophidian.” That’s fancy talk for snake-like. They’re slender bipeds, adorned with button-like protuberances, more often female than male, and often in poses that are exclusively mammalian—for example, a female lizard-like figure suckling an infant.





Ophidian figurines made from terracotta and bitumen. Female found at Ur in 1931, male at Eridu in 1948-49. Drawing of female based on object #31-16-733 at Penn Museum; male figurine was on display at the National Museum of Iraq.


The aforementioned scholars pointed out in their paper that there had been no serious study of those figurines and what they meant to the ancients, and no scholarly literature on the origins of human cranial deformation (at least as of their writing in 1992).


Why might that be?


While there hasn’t been much scholarly attention paid to the snake-like figurines, there have been several papers published within the last ten years on head-shaping in the ancient Near East. Still no conclusions on why or how it got started, but it’s clear that the people who lived in the region—descendants of the refugees from Eden—made a habit of this odd practice.


We’ll never know for sure, but we can speculate: The people who formed the earliest human civilizations copied a look that someone, somewhere had seen and decided was a physical ideal. What motivates modern-day teens to wear the clothes and hairstyles they do? Except that this particular fashion statement didn’t change with the seasons—it appears to have been worn by nearly everybody for more than 6,000 years!


It’s not likely that this was a simple fashion statement. However it started, this was apparently a practice that was believed to convey some advantage.


Think back to what we discussed about the serpentine nachash and seraphim, and remember that at least one of them rebelled against Yahweh. Is it possible that the citizens of the prehistoric Near East were trying to curry favor with a god?


#


Now, if we haven’t already, here is where we may run off the rails.  But let’s run through one more theory, look at the evidence, and see if it makes sense.


As mentioned earlier, Eridu is considered by archaeologists to be the center of the Ubaid culture. The Ubaid period is defined as the civilization in the ancient Near East just before the time of Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, roughly between 6500 B.C. and 3800 B.C.  It would have begun not long after Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden.


Now, God wanted humanity to “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28).  It was not for His people to take dominion over each other.  As Jesus told his disciples thousands of years later, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.  It shall not be so among you” (Matthew 20:25-26a).







Just as Adam and Eve were created to work the land, God’s design for humans was to be more or less self-sufficient—growing our own food, tending our own flocks, and helping each other whenever and however we’re needed.  When you live that kind of life, you’re too busy to lord it over your neighbors.  And, frankly, since you’re not depending on handouts for your family’s daily bread, it’s harder for government to lord it over you.  It makes sense that Israel was led by judges in times of trouble during its early years, but a king wasn’t part of the original plan—even though God, who knows the end from the beginning, surely saw what was coming and let the Hebrews make Saul king anyway.


Earlier, we described the main features of the Ubaid civilization.  Archaeologists and sociologists have noticed two other things that emerged during the Ubaid period—first, it was a transition from a rural to an urban society, and second, society became increasingly stratified.


In other words, the evidence—things people were buried with, mainly—shows that as people moved from the country to the city, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.


This period also saw the construction of the first temples in Mesopotamia.  Each city apparently had a temple for its own local god.  And each temple had a granary for collecting the offerings of the commoners.  Of course, this means somebody oversaw who gave how much, and—more importantly—who received how much. 


 Archaeologists and sociologists believe this led to an elite class of hereditary leaders, who may have been the ones doling out the grain from temple granaries.


Substitute income tax and social security control over the grain harvest and rationing, and it’s clear that things haven’t changed all that much in the last 8,000 years.  But I digress.


It’s fair to ask how this situation came about.  We can only speculate since we don’t have any written records to study.  Logically, though, it’s a pretty good guess that entities who’d rebelled against Yahweh at this early stage had set themselves up as gods.  It’s conceivable, based on what we know about angels from the Bible, that one or more of them appeared to the pre-Sumerians and encouraged certain candidates who were receptive to the idea that 1) the gods needed temples, and 2) the temples required priest-kings to oversee offerings and ensure that the gods were pleased.  The result was a civilization where freedom was restricted to the upper class while the peasants worked the land to support them.


We’re speculating, of course, but from the standpoint of the Fallen, breaking civilization into classes was a brilliant PSYOP.  Destroying the world is much easier when you only have to manipulate a handful of useful idiots who can convince the rest to do things your way.


Scholars who study the Ubaid period have concluded that it was a time of increasing disparity between the classes, but they don’t look at the situation through a spiritual lens.  It happened, but why? They analyze factors like climate and technology, but they ignore the possibility that the unseen realm may have guided those changes.


God’s original design was for people to work the land and live free.  As Christians, who should accept the existence of the spirit realm by default, it should be natural for us to ask whether the lesser elohim might have rebelled against Yahweh’s plan for creation, and if so, how that would play out.  If we don’t, you can bet secular historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists won’t bother.


Since the trend during the Ubaid period was toward ever-larger villages with temples of the gods at the center of everyday life, contrary to God’s command to “multiply and fill the earth,” it’s a fair guess that this change was the work of entities who were disloyal to their Creator—and who wanted to destroy the work that He’d called very good.


COMING UP NEXT: Babel, the Abyss, and the Gate of the Gods

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT set to air on network television mid February (2017) through mid-March. This series and the forthcoming programs will center on two groundbreaking books (to be released Match 7) — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert.


 These reports and entries will unveil what most in the modern Church have never heard regarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods, the Titans, and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.





Not all the holy mountains in the history of the world are natural, formed by the shifting of tectonic plates or the sudden, catastrophic opening of “the fountains of the great deep.” The Tower of Babel was one such artificial mountain. Babel was humanity’s attempt to force its way back into the divine council.


At Babel, mankind tried to storm the castle of God.


For generations, well-meaning Bible teachers have presented the story of Babel as an object lesson on the dangers of pride. Those foolish people were so arrogant they thought they could build a tower high enough to reach heaven!


With all due respect to those teachers, that’s an insult to the intelligence of our ancestors, if you think about it. And it’s a disservice to people in church who want to know why Yahweh was so offended by this project. Really? God is that insecure?


Look, if big egos were enough to bring God to Earth, He’d never leave.


Babel was not a matter of God taking down some people who’d gotten too big for their britches. The clue to the sin of Babel is in the name.


Remember, the Hebrew prophets loved to play with language. We often find words in the Bible that sound like the original but make a statement—for example, Beelzebub (“lord of the flies”) instead of Beelzebul (“Ba`al the prince”), or Ish-bosheth (“man of a shameful thing”) instead of Ishbaal (“man of Ba`al”). Likewise, the original Akkadian words bāb ilu, which means “gate of god” or “gate of the gods,” is replaced in the Bible with Babel, which is based on the Hebrew word meaning confusion.


Now, there’s a bit of misinformation that must be corrected about the Tower of Babel. Contrary to what you’ve heard, Babel was not in Babylon.


It’s an easy mistake to make. The names sound alike, and Babylon is easily the most famous city of the ancient world. It’s also got a bad reputation, especially to Jews and Christians. Babylon, under the megalomaniacal king Nebuchadnezzar, sacked the Temple in Jerusalem and carried off the hardware for temple service. It makes sense to assume that a building project so offensive that God personally intervened must have been built at Babylon.


But there’s a problem with linking Babylon to the Tower of Babel: Babylon didn’t exist when the tower was built. It didn’t even become a city until about a thousand years after the tower incident, and even then it was an unimportant village for about another 500 years.


Traditions and sources outside the Bible identify the builder of the tower as the shadowy figure named Nimrod. Our best guess is he lived sometime between 3500 and 3100 B.C., a period of history called the Uruk Expansion. This tracks with what little the Bible tells us about Nimrod. In Genesis 10:10, we read “the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.”


The land of Shinar is Sumer and Erech is Uruk. Uruk was so important to human history that Nimrod’s homeland is still called Uruk, five thousand years later! We just spell it differently—Iraq.


Accad was the capital city of the Akkadians, which still hasn’t been found, but was somewhere between Babylon and ancient Assyria. Babylon itself was northwest of Uruk, roughly three hundred miles from the Persian Gulf in what is today central Iraq.


 But it wasn’t founded until around 2300 B.C., at least 700 years after Nimrod, and it wasn’t Babylon as we think about it until the old Babylonian empire emerged in the early part of the 2nd millennium B.C.


So where should we look for the Tower of Babel?


ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO
DEREK GILBERT EXPLAINS MORE!



The oldest and largest ziggurat in Mesopotamia was at Eridu, the first city built in Mesopotamia. Scholars put its founding at around 5400 B.C. In recent years, scholars have learned that the name Babylon was interchangeable with other city names, including Eridu. So “Babylon” didn’t always refer to the city of Babylon in ancient texts.

Eridu never dominated the political situation in Sumer after the reigns of its first two kings, Alulim and Alalgar. But as the home city of Enki, god of fresh water, wisdom, and magic, Eridu was so important to Mesopotamian culture that more than three thousand years after Alalgar, Hammurabi the Great was crowned not in Babylon, but in Eridu—even though it had ceased to be a city about three hundred years earlier.


Even as late as the time of Nebuchadnezzar, 1,100 years after Hammurabi, the kings of Babylon still sometimes called themselves LUGAL.NUNki—King of Eridu.


Why? What was the deal with Eridu?


Archaeologists have uncovered eighteen levels of the temple to Enki at Eridu. The oldest levels of the E-abzu, a small structure less than ten feet square, date to the founding of the city. And consider that the spot remained sacred to Enki long after the city was deserted around 2000 B.C. The temple remained in use until the 5th century B.C., nearly five thousand years after the first crude altar was built to accept offerings of fish to Enki, the god of the subterranean aquifer, the abzu.


Now, this is where we tell you that abzu (ab = water + zu = deep) is very likely where we get our English word “abyss.” And the name Enki is a compound word. En is Sumerian for “lord,” and ki is the word for “earth.” Thus, Enki, god of the abzu, was “lord of the earth.”


Do you remember Jesus calling someone “the ruler of this world?”  Or Paul referring to “the god of this world?”  Who were they talking about?


Yeah. Satan.



Here’s another piece to our puzzle:  Nimrod was second generation after the flood. His father was Cush, son of Ham, son of Noah.


In Sumerian history, the second king of Uruk after the flood was named Enmerkar, son of Mesh-ki-ang-gasher.


Enmerkar is also a compound word. The prefix en means “lord” and the suffix kar is Sumerian for “hunter.” So Enmerkar was Enmer the Hunter. Sound familiar?

Quote :

Cush fathered Nimrod; he was the first on earth to be a mighty man.
He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore it is said, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the Lord.”
Genesis 10:8-9 (ESV), emphasis added

The Hebrews, doing what they loved to do with language, transformed Enmer—the consonants N-M-R (remember, no vowels in ancient Hebrew)—into Nimrod, which makes it sound like marad, the Hebrew word for “rebel.”





Giant Gilgamesh clutching lion. Was he Nimrod or a successor?


Now, get this:  An epic poem from about 2000 B.C. called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta preserves the basic details of the Tower of Babel story, including the confusion of language among the people of Sumer.


We don’t know exactly where Aratta was, but guesses range from northern Iran to Armenia. (Which would be interesting. Not only is Armenia located near the center of an ancient kingdom called Urartu, which may be a cognate for Aratta, it’s where Noah landed his boat—the mountains of Ararat. So it’s possible Nimrod/Enmerkar was trying to intimidate the people—his cousins, basically—who settled near where his great-grandfather landed the ark. But we just don’t know.)  Wherever it was, Enmerkar muscled this neighboring kingdom to compel them to send building materials for a couple of projects near and dear to his heart.


Besides building a fabulous temple for Inanna, the goddess of, well, prostitutes, Enmerkar/Nimrod also wanted to expand and upgrade Enki’s abzu—the abyss.

Quote :

“Let the people of Aratta bring down for me the mountain stones from their mountain, build the great shrine for me, erect the great abode for me, make the great abode, the abode of the gods, famous for me, make my me prosper in Kulaba, make the abzu grow for me like a holy mountain, make Eridug (Eridu) gleam for me like the mountain range, cause the abzu shrine to shine forth for me like the silver in the lode. When in the abzu I utter praise, when I bring the me from Eridug, when, in lordship, I am adorned with the crown like a purified shrine, when I place on my head the holy crown in Unug Kulaba, then may the …… of the great shrine bring me into the jipar, and may the …… of the jipar bring me into the great shrine. May the people marvel admiringly, and may Utu (the sun god) witness it in joy.”1
(Emphasis added)

That’s the issue Yahweh had with it right there. This tower project wasn’t about hubris or pride–it was to build the abode of the gods right on top of the abzu.


Could Nimrod have succeeded? Ask yourself: Why did Yahweh find it necessary to personally put a stop to it? A lot of magnificent pagan temples were built in the ancient world, many of them copying the pyramid-like shape of the ziggurats, from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica. Why did God stop this one?


We can only speculate, of course, but God had a good reason or we wouldn’t have a record of it in the Bible. Calling Babel a sin of pride is easy, but it drains the story of its spiritual and supernatural context.


In the view of this author, the evidence is compelling. It’s time to correct the history we’ve been taught since Sunday School:  Babel was not at Babylon, it was at Eridu.


 The tower was the temple of the god Enki, Lord of the Earth, the god of the abyss. Its purpose was to create an artificial mount of assembly, the abode of the gods, to which humans had access.


That was something that Yahweh could not allow.



The end of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta is mostly missing, but it appears that Enmerkar ultimately triumphed over his rival. Other stories suggest that Enmerkar later marched the army of Uruk to Aratta and conquered it.


This is consistent with archaeological evidence of the Uruk Expansion, which covers the period from about 3500 B.C. to about 3100 B.C. Although scholars usually downplay the violence that created the world’s first empire, Uruk spread its influence as far away as northwest Iran and southeastern Turkey. Pottery from Uruk has been found are more than 500 miles away from the city. To put it into context, Uruk at its peak controlled more territory than Iraq under Saddam Hussein.


This was not always a peaceful endeavor. An ancient city called Hamoukar in northeast Syria was destroyed and burned by an army from Uruk sometime around 3500 B.C.


 Scholars have identified the origin of the army by the pottery they left behind.


 Hamoukar was overwhelmed and then burned by attackers who used clay bullets fired from slings to defeat the city’s defenders. Strangely, what appears to have been a trading post from Uruk outside the city was destroyed, too, suggesting that maybe the men sent by Uruk to keep the locals in line had gone native.


That was how the kingdom of Nimrod obtained materials like jewels, copper, silver, lead, gold, timber, wine, and other things that were scarce in the plains of Sumer.


Of course, there is no way we’ll ever know for certain that Nimrod was Enmerkar, and that he was responsible for the Uruk Expansion—which is a nice way of describing the process of conquering everybody within a two-month march of home. Artifacts from Uruk are found everywhere in the Near East, especially a type of pottery called the beveled-rim bowl. This is significant because it offers a glimpse into the way the society of Uruk was organized.


Scholars have found that the society just before the Uruk period, the Ubaid culture, became more stratified as people moved from rural settlements to cities. The Ubaid civilization produced high-quality pottery, identified by black geometric designs on buff or green-colored ceramic. In contrast, around 3500 B.C., the Uruk culture developed the world’s first mass-produced product, the beveled-rim bowl.


The beveled-rim bowl is crude compared to the pottery from the Ubaid culture, but archaeologists have found a lot of them. About three-quarters of all pottery found at Uruk period sites are beveled-rim bowls. Scholars agree that these simple, undecorated bowls were made in molds rather than on wheels, and that they were probably used to measure out barley and oil for workers’ rations.


The way they were produced left the hardened clay too porous to hold liquids like water or beer. (Yes, the Sumerians brewed beer. Enki’s alternate name, Nudimmud, is a compound word: nu = “likeness” + dim = “make” + mud = “beer.” One could argue that Enki is the spirit of our age.)  The bowls were cheap and easy to make, so much so that they may have been disposable. At some archaeological sites, large numbers of used, unbroken bowls have been found in big piles. Basically, these cheap bowls were the Sumerian version of Styrofoam fast-food containers.


