Symbianize Forum

Most of our features and services are available only to members, so we encourage you to login or register a new account. Registration is free, fast and simple. You only need to provide a valid email. Being a member you'll gain access to all member forums and features, post a message to ask question or provide answer, and share or find resources related to mobile phones, tablets, computers, game consoles, and multimedia.

All that and more, so what are you waiting for, click the register button and join us now! Ito ang website na ginawa ng pinoy para sa pinoy!

OLD TESTAMENT ARCHEOLOGY: Timely Truths for the Modern World

nice thread bro! medyo alanganin ako eh, kasi sa daniel, at isiah si cyrus sinugo nya tulad ng sinabi mo inendurso ni cyrus si yhwh sa Judea na pagdating nila dun is babylonian Empire. maaring hindi na nila kilala ang kanilang Diyos dahil sa Babylonians tradition kasi bago sila dumating kingdom of Judah ito parang abrahamic traditions, ng dumating si cyrus dun nya pinakilala muli kasi sa Isiah annointed sya. at naging persian Empire ito dahil sa kanya bago pa dumating ang mga griego sila alexander the Great kaya nauso ang Greek sa Judea pero karamihan armaic daw mga tao noon dyan. tingin mo bro posible kaya?

First, thank you.

Next, mahalagang iconsider natin ang chronology ng mahahalagang events na nangyari before the Jews were carted away by the Babylonians for their first Diaspora: una dun, wala o nagsisimula pa lang ang monotheist movement sa Israel during this time. Maraming kinikilala at sinasamba ang mga Hudyo na Diyos ng panahon na binitbit sila ng Babylonians ng matalo sila sa digmaan. Dala ng pangyayaring ito, namuo sa priesthood ang paniniwala na parusa ito sa mga Hudyo sa di pagkilala sa nag-iisang diyos. Kung susuriin ito, ang kabanata at attitude na ito ay kabaliktaran ng nangyari naman sa Ehipto, kung saan ang sinisi naman nila sa kahirapang dala ng pamamalakad ni Ankhenaten, ang kanilang emperor/king/pharaoh, ay ang kanyang pagwasak sa polytheism—pagsamba sa mga traditional na diyos ng Egypt—para bigyang daan ang monotheism sa pagsamba kay Aten, ang sinasabi niyang nag-iisang diyos sa sanlibutan.

Ang mga Hudyo na kasapi sa kulto ni Aten (Adonai) ay nagtulak na gawin siyang national god/religion sa Israel, bagay na tinutulan ng mas maimpluwensyang section ng Judean priesthood, dala ng di daw magandang tingnan na mag-iimport lamang sila ng dayuhang religion at diyos. Sa kalaunan, napagkasunduang buuhin ang priesthood around a god, Jehovah, and incorporate critical elements of other influential religions, kasama na rin dun ang rituals and practices of the cult of Aten and others.

Bunga ng ambisyon ni Cyrus na palawakin at palawigin pa ang impluwensya ng kanyang imperyo, ginawa nyang policy ang pagtolerate ng local religions sa kanyang imperyo. Ito ay di nalalayo sa mga kalakaran ng mga nauna at mga sumunod na emperors and successful conquerors in history, kasama na diyan sina Alexander the Great at mga czars ng Roman empire.

Habang malakas ang Persian Empire, nagsisimula namang maramdaman ang impluwensya ng Aegean civilization (Greek) sa mga karatig na teritoryo. Kasama na diyan ang kanilang language. Dahilan para lalo pa itong kinilala bilang lingua franca sa Old World pagsapit ng malawakang kampanya ni Alexander the Great.
 
nung galing po sila sa Cult Ankhenaten pagdating nila ng Israel sino ang kinikilalang Diyos ng Judean Priesthood. Sya po pla sino ung ama ni Ankhenaten maraming nagsasabi Alien daw si Ankhenaten gawa nung kakaiba ung shape ng ulo nya. at sinasabing hindi sa Earth nakatira.
 
nung galing po sila sa Cult Ankhenaten pagdating nila ng Israel sino ang kinikilalang Diyos ng Judean Priesthood. Sya po pla sino ung ama ni Ankhenaten maraming nagsasabi Alien daw si Ankhenaten gawa nung kakaiba ung shape ng ulo nya. at sinasabing hindi sa Earth nakatira.

Marami ng diyos sa Canaan (as the whole land encompassing Israel was generally known then) bago pa man at pagkatapos ng exile ng mga Israelites (kingdom of Judah). Una na dito si Baal (Moloch), na kinikilala ring prototype ni Yahweh/Jehovah. Marami ring Judean priesthood ang kasapi sa kulto ni Ahura Mazda (Zoroastrianism), diyos ng isa sa mga pinakanaunang monotheist religions sa history. Kasama rin sa panahong ito ang diyosang si Ashteroth, na kilala bilang consort ni Baal, at sa pagdako maging kay Jehovah/Yahweh din. Si Ashteroth ay kilala bilang si UN.ANNA sa Sumeria, bilang si Ishtar sa mga Persians, Aphrodite sa Greeks, Venus sa Romans, Ishtar (Easter direct origin) sa Assyrians at Babylonians, at Hathor sa Ehipto (Egypt).

Tungkol sa shape ng ulo, ang sabi practice daw ng karamihan ng royal blood sa Mideast, kasama ang Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, ang lagyan ng molde ang ulo ng mga bata para bigyan ng kakaibang hugis (pahaba pataas) ang bungo/ulo ng royalties, para makita silang naiiba at hiwalay sa karaniwang tao lamang na kanilang nasasakupan. Pinick-up ng alien theorists ang kakaibang hugis na ito at tinulak ang ideyang alien origins. Pero malay din natin. Hehe.

Dito muna, balikan ko yung post mo sa kabila pag nakakuha time, superbusy ngayon....

Salamat.
 
WHATEVER IT IS, the TRUTH is the TRUTH. No one could deny it. One way to find out certainty is death. If you DO BELIEVE in GOD's existence and found out that there is NONE, is I think more better than believing that there's NO GOD and found out that THERE IS. I'm NOT SAYING that CATHOLIC SPEAKS THE CERTAIN TRUTH, but I DON'T BELIEVE that the WORLD and these WONDERFUL THINGS that are SO NEARLY PERFECT are only MADE BY FLUKE. Living things live in a world full of resources that it needs; Vitamins, minerals, etc.; How all life systems linked to each others like an internet; How we need each other's capacities and properties. Oh come on, mangyayari lang ba 'to nang hindi sinasadya. I mean, WORLD IS LIKE A COMPUTER PROGRAM and I CONCLUDE THAT THERE'S SOMEONE WHO PROGRAMMED IT. THIS IS NOT JUST A GLITCH!
 
Patriarchs, Exodus, Conquest: Fact or Fiction?







 
says God does not exist, then waste their life.... Talking about God?
 
Last edited:
Some people, scientists including, relish dismantling thousand-year-old lies—while being paid handsomely for their efforts.
 
Haaretz: The Real Ark of the Covenant May Have Housed Pagan Gods

The holy ark was likely kept in Jerusalem for much less time than the Bible tells us.
And it may have contained something other than the Ten Commandments



attachment.php


The last time the Ark of the Covenant was supposedly seen was in Jerusalem, some 2,600 years ago.

Now archaeologists are exploring the ancient town of Kiriath Jearim, where the Bible says the ark was kept for 20 years before being taken to Jerusalem. Even if the excavators don’t expect to find the ark itself, and they don't, they have made discoveries that shed new light on the history of the ancient Israelites and the birth of Judaism itself. Their finds also support theories that King David may not have been the one who moved the ark to Jerusalem.

According to the biblical tale, after the people of Israel bore the Ark of the Covenant through the desert and following Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, it was kept in the Tabernacle at Shiloh – and was then lost in a terrible battle to the Philistines. But God punished the Philistines with sickness and other plagues and they wisely returned their booty to the Israelites, who then settled the ark at Kiriath Jearim for 20 years.

Then, goes the story, King David took it to Jerusalem to be housed first in a tent, and later in King Solomon’s Temple.

From that point, until Jerusalem's destruction by the Babylonians, the ark strangely disappears from the biblical narrative. Nowhere does it figure in the exploits of the kings of Judah or Israel, points out Thomas Römer, a world-renowned expert in the Hebrew Bible and a professor at the College de France and the University of Lausanne.

Supernatural powers

That hasn't stopped scholars and archaeologists from seeking out any clue about its true history. Maybe the ark's enduring mystique lies in the fact that, according to the Bible, it contained the original stone tables of the Ten Commandments, and it had godly powers, which could rally the Israelite armies in battle or strike dead anyone who dared touch it or look inside it.