The concept of measuring out rations implies an employer or controlling central authority responsible for doling out grain and oil to laborers. It’s not a coincidence that the development of these crude bowls happened alongside Uruk’s emergence as an empire. After the flood, which we theorize marked the end of the Ubaid period, people again gravitated to urban settlements where they apparently exchanged their freedom for government rations.


It looks like that’s how Nimrod and his successors, including Gilgamesh, controlled their subjects—moving them off the land and into cities, keeping a tight rein on the means of production and distribution of food and resources.


Now, it’s possible we’re reading more into the evidence than is truly there. It could be that the beveled-rim bowl was nothing more than an easy way for people to carry lunch to work. Will future archaeologists conclude that Americans were paid in carry-out hamburgers because of the billions of Styrofoam containers in our landfills?


Still, given the unprecedented growth of the Uruk empire between about 3500 B.C. and 3100 B.C., it’s not going too far to speculate that the use of mass-produced ration bowls was a symptom of the stratification of society under the rule of Nimrod/Enmerkar and his successors. As in the Ubaid culture, citizens of Uruk found themselves working for hereditary leaders—kings, who justified their rule as ordained by the gods.
As an example, the Sumerian myth Enki and Inanna tells the story of how the divine gifts of civilization, the mes (sounds like “mezz”), were stolen from Enki by the Inanna and transferred from Eridu to Uruk. Enki, always ready for a romp with a goddess, tried to ply Inanna with beer. She maintained her virtue while Enki got drunk, offering her gift after gift as his heart grew merry and his mind grew dim. When he awoke the next day with a hangover, Inanna and the mes were no longer in the abzu. The enraged god sent out his horrible gallu demons (sometimes translated “sea monsters”) to retrieve them, but Inanna escaped and arrived safely back at Uruk, where she dispensed the hundred or so mes to the cheers of a grateful city. Enki realized he’d been duped and accepted a treaty of everlasting peace with Uruk. This tale may be a bit of religious propaganda to justify the transfer of political authority to Uruk.





One more thing:  We mentioned earlier that archaeologists at Eridu have found 18 construction layers at the site of Enki’s temple. Some of those layers are below an eight-foot deposit of silt from a massive flood. The most impressive layer of construction, called Temple 1, was huge, a temple on a massive platform with evidence of an even larger foundation that would have risen up to almost the height of the temple itself.


Here’s the thing:  Temple 1 was never finished. At the peak of the builders’ architectural achievement, Eridu was suddenly and completely abandoned.

Quote :

.”.. the Uruk Period … appears to have been brought to a conclusion by no less an event than the total abandonment of the site. … In what appears to have been an almost incredibly short time, drifting sand had filled the deserted buildings of the temple-complex and obliterated all traces of the once prosperous little community.”2
(Emphasis added)

Why? What would possibly cause people who’d committed to building the largest ziggurat in Mesopotamia at the most ancient and important religious site in the known world to just stop work and leave Eridu with the E-abzu unfinished? Could it be…

Quote :

“Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.
Genesis 11:8-9 (ESV), emphasis added

To the Sumerians, and later the Akkadians and Babylonians (who knew him as Ea), Enki was the supernatural actor with the most influence on human history. He was the caretaker of the divine gifts of civilization, the mes (at least until he was tricked by Inanna), and he retained enough prestige for powerful men to justify their reign by claiming kingship over his city, Eridu, for 2,500 years after the city around the temple complex was abandoned.


For one moment in human history, Enki induced a human dupe—Nimrod, the Sumerian king Enmerkar—to build what he hoped would be a new abode of the gods, the bāb ilu, to rival Yahweh’s mount of assembly. It was to be the heart of a one-world totalitarian government.


Yahweh put a stop to it. But as George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The sin of Nimrod is being repeated today by the globalist movement, slowly but surely leading us back to Babylon.


COMING UP NEXT: Abraham Was Not From UR!?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT set to air on network television mid February (2017) through mid-March. This series and the forthcoming programs will center on two groundbreaking books (to be released Match 7) — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert. These reports and entries will unveil what most in the modern Church have never heard regarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods, the Titans, and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.





Let’s fast forward about 1,000 years from Babel. After the tower was abandoned, it appears that a group of Sumerians traveled by sea around the Arabian peninsula, and then overland across the wadis extending west from the Red Sea to found the 1st dynasty of Egypt.


This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Early Egyptologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie noted a sharp difference between two groups of people buried at a large site near the village of Nakada in Upper (southern) Egypt. One group had been interred with very basic grave goods in simple pits covered with palm branches. The second group had been ritually dismembered, buried in pits lined with brick along with objects of value, such as lapis lazuli jewelry, and then covered with palm logs.


Petrie eventually theorized that the second group, which he dubbed the Falcon Tribe, had invaded and conquered the native inhabitants with superior technology, such as the pear-shaped mace found buried with some in the second group. Make no mistake, in the 4th millennium B.C., the pear-shaped mace was a weapon of mass destruction.
Other evidence, from artwork to architecture—for example, Egypt’s first pyramid, for the pharaoh Djoser, is clearly modeled on the Sumerian ziggurat—linked the so-called Dynastic Race with Mesopotamia. This theory was widely accepted until World War II. After Hitler, however, the Dynastic Race concept was a little too much like the Nazis’ ideas about genetics and bloodlines for comfort.


But then in 1995, Egyptologist David Rohl published his first book, A Test of Time. Rohl makes a strong case for the Dynastic Race theory, even documenting ancient graffiti in Egypt that appeared to show the Falcon Tribe carrying their boats overland from the Red Sea toward the Nile.


Now, is it a coincidence that the name of the first king of the first Egyptian dynasty, Narmer, is awfully close to that of Nimrod, the would-be emperor of Uruk? Scholars have to guess at vocalization in many cases. It’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that the names Narmer and Enmerkar (or “Enmer the Hunter”) were the same.


Peter D. Goodgame explored this idea in greater depth in his book Second Coming of the Antichrist. I bring it up here only to suggest one possible explanation for the decline of Uruk as a regional power at just about the time of the Tower of Babel on the timeline of history. After the humiliation at Babel, Nimrod/Enmerkar may have decided to head for new lands and a fresh start. Since his father, Cush, was apparently the founder of Ethiopia, nearby Egypt, which had been settled by Cush’s brother, Mizraim, may have been a logical place to start over.


Think about that. Did Cush throw his brother and his brother’s family under the bus to give his son, Nimrod, a new start?





By the way, the Sumerian King List mentions that the first city to receive the kingship after the flood was Kish. Remember, there are no vowels in ancient Hebrew. Could Kish have been named for Cush? And Enmerkar’s father, Mesh-ki-ang-gasher, is said to have “entered the sea and disappeared.” Maybe that’s how Sumerian scribes remembered King Cush, who sailed off into the Persian Gulf to establish a new colony with his brothers Mizraim (Egypt) and Put (Libya) in Africa.


Now, that’s all speculation. Nothing so far in this article can be established for certain.


 And to be honest, the Sumerian King List has way too many names between the founding of the Kish dynasty and Enmerkar for the Kish/Cush theory to work.


As the first dynasties in Egypt established themselves and began to build monuments that would surpass those left behind in Sumer, empires rose and fell between the great rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Akkad, under Sargon the Great, established a kingdom around 2350 B.C. that stretched from the Persian Gulf almost all the way to the Mediterranean, but it collapsed less than two hundred years later under the weight of invasions from the barbaric Guti, who swept onto the plains of Sumer from the Zagros Mountains in northwest Iran.


The Guti, who we don’t know much about because they didn’t write, controlled Mesopotamia for about fifty years. They were finally thrown out by Utu-hengal, a king of Uruk, which set off a struggle for dominance between the city-states of the region. Ur finally emerged supreme, and what scholars call the Third Dynasty of Ur gave the region its last native Sumerian kings for a brief period, until about 2000 B.C. Then Ur was sacked by its ancient rival, the Elamites, who occupied what is now the far west and southwest of Iran, the region along the east side of the Persian Gulf.


Into that power vacuum moved a group of Semitic-speaking people called the Amorites. Scholars think the Amorites originated in central Syria, around a mountain called Jebel Bishri, which is on the west side of the Euphrates between Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa. However, scholars still debate that point more than a century after the first scholarly books were published about the Amorites.


Academics aren’t even sure the Amorites conquered the various existing Akkadian and Sumerian city-states. They may have been part of Mesopotamian culture all along and just somehow came out of the confusion around the turn of the millennium in control of the political machinery. What we do know is that around the beginning of the 20thcentury B.C., Amorite kingdoms emerged in what had formerly been Subartu (Assyria), Akkad, and Sumer, and, along with Amorite kingdoms in the Levant, they dominated the Fertile Crescent for the next four centuries.


That was the world of Abram of Ur. We’ll have more to say about the Amorites, but know this: Their influence on history is much greater than you’ve been told.

Here’s another bit of inaccurate history we’ve been taught:  Abram, later Abraham, didn’t come from the Ur in southeastern Iraq, the one that was in imminent danger of being torched by the Elamites. Although it seems to make sense that he might have been a refugee from the collapse of Ur, it’s far more likely that Abraham was born and raised in a part of the world that was close to the Amorite heartland, near the border between modern-day Syria and Turkey.


This was the belief of most scholars for many years until famed archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley made his spectacular discoveries at Ur in Iraq. That Ur, with its magnificent ziggurat and stunning “royal tombs,” seemed much more appropriate as the ancestral home of the patriarch of the world’s great monotheistic religions than some place in Turkey that hasn’t been found yet.


(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO)


GROUNDBREAKING RESEARCH FEATURING DR. HEISER & DEREK GILBERT BEGINS NEXT WEEK!



A recent discovery about some of the remains found by Woolley at Ur gives us a glimpse into the world of Abram. It also illustrates a tendency among scholars to view the ancient world through rose-colored glasses. Woolley and his team, who worked at Ur in the ‘20s and early ‘30s, found 1,850 burials dated to the second half of the third millennium B.C. Seventeen were so elaborate that Woolley, displaying a flair for marketing, dubbed them the Royal Tombs of Ur.


One tomb in particular is worth our attention. It was the tomb of a noblewoman by the name of Pu’abi, an Akkadian name that means “commander of the father.” She’s believed to have died around 2600 B.C. Pu’abi was buried wearing a fabulous golden headdress adorned with carnelian and lapis lazuli. Lapis lazuli wasn’t easy to get back in the day; it was only found in Afghanistan and shipped to Sumer by way of Meluhha, a civilization on the west coast of India.


Among the other treasures buried with Pu’abi, Woolley found the famous Golden Lyre of Ur, one of a dozen stringed instruments in the tomb when it was opened in 1929. 


Sadly, the Golden Lyre of Ur is one of the priceless treasures of antiquity that was lost when the Baghdad Museum was looted in 2003. It was found in pieces in the museum’s car park.


To the point: Also buried with Pu’abi were fifty-two other people arranged in rows inside her tomb. These were apparently servants sent to the afterlife with her to ensure that Pu’abi had everything she needed for eternity.


How nice for her.


Now, Woolley, interpreting the scene with a romantic bias, decided that the servants had gone to their eternal rest willingly, drinking some toxic elixir and then peacefully lying down to await whatever came next. But in 2011, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania used CT scanners to examine six skulls from different royal tombs. They reached a much darker conclusion.


Digital imaging technology and modern forensic science made it clear that the actual cause of death in all six cases was blunt force trauma. Instead of quietly drifting off to their eternal rest, the victims had been bashed in the back of the head with the business end of a battle-axe.


That dumped a large bucket of ice water onto Woolley’s vision of an idyllic death scene. Keep that in mind the next time you get really aggravated at the sense of entitlement displayed by politicians, pop divas, and first-round draft choices. At least when they die, they don’t take dozens of people with them.


Well, because of Woolley’s truly incredible discoveries, Jews and Christians revised the standard map of Abraham’s journeys to show a long trek from southeast Iraq to southeast Turkey, and then on to Canaan.


Prior to Woolley, scholars assumed that Abraham’s Ur was somewhere near Harran, about ten miles inside Turkey along the Balikh River, a tributary of the Euphrates that joins the great river at the Syrian city of Raqqa. Harran was a merchant outpost in Abraham’s day, and it was perfectly situated for it. It sat on a trade route from the Mediterranean to Sumer, linking the cities of Antioch and Carcemish with Nineveh, Babylon, and beyond.


This is consistent with what we know of Abram’s livelihood, who seems less like a shepherd and more like a traveling merchant who conducted business with men at the highest levels of government, as evidenced by his interactions with local kings in Canaan and the pharaoh in Egypt.


Harran is also the name of one of Abraham’s brothers. It’s probable that his brother was named for the city and not the other way around, since the city first appears among records recovered from the ancient city of Ebla dated to about 2300 B.C., some 300 years before Abraham.


The great scholar of Near Eastern history and ancient languages Cyrus H. Gordon made a strong case for Abraham’s origins along the upper Euphrates rather than in the heart of Sumer. Gordon, writing in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies in 1958,⁠1 highlighted a then-recently translated Akkadian tablet from the ancient Canaanite city of Ugarit, a decree from mid 13th century B.C. by the powerful Hittite king Hattusili III to the king of Ugarit, Niqmepa. This decree regulated the activity of Hittite merchants operating in Ugarit, and identified the merchants in question as citizens of Ura, a city near Harran that specialized in tamkârûtum, or foreign trade.


Niqmepa had apparently complained to Hattusili about the traders from Ura. In response, Hattusili decreed that the merchants could conduct business in Ugarit only during the summer months (no great loss—that was the only time of the year when farmers had crops with which to pay); the merchants would have to return home to Ura in the winter; and they were barred from buying real estate in Ugarit.


Gordon then pointed out that the Genesis account indicates that while Abraham and his descendants were in Canaan at God’s call, they were also there for the express purpose of conducting trade. For example:

Quote :

But Hamor [king of Shechem] spoke with [Jacob and his sons], saying, “The soul of my son Shechem longs for your daughter. Please give her to him to be his wife. Make marriages with us. Give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves. You shall dwell with us, and the land shall be open to you. Dwell and trade in it, and get property in it.”
Genesis 34:8-10 (ESV), emphasis added

Gordon observed that men who traded abroad, like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, apparently looked for opportunities to settle where they did business, but were generally barred from buying real estate in foreign lands.


So there are enough similarities between the lifestyles of the patriarchs and the merchants of Ura, not to mention Ura’s proximity to Harran, to make the identification of Ura as Abraham’s Ur a strong possibility. Gordon went on in the article to demonstrate the linguistic possibility that the final vowel in Ura was dropped in the transition from Aramaic to Hebrew.


Logistically, Harran was way too far north and east for Abraham’s father Terah to have made it a stop on the way to Canaan if he’d been traveling from Ur in Sumer. There were much shorter routes between Sumer and Canaan—for example, a trade route used by Amorites that linked Mari on the Euphrates to Damascus via Tadmor (Palmyra).


In other words, Mesopotamians in the 21st century B.C. would have mocked anyone from Sumerian Ur who tried to get to Canaan by way of Harran. Ending up at Harran would have required missing one turn completely and then taking another in the wrong direction, away from Canaan. Put it this way: Traveling to Canaan from Ur by way of Harran is like driving from Nashville to Kansas City by way of Minneapolis.





Travel from Ur to Canaan by way of Haran? Not likely.


Finally, Woolley’s Ur was on the wrong side of the Euphrates.

Quote :

Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers of Israel. And they presented themselves before God. And Joshua said to all the people, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Long ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan, and made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac.’”
Joshua 24:2-3 (ESV), emphasis added

Ur in Sumer was not beyond the Euphrates. It sat on the west bank of the river. But Ura, in modern-day Turkey, was, in fact, “beyond the River.”


“But what about those Chaldeans?” you ask. “Weren’t they around Babylon?”


Glad you asked.


The Chaldeans were a Semitic tribe, possibly descendants of the Amorites, who founded the Neo-Babylonian empire in the first millennium B.C. That’s the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, not the Babylon of Hammurabi, who lived about 1,200 years earlier.
But the Greek historian Xenophon, who wrote in the 4th century B.C., referred to another group of Chaldeans. They were a warlike people who were neighbors of the Armenians. They lived north of Ura and Harran, between Mesopotamia and modern Armenia. In another book, Xenophon linked the Chaldeans to the Carduchians, who were probably the ancestors of the modern Kurds. The Kurds today occupy territory along the borders between Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, an area that includes the places we’re looking at, Harran and Ura.


Gordon also noted that greater Armenia, which was called Urartu from the time of David until the rise of the Neo-Babylonian empire, was in its earliest days known as Ḫaldi (the “ḫ” sounds like “k,” so it’s KALL-dee). In fact, the chief god of the Urartians was named Ḫaldi, father of the Urartian storm-god Teisheba (who was equated with Ba`al-Hadad).


So Ur of the Chaldees was probably Ura of the Ḫaldis. Abraham came from a border region located between the Hittites, the Hurrians, Semitic kingdoms such as Ebla and Mari, Amorite territory, and the Subartans (Assyrians), not the heart of Sumer as we’ve been taught. Understanding Abraham’s origins helps understand the early history of Israel.


Why? Yahweh needed to give the future Israel time to develop its own identity. That wasn’t likely to happen with His people surrounded by the temptations of decadent urban life. Witness what happened to Abraham’s nephew, Lot, when he settled in Sodom.


Further, there is a cryptic comment God made to Abraham that relates to the spiritual history of the world down to the present day.

Quote :

And he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” But he said, “O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?”
He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.
As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
Genesis 15:7-16 (ESV), emphasis added

Iniquity of the Amorites? Wait—what?


Patience. That’s for a future installment in this series.


COMING UP NEXT: The Mysterious Origin Of The “Gods” Of Egypt

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the sixth part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT set to air on network television mid February (2017) through mid-March. This series and the forthcoming programs will center on two groundbreaking books (to be released Match 7) — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert.
 These reports and entries will unveil what most in the modern Church have never heard regarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods, the Titans, and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.





By the time Moses arrived on the scene, around 1500 B.C., the Hebrews had been in Egypt for more than a hundred years. The days of Joseph serving as vizier to the pharaoh were long gone. The Hebrews had grown from an extended family of about six dozen to a couple million, but they were suffering under the rule of a nation that no longer valued their presence except as forced labor.


So Yahweh set the next phase of His plan in motion. After guiding the life of Moses from infancy to adulthood (you don’t think he survived that trip in the reed boat by accident, do you?), Yahweh appeared to Moses in his exile and tasked him with bringing Israel out of Egypt. And the way God had him do it was a clear message to the gods of Egypt.


Moses’ first encounter with Yahweh was in Midian. That was at Horeb in the northern Sinai, later part of Edom (contrary to long tradition that puts the mountain in southern Sinai), the har elohim, or mountain of God. Get this:  The burning bush incident was the first time since Eden that a human had come face to face with Yahweh on His holy mountain. There is no question that the bene elohim, the Fallen, the seventy rebel angels God allotted to the nations after Babel knew about this meeting. It was a very clear message from Yahweh to the rebels:  I have reestablished my mount of assembly on the earth.


The time had finally come. God called Moses back to Egypt to bring His people, Israel, to the place He’d claimed as His own—Canaan.


Yahweh chose to convince pharaoh and the Egyptians to not only let Israel leave, but to encourage them to go. He did it by hardening pharaoh’s heart through a series of increasingly severe trials until the people of Egypt must have been begging pharaoh to let His people go.





There are several studies you can find online that draw links between the ten plagues Yahweh inflicted on Egypt and specific Egyptian gods. For example, the first plague turned the Nile River to blood. This is said to have been directed at Hapi, the god of the annual Nile flood. Plague number two, frogs, was aimed at Heqet, a fertility goddess worshipped since the early dynastic period—the time of Narmer and the first kings of Egypt, about 1,500 or 1,600 years before Moses.


Those match up well enough, but when we get to the third and fourth plagues, the connections are iffy at best. The plague of lice or gnats, depending on the translation you read, doesn’t match up well with any known Egyptian god. The plague of flies is paired by some with Khepri, a god of creation. But Khepri had a scarab beetle for a head, so that’s not a good match, either.


Some of the pastors and teachers who’ve published these studies are very intelligent people whom I respect. However, and with all due respect to those pastor-teachers, they’ve overlooked an even bigger supernatural conflict. Understanding that confrontation will show you why trying to link the ten plagues to specific Egyptian gods is looking in the wrong direction. More accurately, it’s looking at entirely the wrong pantheon.


Yes, Yahweh demonstrated with the ten plagues that His power was superior to that of the gods the Egyptians trusted to keep the Nile flowing and the crops growing. And we know for a fact that Yahweh put a hurt on the gods of Egypt the night He took the lives of Egypt’s first-born.


How do we know? He told Moses.

Quote :

For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord.
Exodus 12:12 (ESV), emphasis added

How likely is it that Yahweh told Moses that He was about to punish imaginary beings represented by idols of wood and stone? What would be the point? How would that establish His power and glory?


No, something happened in the spirit realm on the night of the Passover. When Yahweh passed through the land of Egypt, taking the lives of firstborn humans and animals, He simultaneously carried out His sentence on the bene elohim, the entities who had rebelled and made themselves gods in Egypt.


Here’s a fascinating detail we never hear about in church:  It appears there was a very old tradition in Egypt, an ancient myth dating back centuries before the Exodus, that a day was coming when the first-born of Egypt would die. The pyramids of the 5th Dynasty king Unas, c. 2350 B.C., and the 6th Dynasty king Teti, c. 2320 B.C., are inscribed with this line from a well-known inscription called the “Cannibal Hymn”:

Quote :

It is the king who will be judged with Him-whose-name-is-hidden on this day of the slaying of the first-born.⁠1

Similar phrases are found on other coffins from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, including a variant that reads “this night of the slaying of the first-born.” Some scholars believe the context of the Coffin Texts and the Cannibal Hymn points to the first-born belonging to the gods, although that’s not a view shared by all Egyptologists.


What does it mean? Scholars aren’t sure. But it seems that by the time of the Exodus, there was a very old tradition in Egypt of a future nightmare event when the first-born would be killed.


Consider this possibility: Maybe the Coffin Texts and the “Cannibal Hymn” were an ancient warning to Egypt of that coming day of judgment. And forty years earlier on Mount Sinai, Yahweh revealed to Moses that He was Him-whose-name-is-hidden, I AM WHO I AM—the One who would someday fulfill the prophecy of the slaying of the first-born.


That’s speculation, of course, but fascinating. And we’re not at the best part yet.


Scholars today, 3,500 years later, still argue about where the Red Sea crossing occurred. We won’t get into it here. If it hasn’t been settled by now, we’re not going to put the question to bed in a couple of paragraphs. Besides, that’s not important right now. What matters is what Yahweh told Moses to do next.

Quote :

Then the Lord said to Moses,
“Tell the people of Israel to turn back and encamp in front of Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, in front of Baal-zephon; you shall encamp facing it, by the sea.
Exodus 14:1-2 (ESV, emphasis added)

Okay, this begs some questions:  Why did God tell Moses to turn back? Why did He command Moses to camp facing Baal-zephon? What is Baal-zephon? And mostly, what was Ba`al doing in Egypt?


You know Ba`al was the Canaanite storm-god and the king of their pantheon. He’s mentioned in the Bible from the Book of Exodus through the gospels. Ba`al, which is properly pronounced bah-awl with a glottal stop like, “Uh-oh,” was the main thorn in the side of the Israelites, especially those who were faithful to Yahweh, for the next 1,500 years, all the way down to the time of Jesus.


But during the Second Intermediate Period in Egypt, roughly 1750 to 1550 B.C. (give or take a hundred years), foreigners from Canaan called the Hyksos ruled northern Egypt. Their capital was at a city called Avaris in the Nile delta, and they worshipped the gods of the Canaanite pantheon, headed by Ba`al.


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That’s why the well-intentioned efforts to identify Egyptian gods as targets for the plagues are looking at the wrong pantheon. During most of the time the Israelites were in Egypt, from about 1665 B.C. to 1450 B.C., the country was divided. Native Egyptian rulers only controlled the southern part of the country, which, oddly enough (to us Americans), was called Upper Egypt. Their capital was at Thebes. Lower (northern) Egypt was under Hyksos control, and their gods were the ones worshipped by the Semitic inhabitants of the Levant and Mesopotamia.


We don’t know whether the Hyksos were still around at the time of the Exodus. At some point, probably while the Israelites were still living in Goshen in the Nile Delta, an Egyptian king decided he’d had enough and brought an army north to drive the Hyksos out of the land. The revolution began under Seqenenre Tao, whose badly battered mummy shows that he probably lost his last battle against the Hyksos. His sons, Kamose and Ahmose, carried on the fight, with Ahmose finally driving out the hated Asiatics after a war that appears to have lasted for at least twenty years.


You’ve noticed the similarity between the names of Seqenenre’s sons and Moses. Yes, Moses is an Egyptian name.


It appears the Hyksos left Avaris under a negotiated truce, but Ahmose apparently changed his mind about the deal. He chased the Hyksos toward Canaan, catching up with them at a Hyksos stronghold called Sharuhen, a town either in the Negev Desert, south of Israel, or near Gaza (Joshua 19:6 puts it in the territory of the tribe of Simeon). After a three-year siege, Ahmose took the town and razed it, ending Canaanite political influence in Egypt once and for all.



As best we can tell, it appears the principalities and powers who influenced the Hyksos brought them to Egypt at precisely the time of the Israelites’ sojourn, and everything else that happened, including the war for Egyptian independence, was part of a bigger plan: Genocide, something the house of Israel has survived many times now.


Consider: Just as Joseph was kidnapped by traders and carried off to Egypt, laying the groundwork for his family to follow and grow into a nation, a group of Jacob’s Semitic-speaking, Ba`al-worshiping neighbors also arrived in Egypt and took over the government from the natives.


Coincidence?


No. Analyzing history through a biblical lens, the Second Intermediate Period in Egypt was apparently a plan by the Fallen to bring a specific group to power in the land where Yahweh had led the Israelites. The purpose was to destroy the people that God had chosen for Himself.


Regardless of how it started, the long war between the native Egyptians in the south and the foreign Hyksos in the north could explain why the Israelites fell out of favor. If power changed hands from Semitic overlords to native Egyptian kings, the Semitic-speaking Hebrews would have been seen as potential enemy collaborators. The narrative in Exodus fits the political situation of the mid-15th century B.C.

Quote :

Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, “Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.”
Exodus 1:8-10 (ESV)

The dates are uncertain and scholars disagree over which Egyptian king was the pharaoh of the Exodus, although it’s pretty much agreed that it wasn’t Ramesses II, better known as Ramesses the Great—or Yul Brynner, if you’re old enough to remember the movie. Ramesses lived and ruled about two hundred years later, between 1279 B.C. and 1213 B.C.


It may seem counterproductive for Ba`al to lead the Hyksos into Egypt, set them up as kings, and then allow them to be run off again by native Egyptians within a hundred years or so. But the Egyptians’ hatred of the Israelites was a byproduct of the Hyksos intervention. Besides, despite what you’ve seen in movies over the years, the worship of Ba`al and other Semitic gods continued in northern Egypt long after the Hyksos were driven out.


During the reign of the Hyksos, Ba`al was identified with the god Set, the Egyptian god of storms, chaos, the desert and foreigners—a good fit with Ba`al, apparently. The Hyksos adopted Set and blended the two into a single entity.


Today, we think of Set, sometimes called Seth or Sutekh, as an evil god who cut up his brother Osiris into fourteen pieces. He was usually depicted as a bizarre character with a human body and an anteater-like head. But as we’ve mentioned, Set wasn’t always a villain. In the time of the Hyksos and for a few centuries after, Set helped the sun god, Ra, by defeating the evil serpent Apep/Apophis, the embodiment of chaos, which tried to eat Ra’s solar boat every night as it disappeared over the horizon. In this tale, Set’s nightly victory over Apep echoed the Semitic myth in which Ba`al vanquished the chaos god of the sea, Yam, and his sea-dragon servant, Lotan.


Points to you if you noticed the similarity between the name Lotan and the Bible’s Leviathan. It’s a classic PSYOP by the Fallen, claiming the deeds of Yahweh as their own.


When Apep delayed Ra’s boat, there were storms; when he ate it, there was an eclipse. But Apep’s victories were always temporary, and every evening Set was back on the front of the boat to spear the serpent.


Later in Egyptian history, though, after being conquered by the Nubians, Assyrians, and Persians one after another between 800 B.C. and 525 B.C., the god of foreigners was no longer welcome around the pyramids. That’s why later Egyptians considered Set evil.


The worship of Ba`al-Set continued in northern Egypt for at least four hundred years, long after the Hyksos were run out of the country. In fact, the pharaohs of the Ramesside dynasty, who were the first Egyptian kings to be called pharaoh (which means the term wasn’t used in the days of Joseph or Moses), were worshipers of Ba`al-Set. The father of Ramesses the Great was named Seti I—literally, “man of Set.”


 Several other kings of the Ramesside period, including Seti II and Setnakht (“Set is strong”), were also named for the god.


There is some speculation that because Ramesses the Great was a redhead (true!), his family may have been descendants of the Hyksos invaders. Whatever the reason, Ramesses II set up a stela at Pi-ramesses, near the site of the old Hyksos capital Avaris, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Set doing… something. Scholars aren’t sure of what, exactly. The unimaginatively-named Year 400 Stela portrays Seti I presenting wine to Set, who’s depicted like the images of Ba`al found in the Levant, with a human head instead of the more familiar anteater-head from later Egyptian history.





The Year 400 Stela features Seti I (right), father of Ramesses the Great, and the god Set (left), who was identified with Ba`al in Egypt for most of the 2nd millennium B.C.


Since the stela points back four hundred years to about 1650 B.C., it could mark the arrival of Ba`al-Set in the Nile Delta. Counting back 215 years from the Exodus date of 1450 B.C., this is just about the time Jacob and the family arrived in Egypt.


Again, we ask: Coincidence?


When Yahweh led the Israelites out of Egypt, He ordered them to turn around and camp on the shore of the Red Sea facing something called Baal-zephon all night. Why?


 Specifically so they’d cross the Red Sea right in front of it.


Here’s the funny part: As worshipers of the desert-god Set, the Egyptian army probably thought they had the Israelites right where they wanted them.

Quote :

For Pharaoh will say of the people of Israel, ‘They are wandering in the land; the wilderness has shut them in.’
Exodus 14:3 (ESV)

Caught in front of Baal-zephon between areas controlled by their god, Ba`al-Set, master of the sea and god of the desert—the Egyptians must have figured the Israelites were hopelessly trapped!


Which brings us back to our earlier question: What was Baal-zephon, and why was it so important? Why did God tell Moses to turn around so this confrontation happened right there?


Here’s why: The name of Ba`al’s holy mountain, which is more than five hundred miles north of the Nile delta, was Mount Zaphon.


Hmm. Zephon, Zaphon. Same name, different transliteration into English. 


Coincidence?


No! The Red Sea crossing was a supernatural smackdown! Ba`al was the god of storms, the god who vanquished the primordial chaos god of the sea, Yam. Because of this, Ba`al was the god of maritime navigation and the patron god of sailors.


So Yahweh didn’t just deliver the Israelites “out of the hand of pharaoh,” He delivered them out of the hand of Ba`al. And to make sure nobody misunderstood the message, He did it in front of a site dedicated to Ba`al, and by mastering the sea—Ba`al’s domain.


This was a called shot! Just like Babe Ruth at Wrigley Field in the 1932 World Series, the confrontation at the Red Sea was engineered by Yahweh to serve notice to the Fallen:  My people are freed from their bondage and now we are coming for you.