When they return daily to base camp, the archaeologists digging at Kiriath Jearim divide their finds into various baskets with labels like “glass,” “animal bones” or “small finds.” Just one basket remains inevitably empty: the one jokingly labeled “the ark.”

No, no one expects to find any trace of the elusive ark in the ruins of this ancient Israelite settlement.

“I am not interested in the historicity of the Ark Narrative. I want to know what’s behind it, what it tells us about the history of Judah and Israel, of the cult of the God of Israel and the Temple in Jerusalem,” says archaeologist Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, who has conducted digs at two locations said to have housed the ark: at Shiloh, north of Jerusalem, back in the 1980s, and this month at Kiriath Jearim, in a joint project with the College de France.

Not King David after all?

Many Biblical scholars think the story of the ark was a separate text, the so-called “Ark Narrative,” dating from around the 8th century B.C.E., which was later incorporated into the biblical texts, in the books of Samuel, perhaps just before the exile to Babylon.

The story in 2 Samuel 6 about how David brought the ark to Jerusalem is actually a later tradition that was tacked onto the original Ark Narrative, which initially ended with its arrival in Kiriath Jearim, Römer suspects.

It has long been forgotten who wrote "the Bible": different parts were clearly written in different times by different people, over hundreds and hundreds of years. But the Davidic or Solomonic texts are not believed to have originated in their own time, only centuries later.

Also, while there is still debate over the historicity of figures like David and Solomon, most scholars agree that there is little archaeological evidence for the large, united Israelite kingdom in the 10th century described in the Bible.

The biblical texts that recount this glorious empire and Solomon’s building of the Temple seem to have originated from the late 7th century B.C.E., in the time of King Josiah, around three centuries after the supposed Davidic era, Römer says.

Josiah was the Judean king known for expanding the borders of Judah and centralizing the worship of Yahweh at the Temple in Jerusalem while stamping out all other cults.

“It is possible that the ark stayed much longer at Kiriath Jearim, and it was only Josiah who brought it to Jerusalem when he wanted to centralize all cultic and political activity there, and his scribes justified it by writing the story about David taking the ark,” Römer postulates. “This might explain why there are no more stories about it,” since after Josiah’s reign (640-609 B.C.E.) Judah would survive less than three decades before falling to the Babylonians.

The Bible itself, in what may have been an editorial slipup, appears to confirm Josiah's role in bringing the ark to Jerusalem. It is he, not David, who tells the Levites in 2 Chronicles 35:3 to “put the holy ark in the house that Solomon the son of David, king of Israel, built. You need not carry it on your shoulders."

Nine-foot thick wall

There is also extra-biblical evidence for the "Josiah theory" coming from the dig at Kiriath Jearim, which is a tell (an artificial hill created by stratified remains of human habitation) located just 12 kilometers west of Jerusalem.

This is the first time that this biblical site has been investigated in depth. The remains uncovered there range from the early Bronze Age to the Byzantine period.

The major discovery of this season so far has been a massive retaining wall, three meters thick and still standing two meters tall – which, judging from the pottery shards that surround it, dates from the 8th or 7th century B.C.E.

This wall supported an artificially flattened terrace at the top of the mound. As was common for settlements across the Levant, the terrace could have housed a temple, Finkelstein told Haaretz during a tour of the site last week.

“This site might have been one of the most important cultic centers of the country,” says Christophe Nicolle, an archaeologist from the College de France who jointly directs the Shmunis Family Excavations at Kiriath Jearim with Finkelstein and Römer.

“This reinforces the idea there was a temple here in the 8th or 7th century B.C.E., perhaps in competition with the Temple in Jerusalem,” Finkelstein says. Such competition, at least initially, would have had a strong national character: Although the Judahite capital of Jerusalem was just a few kilometers away, Kiriath Jearim was a Benjaminite town, according to the Bible.

So, in certain periods, Kiriath Jearim could have been a border settlement belonging to the northern Kingdom of Israel, which encompassed all the tribes of Israel except Judah.

This kingdom of Israel, which dwarfed Judah in size and power, was often at loggerheads with its southern neighbor until it was destroyed by the Assyrians in the late 8th century. Only then, mainly during Josiah's time, was Judah able to expand into Benjamin and other areas, which is also why Judah and Benjamin were the only Israelite tribes that were not lost in the Assyrian conquest.

In other words, the archaeological evidence shows strong cultic activity at Kiriath Jearim in the 8th and 7th centuries B.C.E., well after King David was supposed to have carried off the ark, but before King Josiah brought the area under Jerusalem's control.

There are hints of the rivalry between Judah and Israel in the fact that the Book of Joshua repeatedly mentions that Kiriath Jearim, which means “Town of Forests” in Hebrew, was also known as Kiriath Baal or Baalah, linking it to the worship of the Canaanite god Baal – something akin to anathema for the biblical scribes of Josiah’s time. The dual name is also mentioned in 1 Chronicles 13:6: "David and all Israel went to Baalah of Judah (Kiriath Jearim) to bring up from there the ark of God the Lord".

If these theories are correct, it would mean that the Ark of the Covenant, one of the symbols most associated with Judaism, was in fact housed in Jerusalem only in the final decades before the Babylonian invasion. For most of its life, it would have been at Kiriath Jearim and its previous home, Shiloh – today in the northern West Bank.

Baal and Asherah inside?

In fact, for most of its existence, the ark may have been associated with religious practices that would seem completely alien to Jews today.

The biblical verses that claim the ark contained the Tablets of the Law are also considered to be late texts, dated to King Josiah’s era or possibly even later, Römer says. Furthermore, he notes, the apologetic verse in 1 Kings 8:9 stating that “There was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone, which Moses put there at Horeb" (Mt Sinai) may be an indication that the Ten Commandments had substituted something else.

Early Israelites worshipped Canaanite gods like Baal and El, as suggested by the 8th-century Hebrew inscriptions found at a shrine in Kuntillet Ajrud, in northeast Sinai, and by both the biblical subtext and the archeological record.

In the early days, Yahweh himself was far from an invisible, universal deity. He was worshipped in the form of a bull or a sitting god; he had a divine consort, Asherah, and, as shown again in the Ajrud inscriptions, had localized cults that venerated “Yahweh of Samaria” and “Yahweh of Teman,” rather than a centralized worship in Jerusalem.

In his book “The Invention of God,” Römer writes that throughout the Levant, it was common for pre-Islamic Arabs and Bedouins to carry holy chests that contained two sacred stones or the statues of two gods, that were later replaced by the Koran. Similarly, the ark may have originally contained two statues representing Yahweh and Asherah, he speculates.

Indirect support for the theory abounds. Baal was the Canaanite god of storms associated with war and fertility. Aside from Kiryath Jearim's alternative name of Kiryath Baal, throughout the biblical narrative, the ark is connected to war – for example, it is carried into battle by the Israelites. It is also connected to fertility. Hannah, the Prophet Samuel’s mother, is a sterile woman who is blessed with a child after praying at the Tabernacle in Shiloh and then dedicates her son to the service of God.

On the flip side, when David brings the ark to Jerusalem, he dances ecstatically and semi-naked before it – and when his wife Michal criticizes this display, she is punished with sterility.

These biblical stories may all contain echoes of the ancient cults connected to the ark. It is difficult to completely untangle the many layers of history and myth contained in this story thousands of years later, but a broader message does emerge.

The Bible appears to describe the ancient Israelites, from Moses onward, as staunch monotheists who sometimes err towards paganism and are punished for their sins by God. But this picture may be the result of mostly self-serving propaganda by the priests and scribes of the late monarchic or post-exilic periods.

The reality emerging today from the combined work of biblical scholars and archeologists is much more complex and diverse. It indicates that Judaism as we know it today evolved slowly and organically, incorporating a variety of influences and religious traditions from the mosaic of cultures that lived side by side in the region.


SOURCE
 

Attachments

  • ark01.jpg
    ark01.jpg
    62.4 KB · Views: 54
Read the Bible and if you still don't get it. Read it again, then you can talk to someone who already read it.
 
Read the Bible and if you still don't get it. Read it again, then you can talk to someone who already read it.

Okay. Read until you get to have your brains cooked by brainwashing. By creating a portion of your mind as God, thus creating multiple personality complex within yourself—aka neurological, bipolar disorder. And raise hell against unbelievers because they wouldn't go that way.
 
Last edited:
sir,

Mejo napabasa lng ako sa article muh.. in some point na curious ako sa part nang solomon gates.. and nag research ako...

me nkita ako neto.

http://kingsolomonsgate.com/

well.. not sure ako...

Megiddo and others like it were part of the chiefdom ("kingdom" would be larger in area of influence) of Samaria. Judah was another, and to the south. These were separate—not unified—kingdoms. To ascribe the achievements of the northern kingdom to the southern kingdom would thus be misleading. The north was bigger and richer, the reason why it attracted the attention of Assyria and was thus sacked as was the fate of minor chiefdoms or kingdoms during those times. Moreover, these kingdoms were not on friendly terms.

What Judah did, in essence, was appropriate the achievements of its enemy chiefdom to the north and claimed it as its own. It amounts to a pious, biblical fraud, castigating the apostate kings of the 8th - 9th century northern kingdom of 'Israel' and elevated its own importance in an earlier, fantasized empire—ruled from an imaginary imperial capital of Jerusalem.

Extensive archaeology in the city reveals Jerusalem was a village in the 10th century BC. In contrast, Megiddo, falsely claimed as "part of the empire," far to the north, had a palace!
 
Last edited:
attachment.php


Beauty and biblical evidence both lie in the eye of the beholder, it seems. No evidence of the events described in the Book of Genesis has ever been found. No city walls have been found at Jericho, from the appropriate era, that could have been toppled by Joshua or otherwise. The stone palace uncovered at the foot of Temple Mount in Jerusalem could attest that King David had been there; or it might belong to another era entirely, depending who you ask.

Archaeologists always hope that advances in technology will shed fresh light on at least part of this ancient mystery: Did the Bible really happen? So far, what discoveries there are, tend to indicate that at the least, the timelines are off.


A paucity of evidence

Eighteen years ago, on October 29, 1999, Haaretz published an article by Tel Aviv University's Ze’ev Herzog, whose message was spelled out in the very headline: “The Bible: No evidence on the ground.”

Of what? No evidence that the children of Israel sojourned in Egypt, passed through a miraculously parted Red Sea, wandered the Sinai Desert for 40 years or indeed any years, and no evidence that they conquered the land of Israel and divided it up among 12 tribes of Israel. The?renowned archaeologist also shared his suspicion that David and Solomon’s "United Kingdom," described in the Bible as a regional power, was at most a minor tribal domain.







"Jehovah, the God of Israel, had a wife and the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only towards the end of the period of the kingdom, not at Mount Sinai,” Herzog also wrote.

The unbridgeable gap Herzog described between the Biblical tales and the archaeological findings was nothing new, to researchers. Israeli archaeologists have long thought as much, based on biblical criticism theories originating in Germany during the early 19th century. The general public, however, was shocked.

Today, 18 years on, armed with cutting-edge dating and molecular technologies, archaeologists increasingly agree with Herzog that generally, the Bible does not reflect historical truths. But the jury's out on several key issues, and at least some stories have been bolstered by actual discoveries, for instance, in the copper mines of Timna, the mysterious powerful fort of Qeiyafa, and in Jerusalem itself.


Bible in one hand, pick in the other
Meanwhile, everybody wants to know whether the Bible is literally true, from the layman to the clergy, to the political echelon, pertaining as it does to questions of identity and “our right to the land.”

Among archaeologists, the camps have split according to academic institution: In Jerusalem the biblical (maximalist) camp dominates, for instance arguing that the impressive palace found in the City of David practically had to have belonged to David. In Tel Aviv, the critical (minimalist) camp prevails in Tel Aviv, arguing that there is no evidence to buttress the bible, and that the palace in Jerusalem evidently doesn't date to the Davidic era.

The founding fathers of Israeli archaeology explicitly set out with the Bible in one hand and a pick in the other, seeking findings from the biblical eras, as part of the Zionist project. But as excavations progressed in the 1970s and 1980s, rather than substantiation, what began to pile up was contradictions.

In Jericho no wall was found from the era that Joshua was supposed to have lived, around the mid-13th century B.C.E., that he could have caused to tumble down. No evidence has been found that a large new group of people entered into Canaan during the post-Exodus settlement period.











attachment.php

The roughly 3000-year old skeletons found in the Philistine graveyard
in Ashkelon have clear hallmarks of Aegean customs, not Canaanite.
Credit: Philippe Bohstrom​




There is, in fact, no evidence to substantiate Exodus.

In Jerusalem, no concrete remains have been found from the purported glorious United Kingdom, and nowhere is there ex-biblical evidence of the kings David or Solomon either, with the possible exception of the "Beitdavid" inscription (more on that below). Nor do major archaeological tells conform to biblical descriptions, until after the period of the purported United Kingdom.

From the Egyptian frying pan into the fire
The last 18 years of digging have changed basically nothing about the very earliest Biblical periods, for all the advances in archaeological technique.

Archaeology has not been able to find the Patriarch Abraham, or signs of his heirs. There is no evidence that the Children of Israel ever went to Egypt, or fled it in the Exodus.

Israeli archaeology was late to adopt carbon-14 dating techniques, and until recently dated sites relying largely on pottery. Today not only is C-14 being used to date organic materials: advanced techniques enable inorganic materials and structures to be dated as well. And the new discoveries occasionally rock the boat, in both camps.

If anything, archaeologists find inconsistencies between the biblical accounts and the facts. For example, the Book of Genesis mentions camels, but the earliest domestic camel bones found in Israel date to around 930 B.C.E., about a millennia after their appearance according to the Bible.

Ditto the Philistines, who seem to have actually sailed to the Holy Land only centuries after the Bible says they did.

Genesis 21:34 for instance says, "And Abraham stayed in the land of the Philistines for a long time." That seems anachronistic. Genesis 26:1 adds: "And there was a famine in the land, beside the first famine that was in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went unto Abimelech king of the Philistines unto Gerar." Famine was likely but the Philistines weren't supposed to live there in Abraham's time.

No evidence has been found of ancient Hebrews in Egypt, or of their subsequent passage through the Sinai. Few (outside the observant community) dispute that the scripture is not a reliable description, though some argue that even if masses of people trooped through the desert, even for 40 years, they wouldn't necessarily leave any traces behind. They would have sheltered in tents, not erected stone buildings, and their footsteps are long vanished from the sand.

Another snag is that Egypt itself ruled the Land of Israel at that time of the purported Exodus. Even if the Children of Israel fled from Egypt, they would just have reached another territory under Egyptian control. It is hard to find a mainstream archaeologist prepared to defend the biblical description of events. There, in 18 years, nothing has changed.


attachment.php
 

Attachments

  • aegean, not canaanite.jpg
    aegean, not canaanite.jpg
    191.5 KB · Views: 120
  • digging01.jpg
    digging01.jpg
    202.8 KB · Views: 121
  • Round 2-Archaeology and the Bible-final.jpg
    Round 2-Archaeology and the Bible-final.jpg
    334.8 KB · Views: 115
Last edited:
Living Sumeria: The Historical Evolution of Yahweh

attachment.php



When it comes to Near East religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—all roads lead to Sumeria. As it turns out, the first truly systematic formulation of formal religion traces its roots in the first truly massive civilization in Near East history[SUP]*(BUT see note)[/SUP] serving as the prime archetype, the first model from which all other succeeding Near East religions have drawn from, either directly copying, recasting, reappointing, or repurposing them for their own national objectives.

*(Note: scholars now have to reckon with dating the Indus Valley-Harappa civilization, or the latest Northern European civilizations that the newest archaeological finds are only now beginning to unravel; it is also worth noting that as the greatest symbols of humanity’s transition from pastoralism and hunting and gathering to agriculture, both Sumeria and the Indus Valley are now widely believed not only to be largely contemporary, but that they shared similar impulse to emphasize the roles of both water and the bull, in their major symbols, to this momentous transition; that some form of trade and exchange, both in goods, ideas, and people have always occurred between them: in fact, DNA evidence now attests to the fact that South Asian people, especially Tamils, had been largely incorporated into the Sumerian-Mesopotamian populations)

As it is with all Near East religions and their pantheons of gods, any serious attempt to throw light into the origins of the Hebrew god, Yahweh, and the essential motifs found in the bible must start with Sumeria and involve the use of multiple disciplines, foremost among them archaeology, astrophysics, geology, anthropology, and literary criticism.

In Sumeria, the clues to Yahweh rest in one of its chief gods, Ea (pronounced Ay-ya) also called Enki, one of the most important sons of Anu, the chief Sumerian deity, along with Enlil, the two of them comprising the prime duopoly of power in Sumerian pantheon.