That was the reason for the crossing. Yahweh used it to demonstrate His power, yes, but for a specific purpose—to make it crystal clear to the Israelites that I AM was unparalleled, unchallenged, and sovereign. It was a demonstration of His authority over the divine entities who’d chosen to abuse the responsibilities He’d given them after Babel. And it was a clear message to the gods that the days of their rebellion were numbered.


COMING UP NEXT: Iniquity of the Amorites – Babylon, Og, and the Angels Who Sinned

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the seventh part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT set to air on network television mid February (2017) through mid-March. This series and the forthcoming programs will center on two groundbreaking books (to be released Match 7) — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert.


 These reports and entries will unveil what most in the modern Church have never heard regarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods, the Titans, and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.





In a previous article in this series, we mentioned an odd comment that God made when He gave Abraham a glimpse at the future:

Quote :

As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.“
Genesis 15:7-16 (ESV), emphasis added

The obvious questions that come to mind: Who were the Amorites, and why was the timing of the Exodus linked to their iniquity? What was their iniquity? What could they have done that was so bad that God made it a signpost on the road to Revelation? Whatever it was, the evil of the Amorites was legendary among the Jews:

Quote :

And the Lord said by his servants the prophets,
“Because Manasseh king of Judah has committed these abominations and has done things more evil than all that the Amorites did, who were before him, and has made Judah also to sin with his idols, therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Behold, I am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such disaster that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.
2 Kings 21:10-12 (ESV), emphasis added

Manasseh was king of Judah about seven hundred years after the Exodus, nearly 1,200 years after Abraham was first called from Ura, near Harran. Whatever the Amorites did, it was bad.


The Amorites were incredibly resilient. They hung around, and dominated for a long time, a part of the world where people have been fighting each other since the time of Nimrod. They were a Semitic speaking people who occupied nearly the entire Near East during the first half of the 2nd millennium B.C. According to the Bible, the Amorites descend from Noah’s son, Ham, by way of Canaan. However, even though Ham is considered the progenitor of various African races, Egyptian artists usually represented Amorites with fair skin, light hair, and blue eyes.


The Amorites were first mentioned in Mesopotamian records around 2400 B.C., just before Sargon the Great turned Akkad from a city-state into an empire. They were known to the city-dwelling Sumerians as the MAR.TU, who considered them savage, uncouth, and generally unpleasant.

Quote :

The MAR.TU who know no grain… The MAR.TU who know no house nor town, the boors of the mountains… The MAR.TU who digs up truffles… who does not bend his knees (to cultivate the land), who eats raw meat, who has no house during his lifetime, who is not buried after death[.]⁠1

Scholars haven’t reached a consensus over just where the Amorites came from. The Ebla texts refer to an Amorite LU.GAL, or king, named Amuti, in the 2300s B.C. The Amorite kingdom, MAR.TUki in Sumerian, seems to have been centered in Syria around Jebel Bishri, a mountain on the west bank of the Euphrates about 30 miles west of Deir ez-Zor. The mountain of the Amorites, called Bašar back in the day, was the site of a military victory led by the Akkadian king Narām-Sîn, grandson of Sargon the Great, over a coalition of Amorites led by Rish-Adad, the lord of a small city called Apishal.


Evidence uncovered by a team of Finnish researchers who began work at Jebel Bishri in 2000 indicates that the main urban center of MAR.TUki in the third millennium B.C. was Tuttul, a city on the Euphrates near the modern city of Raqqa. Tuttul was settled by the 26th century B.C. and was sacred to Dagan, chief god of the local pantheon. A second temple of Dagan was built later at Terqa, south of Tuttul on the Euphrates about halfway to Mari, which was near where the Euphrates crosses from Syria into Iraq.


This leads to a bigger question: What exactly was the religion of the Amorites? Might that shed some light on why Yahweh called them out when He made the covenant with Abraham?


Judging by personal names in the earliest records, it looks as though there were originally only two main gods of the Amorites—the moon-god, Ereah or Yarikh (from which Jericho, a center of moon-god worship, got its name), and “the” god, El.


That should interest anyone who’s read any of the Old Testament. Besides being the name of the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon, El was one of the names the prophets applied to Yahweh. Remember that El was the only name by which Yahweh was known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That’s significant because they lived during the time the Amorites controlled the Near East.





Meanwhile, the moon-god, while not as well-known as Satan, Ba`al, or Marduk, enjoyed a long run as one of the most influential gods of the Near East. After the defeat at Jericho, Yarikh (Sîn to the Akkadians, Nanna to the Sumerians) reemerged as the chief god of Babylon nearly a thousand years later under its last king, Nabonidus (reigned 556-539 B.C.). And you can make a strong case that the moon-god today leads what may become the largest religion on the planet within the next half-century.


However, as they gained political control over regions previously governed by the Akkadians and Sumerians after 2000 B.C., the Amorites began adopting the gods of their subjects. A classic example is the Amorite chief, Šamši-Adad I. His father, Ila-kabkabu (possibly “El is my star”), had been the king of Terqa. After being forced to flee to Babylon during the reign of Narām-Sîn of Akkad, Šamši-Adad eventually returned home, overthrew Narām-Sîn’s successor, and became the first Amorite king of Assyria.


Šamši-Adad, whose name includes that of the storm-god of Aleppo, named the son he placed on the throne of Mari, whose territory bordered on Yamḥad (Aleppo), Yasmah-Adad. The son who governed the Akkadian part of his realm was named Išme-Dagan. Both names mean “(deity) hears”, but presumably Adad and Dagan were more acceptable to the subjects of their respective parts of the realm than Amorite gods like Ilu (El) or Ereah (Yarikh).



The Amorites, like the later Israelites, were subdivided into tribes. By the time of Abraham, the Amorites were divided into two main groups—the Binū Yamina (“sons of the right hand”, or southerners) and the Binū Sim’al (“sons of the left hand”, or northerners). The division seems based on an ancient agreement over pasturing rights: The Bensimalites took their herds to the Khabur River triangle in what is today northern Syria, while the Benjaminites pastured their flocks in the territories of Yamḥad (Aleppo), Qatna, near modern-day Homs, and Amurru, the mountains of northern Lebanon to the southeast of Ugarit.


Sometime around the end of the third millennium B.C., the Sumerian dynasty of Ur collapsed under the weight of intrusions by Amorite tribes and invasions from Elam.


 The century beginning about 2000 B.C. is hazy, a period of history that we’ll probably never decipher. When the fog lifts around 1900 B.C., we find Amorites ruling nearly all the power centers in Mesopotamia and the Levant. They’d spread out from their traditional base on the steppes of northern Syria and Iraq to as far as the Jordan River in the southwest, southern Turkey in the north, and as far southeast as an insignificant village on the Euphrates that would soon play a major role in world history—some of which hasn’t happened yet.


Because of their association with Jebel Bishri and the steppes of Syria, west of Sumer, the Sumerian word for Amorite, MAR.TU, became a synonym for the compass point west, just like the Hebrew link between Mount Zaphon and tsaphon, north. However, there was another area occupied by Amorites. Northeast of modern Baghdad, around the Diyala River valley, an Amorite tribe called the Tidnim, Tidnum, or Tidanum was a major source of trouble for the Sumerians at least as far back as 2800 B.C., when the first mention of a “chief” or “overseer” of the tribe is found at Ur. (However, one of the peaks of Jebel Bishri was called Jebel Diddi, or Mount Diddi, which may come from Didānum—same name, different transliteration—so the tribe may have history there as well.)⁠2


The Tidnum of northeast Mesopotamia were so troublesome that the last Sumerian kings of Ur built a wall, possibly 175 miles long, from the Euphrates across the Tigris to a site along the Diyala. The project was called the bad mar-du murīq-tidnim, or, “Amorite wall which keeps the Tidnum at bay.”





Areas under Amorite control circa 2000 B.C.


It may have been more of a border fence than a Great Wall of China-type structure. The only mentions of the wall are the names of the fourth and fifth years of king Šu-sin’s reign, and that there are no mentions of it at all among the piles of tablets that recorded the king’s business in Ur. However, what Šu-sin has done is establish the link between the Amorites and the Tidanum. And that’s important.


Whoever the Tidanum were, they were clearly honored—actually, venerated—by their descendants. Based on texts found across the ancient Near East, the Tidanum were the ancestors of the ruling houses of the old Assyrian kingdom of Šamši-Adad, the old Babylonian empire of Hammurabi the Great, and the kings who ruled Ugarit down to about 1200 B.C. Two of the kings in the line of Hammurabi include a variant of the tribal name as the theophoric element (Ammi-ditana and Samsu-ditana), indicating that the Tidanum, if not gods, were at least considered god-like by their descendants.


The name Tidanum and its variants—Tidinu, Titinu, Tidnim, Didanum, Ditanu, Datnim, Datnam—had a strong military connotation in ancient Mesopotamia. A text from Ebla refers to an official named Tidinu, chief of the mercenaries in the court of Ibrium, the powerful vizier of king Irkab-damu in the 24th century B.C. It appears that some Amorites served Sumerian kings during the late 3rd millennium B.C. as soldiers, and they might even have been part of the royal bodyguard in Ur for kings Shulgi and Šu-shin.


But the Tidanum were also depicted as enemies of Sumer alongside Anshan (northwest Iran) by Shulgi, who ruled Ur for nearly half a century sometime around 2100 B.C. His son, Šu-sin, marked one of the years of his reign as the year in which he defeated a coalition of rebellious Tidnum and Ya’madium, another Amorite tribe that lived in eastern Mesopotamia.


And when Ur finally fell around 2004 B.C., the “Tidnumites” were one of the groups blamed in a Lamentation Over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur:

Quote :

 In Ur, no one took charge of food, no one took charge of water,
Who was (formerly) in charge of food, stood away from the food, pays no heed to it,
Who was (formerly) in charge of water, stood away from the water, pays no heed to it,
Below, the Elamites are in charge, slaughter follows in their wake,
Above, the Halma-people, the “men of the mountains,” took captives,
The Tidnumites daily fastened the mace to their loins…⁠3

So what’s the significance of the Tidnum/Tidanu? We’ll get to that shortly.

After the fall of Ur, things changed quickly. Scholars still debate whether the change was by conquest or gradual assimilation, but within a hundred years or so Amorites had taken control of every major political entity from Canaan to southern Mesopotamia.


A hundred years after that, by the early 18th century B.C., an Amorite city-state that had been a small settlement on the Euphrates since about 2300 B.C. began an incredible rise to become the dominant power in Mesopotamia—Babylon. It became so influential that people from the time of Isaac and Jacob until the present day have called the region Babylonia instead of Sumer.


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Take a moment and think back to Genesis 15:16: “The iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”


Now realize that Babylon, a byword for sin, depravity, and occult wickedness throughout the Bible, even in prophecy that is yet to be fulfilled, was founded by the Amorites.


There is no ethnicity called “Babylonian”. That’s like saying this author is ethnically Chicagoan (Chicagoite?) just because he was born there. Babylon was just the name of a small village led by an ambitious Amorite chief named Sumu-Abum. He and his next few successors didn’t even bother calling themselves “king of Babylon”, an indication of how unimportant it was at first. It was more than a hundred years before Hammurabi, the greatest Amorite king in history, made Babylon a regional power.
As with all cities in Mesopotamia, the village of Babylon had a patron god. Marduk was a second-rate member of the pantheon until the Amorites elevated Babylon to prominence during the 18th century B.C. By the second half of the 2nd millennium B.C., Marduk had assumed the top position in the Mesopotamian pantheon, replacing Enlil as king of the gods.


Marduk’s early character is obscure. As Babylon grew in importance, the god assumed traits of other members of the pantheon, especially Enlil and Ea (the Akkadian name for Enki). Marduk was considered the god of water, vegetation, judgment, and magic. He was the son of Ea and the goddess Damkina, and his own consort was Sarpanit, a mother goddess sometimes associated with the planet Venus, and not surprisingly, the goddess Ishtar/Inanna.


By the time of the Exodus, Babylon had been the dominant power in Mesopotamia for nearly three hundred years. It proudly carried on the tradition of arcane pre-flood knowledge brought to mankind by the apkallu, who, as fish-men from the abzu, were presumably able to survive the flood, or by Gilgamesh, who is mentioned on a cylinder seal as “master of the apkallu“.


Of course, the Hebrews under Moses knew that the knowledge of the apkallu/Watchers was forbidden, secrets that humans weren’t meant to know. It was as much the reason for the imprisonment of the Watchers as their sexual sin of mating with human women. And this knowledge was proudly celebrated by the Amorite kings and priests of Babylon.


Bringing this back around to the conquest of Canaan: That’s why the kingdoms of Sihon of Heshbon and Og of Bashan were kherem. And that’s why Moses went out of his way to show his readers the connection between the Amorites of Babylon and the Amorites of the Promised Land.


How did he do that? Have you ever wondered why Moses bothered to include this little detail in his account of the victory over Og?

Quote :

For only Og the king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaim. Behold, his bed was a bed of iron. Is it not in Rabbah of the Ammonites? Nine cubits was its length, and four cubits its breadth, according to the common cubit.
Deuteronomy 3:8-11 (ESV), emphasis added

Nine cubits by four cubits is thirteen-and-a-half feet by six feet! So Og was a giant, right? Well… No, not necessarily.


Yes, the Rephaim were linked to the Anakim, the descendants of the Nephilim. And tradition holds that Og was a really big dude. But that wasn’t the point here. Moses was writing to an audience that was familiar with the infamous occult practices of Babylon.





Every year at the first new moon after the spring equinox, Babylon held a new year festival called the akitu. It was a twelve-day celebration of the cycle of regeneration, the beginning of a new planting season, and it included a commemoration of Marduk’s victory over Tiamat. The entire celebration, from Yahweh’s perspective, was a long ritual for “new gods that had come recently” involving all manner of licentious behavior.


The highlight of the festival was the Divine Union or Sacred Marriage, where Marduk and his consort, Sarpanit, retired to the cult bed inside the Etemenanki, the House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth, the great ziggurat of Babylon. Although scholars still debate whether the Sacred Marriage was actually performed by the king and a priestess, it didn’t matter to Yahweh. The idea that a bountiful harvest in the coming year depended on celebrating Marduk’s sacred roll in the sack was abhorrent.


Now, here’s the key point: Guess how big Marduk’s bed was?

Quote :

“…nine cubits [its long] side, four cubits [its] front, the bed; the throne in front of the bed”.⁠4

Nine cubits by four cubits. Precisely the same dimensions as the bed of Og. That is why Moses included that curious detail! It wasn’t a reference to Og’s height; Moses was making sure his readers understood that the Amorite king Og, like the Amorite kings of Babylon, was carrying on pre-flood occult traditions brought to earth by the Watchers.


And that’s why Og and his Amorite ally Sihon were kherem. It was, and still is today, a spiritual battle.


But that’s not all. Oh, no—there’s a lot more we can add to the legacy of the Amorites. Let’s go back to our discussion of that fearsome tribe, the Tidanu.


A scholar named Amar Annus made a startling connection in 1999 that has gone mainly unnoticed, especially by Bible scholars. Several Amorite royal houses, including those of the old Babylonian kingdom, the old Assyrian kingdom, and the kings of Ugarit, traced their ancestry from Dedan, whose descendants were called the Didanu, Tidanum, and variations thereof.


According to Annus, that’s the name from which the Greeks derived the word titanes—the Titans.⁠5


Did Amorite royalty really believe they descended from the Titans, the old gods who planned their rebellion against God at Mount Hermon in the dim, distant past? Yes, it looks that way.


Given the established links between the Amorites, the Rephaim/Nephilim, the Titans/Watchers, and the pre-flood knowledge of the Watchers brought back into the world by the Amorite kingdom of Babylon, this speculation isn’t exactly coming out of thin air.