To understand why Ea/Enki is key to the identification of Yahweh, the crucial giveaway rests in the bible’s use of essential motifs that first appeared in the Sumerian system: creation of the universe, creation of humankind, creation techniques (by word [logos], and by “fashioning”), rebellion in heaven, cherubim, the Earth and its organization, death and the netherworld, Original Sin, lost chance at immortality, resurrection, fate of man, a god saving favored man during a flood, the garden of eden, tree of knowledge, tree of life, immortality, the sabbath, the Flood, the tower of Babel, the plague, the Job motif, the Fall of Man, personal god, Cain and Abel, the snake, Yahweh’s long-running battle for supremacy against Baal, among others.

From Ea/Enki comes the “historical evolution” of the Hebrew God, variously called Yahweh, Yaw, Yah, Yam, Ya, Yahu, El, Elohim (singular sense) or Ehyeh asher Ehyeh (“I am that I am” Hebrew: Hayah Ex 3:14) over a period of 3,000 years (the 4th–1st Millenniums BC).

Very briefly, Yahweh is an amalgam, a conflation or fusion of sundry gods and goddesses from earlier periods, having absorbed their functions, epithets, and achievements. That is to say, the Latin motto found on the coins and currency of the United States of America, E Pluribus Unum—From Many, One—appropriately describes Yahweh.

By what mechanism did Yahweh come to absorb the earlier gods and goddesses, their feats, epithets, titles, and glories?

It was via political power.

Scholars have noted that as political fortunes shifted with the rise and fall of various polities in Mesopotamia, the earlier gods came to have their powers usurped by the latest conqueror, the pattern started by the conqueror of Sumeria which then carted away Sumerian gods and just merely rebranded or reappointed those gods with local names or new, mostly lower positions than previously. Babylon upon coming to power created its Enuma Elish hymn which enumerates how Marduk the son of Ea has garnered the power and attributes of the earlier gods, some 70 of whom are enumerated. They become aspects of his persona.

Still later Assyria arose and conquered Babylon. The Assyrians “appropriated” the Enuma Elish and made Asshur the supreme god, and Marduk joined the 70 gods as merely another persona of Asshur.

Similarly, the Canaanites made Enuma Elish their own and raised El as the most high, counting Yahweh among the 70 sons along with Baal. El divides the known world among his 70 sons, Yahweh appointed as the god, as the absolute power above Israel. And here one can even wonder why Israel was named after EL—Isra-El—rather than after Yah or Jah, which should render it, Israyah or Israjah?

Thus too, that as the political fortunes of Israel “waxed” and she triumphed over the Canaanites, their gods’ and goddesses’ powers, epithets and feats were ascribed to Yahweh.

There was a difference, however: the Hebrews generally challenged or refuted Mesopotamian notions (compare that to how Islam, even though claiming to be related to Judaism and Christianity as another Abrahamic religion, disagrees with many views of those other two), so instead of enumerating these gods and goddesses as personas of Yahweh, they were altogether “dismissed” as idols of wood and stone and not gods at all. There was only one god, Yahweh.

The usurping of earlier gods by later gods went on into Christian times. In the New Testament we are informed that Jesus Christ was Yahweh of the Old Testament (John 1:1–18). Christ made Adam and Eve, Christ gave Moses the 10 Commandments, the “God-blinded” Jews unknowingly had been worshipping Christ, not God the Father! Then along came Islam claiming that Jesus was not the God of the Old Testament—Allah was! So we have before us some 4,000 years of “Godly usurpations” via the rise and fall of political entities.

As Yahweh is an amalgam of many gods and goddesses—Mesopotamian, Hittite, Syrian, Phoenician, Egyptian, and Canaanite, it is a useless methodology to nitpick and stress the differences and ignore the similarities shared by the various deities. The Hebrews had no obligation—they did not see themselves having the duty—to preserve all the characteristics of any given god or goddess: they simply omit what they have no interest in to build their case for there being only one God. Hence, there is no valid reason to worry about “the inconsistences” which some scholars view as “cancelling-out” identifications.

Gods fused into Yahweh’s persona are the Sumerian Enki (Akkadian/Babylonian Ea), Enlil (Ellil), An (Anu), Utu (Shamash), Yam or Yaw, the Egyptian Hyksos’ god Baal Saphon (Baal Hadad), as well as Seth (Seth/Set being assimilated to Baal Saphon) and Sopdu of Egypt, those Egyptian gods surfacing in altered form in the Exodus traditions.

Professors Graves and Patai (1963) on the Hebrews borrowing the epithets and achievements of the pagan gods and ascribing them to Yahweh:

“The titles and attributes of many other Near Eastern deities were successively awarded to Yahweh Elohim…. Prophets and Psalmists were as careless about the pagan origins of the religious imagery they borrowed, as priests were about the adaptation of heathen sacrificial rites to God’s service. The crucial question was: in whose honor these prophecies and hymns should now be sung, or these rites enacted? If in honor of Yahweh Elohim, not Anath, Baal or Tammuz, all was proper and pious.”

(p. 28. Robert Graves & Raphael Patai. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. New York. Greenwich House. 1983 reprint of 1963, 1964 editions)​

Professor Batto (1992) on the Hebrews recasting of earlier Mesopotamian myths and motifs in the Hebrew Bible:

“I want to emphasize that this new mythmaking process is a conscious, reflected application of older myths and mythic elements to new situations…. In so far as one admits the presence of myth in ancient Babylonian and Canaanite culture, then one must also admit the presence of myth in the Bible….”

(pp. 13–14. “Introduction.” Bernard F. Batto. Slaying the Dragon, Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition. Louisville, Kentucky. Westminster/John Knox Press. 1992)​

“Now the Yahwist’s primeval narrative is itself a marvelous example of mythmaking based upon prior Mesopotamian myths…. Interestingly, the reappropriation of mythic traditions and intertextual borrowing posited for biblical writers was already present within ancient Babylonia, and illustrates that biblical writers must be understood within the larger ancient Near Eastern literary and theological tradition.”

(p. 14. “Introduction.” Bernard F. Batto. Slaying the Dragon, Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition. Louisville, Kentucky. Westminster/John Knox Press. 1992)​

“Biblical writers throughout the history of the composition of the Hebrew Bible have used and reused myth … to undergird their religious and/or sociopolitical agenda. My purpose … has been only to show through representative examples how biblical authors actually went about using mythic motifs in their writing and how they consciously manipulated these to serve their specific purposes.”

(pp. 171–172. “Conclusion.” Bernard F. Batto. Slaying the Dragon, Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition. Louisville, Kentucky. Westminster/John Knox Press. 1992)​

Lambert has noted that for the Mesopotamian cosmographers, their efforts were not so much the creation of new gods and new concepts from whole cloth, but rather the taking of older concepts and adding a “new twist.” Thus, with regards to Yahweh: he is the result of “new twists” derived from a “reworking and transformation” of older concepts by the Hebrews, who followed in the footsteps of their Mesopotamian counterparts.

Professor Lambert:

“The authors of ancient cosmologies were essentially compilers. Their originality was expressed in new combinations of old themes, and in new twists to old ideas.”

(p.107. W.G. Lambert. “A New Look at the Babylonian Background of Genesis.” [1965], in Richard S. Hess & David T. Tsumra, Editors. I Studied Inscriptions from Before the flood. Winona Lake, Indiana, Eisenbrauns, 1994)​

Kramer, a Sumerologist, notes the indebtedness of Israel’s mythographers to Sumerian concepts:

“The literature created by the Sumerians left its deep impress on the Hebrews, and one of the thrilling aspects of reconstructing and translating Sumerian belles-lettres consists in tracing resemblances and parallels between Sumerian and Biblical literary motifs. To be sure, the Sumerians could not have influenced the Hebrews directly, for they ceased to exist long before the Hebrew people came into existence. But there is little doubt that the Sumerians had deeply influenced the Canaanites, who preceded the Hebrews in the land that later came to be known as Palestine, and their neighbors, such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, Hurrians, and Arameans.”
(pp. 143–144. “The First Biblical Parallels.” Samuel Noah Kramer. History Begins at Sumer, Twenty-seven ‘Firsts’ in Man’s Recorded History. Garden City, New York. Doubleday Anchor Books. [1956] 1959)


TO BE CONTINUED....
 

Attachments

  • Living_Sumeria-FINAL.jpg
    Living_Sumeria-FINAL.jpg
    283.5 KB · Views: 111
Last edited:
Re: Living Sumeria: The Historical Evolution of Yahweh

attachment.php

Part 2


Biblical Merry-Go-Round

By and large, the Bible has provided false clues to generations of bible scholars, leading them on a “merry chase” into the Negev and Sinai for the origins of Yahwehism (so-called Wilderness Theory).

That is to say, scholars have been misled by the Bible’s false clues that Yahweh is “originally” a god of the Sinai: he’s really a Canaanite-Phoenician-North Syrian God of Ugarit and Byblos (more on this later). One sometimes forgets that Yahweh’s first appearance is not to Moses at Sinai—it’s to Abraham at Ur of the Chaldees, where a temple existed, according to Leick and others, to the Mesopotamian god, Enki/Ea/Ayya, and later at Haran in Northern Syria as well as Damascus.

The surest sign that the Wilderness Theory is heading nowhere is that archaeology has found no evidence of the Exodus in Sinai or near the traditional Mt. Sinai associated with Gebel Musa near Saint Catherine’s Monastery (see succeeding discussions). The Bible dates the Exodus event to ca. 1446 BC (1 Kings 6:1) which is in the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1560–1200 BC). There are no graves of the thousands who allegedly perished in the worship of the golden calf, yet there are graves in the Sinai from Early Bronze Age times. Some argue the Exodus was ca. 1200 BC, towards the end of the Late Bronze Age, Israel introducing the Iron Age, yet no Early Iron exists in the Sinai or at Kadesh-Barnea (Ain el-Qudeirat or Ain el-Qadeis in the lower Negeb).

That there is simply no archaeological evidence in Sinai to substantiate Israel’s 600,000 warriors and their families (extrapolated to be 2 million souls!) means no Moses, no Joshua, no Yahweh coming down upon Mt. Sinai—it’s all a myth. The origins of Yahwehism are not Sinai and the Negeb; Yahwehism is from Northern Syria (as preserved in the myths found at Ugarit) and Phoenicia. Those seeking it in the southern wilderness are following a false trail, provided by the biblical texts that have proven to be notoriously inaccurate by the findings of archaeology for time periods before 1000 BC. (p. 28, Aviram Perevolotsky and Israel Finkelstein. “The Southern Sinai Exodus Route in Ecological Perspective.” pp. 27–41. Biblical Archaeology Review. July/August. 1985. Vol. XI No. 4; pp. 62–63, “Did the Exodus Happen ?” Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed, Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York. The Free Press. 2001. ISBN0-684-86912-8)

Research on the Exodus has determined that as presented in the Bible, the Exodus is fiction but based on real historically related events. The event in question pertains to the expulsion of the Hyksos ca. 1540 BC by Pharaoh Ahmose I.

Finkelstein and Silberman, utilizing the latest information from archaeological findings, have posited that the Primary History (of Israel, Genesis–2 Kings) was written toward the end of the late 7th century and first half of the 6th century BCE, and that current events and concerns have been retrojected by the biblical narrator into hoary antiquity and the 3rd and 2nd millenniums BCE:

“This basic picture of the gradual accumulation of legends and stories—and their eventual incorporation into a single coherent saga with a definite theological outlook—was a product … of Judah in the seventh century BCE. Perhaps most telling of all the clues that the book of Joshua was written at this time is the list of towns in the territory of the tribe of Judah, given in detail in Joshua 15:21–62. The list precisely corresponds to the borders of the kingdom of Judah during the reign of Josiah. Moreover, the placenames mentioned in the list closely correspond to the seventh-century BCE settlement in the same region. And some of the sites were occupied only in the final decades of the seventh century BCE.” (p.92, Finkelstein & Silberman)
“All these indications suggest that the Exodus narrative reached its final form during the time of the 26th Dynasty, in the second half of the seventh and first half of the sixth century BCE.” (p. 68, “Did the Exodus Happen ?” Finkelstein & Silberman)​

Yahwehism did not arise from a series of revelations to Abraham in Canaan and the Negev ca. 2000 BC—there was no well of Beersheba before 1200 BC, the Philistines did not arrive in Canaan until ca. 1174 BC. Neither did Yahwehism arise through a revelation to Moses in the 15th century BC while he was wandering the Sinai wilderness (ca. 1446 BC, cf. 1 Kings 6:1), because archaeology reveals no Late Bronze Age presence at Mt. Sinai/Gebel Musa (2 million people). The fact that Northern Israelite names bear the theophoric Yaw suggests that they remained truer to their polytheistic religious heritage.

Again, it must be emphasized: the origins of Yahwehism are not to be sought in the Negev or Sinai: the biblical clues are false and archaeology reveals the events could not have occurred in the periods the Bible claims. Biblical scholars have been led on a merry chase into the Negev and Sinai—the origins are in the north, preserved at Ugarit and Mari in Syria as well as Sumer (Kish, cf. below) and to a degree in Phoenicia as well.

What is being remembered in the biblical texts about Yahweh dawning from Seir and Paran (the Sinai) is the presence in the Southern Sinai and the Arabah of Late Bronze Age miners from South Canaan, working the Egyptian mines in the 18th–20th Dynasties. These miners left Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions at Serabit el Khadim (15th century BC) and the Hathor shrine, showing that they had no problem assimilating their god, EL, to Egyptian gods and goddesses. “Yah” as an inscription, “Yah of Gat (Gath),” first surfaces in Canaan on a Late Bronze Age ewer found in a temple’s debris at Lachish, not the Sinai and Edom.

Israel did, however, preserve a notion that their ancestors were Syrians (“Arameans”). The archaeological evidence extrapolated from the Syrian myths found in Ugarit about the struggle for supremacy to claim the title “Lord of the Earth” between Yaw/Yam and Baal seems to bear out the northern Israelite theophoric Yaw vs. Baal scenarios and confirms that Aramaean/Syrian religious beliefs are, to a degree, what is behind Yahwehism.

Deut 26:5 RSV

“And you shall make response before the Lord your God. ‘A wandering ARAMEAN was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous.”

Here, the Pentateuch is fusing two different origins stories together, Bronze Age Canaanite and Iron I Aramean, taking into separate account the fact that the hundreds of villages suddenly appearing in the Hill Country of Canaan in Iron IA are Arameans driven from Aram/Syria by famine and war.

By 560 BC when the Exodus story in its present form was written in the Exile (cf. 2 Kings 25:27), the narrator was evidently unaware that his God, Yahweh, was an amalgam of earlier pagan Late Bronze Age gods from Sumer, Syria (Ugarit & Mari), Canaan and Egypt (the Hyksos’ Baal-Zephon/Baal-Hadad, assimilated to the Egyptian god Set/Seth).

Kramer wrote a number of books on Sumer, noting that Genesis’ Yahweh shares some motifs (more on this later) associated in stories about Enki. How to account for this? The Bible tells us that Abraham and his father Terah were from Ur of the Chaldees, identified by some scholars with Ur in Lower Mesopotamia.

The Hebrews have apparently transformed the Mesopotamian myths in Genesis, but how does one account for this from a biblical point of view? Where’s the “link”? The “missing link” is Ur of the Chaldees, where lived Terah and his son Abraham before their departure to Haran in northern Syria.

Excavations at Ur (Tell el Muqqayar, south of Babylon) have uncovered tablets from all periods of the city’s long history, and some preserve the myths of this region dating back to Sumerian times. Leick noted that at times Syrian (Amorite) influence is detectable in some of these myths; they are not “purely” Sumerian—they have been reworked and augmented. It points to the possibility that Terah and Abraham’s ancestors were Syrians who had earlier settled at Ur. It appears a “Syrian” Terah and Abraham later came “to make a break” with the local myths and develop their own interpretation of the relationship between God and Man via inversions of the local myths. They apparently left Ur because the local populace rejected their new insights or “revelations” and returned to their ancestral homeland of Haran to promulgate their new vision to a less hostile audience.

Professor Kramer on Abraham of Ur being Genesis’ “missing link”:

“To be sure, even the earliest parts of the Bible, it is generally agreed, were not written down in their present form much earlier than 1000 BC, whereas most of the Sumerian literary documents were composed about 2000 BC or not long afterward. There is, therefore, no question of any contemporary borrowing from the Sumerian literary sources. Sumerian influence penetrated the Bible through the Canaanite, Hurrian, Hittite, and Akkadian literatures—particularly through the latter, since, as is well known, the Akkadian language was used all over Palestine and its environs in the second millennium BC as the common language of practically the entire literary world. Akkadian literary works must therefore have been well known to Palestinian men of letters, including the Hebrews, and not a few of these Akkadian literary works can be traced back to Sumerian prototypes, remodeled and transformed over the centuries.