COMING UP NEXT: God vs. the Titans

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the eighth part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT set to air on network television mid February (2017) through mid-March. This series and the forthcoming programs will center on two groundbreaking books (to be released Match 7) — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert. These reports and entries will unveil what most in the modern Church have never heard regarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods, the Titans, and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.

Let’s bring our timeline of history into focus: The Bible tells us that Abraham arrived in Canaan 430 years before the Exodus. With the Exodus at 1446 B.C., that puts Abraham in Canaan in 1876 B.C., just as the fog over the political situation in Mesopotamia lifted with Amorites in control.

So let’s review:

• Amorite kingdom of Babylon founded — 1894 B.C.
  
• Abraham arrives in Canaan — 1876 B.C.
  
• Isaac born to Sarah — 1851 B.C.
  
• Isaac marries Rebekah — 1811 B.C.
  
• Hammurabi crowned king of Babylon at Eridu — 1792 B.C.
  
• Jacob and Esau born — 1791 B.C.
  
• Abraham dies — 1776 B.C.
  
• Hyksos take over Lower Egypt — c. 1750 B.C.
  
• Jacob arrives in Egypt — 1661 B.C.
  
• Ahmose drives Hyksos out of Egypt — c. 1550 B.C.
  
• Moses leads the Exodus — 1446 B.C.
  
• Joshua leads the Conquest — 1406 B.C.
  

Interesting, isn’t it, that the Amorite domination of Mesopotamia began just as God called Abraham and directed him to Canaan? And that Babylon reached the peak of its power with the ascension of Hammurabi the Great just about the time Jacob and Esau were born?


At the same time, a Semitic-speaking, Ba`al-worshiping state emerged to take control of northern Egypt just before the arrival of the house of Jacob. Wouldn’t it be, you know, coincidental if the Hyksos rulers of Lower Egypt were Amorites, too?


Well, yes, it would—if we believed in coincidences. And as it happens, scholars do, in fact, believe the Hyksos were Amorites.


The best-known of the Hyksos kings, Khyan, is attested from inscriptions found as far from Egypt as Cyprus and modern-day Baghdad (probably originally in Babylon). An Amorite king with the same name, spelled Hayanu, is listed in a genealogy as a distant ancestor of Šamši-Adad and the royal house of the old Assyrian kingdom.


Scholars have also noticed strong similarities in the burial practices of the Hyksos and various Amorite kingdoms, especially the practice of sacrificing donkeys for burial with important people and under the doorways of new buildings.


So yes, it’s strangely coincidental, if you’re a believer in coincidence theories.
 Otherwise, it seems an unseen hand or hands moved the Amorites into position in Egypt and Canaan just before the Israelites arrived—almost as if they’d been placed there to wait for God’s chosen people.


It’s also noteworthy that while the Anakim were confirmed in Canaan by extrabiblical sources from Egypt, the Anakim haven’t been found anywhere else in the ancient Near East.


But you know by now we’re not coincidence theorists. Let’s pull these historical threads a little harder. Why did God link the timing of Israel’s return to the iniquity of the Amorites?


We’ve established that the Amorites founded Babylon. This is documented mainstream history, unquestioned by secular scholars. The Amorites are also linked by historic records to a tribe called the Tidnum/Tidanum which seemed to have a strong military reputation, troublesome enough that the last Sumerian kings of Mesopotamia built a very long wall in a futile attempt to keep them away. That is also solidly documented mainstream history.


The Bible links the Amorites to the Anakim (Deut. 2:10-25). The Transjordan campaign was aimed at two Amorite kings, Sihon and Og, who were both remembered as giants. Remember that the Amorite king Og was called the last of the Rephaim (Deuteronomy 3:11). Texts found throughout Mesopotamia identify the Tidnum/Tidanum as a tribe of the Amorites. In Ugarit, the spelling is usually Ditanu or Didanu. And those texts are usually in the context of venerated dead ancestors, especially the honored royal dead.


The city-state of Ugarit, usually described as Canaanite by Bible teachers, was more accurately an Amorite kingdom. The tablets found by archaeologists there have provided a wealth of knowledge about ancient Hebrew and the history of the period around the time of the Exodus. And some of the connections between secular history, the Bible, and the supernatural realm are absolutely fascinating.


For example, a funerary text identified as KTU 1.161, or RS 34.126 (designations that identify the tablet in question), plainly connects the Amorite tribe of Didanu (Ditanu/Tidnum/Tidanum) with the biblical Rephaim—in a ritual to summon them from the dead!

Quote :

“Sacrifice of the Shades” liturgy:
You are summoned, O Rephaim of the earth,
You are invoked, O council of the Didanu!
Ulkn, the Raphi’, is summoned,
Trmn, the Raphi’, is summoned,
Sdn-w-rdn is summoned,
Ṯr ‘llmn is summoned,
the Rephaim of old are summoned!
You are summoned, O Rephaim of the earth,
You are invoked, O council of the Didanu!⁠1
Emphasis added

Yeah, I know! What?!

Scholars who look at this text from a secular perspective tend to view it as an academic curiosity, a window into the psychology of people who lived 3,500 years ago.


 But as Christians, filtering this through the lens of truth, we get a whole different picture.





In this ritual, the Rephaim, which included a council of the Didanu, were invoked to accompany the recently deceased king of Ugarit, Niqmaddu III, to the underworld.


 They were also there to bless the new king, Ammurapi III, who—although he probably didn’t know it—was the last king of Ugarit. His kingdom was about to be overrun by the so-called Sea Peoples sometime around 1200 B.C.


The Rephaim and the council of the Didanu were apparently summoned to impart to the king the power to overcome death, and to make the living king one of the rpum—the Rephaim. Assuming this ritual wasn’t an invention for Ammurapi, and evidence from Babylon suggests it wasn’t, it appears that the coronation rites of the Amorite kings of Ugarit (and maybe other Amorite kingdoms) summoned the king’s dead ancestors, who they identified as the Rephaim.


Imagine a ritual like that in front of the White House on Inauguration Day (no pun intended. It actually happens)!



Now, buckle up, because we’re going to work through some challenging stuff in the rest of this chapter. Most of what follows comes from a paper published in 1999 by scholar Amar Annus of the University of Tartu, Estonia,⁠2 whose research into the Mesopotamian origins for some of the weirder themes in the Old Testament, like the Watchers and their sin, is truly groundbreaking.


For starters, Annus concluded that the West Semitic root for the word Rephaim, mrp’, appears to be the origin of the Greek word merops. The word can have a similar meaning in both languages, “healer” or “healing.”


Kos, an island in the southeast Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey, was formerly called Meropis, after one Merops, the mythical first king of the island. Merops was thought to be an autochthon, an original inhabitant of the land, one who sprang from the rocks and trees as opposed to a foreigner who settled in it. His people, then, were the Meropes. The key point is that Merops, Meropis, and the Meropes all derive from the Semitic root mrp’.


We also find that root as the basis of the phrase meropes anthropoi. That phrase was used by the Greek poet Hesiod in his famous poem Works and Days to describe the men who lived in a long-ago Golden Age.

Quote :

First of all the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Cronos when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods.
Hesiod, Works and Days

Who were these meropes anthropoi? Homer named a few of them in Odysseus: 


Theseus, who killed the Minotaur on Crete; Aegeus, the mythical founder of Athens; Polyphemus, the cannibalistic giant son of Poseidon, one of the Cyclopes; Caneus, a nigh invulnerable warrior, transformed from a woman into a man by Poseidon; Dryas, leader of a tribe that fought a long war with the Centaurs; and so on.


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Significantly, Hesiod mentions that the meropes anthropoi became, upon death, daimones, although he viewed them more favorably than Jews and Christians do demons:

Quote :

But after earth had covered this generation — they are called pure spirits dwelling on the earth, and are kindly, delivering from harm, and guardians of mortal men; for they roam everywhere over the earth, clothed in mist and keep watch on judgements and cruel deeds, givers of wealth…
Hesiod, Works and Days, emphasis added

The Book of Enoch offers a slightly different explanation for the origin of demons:

Quote :

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And now, the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling. Evil spirits have proceeded from their bodies; because they are born from men and from the holy Watchers is their beginning and primal origin; they shall be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits shall they be called. [As for the spirits of heaven, in heaven shall be their dwelling, but as for the spirits of the earth which were born upon the earth, on the earth shall be their dwelling.] And the spirits of the giants afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on the earth, and cause trouble: they take no food, but nevertheless hunger and thirst, and cause offences. And these spirits shall rise up against the children of men and against the women, because they have proceeded from them.

1 Enoch 15:8-12 (R.H. Charles translation), emphasis added

Thus, between Hesiod and Enoch we can connect the meropes anthropoi, the men of the Golden Age, to the Nephilim, children of the fallen Watchers. Both lived during a pre-flood age, and both, upon death, became wandering spirits called demons. It’s just that the Greek view of daimones was more favorable than the Jewish (or Mesopotamian, for that matter) understanding of demons.


Needless to say, that’s another PSYOP by the Enemy.


Kronos, Saturn to the Romans, was king of a race of gods called the Titans, who reigned supreme after Kronos deposed his father, Uranus (with extreme prejudice—Kronos castrated him with a scythe). The golden race of men created by the Titans was the only one that lived during the reign of Kronos. Told that he would be deposed in turn by his children, Kronos tried to preserve his kingship by eating his kids as soon as they were born. Zeus was spared that fate by his mother, Rhea, who gave Kronos—obviously not a picky eater—a boulder wrapped in a blanket instead. When Zeus was grown, he freed his siblings and led a war to depose the old tyrant. The Titans were defeated and imprisoned in Tartarus.


So through the link between the Semitic root mrp’ and the Greek word meropes, we have a connection between the Nephilim and the heroic men of the Golden Age of Kronos, the meropes anthropoi, “the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.”


Now, back to the Bible: Og, last “of the remnant of the Rephaim”, ruled the land of Bashan, a territory that included Mount Hermon, the place where the rebellious Watchers descended. In Deuteronomy 1:3, Joshua 12:4-5, and Joshua 13:12, we’re told specifically that Og “lived at Ashtaroth and at Edrei and ruled over Mount Hermon.” Edrei was the site of the battle between Israel and the forces of Og. And one of the Ugaritic texts, KTU 1.108, confirms the link between Og and the Rephaim as denizens of the netherworld.

Quote :

May Rapiu, king of eternity, drink wine, may he drink, the powerful and noble god, the one who rules in Athtarat [Ashtaroth], the god who reigns in Edrei, who sings and plays on the lyre…
KTU 1.108, emphasis added

In other words, the Amorites of Ugarit believed that a god named Rapiu, a singular form of the word rpum (Rephaim), ruled exactly the same territory as Og, king of Bashan. And since Rapiu, the king of eternity, was linked to the Rephaim, the honored ancestral dead, Og’s kingdom around Mount Hermon was essentially the gateway to the underworld.


Here’s another interesting data point: In Ugaritic, Bashan, which Ugaritians pronounced with a “th” instead of an “sh”, meant “place of the serpent”—a callback to the divine rebel, the nachash, of Genesis 3. Remember from Isaiah 14, the nachash was cast down to Sheol where the dead kings of the nations reside. Did that happen at Bashan?


Canaanite myth offers another link between Og and the Rephaim: Danel (the Ugaritic equivalent of the Hebrew name Daniel), the hero of a Canaanite myth called The Legend of Aqhat, is described in the story as a mt rpi. According to Amar Annus, mt rpi, which means “man of Rephaim”, is a linguistic match for meropes anthropoi. That specifically links the golden race men from the age of Kronos—i.e., the Nephilim—to the Rephaim, and thus to the council of the Didanu.


But get this: Danel is also called mt hrnmy, which means “man of Hermon.”


Yeah. That Hermon.


So now we can link the biblical Rephaim, the mythical meropes anthropoi of the Golden Age of Kronos, the Nephilim, the Watchers of Genesis 6, and the mysterious council of the Didanu—which, remember, was probably the name of an ancient tribe of Amorites claimed as the ancestors of the kings of Ugarit, Assyria, and Babylon.


This is a good time to point out that the ill-fated Ammurapi III of Ugarit mentioned above shared a name with the most famous king of the old Babylonian empire, Hammurabi. Scholars typically translate their names, ammu rapi, as “my kinsman is a healer.” This draws on the possible meaning “healer” of the Semitic root rpi.


Although this author is not a scholar of ancient Semitic languages, in the context of what we’ve just read, a more accurate rendering of Ammurapi/Hammurabi might be “my kinsman is a Raphi’“—one of the Rephaim.


Since you’re perceptive, you’ve probably already figured out where this is leading. But to put this on the record, we will now lay this out in black and white: The name of an ancestor of several Amorite royal houses, Dedan, whose descendants were called the Didanu, Tidanum, and variations thereof, is the name from which the Greeks derived the word titanes—from which we get the name of the Titans.


Dedan is a name attested in the Bible. Dedan and Sheba are locations in western Arabia mentioned several times by the prophet Ezekiel (about which more later). It’s also the name of one of the leaders of Korah’s rebellion against Moses, Dathan (see Numbers 16).


One of the nephews of Nimrod was named Dedan, maybe not coincidentally. Could his name have been in honor of the Titans, the old gods who descended at Mount Hermon in the dim, distant past? Given the later links between the Amorites and the Rephaim, and the pre-flood knowledge brought back into the world by the Amorite kingdom of Babylon, this speculation isn’t exactly coming out of thin air.

While we’ll never identify for sure the Dedan whose name became synonymous with the old gods, or why the Amorites appear to have carried the belief that they were their heirs, we can document the connection between the Watchers of the Bible and the Titans of Greek myth.


When the Olympians defeated the Titans, Zeus banished them to Tartarus, a place of torment for the wicked as far below Hades as the earth is below heaven. That just happens to be the current address of the Watchers who landed at Mount Hermon.

Quote :

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment;
2 Peter 2:4 (ESV), emphasis added

The Greek word translated “cast them into hell” is the verb ταρταρόω, tartaroo, which literally means “to thrust down to Tartarus.” This is the only use of that word in the New Testament. Hades, meanwhile, is mentioned nearly a dozen times, including twice by Jesus. That distinguishes Hades from Tartarus, which was apparently reserved as a special place of punishment for angels who sinned. And the only explicit example of angels sinning in the Bible is in Genesis 6:1-4, which is confirmed by the passages in 2 Peter and by Jude, who clearly linked the punishment of the angels to a sexual sin.


Further, the Jewish scholars who translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek two hundred years or so before Jesus’ birth into the text called the Septuagint understood the link between the Rephaim and the pagan gods. In 2 Samuel 5, the scholars translated the site of David’s battle against the Philistines, emeq rapha, as Valley of the Titans.


So. The Titans of the Greek myths were the “angels who did not stay within their own position of authority,” the Watchers of Genesis 6. They are bound in Tartarus, kept “in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day.” Their children, the Nephilim, whose spirits are the demons that plague the earth to this day, were the shades of Sheol, the Rephaim, who were summoned in rituals by Amorite kings who believed they were their honored dead ancestors.


Seriously.


Does the phrase “the iniquity of the Amorites” begin to make more sense?


COMING UP NEXT: When Jesus vs the Apkallu!

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the ninth part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT set to air on network television mid February (2017) through mid-March. This series and the forthcoming programs will center on two groundbreaking books (available starting this week) — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert. These reports and entries will unveil what most in the modern Church have never heard regarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods, the Titans, and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.

Jesus, of course, was fully aware of the ongoing war for his holy mountain. For him, the war was personal.

Many of the key events in the life of Jesus occurred at the Temple Mount. As an infant, Jesus was presented at the Temple in accordance with the Law, where Simeon, a man who had been told he’d live to see the Messiah, and Anna, an 84-year-old prophetess, were led to Jesus by the Holy Spirit. When he was twelve, he stayed behind in the Temple after his parents started back to Nazareth after the Passover celebration in Jerusalem. It was a full day before they realized Jesus was missing, and at least three more before they found him in the Temple talking with the rabbis.