However, there is another possible source of Sumerian influence on the Bible, which is far more direct and immediate than that just described. In fact, it may well go back to Father Abraham himself. Most scholars agree that although the Abraham saga as told in the Bible contains much that is legendary and fanciful, it does have an important kernel of truth, including Abraham’s birth in Ur of the Chaldees, perhaps about 1700 BC, and his early life there with his family. Now Ur was one of the most important cities of ancient Sumer; in fact, it was the capital of Sumer at three different periods in its history. It had an impressive edubba; and in the joint British-American excavations conducted there between the years 1922 and 1934, quite a number of Sumerian literary documents have been found. Abraham and his forefathers may well have had some acquaintance with Sumerian literary products that had been copied and created in their home town academy. And it is by no means impossible that he and the members of his family brought some of this Sumerian lore and learning with them to Palestine, where they gradually became part of the traditions and sources utilized by the Hebrew men of letters in composing and redacting the books of the Bible.”

(p. 292. “The Legacy of Sumer.” Samuel Noah Kramer. The Sumerians, Their History, Culture, and Character. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press. [1963] reprint 1972. ISBN 0-226-45237-9. paperback)​

“Extra-biblical evidence” suggests a Jewish understanding from as early as the Hasmonean period (late 2nd century BC), that the Israelite forefathers were indeed originally of Babylonia, and only later of Haran of Mesopotamia and that because they had departed from the forms of worship embraced by their ancestors, they were apparently driven away as heretics to Haran and later to Canaan. Thus, if the inversions, transformations, and reformatting of the Mesopotamian myths are Terah and Abraham’s doing, one can see why they would be driven out of Ur of the Chaldees by the local inhabitants who would object to their religious myths being nullified by the “revelations” of these two men.

Clearly, the first truly important insight involves the so-called history of Abraham himself.

One tends to forget that Yahweh’s first appearance to Abraham was not in the Sinai, but at the city called Ur of the Chaldees in Lower Mesopotamia. Yahwehism begins at Ur, and this article explores Lower Mesopotamia as one of the sources for Israel’s God, in addition to north Syria and Haran as well as Phoenicia, Canaan and Egypt (with a nod for the Sinai, Negev, Arabah, and Midian).

Abraham according to the biblical chronology compiled by some scholars was born circa 2100 BCE and lived at Ur of the Chaldees (modern Tell al Muqayyar in Sumer according to some). If Kramer is correct in identifying certain motifs associated with Enki as later ascribed to the Hebrew God Yahweh, it is possible that Abraham would have known Enki as Ea, as this name change occurred approximately some 400 years before his birth. Apparently, the Aramaic “ear” at Haran where Terah and Abraham later settled, via “assonance,” transformed Ea (pronounced Ay-a according to Leick) into Ehyeh who allegedly spoke to Moses at the burning bush (Ex 3:14).

Ur is between Shurrupak (to its north) where the Sumerian flood account is fixed and Eridu (to its south) where lay Enki’s residence and principal shrine. Mesopotamian myths allude to Enki’s presence in Ur, he decreeing its fate:

“He [Enki] proceeded to the shrine of Ur; Enki, the king of the Abzu, decrees (its) fate: “City possessing all that is appropriate, water-washed, firm-standing ox, dais of abundance of the highland, knees open, green like a mountain, Hashur-grove, wide of shade—he who is lordly because of his might (?) has directed your perfect me’s, Enlil, the ‘great mountain,’ has pronounced your lofty name in the universe. City whose fate has been decreed by Enlil, shrine Ur, may you rise heaven high.”

(p.178. “Literature: The Sumerian Belles-Lettres.” Samuel Noah Kramer. The Sumerians, Their History, Culture, and Their Character. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press. 1963. ISBN 0-226-45238-7. pbk)​

A Jewish savant writing at the time of the Hasmoneans (2nd–1st century BC) notes that Terah and Abraham fled Ur of the Chaldees, when their monotheistic challenge was “rejected” by the polytheistic populace.

Abraham’s ancestors were originally Chaldeans not Arameans (contra De 26:5), and that originally they lived in Chaldea, not Aram (Syria and Haran here rendered “Mesopotamia”). As Chaldeans they worshipped many gods, but while in Chaldea they came upon the idea that there was only ONE GOD, and they were driven from Chaldea (Babylonia) by their Chaldean kinsmen for refusing to worship any longer the ancestral gods. In other words, this anonymous Hasmonean Jewish savant understood that “monotheism” began with Yahweh supposedly revealing himself to Terah and Abraham in Chaldea (cf. Ge 11:31–32) rather than at Haran in Aram/Syria (cf. Ge 12:1–4).

Joshua 24:1–3 RSV

“Then 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, “Your fathers lived of old beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and 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.”’”

Genesis has Yahweh revealing to Abraham just how to worship him. In light of the above assertion by the anonymous Jewish Hasmonean savant, it would appear that Abraham’s concepts of the deity “ought to be” traceable to Chaldean precepts, or some “reworking” and “transformation” of Chaldean beliefs regarding the relationship between man and God:

Genesis 26:5 RSV

“Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.”

Scholars understand that “Ur of the Chaldees” is an anachronism when applied to Abraham who is understood to have flourished circa the 22nd century BC. The city did not become part of Chaldea until the 8th–6th centuries BC, when Chaldean tribes who inhabited the marshlands south of Babylonia and extending to Elam seized the area and ruled it under a “Chaldean dynasty.” Thus the 2nd century BC Hasmonean savant is applying the term “Chaldean” to Abraham from a late geographical convention which equated Babylonia with Chaldea and Babylonians with Chaldeans since the 8th–6th centuries BC.

Scholars are divided as to Ur’s location, positing it is either Urfa in modern Turkey or Ur in Babylonia. Modern tell Mughayir alternately rendered Mugheir, Mugayyar, Muqayyer, Muqqayir or Muqqayyar. This brief article investigates the claims made by both sides. Professor Sarna, favoring it to be Babylonia, notes that the term “of the Chaldees” (Hebrew: Kasdim) dates the Abrahamic narrative to no earlier than the 7th century BC:

“The difficulty, however, lies with the designation ‘Ur of the Chaldeans.’ The name ‘Chaldeans’ as applied to lower Mesopotamia does not appear before the eleventh century BCE, many hundreds of years after the patriarchs. The city of Ur itself could not have been called ‘of the Chaldeans’ before the foundation of the Neo-Babylonian empire in the seventh century BCE. The characterization, therefore, as distinct from the tradition, would seem to be anachronistic.”

(p. 98, “The Problem of Ur,” Nahum M. Sarna. Understanding Genesis. New York. Shocken Books. 1966. reprinted 1970)​

If Professor Sarna is correct that the term “Ur of the Chaldeans” must have arisen after the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire of the seventh century BC, then Genesis and the Pentateuch was probably composed no earlier than this period.

2 Kings 25:27 gives a date of ca. 562–560 BC, this period being the time of reign of the Babylonian king Evil-Merodach (Chaldean: Amel-Marduk), suggesting the sixth century BCE for the composition of the national history (Genesis to Kings). “Ur of the Chaldeans” serves as a marker that the text is not earlier than the seventh century BC (Ur not being a part of Chaldea before that date).

Professor Rogerson’s view on the “final dating” of Genesis understands its last redaction or editing was in the Exile (or shortly thereafter):

“The simple answer to the question of date is that Genesis 1–11 is part of the larger work containing Genesis to 2 Kings…. This complete work did not reach its final form until during or after the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE. However, the date of the final editing does not determine the date of the individual items to be found in Genesis 1–11.”
(p. 76. “The Date of Genesis 1–11.” John William Rogerson. Genesis 1–11. Sheffield, England. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. University of Sheffield]. 1991)​

Ur, like many cosmopolitan Mesopotamian city-states at this time (see image above), was a bustling city boasting of sophisticated palace and temple complexes, along with advanced government and sociopolitical organization. Among other things, it has a highly evolved class of priesthood (dedicated to Nanna [Sin], moon god who became god of Islam, which went back to the original god of Abraham, not his new god [more on this later]) whose status in society is reminiscent of that enjoyed by priests, pharisees, and scribes during the purported time of Christ. Given this, it is easier to see why Abraham could be viewed as the first rebel heretic spurned by his kin and fellow citizens, much the way it was with Jesus Christ and Mohammad in the succeeding generations.




TO BE CONTINUED....
 