Early in his ministry, Jesus visited Jerusalem during Passover and drove the moneychangers and animal merchants out of the Temple. Later, probably during the second Passover of his ministry, Jesus healed a lame man at the Pool of Bethesda at the north end of the temple complex. Shortly before the Crucifixion, Jesus drove out the moneychangers a second time, and Matthew records that he healed many lame and blind people who came to him at the Temple.


Isn’t it interesting that even in the building erected by the wicked king Herod, and without the Ark of the Covenant in the temple, Jesus was still consumed with zeal for his Father’s house?


And that passion extended beyond the 35 acres that make up the Temple Mount. Israel’s inheritance was Yahweh, and the land inside the borders He established during the time of Moses and Joshua belonged to Him. That’s why Jesus devoted so much of his ministry to healing the sick and casting out demons—which were, remember, the spirits of the Nephilim. He wasn’t just restoring people to physical and spiritual health, he was casting them out of his land, Israel.


When we step back and take a fresh look at the events of Jesus’ life, many things take on new meaning when they’re framed in the context of the war between God and the gods. And, of course, many of the arguments offered by skeptics to explain away the divinity of Jesus are nothing more than PSYOPs by the Fallen to convince modern minds, clouded by the fog of scientism, that Jesus was either a political radical, a social justice warrior, or a misunderstood itinerant preacher—anything but God made flesh.


For example, the Transfiguration. What was the point of all that?

Quote :

And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” For he did not know what to say, for they were terrified. And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.” And suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only.
Mark 9:2-8 (ESV)

First reaction by the modern reader: Awesome special effects! But if the purpose of the Transfiguration was to demonstrate his divinity, why did Jesus take only three of his disciples? Wouldn’t it have been more productive to bring all twelve? Or why not perform this great visual effect for the thousands of people who had to settle for a miraculous lunch of bread and fish?


Here’s why: The intended audience wasn’t human.


The clue to the real purpose of the event is the location. Both Mark and Matthew note that the Transfiguration took place on a high mountain. Now, Israel has plenty of mountains, but not many that can be described as high—at least not relative to the rest of the peaks in the land.


Second, note that they climbed a mountain near Caesarea Philippi. That narrows the field. The town was in the northeastern part of the Holy Land, north of the Sea of Galilee and Lake Huleh, in the area we call the Golan Heights. To be precise, Caesarea Philippi sat at the southwestern base of Mount Hermon.


Ah. Bull’s eye!


Yes, the very mountain where the Watchers/Titans descended and made a pact to corrupt humanity was where Jesus was transfigured into a being of light before the eyes of Peter, James, and John.


Coincidence?


Not on your life! Jesus knew exactly what he was doing. This was a cosmic poke in the eye, a declaration to the Fallen that the Second Power in Heaven had arrived in the flesh. He was declaring that the temporary dominion of the rebellious bene elohim was nearly at an end—that Yahweh’s mount of assembly would soon fulfill the promises proclaimed by the prophets. And he did it on the mount of assembly of El, the high god of the Canaanites.


More accurately, it was where the Fallen tried to usurp the name of El Shaddai, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.


If we back up a chapter in Matthew and Mark, there is another incident that foreshadowed what happened on Mount Hermon. At the base of the mountain, outside the city of Caesarea Philippi, is a place called Paneas (today called Banias). It’s a cave and a spring that’s been sacred to the Greek god Pan since the time of Alexander the Great.


Pan was the god of wild, desolate places, shepherds and flocks, music, fields, groves, and wooded glens. Pan was also linked to fertility, which influenced much of the art depicting the god in the classical world. He was often shown pursuing or engaged in physical relations with goddesses, nymphs, women, teen boys called eromenoi, and/or goats. (Ecch. Some of those ancient vases and frescoes should have been rated R or NC-17.) As a rustic nature god, Pan normally wasn’t worshiped in temples. He preferred outdoor settings, especially those that were like his home in Arcadia, a mountainous region of southern Greece.


The Grotto of Pan at Paneas has been sacred since ancient times. A gushing spring once flowed from the cave, feeding the marshy area north of Lake Huleh that was the source of the Jordan River. An earthquake years ago shifted something under the mountain, and today the stream seeps quietly from the bedrock below the mouth of the cave.


After the Greeks came to the Levant, Pan gradually replaced an earlier local fertility cult. Scholars have suggested that Aliyan, a minor Canaanite god of fountains, may have been the deity worshiped at Paneas before the Greeks arrived. This might have been the god called Baal-Hermon, the Lord of Hermon, in Judges 3:3.


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Christians in the centuries after Jesus equated Pan with Satan. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how Greek depictions of the goat-god influenced later artists, what with the horns, hooves, tail, and all. But those connections were mainly in the minds of imaginative medieval artists, since there is nothing definite in the Bible that describes the appearance of Satan other than a warning that he can appear as an angel of light. However, there are some interesting links that suggest there was more to Pan than a fun-loving, randy nature spirit.


We go back more than 1,400 years from the time of Jesus to the Exodus. Apparently, the Israelites began to worship entities during their forty years in the desert called se’irim, or “goat demons.”

Quote :

And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to Aaron and his sons and to all the people of Israel and say to them, This is the thing that the Lord has commanded. If any one of the house of Israel kills an ox or a lamb or a goat in the camp, or kills it outside the camp, and does not bring it to the entrance of the tent of meeting to offer it as a gift to the Lord in front of the tabernacle of the Lord, bloodguilt shall be imputed to that man. He has shed blood, and that man shall be cut off from among his people. This is to the end that the people of Israel may bring their sacrifices that they sacrifice in the open field, that they may bring them to the Lord, to the priest at the entrance of the tent of meeting, and sacrifice them as sacrifices of peace offerings to the Lord. And the priest shall throw the blood on the altar of the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting and burn the fat for a pleasing aroma to the Lord. So they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices to goat demons, after whom they whore. This shall be a statute forever for them throughout their generations.
Leviticus 17:1-7 (ESV), emphasis added

The se’irim, literally “hairy ones,” were satyr-like (i.e., Pan-like) beings who the Israelites began to worship during their wanderings in the desert. The sacrifices away from the tabernacle were consistent with the worship of Pan. It appears that the section of the Law recorded in Leviticus 17, requiring that all sacrifices be brought to the tent of meeting, was specifically to stop the worship of these goat-demons.


Now, se’ir is one of those words where the translation depends on the context. Usually, it simply means “goat” or “kid.” But there are four places in the Old Testament where the word clearly refers to a demon or devil. Here’s another example: In Isaiah 34, the prophet turns his polemical gift on the land of Edom:

Quote :

Thorns shall grow over its strongholds,
nettles and thistles in its fortresses.
It shall be the haunt of jackals,
an abode for ostriches.
And wild animals shall meet with hyenas;
the wild goat shall cry to his fellow;
indeed, there the night bird settles
and finds for herself a resting place.
Isaiah 34:13-14 (ESV), emphasis added

Again, the “wild goat” is based on the Hebrew root se’ir. The KJV translates the word as “satyr,” as it does in Isaiah 13, but most English translations are similar to the ESV—wild goat, male goat, hairy goat, etc.


Now, back to Moses: The Book of Leviticus records an interesting requirement for the Day of Atonement. It involved a goat that was driven from the camp into the wilderness for a being called Azazel.

Quote :

“Aaron shall offer the bull as a sin offering for himself and shall make atonement for himself and for his house. Then he shall take the two goats and set them before the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting. And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel. And Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord and use it as a sin offering, but the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Azazel.
Leviticus 16:6-10 (ESV), emphasis added

Scholars interpret the ritual as complementary rites of atonement, with the sacrificial goat and the second goat who carries the sin of the people away. The priest would lay hands on the goat for Azazel and impart the sins of the people on it before it was led out of the camp and into the wilderness. This is the origin of the term “scapegoat.”


Because you’ve been paying attention, you’re remembering right about now that the name Azazel has come up once before in this book. That’s because the Book of 1 Enoch names Azazel as one of the leaders of the rebellious Watchers who descended at Mount Hermon. And right there is a link between Azazel and the se’irim, the satyr-like deities dancing in the wilderness who just happen to bear a strong resemblance to the Greek god Pan.


Of course, unless you’re a coincidence theorist, you see these details as a connected thread, part of an enemy PSYOP to distract the Jews from their devotion to Yahweh. But that’s not all.


Greek myths record fascinating connections between Pan and a pair of other deities we’ve already encountered in this study: In one story, Pan, in his goat-god aspect Aegipan, assisted Zeus in the chief god’s epic battle with the chaos god, Typhon. When Typhon turned to attack Aegipan, the goat-god dove into the Nile River, with the parts above the water remaining a goat but the part below the waterline transformed into a goat. Thus, Aegipan became the goat-fish Capricornus, or Capricorn.


Even though the constellation Capricorn is faint, it’s been consistently depicted as a hybrid goat-fish since at least the 21st century B.C., the time of the last Sumerian kings to rule over all of Mesopotamia. And—here’s the kicker—the goat-fish was a well-known symbol of the god of the abzu, Enki.


So now we can draw links directly from Enki, god of the abyss, to the goat-demons of the Exodus and the goat-god worshiped at the base of Mount Hermon in the time of Jesus Christ.


And it was there at Caesarea Philippi, right outside the Grotto of Pan, where this exchange took place between Jesus and his hot-headed disciple, Peter:

Quote :

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.“
Matthew 16:13-18 (ESV), emphasis added

Remember that the Grotto of Pan is at the foot of El’s mount of assembly, site of the rebellion by the Watchers. It’s also in Bashan, gateway to the netherworld. Was it a coincidence that it was there Jesus asked Peter, “Who do you say that I am?”


No. Jesus made a statement to the Fallen there, a declaration of his divinity: 


On their rock, he would build his church!


Then he climbed their rock, Mount Hermon, and was transfigured into a being of light, his face like the sun and his clothes dazzling white—and the disciples heard Yahweh’s voice from heaven.


#
We need to look at one more event that took place in northern Israel, near Mount Hermon. This is in Luke 10, the chapter immediately after Peter’s declaration of faith and the Transfiguration on Mount Hermon. In other words, the time and place of this event was also deliberate.

Quote :

After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them on ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about to go.  […]
The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
Luke 10:1-20 (ESV), emphasis added

Now, some translations say there were seventy disciples, others say seventy-two. The Greek manuscripts of Luke are split and there is no way to know for sure which number Luke wrote on his original draft of the gospel. But either way, given the location and the purpose of the mission, there are good theological reasons to believe the number was not, you know, coincidental.


How many sons of El were in El’s assembly on Mount Hermon? That’s right, seventy—plus Ba`al and El equals seventy-two.


How many nations did Yahweh create at the Tower of Babel? Seventy—but some translations of the Bible actually name seventy-two.


How many elders of Israel climbed Mount Sinai to meet Yahweh face to face? Seventy—plus Moses and Aaron makes seventy-two.


What was the point of Jesus sending the disciples out ahead of him? It was the start of the church’s mission to reclaim the nations from the Fallen, the kickoff event of the Great Commission. Satan, the nachash from the book of Genesis, fell “like lightning from heaven” because he’d lost his legal claim as lord of the dead over those who die in Christ. Why? Because we are guaranteed eternal life through the shedding of his blood.


However you count it, sending out that specific number of disciples wasn’t an accident or a coincidence, it was a clear message to the old gods: Get off my land!


COMING UP NEXT: Bad Moon Rising – From Babylon to Jericho to Mecca

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the tenth part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT set to air on network television mid February (2017) through mid-March. This series and the forthcoming programs will center on two groundbreaking books (to be released Match 7) — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert. These reports and entries will unveil what most in the modern Church have never heard regarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods, the Titans, and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.

Jabal al-Nour is near Mecca in western Saudi Arabia

If we’d been interested in stopping at a nice biblical number to justify a catchy title, something like The Seven Mountains of the Supernatural War, we’d have ended the new book The Great Inception at Mount Zion. But this book would be incomplete without bringing up an eighth holy mountain, one that’s had a tremendous and incredibly destructive impact on the world.

This mountain is responsible for what statisticians say will be the world’s largest religion by about 2070 unless something drastic happens. In that regard, we must give credit where it’s due—this mountain was, without question, the site of the most successful supernatural PSYOP in history.


The Arabic name of this peak means Mountain of Enlightenment. Jabal al-Nour is near Mecca in western Saudi Arabia. It’s the site of the cave where Muhammad was visited by an angel calling itself Jibril, or Gabriel.


The message was not from God. Yahweh does not contradict Himself, but the Quran clearly does. Muhammad saw something, of that we have no doubt. But it was not a messenger from Yahweh.


We’ll deal with the specific beliefs of Islam and its major sects in the book. Islam has a role to play in the future conflict for God’s holy mountain, but sadly for Muslims, the part the Fallen wants them to play is very simple—to die.


Allah is the name used for the god of Islam, but it’s also the name used for the God of the Bible by Arab Christians. This is somewhat confusing, which is, of course, not coincidental. Just as El was the name of the chief god of the Canaanites and a generic name for God in Hebrew, “Allah” is another PSYOP by the Fallen to muddy the water.


Many Christians assume that Muslims worship the same god they do, and so they aren’t surprised to learn that Arab Christians apply the same proper name to the God of the Bible. This is the same mistake as assuming a pagan Amorite in the 15th century B.C. who prayed to El was calling on the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Muslims, who believe that Allah has no son, have put their faith in something they think is the God of the Book (the Bible). How can that be, when there are fundamental differences between Allah and Yahweh?


Some Christian scholars draw a link between Allah and older deities worshiped in Arabia prior to Muhammad. This isn’t universally accepted, but it doesn’t have to be to make a case for the god of Islam being something other than Yahweh.


Etymologically, the explanation that seems to make the most sense, and the one accepted by most scholars, suggests that Allah is a contract of al-lāh, “the god.” That’s like the old Semitic use of El, a proper name that grew out of the generic Proto-Semitic word ʾil-, meaning “deity” or “god.” Variant forms show up in Akkadian (ilu), Ugaritic (il), and Hebrew (eloah, the singular form of elohim).


Still, differences in the fundamental characteristics of Allah and Yahweh force us to conclude that one of two things must be true: Either, 1) Allah and Yahweh are one and the same, and the Bible doesn’t accurately record the way Yahweh revealed Himself to the prophets and apostles; or, 2) some thing lied to Muhammad in that cave on Jabal al-Nour, and Allah is not the God of the Bible.


Given that we have Old Testament texts that can be reliably dated to at least two centuries before Jesus (the Septuagint translation from Hebrew into Greek), and most scholars would accept earlier dates for the authorship of those books, and that the books of the New Testament are the best attested documents from the classical period, there is compelling evidence that the Bible has not been corrupted or substantially changed since it was written by the apostles and prophets. While there are minor differences between some texts, the sheer number of manuscripts and documents that quote scripture, like letters from the early church fathers, provide plenty of material to cross-check the books of the Bible and confirm its reliability.


In contrast, the Quran was compiled into its final form about twenty years after the death of Muhammad from several competing versions. By the time of the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, Islam had spread from Arabia into Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Iran, cultures that were different from one another and from the origin point of the faith.


 Uthman was reportedly motivated to take on the project by disputes between some of the new followers over the correct way to pray. So, to prevent Muslims from fighting over the book, texts were collected from around the caliphate and compiled into an “official” version, and variant copies were destroyed.


Even Muslim scholars—mainly Shia, who believe that Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law was the rightful heir to the prophet’s growing empire—admit that Uthman corrupted the Islamic holy book by his action.


There is more to the story, of course. Scholars spend entire careers studying the Quran just as others do the Bible. But the fundamental difference between the Quran and the Bible is that there is no comparison between the two when it comes to the quantity and quality of the source material.


We take no joy in saying so. Literally billions of humans will pay the ultimate price for the supernatural deception worked on a charismatic Arab trader fourteen centuries ago. And billions more will be destroyed in the cataclysmic final battle for the holy mountain of Yahweh. The bloodthirsty gods are preparing for war.


#
Here is where another brief review of history may be helpful. We’ll get a little speculative, and because we’re dealing with the spirit realm there is only so much we can say with one hundred percent confidence.


What happened to the Amorites? Scholars have been exploring that question ever since their existence was confirmed by sources outside the Bible in the 19th century.


 They were pushed out of Mesopotamia by the Kassites, who took Babylon in the 16th century B.C., and native rulers near the Persian Gulf called the Sealand Dynasty.


 We’ve already discussed how the Amorite Hyksos rulers of Lower Egypt were evicted by native Eygptians around the same time.





Area under Amorite control circa 2000 B.C.


They Amorites disappear from history around the time of the Sea Peoples invasion of the Levant and Egypt in the late 13th and early 12th centuries B.C. This coincides with what scholars call the Late Bronze Age collapse. Over a period of about fifty years, between about 1200 and 1150 B.C., the major states of the eastern Mediterranean from Mycenaean Greece and Hatti to the Amorite and Canaanite states of the Levant were destroyed.


This was the event that ended the kingdom of Ugarit during the reign of the ill-fated Ammurapi we mentioned in an earlier chapter. A small kingdom southeast of Ugarit called Amurru, named for the Amorites, was also wiped out around this time.


This was the period of the later Judges, a time that set the stage for the emergence of the kingdom of Israel. Barak and Deborah’s destruction of Hazor, which some scholars think may have belonged to the kingdom of Amurru, may be dated to this time.


The bottom line is that only Egypt and a few small kingdoms in northern Syria appear to have survived this wave of destruction. The Philistines settled in what we call today the Gaza Strip, and they may have been part of the Sea Peoples coalition. Emerging from the ashes of this turmoil alongside the kingdom of Israel were several Aramean kingdoms, with Damascus and Hamath being the largest.


Because they came out of the same area formerly associated with the Amorites, it’s easy to assume that the Aramean people were just descendants of the Amorites who carried on as best they could after the disasters of the Late Bronze Age collapse. But we can’t make that assumption any more than we could assume that the Israelites were just Canaanites with a repackaged religion because of where David came to power.


By analyzing texts that have been found from the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and later Egyptian kingdoms, we can piece together a history that seems solid. While the name “Amorite” fell out of use after the conquest of Canaan, there are a couple of tribal names that bridge the period between the disappearance of the Amorites and the emergence of the Arameans. Specifically, the Aḫlamū, sometimes called Aḫlamū-Aramayū (Aḫlamū-Arameans) by the Assyrians, and our old friends the Suteans.


Together, these two tribal names appear to be used, at least sometimes, interchangeably with both Amorite and Aramean nomads, mainly in the steppes of Syria and the Transjordan. After the conquests of the Assyrian empire through the 7th century B.C., even the Arameans fade from history, although the Aramaic language, because it was adopted as the lingua franca by Assyria, became the language of trade and cultural exchange in the Near East from about 600 B.C. to around the time of Jesus before giving way to Greek.


In short, scholars can document a “geographical, historical and linguistic continuity” between the Amorites of the Old Babylonian period and the Arameans of the Middle Babylonian era.⁠1


Recent history in the old Amorite homeland, which includes Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, points to a troubled future for the Holy Land. We mentioned earlier the existence of territorial spirits, the main biblical example being the Prince of Persia that tied up the messenger to Daniel for several weeks. We can’t know for certain, but it’s worth mentioning because, as you’ve noticed by now, this author doesn’t put much stock in coincidence, especially where it concerns the Bible and the ongoing spiritual war.


Here are the relevant questions: Can it be just a weird coincidence that the hot spots in the Middle East, especially since the emergence of the Islamic State since the summer of 2014, are a match for the areas defined as the homeland of the Amorites four thousand years ago? Is it just a cosmic accident that the land of the Amorites, especially central and northern Syria, are far more important in the eschatology of Islam than Arabia, the land of Islam’s birth?


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Consider the otherwise inexplicable atrocities in the Islamic State’s capital, Raqqa, which lies on the west bank of the Euphrates close by Jebel Bishri, the ancient mountain of the Amorites; or the destruction in Aleppo, called the City of Hadad when it was ruled by Amorite kings in the days of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The prophecies that guide the leadership of the Islamic State focus on lands where the old gods of the Amorites once reigned supreme.


In Iraq, where ISIS is hard pressed at this writing by Iraqi, Kurdish, Turkish, and American forces in the city of Mosul, analysts at the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Training Academy at West Point suggest that ISIS has already prepared a fallback plan in Diyala province if they can’t hang on in Mosul. The analysts feel the terrain and the demographic makeup of Diyala is especially well suited for an ongoing insurgency.⁠2 That’s the area northeast of Baghdad along the Diyala River toward the Hamrin mountain range, where more than four thousand years ago the doomed Sumerian kings of Ur built their futile Amorite-wall-which-keeps-the-Tidnum-at-bay.


All of this begs the question: What foul spirit is at work in MAR.TUki, the ancient land of the Amorites?


#
Let’s dig a little deeper. And, if you’ll indulge us, we’ll get a little speculative. As we’ve noted, there is only so much we can know for sure about the spirits opposed to God. They lie, and our perception into that realm is limited. But let’s look at what’s available to us and see if we can draw some tentative conclusions.


Most Bible scholars who trace the movement of the nations that dispersed from Babel in Genesis 10 place two nations that mentioned in Ezekiel’s prophecy of the Gog-Magog war, Sheba and Dedan, in Arabia. Sheba was the father of the Sabeans, who founded a kingdom in southwest Arabia, modern-day Yemen.


Dedan settled along the coast of the Red Sea in western Arabia, in the area called the Hejaz. Dedan was an important oasis along the caravan route between Sheba and Babylon. Because of the brutal desert that covers the interior of Arabia, the route traveled north through Edom, just southeast of Judah. Dedan eventually grew into an independent kingdom around the time of the prophets Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. The last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, spent most of his reign living at the important Dedanite oasis of Tayma while entrusting Babylon to his son, Belshazzar—he of the mene, mene, tekel, upharsin incident.


Sheba and Dedan were sons of Raamah, a son of Cush, the son of Ham. This makes Sheba and Dedan nephews of Nimrod, who we believe was the Sumerian king Enmerkar, would-be builder of the abode of the gods, the tower of Babel at Eridu. 


(Sheba and Dedan are also mentioned in Genesis 25 as grandsons of Abraham and his concubine Keturah, through their son Jokshan. Geographically, though, it still places them among the tribes of Arabia.)


Nobody is sure why Nabonidus spent a decade living in the desert, but the best guess is that he was seeking prophecy and guidance from his preferred deity, the moon-god Sîn, who the king elevated to the top spot in the pantheon.

Quote :

I accomplished the command of Sîn, king of the gods, lord of lords, dwelling in the heavens, who, in comparison of the gods in heaven, his name is surpassing: (also) of Šamaš [sun-god], who is his brightest (peer), of Nusku [fire-god], Ištar [Ishtar/Inanna, goddess of sex and war], Adda [Hadad, the storm-god Ba`al], Nergal [Resheph/Apollo, god of war and plague, and gatekeeper to the underworld], (those) who accomplish the command of Nannar [Sumerian name for Sîn] their surpasser.⁠3
Harran inscription H2, A & B, Col. III (text in brackets added)

Note that Marduk is missing from that list of deities. Nabonidus probably made an enemy of the established Marduk priesthood in Babylon, possibly creating a religious fifth column that contributed to the ease with which Babylon fell to the Persians.


It’s believed that Nabonidus’ mother Addagoppe (Adad-guppi—notice the theophoric element Adad) was a priestess of Sîn from Harran in northern Mesopotamia. 


Remember, Harran was the moon-god’s cult center that was so important to the Amorite Binū Yamina tribes in Abraham’s day, 1,400 years earlier. So Nabonidus may have been of old Aramean/Amorite stock, and for some reason—call it infernal revelation, if you will—he was compelled to revive the flagging cult of Sîn and transplant it to the Arabian desert.





Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, shown worshipping the moon-god Sîn, the sun-god Šamaš, and Ishtar, represented by Venus. Credit: Jona lendering (own work), CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2629946.


The moon-god has a long history in that part of the world. Not only do we have the evidence of the cult centers of Ur, Harran, and Jericho that date back to the 3rdmillennium B.C., but remember the account of Gideon’s victory over the Midianites, another people who lived in northwestern Arabia. Gideon’s huge haul of gold included the crescent ornaments from the Midianites’ camels, which presumably honored the moon-god. Symbols depicting a heavenly triad of Sîn, Šamaš, and Ishtar—moon, sun, and Venus—are common from the mid 2nd millennium B.C. at least through the time of Nabonidus, who is depicted venerating the three deities on stela that have survived.


While the star and crescent symbol prominent in the Islamic world today only came into use after the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453, it’s not too much of a reach to suggest that the ancient cult of the moon-god in the Near East and Arabia has been carried into the modern era by the descendants of the Amorites, Arameans, and their Arab neighbors to the south, especially with the boost given to the moon-god’s cult in Arabia by the king of Babylon during the last days of that empire.


Why is this of interest? While Sheba (Yemen) seems almost geographically irrelevant to end times prophecy (except maybe as a flashpoint for a wider Sunni-Shia war), Dedan, as we showed earlier, bears the same name as the ancient Amorite tribe Didanu/Tidanu, from which the Greeks derived the name of the Titans. And the area settled by the Dedanites, the Hejaz, includes the two holiest sites of Islam, Mecca and Medina.


While Muslim scholars would argue the connection, the symbolic link, at least, is obvious. Joel Richardson does an excellent job of establishing the pagan roots of Allah in his new book, Mystery Babylon. The historical link between Nabonidus, the moon-worshiping king of Babylon, and the region of Islam’s holiest sites may be coincidental, but you know our feeling about coincidence theories.


Now, please understand: We’re not suggesting a physical connection between the Watchers/Titans and the Arab tribes that spread Islam across the world. In other words, and we truly hope this doesn’t disappoint you, we do not see a role in the end times for ISIS Nephilim.⁠4


Nevertheless, it’s fascinating that history has once again provided a spiritual link between the past and the future where we never expected to find one.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the eleventh part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT airing now on network television and our ROKU and YouTube channels. 

This series and the programs center on two groundbreaking books (to be released April 7) — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert. These reports and entries unveil what most in the modern Church have never heard regarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods, the Titans, and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.

Nimrod was second generation after the flood. His father was Cush, son of Ham, son of Noah.

In Sumerian history, the second king of Uruk after the flood was named Enmerkar, son of Mesh-ki-ang-gasher.


Enmerkar is also a compound word. The prefix en means “lord” and the suffix kar is Sumerian for “hunter”. So Enmerkar was Enmer the Hunter. Sound familiar?

Quote :

Cush fathered Nimrod; he was the first on earth to be a mighty man.
He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore it is said, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the Lord.”
Genesis 10:8-9 (ESV), emphasis added

The Hebrews, doing what they loved to do with language, transformed Enmer—the consonants N-M-R (remember, no vowels in ancient Hebrew)—into Nimrod, which makes it sound like marad, the Hebrew word for “rebel”.


Now, get this:  An epic poem from about 2000 B.C. called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta preserves the basic details of the Tower of Babel story.


We don’t know exactly where Aratta was, but guesses range from northern Iran to Armenia. (Which would be interesting. Not only is Armenia located near the center of an ancient kingdom called Urartu, which may be a cognate for Aratta, it’s where Noah landed his boat—the mountains of Ararat. So it’s possible Nimrod/Enmerkar was trying to intimidate the people—his cousins, basically—who settled near where his great-grandfather landed the ark. But we just don’t know.)  Wherever it was, Enmerkar muscled this neighboring kingdom to compel them to send building materials for a couple of projects near and dear to his heart.


Some background:  The poem refers to Enmerkar’s capital city Uruk as the “great mountain”. This is intriguing, since Uruk, like most of Sumer, sits in an alluvial plain where there are precisely no mountains whatsoever. Uruk was home to two of the chief gods of the Sumerian pantheon, Anu, the sky god, and Inanna, his granddaughter, the goddess of war and sex. (And by sex, we mean the carnal, extramarital kind.)


While Anu was pretty much retired (like the later Canaanite god El), having handed over his duties as head of the pantheon to Enlil, Inanna played a very active role in Sumerian society. For example, scholars have translated ritual texts for innkeepers to pray to Innana, asking her to guarantee that their bordellos turn a profit.


Apparently, part of the problem between Enmerkar and the king of Aratta, whose name, we learn from a separate epic, was Ensuhkeshdanna, was a dispute over who was Inanna’s favorite. One of the building projects Enmerkar wanted to tackle was a magnificent temple to Inanna, the E-ana (“House of Heaven”). He wanted Aratta to supply the raw materials. Apparently, this wasn’t only because there isn’t much in the way of timber, jewels, or precious metal in the plains of Sumer, but because Enmerkar wanted the lord of Aratta to submit and acknowledge that he was Inanna’s chosen one. And so Enmerkar prayed to Inanna:

Quote :

“My sister, let Aratta fashion gold and silver skillfully on my behalf for Unug (Uruk). Let them cut the flawless lapis lazuli from the blocks, let them …… the translucence of the flawless lapis lazuli ……. …… build a holy mountain in Unug. Let Aratta build a temple brought down from heaven — your place of worship, the Shrine E-ana; let Aratta skillfully fashion the interior of the holy jipar, your abode; may I, the radiant youth, may I be embraced there by you. Let Aratta submit beneath the yoke for Unug on my behalf.”[i]

Notice that Inanna’s temple was, like Uruk, compared to a holy mountain. And given the type of goddess Inanna was, the embrace Enmerkar wanted was more than just—ahem—a figure of speech.



The Burney Relief at the British Museum is a terracotta plaque dated to 1800-1750 B.C. It’s believed to represent Inanna, although it may be the demoness Lilith or the goddess of the underworld, Ereshkigal.
To be honest, some of the messages between Enmerkar and Ensuhkeshdanna about Inanna were the kind of locker room talk that got Donald Trump into trouble during the 2016 presidential campaign. But I digress.


Well… no. Let’s continue with the digression for a minute. We should stop for a brief look at Inanna’s role in human history. The goddess has been known by many names through the ages: Inanna in Sumer, Ishtar in Babylon, Astarte in Canaan, Atargatis in Syria, Aphrodite in Greece, and Venus across the Roman world. Let’s just say the image we were taught of Aphrodite/Venus in high school mythology class was way off.


Since we’d like to keep this a family-friendly book, we won’t dig too deeply into the history and characteristics of Inanna. Scholars don’t completely agree on the details, anyway. But it’s safe to say Inanna wasn’t a girl you’d bring home to meet your mother.


In fact, she wasn’t always a girl, period. You see, while Inanna was definitely the goddess with the mostest when it came to sex appeal, she was also androgynous. She was sometimes shown with masculine features like a beard. On one tablet (although from much later, in the first millennium B.C., almost three thousand years after Nimrod), Inanna says, “When I sit in the alehouse, I am a woman, and I am an exuberant young man.”[ii]  Her cult followers included eunuchs and transvestites, and she was apparently the first in history to make a practice of sex reassignment:

Quote :

She [changes] the right side (male) into the left side (female),
She [changes] the left side into the right side,
She [turns] a man into a woman,
She [turns] a woman into a man
She ador[ns] a man as a woman,
She ador[ns] a woman as a man.[iii]

It’s wonderfully ironic. The 21st century progressive ideal of gender fluidity was personified more than five thousand years ago by the Sumerian goddess Inanna, a woman who craved sex and fighting as much (or more) than men, taking on all comers in love and war, and better than men at both. Her personality is celebrated by modern scholars as complex and courageous, transcending traditional gender roles, turning Inanna into an icon of independent man/woman/other-hood.