Attachments

  • 1Layard_reconstruction-of-ancient-Babylon-finalsb.jpg
    1Layard_reconstruction-of-ancient-Babylon-finalsb.jpg
    566.8 KB · Views: 103
Re: OLD TESTAMENT ARCHEOLOGY: Shocking Truths That Never Shook the World

may dalawang religion noon sa roman empire noon before naging popular ang christianity


pagan rome
at christian rome

puro animation lang ito hehe.. cancer caster.:rofl:
 
Living Sumer: The Historical Evolution of Yahweh

puro animation lang ito hehe.. cancer caster.:rofl:
As opposed to ... dream caster? Hehe

Not related to opioids syempre :lol:
 
Re: Living Sumer: The Historical Evolution of Yahweh

attachment.php


Part 3




Sumerian Motifs All Over Near East Religions—In Toto or Recast

Formal theism begins—and find their first widespread form—in Sumeria. All the giant dogmas that we come to identify with belief in gods all find their formal formulation in these ancient non-Semitic people of the Near East. Nothing beats the original, and for many—even popular culture such as the proliferation of Gilgamesh-based animes, or of Son Goku riding the clouds—the Sumerian system offers a virtual smorgasboard of enticing ideas that spur adaptations—or in the case of immediate successors, in toto . The very idea of gods, of gods getting in the thick of human affairs, of gods creating the universe and humankind, a grand plan, the notion of paradise, special gardens of gods, rewards and punishments, judgment day, gods playing favorite among humans, the concept of immortality and why humans don’t have that, rebellion in the heavens, angels and cherubims, first state of innocence and its loss, the trees conferring knowledge and immortality, fall of man, the thing about the rib of Adam, woman as temptress, the snake or serpent, original sin, flood to decimate all humankind, gods conveying their messages to humankind by dream, of a god confusing humankind by sowing the seeds of language differences, pain and suffering, fate of man—the Job motif—and many more all find their origin or grand schema in the Sumerians, a feat that no other civilization could claim.

Creation: Technique of Creation—By Word (Logos), Fashioning from Clay, from God Body Parts
When it comes to the technique of creation attributed to deities, the Sumerian philosophers developed a doctrine that became official dogma throughout the major world religions: the doctrine of the creative power of the divine word famously known in the Greek form, Logos, and put to good effect in the New Testament through the musings of the book of John.

All that the creating deity had to do, according to this doctrine, was to lay his plans, utter the word, and pronounce the name. This notion of the creative power of the divine word was probably the result of an analogical inference based on observation of human society: if a human king could achieve almost all he wanted by command, by no more than what seemed to be the words of his mouth, how much more was possible for the immortal and superhuman deities in charge of the four realms of the universe. Thought and word alone are what matters—giving the gods power over any source of creation and without any issue whatsoever.
(pp. 115
–116. "Religion: Theology, Rite, and Myth." Samuel Noah Kramer. The Sumerians. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press. 1963)

The power of the word has a dark side too: curses are believed to affect target entities especially if the person casting the curse has in possession the secret incantations and spells first practiced by the gods. Not only that, this belief has reached its highest point in the understanding that knowing the very word, the very name of the gods, would confer the knower power over the gods, so the gods had better be careful revealing their secret names only to their most trusted lieutenants.

Of course this does not prevent the gods from indulging in physical exertion and use of imagination to fashion out any creation. Thus, in the case of man, Enki/Ea/Ay-ya with an entire assembly of gods in tow, deigned to fashion out man from clay and the body of a slain rebellious god, infusing the creation with the blood and flesh of the rebel (later projected to be the essential soul) and the breathing air spirit most identified with the air-spirit god Enlil. In one bold stroke of imagination, we have the archetype, the very template from which creation traditions from all over the world had it all: creation by logos, ex nihilo or ex deo (Western tradition), fashioning (Western tradition) and from the body of a godly being (South Asia [Indian], Asian, Australian, North American and South American traditions).

The Primacy of Cultural Backgrounds in Comparative Religion
To the great number of archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians who painstakingly labored to piece together the civilization of Sumeria that only more than a hundred years before no one had the slightest clue ever existed, the first striking feature of its religious narratives is the overwhelming presence of themes that are widely prevalent in the major religions of the world, most of them in use as objects of unquestionable dogma that their adherents must accept as infallible and thus beyond doubt or question. Another pattern also became prominent: the cultural background of later adapters played a large part in how the same divergent themes are reintepreted for their own needs, the new interpretations taking a position that is as diametrically opposed to the original as their cultures were, reflecting the long-running clash of worldview and deep animosity among civilizations involved.

Thus it was with the city-loving, plantation-agricultural Sumerians and the steppe/desert-loving nomadic pastoral Hebrews. This deep-seated divide culminated in the Hebrews having the world's first murderer, the agriculturalist Cain, founding the first city, thereby mocking city life as depraved, cities being full of murderers and thieves. God's heart's delight was not a city garden, it was the remote eden where roamed the wild animals and naked man (Enkidu), a good way to get back at the city-dwelling grain planters who started hurling insults against the animal-loving pastoralists. As will be seen, most of this deep-seated antagonism could be gleaned in other themes as well, almost a line-by-line reversal in order to show their utmost loathing for the founders of civilization, the “descendants of Cain” themselves.

The most important motifs employed by Genesis authors were drawn from a wide spectrum of Sumerian-Mesopotamian sources under several different genres: annals, myths, and hymns, proverbs, among others.

The city-dwellers of Lower Mesopotamia (Nippur, Uruk, Eridu, and Ur in Sumer) who concocted these myths, safely esconced in their walled cities and the comforts of homes rather than portable tents and taking enormous pride in their princely lifestyles, mocked, despised and feared the nomads of eden, portraying the eden steppelands as a place of desolation fit only for wild animals, tent-dwelling thieves, brigands, and cut-throats, regarding them as backward people and ever-present threats to their way of life.

In response to these perceived deep insults, the nomads of eden (Terah, Nahor, and Abraham) took these myths and turned them upside down and on their ear via a series of inversions or reversals in defense of their way of life. Israel's “origins mythology” is that of nomadic herders who have recast the “origins” myths of the city-dwellers of Sumer in order to glorify their way of life as shepherds of the eden.Terah, Nahor, and Abraham while living in Ur, came to reject the Mesopotamian notions because these urbanites despised and mocked their nomadic herdsman way of life in the eden steppelands.

Thus, for the Hebrews: tent-dwelling shepherds and nomads were not murderers and despised by God—the descendants of Cain, the first murderer and founder of cities, were! God did not build a city to dwell in and plant a city-garden for himself and put man in it, his garden was in the eden—“uncultivated steppe.” God was a God of the Wilderness (eden). His “first home” would not be a temple in a city, it would be a humble shepherd's tent, the Holy Tabernacle at Mount Horeb in the midst of the great and terrible wilderness of Sinai where he earlier had revealed himself to Moses while he herded Jethro's sheep!

It is the longest-running tit-for-tat, and we modern humans are also in it for a ride dealing with the believers in these myths.

Thus the slighted party kept a keen eye on those details of the city-dwellers’ myths that they could overturn and counter according to their own designs,while keeping those that were harmless enough to leave untouched. Among the latter is cosmology and cosmogony, reserving their ire largely to those parts that pertain to the relationship of man and the divine.

Sumerian Cosmology and Cosmogony: The Primacy of Water
First, the Sumerians concluded, there was the primeval sea; the indications are that they looked upon the sea as a kind of first cause and prime mover. Sumerians first recognized the primacy of water in all the universe, before the Babylonians, Canaanites, Hebrews, and the Egyptians picked up the idea with their own minor modifications. Primeval water, water of chaos, was coexistent and conterminous with the gods.

Water was a reasoned choice. First, water was essential to life and perhaps even embodied a vital principle. All living things were wet inside. Second, water was the only substance known to the ancients that existed in all three phases; liquid, solid, and vapor. Of course they didn’t really know of the existence of water vapor as a gas, but they must have observed that boiling water produced rising steam, that water evaporated, and also that water condensed on cool surfaces as dew. It probably never snowed or froze in Egypt, but from the mountains of northern and eastern Mesopotamia people would have known of snow and ice and how it changed into water. Third, water came both up from under the ground and down as rain. So it was natural to conceive of water as surrounding the Earth (i.e. that part of the world where men dwelt).

In the eyes of the Sumerian teachers and sages, the major components of the universe (in the more narrow sense of the word) were heaven and earth (indeed, their term for universe was an-ki, a compound word meaning "heaven-earth"), the air-spirit above the waters between heaven and earth, and the underworld. It was the air-spirit in the person of Enlil and Ea of the waters who would, through their various reiterations, turn out to define the religions of the world, not just their immediate Near East imitators and successors.

But first we go to the human-divine relationship motifs in the next installment, before concluding with how Yah or Yahweh has become known in these parts of the world and in our times later on.




TO BE CONTINUED....
 

Attachments

  • Living SumerPart3.jpg
    Living SumerPart3.jpg
    866.8 KB · Views: 86
Re: Living Sumer: The Historical Evolution of Yahweh

attachment.php


Part 4



Eden-Bound: When Gods Were Man
To the Sumerian sages, first came the gods and their cities. All else—plants and vegetation, animals, man—would come later.