There is an ongoing debate among scholars as to whether the priesthood of Inanna was involved in ritual sex. The concept of divine marriage was common in ancient Mesopotamia, but generally the participants were a god and his consort. It appears that the rituals were intended to please the god so he’d be receptive to the requests from a city or kingdom under his protection.


However, as a harimtu, which might mean “temple prostitute” or may simply refer to a single woman, Inanna herself participated in the rite with a king. And since she was the dominant partner in the ritual coupling, gender roles might not have been as clearly defined as we would assume.


From a Christian perspective, however, Inanna isn’t complex at all. She’s a bad Hollywood screenwriter’s idea of a 15-year-old boy’s fantasy woman. Inanna is selfish, ruled by her passions, and destructive when she doesn’t get her way. The Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, who ruled Uruk two generations after Enmerkar, is remembered partly for rejecting Inanna. As he pointed out in the story, every one of the men in her life suffered horrible consequences—for example, Dumuzi the Shepherd, who ruled as a king in Bad-Tibara, the second city in Sumer to exercise kingship after Eridu.


In the myth, even though Inanna married Dumuzi, she was happy to throw him under the bus when demons tried to drag her younger son, Lulal (Bad-Tibara’s patron god), down to the netherworld. At Inanna’s urging, the demons spared Lulal and took Dumuzi instead. Dumuzi’s sister pleaded for him, so Inanna agreed to allow her to take his place for half the year, thus making Dumuzi the first of many “dying and rising gods” in the ancient Near East.


More than two thousand years later, one of the abominations God showed the prophet Ezekiel was women at the entrance of the north gate of the Temple weeping for Dumuzi, called Tammuz in the Bible.


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Well, for his impudence at daring to remind Inanna about the fate of Dumuzi, and the other poor shlubs who’d succumbed to the charms of the wild goddess, she flew up to heaven in a rage and demanded that her father, the sky god Anu, unleash the Bull of Heaven on Gilgamesh. That didn’t go well for the Bull of Heaven, but sadly for Gilgamesh, his best friend Enkidu was killed by the gods as punishment for spoiling Inanna’s revenge.


We shared all of that with you to make a point:  This is the deity Enmerkar/Nimrod wanted to make the patron goddess of his city, Uruk! (Replacing her father Anu, ironically.)  Could it be that veneration of the violent, sex-crazed, gender-bending Inanna was responsible for Yahweh’s decision to stop Nimrod’s artificial holy mountain?


Well… no. Probably not. Inanna has enjoyed a very long run near the top of the Most Popular Deities list. And why not? Selling humans on the concept of sex as worship is easy.


Looking at the values of our modern society, it’s no stretch to say that Inanna is the spirit of the age. Gender fluidity is the flavor of the month among progressives in the West. The values of Inanna—immediate gratification and sex with whoever, whenever—are considered more open-minded, tolerant, and loving than the virtues of chastity, fidelity, and faithfulness introduced by Yahweh long after Inanna was first worshiped as the Queen of Heaven.


Ironically, this means that so-called progressive ideas about gender and sexual morality are actually regressive! The enlightened think they’re cutting edge, breaking new ground and smashing old paradigms, when in fact they’re just setting the calendar back to more than a thousand years before Abraham.


If Yahweh had genuinely intervened to put a stop to the cult of Inanna, she would be long forgotten, like Enki. And Miley Cyrus would be a freak, not a culture hero.


No, the transgression of Nimrod was much more serious. Besides building a fabulous temple for the goddess of prostitutes, he also wanted to expand and upgrade the home of the god Enki, the abzu—the abyss.


For more on that story, see Part 4 of this series, Babel, the Abyss, and the Gate of the Gods.


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[i] Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Fluckiger-Hawker, E, Robson, E., and Zólyomi, G. “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,” The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.8.2.3#), retrieved 12/17/16.


[ii] Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Fluckiger-Hawker, E, Robson, E., and Zólyomi, G. “A cir-namcub to Inana (Inana I),” The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.4.07.9&charenc=j#), retrieved 12/17/16.


[iii] Sjoberg, A.W. “In-nin Sa-gur-ra: A Hymn to the Goddess Inanna,” Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie 65, no. 2 (1976): p. 225.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the twelfth and final part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT airing now on network television and our ROKU and YouTube channels. This series and the programs center on two groundbreaking books — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert. These reports and entries unveil what most in the modern Church have never heard regarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods, the Titans, and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.

In 2017, Arch to Baal being erected in numerous centers of power worldwide.

Ba`al was the main enemy of Yahweh in the Old Testament. One could argue that he was even more of a villain in the Bible than Satan, who’s only mentioned in fourteen Old Testament verses, in the books of 1 Chronicles, Job, and Zechariah. Ba`al, on the other hand, appears 106 times in 88 verses (including personal and place names, like Baal-zephon).

Ba`al arrives in Exodus and he’s still around in the New Testament. Jesus discussed him with the Pharisees (see Matthew 12:22-28).


Ba`al isn’t a name, it’s a title. It means “lord”, in the same way we Christians usually say Lord (and our Bibles read Lord) instead of saying Yahweh or spelling out YHWH.


 That’s rather arrogant, when you think about it. And Ba`al wasn’t the only one; over time, Babylon’s chief god Marduk came to be known as Bel, which also means “lord”.


Ba`al has had a long career. He’s not recognized as an active deity in our world today, to the best of our knowledge. There may be a few here and there who try to recreate the old religion of the ancient Canaanites, but like aging pop divas, the old gods reinvented themselves as time and people moved on. We’ve already seen how Sumerian Inanna became Babylon’s Ishtar, the Semitic Astarte, Aphrodite of Greece, and Venus of Rome.


Over time, Ba`al replaced the original name of the West Semitic storm-god Hadad (or Haddu), who was also called Adad/Addu by the Akkadians. Ba`al has also been identified with the Hurrian god Teššub, the Hittite god Tarhunt (or Tarhun), the Urartian god Teisheba, the Sumerian god Iškur, the Amorite god Amurru (incorrectly, as it happens), and others.


Of course, Ba`al is best known as Zeus—Jupiter to the Romans.


The earliest of these storm-god manifestations was Iškur (note: the š sounds like “sh”). However, Iškur was a minor deity in the Sumerian pantheon. That’s logical; in a land that’s mostly desert, a god of storms and life-bringing rain wasn’t as important as Enki, who controlled the fresh waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. Irrigation was far more important than rainfall for growing crops in southern Mesopotamia. Farther north, where rain was key to agriculture, Iškur played a larger role in the pantheon.





Stela at the Louvre from the ancient city of Ugarit depicting Ba`al with his characteristic mace and thunderbolt.


The chief god Enlil and his son, the war-god Ninurta, also had storm-god characteristics. This left Iškur looking like a pale imitation of the others, a third-tier superhero in a comic book universe. He was believed to be the son of Anu, although some traditions claimed that Enlil was his father. This could mean that Iškur wasn’t a native Sumerian deity but an import from Sumer’s Semitic-speaking neighbors. As the patron god of Karkara, a minor city near Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, Iškur’s cult center didn’t have enough political clout to elevate him into the upper rank of the pantheon, as Babylon later did for Marduk.


The first written evidence of the cult of Iškur comes from the cities Lagash and Adab in the middle of the 3rd millennium B.C. Adab was near Karkara, site of Iškur’s temple, the House of the Big Storms. Unfortunately, the ruins of Karkara haven’t been discovered yet, so we don’t know much about his cult or the local traditions about him. But based on prayers and rituals that have been preserved, it appears Iškur, like most of the Mesopotamian gods and goddesses, could be good or bad depending on his mood. The storm-god brought necessary rain for the crops needed to survive but he could also destroy fields with wind, hail, and flood.


He first appeared under the name Hadda at Ebla around 2500 B.C., and as Adad in Old Akkadian texts, the period of history that began with the empire of Sargon the Great around 2330 B.C. We know they’re the same because the Sumerian logogram for Hadda/Adad was the same used for Iškur (dIM). As god of the heavenly waters, Iškur was sometimes praised as the twin brother of Enki. This may be an early example of the “twin gods” motif in ancient mythology. Sometimes they’re brother-sister twins, such as Apollo and Artemis; sometimes divine-mortal twins, like Castor and Pollux; and sometimes, as in this case, a pair of brothers, one more important than the other, at least in the early days. Until the early 2nd millennium B.C., it wouldn’t have been a compliment for Enki, the god responsible for the fresh water of the abzu and the fundamental laws of civilization, the mes, to be compared with a minor deity like Iškur.


Iškur-Adad, later Ba`al, played a key role in the cosmology of Mesopotamia for the next 2,500 years. His importance to the cultures of the region grew with the political influence of the Amorites, who may have introduced Iškur into Sumer, reaching its peak in the 2nd millennium B.C. and lasting through the time of Jesus.


At Mari, which was located on the Euphrates about 75 miles southeast of the modern city of Deir ez-Zor, a powerful but short-lived Amorite kingdom grew from the ashes of an older state that had been smashed by Sargon the Great. The name Haddu often appears in texts found at Mari alongside Dagan, a grain god (contrary to common belief, Dagan/Dagon was never a fish god), and Itūr-Mēr as one of the three great gods of the kingdom of Mari.


As political control of Mesopotamia shifted from Akkad to Ur and then to Babylon between 2150 B.C. and 1900 B.C., powerful Amorite kingdoms in Assyria, Mari, and Yamḥad (modern Aleppo, Syria) emerged alongside the old Babylonian empire. At the same time, the storm-god’s identity gradually shifted from Sumerian Iškur to Akkadian Adad and his importance in the pantheon grew. By the time Hammurabi brought Babylon to the greatest extent of its power, Adad was firmly established among the great gods of Mesopotamia. Meanwhile, the lion-dragon was replaced by the bull as the animal associated with Adad, a symbol more familiar to those who know Ba`al from the Bible.


While texts from the Canaanite city-state Ugarit name Mount Zaphon as the site of Ba`al’s palace, the capital of Yamḥad, Halab (Aleppo), was known across the ancient Near East as the City of Hadad. The storm-god’s sanctuary there, which lies beneath a massive citadel in Aleppo’s old quarter, dates to the Early Bronze Age, the mid-3rdmillennium B.C. (ca. 2500 B.C.), and it was in use until about the 9th century B.C.
The importance of the storm-god of Aleppo is highlighted by evidence of his cult across Mesopotamia and the Levant, from Nuzi, east of the Tigris River, to Hattuša, capital of the Hittite empire, in what is now north-central Turkey. By the old Babylonian period (1700s B.C.), Hadad was, other than Marduk, the preeminent god in Mesopotamia. Emissaries from Elam, today’s northwest Iran, once traveled to Halab to present a bow as a gift to Hadad.





Figurine of Baal found at Ugarit.


Yamḥad certainly enjoyed the benefits of the storm-god’s presence in its midst. The king was called “beloved of Hadad” and the kingdom was the Land of Hadad. The god bestowed kingship and assigned territory to kings, even to those outside the borders of Yamḥad. Before the Amorites swept into southern Mesopotamia and took control from the native Sumerians in the early 2nd millennium B.C., that power was restricted to Enlil. (After the rise of Babylon, various deities besides Hadad, including Marduk, Dagan, and the moon-god Sîn, claimed king-making authority at different times and places.)


If you’re a reader of the Bible, you recognize that this is another bit of propaganda from the spirit realm. Scripture tells us “there is no [governing] authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Romans 13:1, ESV).


It was believed that the sacred weapons forged for Ba`al by the craftsman god, Kothar-wa-Khasis (Skillful-and-Wise, or Deft-and-Clever), to defeat the sea-god Yam were kept at the temple of Hadad in Aleppo. Letters found at Mari confirm that the weapons, clubs named Yagrush (Chaser) and Aymur (Driver), were transported from Aleppo to the city of Terqa for Zimrī-Līm, the king of Mari during the time of Hammurabi (c. 1775 B.C.), and placed in the temple of Mari’s chief god, Dagan.


This is fascinating on a couple levels. First, it’s clear that the clubs were actual physical objects that could be brought out and displayed during ceremonies. Second, the weapons apparently had some ritual function. Whether the clubs were returned to Aleppo, we don’t know, but it raises a disturbing thought: This is sheer speculation, but is it possible that these weapons, whatever they were, still exist, are in Aleppo today, and are somehow spiritually linked to the savage violence of the ongoing Syrian civil war?


(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO)


GROUNDBREAKING RESEARCH FEATURES DR. MICHAEL HEISER & DEREK P. GILBERT!



Roughly 80 miles west of that city, Mount Zaphon, the home of Ba`al’s palace, was known to the Greeks as Mount Kasios. The Greek storm-god Zeus was naturally identified with Ba`al-Hadad, and the aspect of Zeus who reigned there was known as Zeus Kasios (Jupiter Casius to the Romans).


We mentioned earlier that Mount Zaphon/Kasios was the site of the epic battle between Zeus and the chaos monster, Typhon, which is a clear parallel with Ba`al’s victory over Yam and his minion, the sea dragon Lotan (the Canaanite name for Leviathan).


The victory of a god over the chaos monster representing the sea or, as scholar Robert D. Miller termed it, the storm-god-slays-dragon myth, is a theme that stretches back to Sumer. The Zeus-Typhon and and Ba`al-Yam conflicts were preceded by the Hittite myth of Tarhunt and the dragon Illuyanka, the Indian myth of the god Indra’s defeat of the dragon Vrtra (with a thunderbolt, naturally), and before that, the account of Marduk and Tiamat in the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish.


In the god lists found at Ugarit, which serve as a lexicon between Ugaritic and Akkadian, Tiamat is equated with Ba`al’s nemesis, Yam. After his victory over Tiamat, Marduk, like Ba`al, was declared king of the gods and had a palace built in his honor.


Some scholars have observed that because no copy of the Enuma Elish predates the tablets containing the Baal Cycle found at Ugarit, and it probably originated no more than two hundred years before the Baal Cycle, the storm-god-slays-dragon myth may have traveled to Babylon from the region around Mount Zaphon and not, as is generally assumed, the other way around. This makes a lot of sense. It’s far more likely that people near the Mediterranean would envision the sea as a monstrous opponent of the gods than the inhabitants of arid central Mesopotamia.


As we mentioned earlier, the Sumerian storm-god Iškur may well have been a Semitic import. The Amorites were in contact with southern Mesopotamia from an early age. 


As with the belief that the storm-god was king of the gods, the account of his triumph over chaos may have traveled west to east with Amorite caravans. Of course, these tales were a PSYOP to lay claim to the victory that Yahweh had won over Leviathan and chaos.


And there is another connection linking all these stories: We previously mentioned a letter to Zimrī-Līm, the king of Mari, confirming receipt of the weapons of Hadad at the temple of Dagan in Terqa. The king also received a message purportedly from the god himself through one of his prophets:

Quote :

Thus says Adad, I brought you back to the throne of your father, I brought you back. The weapons with which I fought Tiamat I gave to you. With the oil of my bitter victory I anointed you, and no one before you could stand.
A Prophetic Letter of Adad to Zimrī-Līm (A.1968), emphasis added

The word translated “Tiamat”, têmtum (a variant form of Tiamat), is a cognate of the Hebrew word tehom, which appears in the very second verse of the Bible:

Quote :

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep (tehom). And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Genesis 1:1-2 (ESV)

Linking the Sumerian chaos goddess, Tiamat, and “the deep” of Genesis 1:2 puts that verse in a new light. Why did the Spirit of God hover over the waters? Is it possible Yahweh defeated a divine rebel before creating Adam and Eve? And having cast Tehom/Tiamat into the abyss, did His Spirit remain to guarantee the monster would stay there?


Thus, the creation of the world as recorded in Genesis is linked to the Enuma Elish, the Baal Cycle, and the storm-god-slays-dragon myths of ancient Anatolia and Greece, and probably the nightly contest between Set and Apophis, the Indian myth referenced above, the battles between Thor and Jörmungandr, and others. Not surprisingly, scholars generally believe the biblical account was inspired by the Babylonian myth instead of the other way around—as we said, a PSYOP.