The Sumerian gods followed a well-defined hierarchy of power: the most powerful, including An (Anu), Enlil, Enki were followed by gods of the fates and judgment, and below them minor deities who took their places in heaven, earth, and the underworld.

The gods did not always agree among themselves, and so they had armies or hosts to battle among one another, creating a host of minor gods, dragons, and leviathans among others to help them win their wars. In this regard, the elohim—the gods—were not so different from humans. The chief gods could go weary of the other gods and decide to destroy them to give them rest. It is from this constant jockeying for power that gods decided which side to support in the next battles to come—the armageddon.

And the Sumerian gods had to feed themselves. For that, they created city gardens and tended these themselves. They harvested the plantations’ produce and fetched water from the Tigris and Euphrates to fill their tables with the bread and water of life, especially empowered by spells and incantations to grant those who eat them immortality.

Soon enough the gods grew weary from the toil of tending their gardens. They petitioned the air god, the father-figure Enlil, to do something about it.

Enlil’s solution: to create the minor gods Igigis and mandate them to carry the task of tending to the gardens, now including the gardens in eden, the steppes or plains, digging trenches, canals, riverbeds, planting seeds, hoeing weeds, briars, and brambles.

These proved to be back-breaking tasks, and after 3,600 years the Igigis had had enough: they marched to Enlil in his city at Eridu and petitioned an end to their miserable existence. The minor gods essentially mutinied and rebelled against the more powerful gods, the first of such kind heard in the annals of human history, not to be heard again until the appearance of the Hebrew bible some two thousand years later. Poetically, among the first to be found in Canaan were cuneiform tablets coming from Sumer containing such rich sources of this idea, thoughtfully studied by the scholars and other learned men of the Hebrews. But back to the story of the Sumerians.

The ruling gods granted the Igigis their wishes, but with one caveat: they grabbed and slayed the leader of the rebellion and from his blood and body came raw materials that the gods brought with them to their creation chambers. There they also deposited clays claimed from the abyss. Enki/Ea presided over a few gods and goddesses on the project and, going to work, fashioned out 7 pairs of men and women mixed with the blood and flesh of the rebel leader. That done, all that was needed to complete the task was for the spirit god Enlil to breathe through the creations to finally grant them life. Thus when men die, they are said to return to clay and give back the spirit to Enlil. Death also liberated the ghost of the slain Igigi leader, the ghost representing the essence of his previous life. But while alive, humanity’s fate was to be at the garden of eden serving the gods. They were eden-bound.

In the Garden of Eden
Representing the first men was Adapa.

Among other things, Enki/Ea clothed Adapa and endeavored to teach his beloved creation the arts of civilization, of laws and institutions to instill order in the growing human societies, hoping that wisdom and a sound sense of good and evil would set humanity in solid footing for generations to come.

And of course the god taught Adapa the arts of plantation of cultivation so he could attend to his duties at the garden of eden with competence. Not only that, the god also granted a special favor to Adapa: he taught him the secret knowledge of the gods, the power of words through magic spells and incantations. Presumably this was to help Adapa dispose of his tasks—a previous source of discontent with the gods
with less resistance and more ease, especially when dealing with the elements and wild animals.

Then one day the unthinkable happened: Adapa came into blows with the Southwind god, and using the powerful spell learned from Ea/Enki, he defeated the wind god who always seemed to draw constant amusement sending his plants to oblivion. The assembly of gods were shocked. Whispers echoed in the divine corridors of power, until An made the obvious official call: summon Adapa and interrogate the man how he came upon such powers to defeat a god.

The decision made the other gods uneasy: they knew that if Adapa were punished, then they would also pay the price and could already see themselves back tending to the city gardens and the garden of eden—an ugly proposition. On the other hand, An could play generous and instead promote Adapa and his kind to the rank of god, yet still moving in the direction of a similarly unacceptable solution. If mankind became god, they would no longer be required to work the city gardens and the garden of eden.

So the gods made their move, and through Enki/Ea instructed Adapa not to accept any food offered by An, warning the man that if he did eat the food in offer, the fruits of his own labor, he would surely die.

At the meeting between An and man, An eventually came to the conclusion that since man already possessed the kind of knowledge reserved only for the gods, and since he was but one step away from immortality and godhead, he should be fully made god, and consequently had attendants serve Adapa the gods’ bread and water of life to grant him immortality and god status. To which, being the noble man that he was, eternally loyal and obedient to Ea/Enki, Adapa refused with grace
—following Enki's/Ea's instruction.

An, supremely surprised, took the matter as a grand irony from the gods of fates and afterwards treated himself to the most boisterous hearty laugh he had managed in a while.

And so Adapa was soon back to his duties at the garden of eden, grimly working his years away to the service of provisioning for the gods their foods twice daily in their temples, blissfully unaware that he had just barely missed the boat to immortality through the trickery of his favored god….


The garden of Eden hosted all sorts of plantations and wild beasts and vegetation. It also hosted a man named Enkidu.

Enkidu was no ordinary man, for from the start he only knew life among the wild beasts and communed naked with them, eating the same wild grass and drinking from a watering hole that they called a place of delight. There was just one little problem: Enkidu had the habit of frustrating a hunter who had to see his traps empty after Enkidu duly freed what he thought was his kind from those devious contraptions.

But the hunter was not to be outdone: spying the strange man among the wild beasts, he called forth the services of a renowned, well-regarded prostitute Shamhat to entice Enkidu out of his misfit existence and bring out the natural manhood in him.

Placing herself in the watering hole, Shamhat soon had Enkidu under her potent power once he went there for a drink with the beasts. Naked and summoning the persuasive talents that made her famous in the lands, Shamhat had Enkidu under intense heat, and not from the weather, to the aghast of the animals.

They sensed something went amiss, that something went out of Enkidu during his torrid dalliance with the strange woman. When that was done, they didn’t see Enkidu in the same light as before: he was different, and consequently they left him with the woman and her devices, Enkidu taking the fall, never again to go back to his days of wild innocence. That woman temptress took their man companion away from them, took his innocence, and Enkidu had no choice but to go with Shamhat and join civilization, later making a name for himself as the loyal right of hand of Gilgamesh, the Hercules of Sumer.


The garden of eden also made a name among gods and men as the source of mystic fruits that granted equally esoteric knowledge to those who consumed them.

Lady of Eden Inanna, the goddes of beauty, love, and sex was to be married to the Lord of Eden, Dumuzi, also known as the Great Serpent Dragon. It was to be a festive occasion, except for one problem: Inanna had absolutely no knowledge about sex and was a nervous wreck utterly concerned that she would not be able to fulfill her conjugal duties with her husband.

A quick fix was in hand: calling her twin brother the sun god Utu, they made a fast pilgrimage to the garden of eden and consumed as much fruit she could find there, including the pine nut with what many said possessed many magical powers. Shortly she had the knowledge she sought for and was happy to consummate the marriage with Dumuzi.

But their story did not end there.

Inanna later ran into trouble while making her way to the underworld to visit her sister, Ereshkigal, who was abducted by the god of the underworld and carried there to be his queen. The underworld had its own rules, among them that anyone who entered could not go back onto the surface, unless a replacement, a surrogate was made. The visit soon took a grisly turn, as Ereshkigal had Inanna killed to make her a permanent resident of Hell.

But that was not the end of it. As it turned out, Enki/Ea, Inanna’s father, was well aware of the kind of fate that awaited Inanna in the underworld, so he arranged for a messenger to send a bread of life, a water of life, or a plant of life to give to Inanna to resurrect her if she did not make it back in three days.

When exactly that happened, she quickly bolted out to make an escape, making a deal with the demon guards that if they would accompany her ascent she would find them a surrogate in her stead back on the surface of earth. Unfortunately it was her husband that she had to spy first, Dumuzi at that time getting his shepherding rest under an apple tree. Thinking fast, Inanna quickly took flight in the direction of her husband and entreated the demons to take Dumuzi away as her surrogate in the underworld. The demons listened, and they had Dumuzi overpowered and bound in the apple tree, intending to transport him later to their underground realm.

But Dumuzi had another thing in mind: with the help of his brother-in-law Utu, he transformed into a snake, briefly eluding his captors but soon enough was recaptured and had to die to take Inanna’s place. Inanna, of course took all the blame for the fall of Dumuzi as Shamshat the temptress took the blame for the fall of Enkidu.




TO BE CONTINUED....
 

Attachments

  • Garden of Eden-final.jpg
    Garden of Eden-final.jpg
    333.9 KB · Views: 62
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom