2 - WHEN PARADISE WAS LOST

The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, on the face of it a deliberate and decisive breaking of the links between The Adam and his creators, was not that final after all. Were it to be final, the records of Divine Encounters would have ended right then and there. Instead, the Expulsion was only the start of a new phase in that relationship that can be characterized as hide-and-seek, in which direct encounters become rare and visions or dreams become divine devices.

The beginning of this post-Paradise relationship was far from auspicious; it was, in fact, a most tragic one. Unintentionally it brought about the emergence of new humans, Homo sapiens sapiens. And as it turned out, both the tragedy and its unexpected consequence planted the seeds of divine disillusionment with Humankind.

It was not the Expulsion from Paradise, such a cherished topic for preachings on the "Fall of Man," that was at the root of the plan to let the Deluge wipe Humankind off the face of the Earth. Rather, it was the incredible act of fratricide: When all of humanity consisted of four (Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel), one brother killed the other!

And what was it all about? It was about Divine Encounters ...

The story as told in the Bible begins almost as an idyll:

And the Adam knew Eve his wife

and she conceived and gave birth to Cain;

and she said:
"Alongside Yahweh a man I brought to be."

Again she gave birth, to his brother Abel.

And Abel became a shepherd of flocks

and Cain a tiller of the land.

Thus, in just two verses, does the Bible introduce the reader to the entirely new phase of human experience and sets the stage for the next Divine Encounter. In spite of the seeming break between God and Man, Yahweh is still watching over Humankind. Somehow - the Bible does not elaborate how - grains and cattle have been domesticated, with Cain becoming a farmer and Abel a shepherd.

The brothers’ first act is to offer the first fruits and yearlings to Yahweh in gratitude. The act implies a recognition that it was thanks to the deity that the two ways of obtaining food became feasible.

The privilege of a Divine Encounter was expected; but,

Yahweh paid heed unto Abel and his offering; unto Cain and his offering He paid no heed. So Cain was very resentful and his countenance was sullen.

Perhaps alarmed by this development, the deity speaks, directly, to Cain, trying to dissipate his anger and disappointment. But to no avail; when the two brothers were alone in the field, "Cain came upon his brother Abel and killed him."

Yahweh was soon demanding an accounting from Cain. "What hast thou done?" the Lord cried out in anger and despair; "the voice of thy brother’s blood cries unto me from the ground!" Cain is punished to become a wanderer upon the Earth; but the Earth too is accursed, to cease its fertility. Recognizing the magnitude of his crime, Cain is afraid of being killed by unnamed avengers. "So Yahweh put a mark on Cain, so that whoever shall find him should not smite him."

What was this "mark of Cain"? The Bible does not say, and countless guesses are just that - guesses. Our own guess (in The Lost Realms) was that the mark might have been a genetic change, such as depriving the line of Cain of facial hair - a mark that would be immediately obvious to whoever shall find them.

Since this is a mark of recognition of Amerindians, we have suggested that since Cain "went away from the presence of Yahweh and resided in the Land of Nod, east of Eden," his wanderings took him and his offspring farther into Asia and the Far East, in time crossing the Pacific to settle in Mesoamerica.

When his wanderings ended, Cain had a son whom he named Enoch and built a city "called by the name of his son." We have pointed out that Aztec legends called their capital Tenochtitland, "City of Tenoch," in honor of ancestors who came from the Pacific. Since they prefixed many names by the sound "T," the city could have really been named after Enoch.

Whatever the destination of Cain or the nature of the mark were, it is clear that this final act in the Cain-Abel drama required a direct Divine Encounter, a close contact between the deity and Cain so that the "mark" could be emplaced.

This, as the unfolding record of the relationship between Man and God will show, was a rare occurrence after the Expulsion from Paradise.

According to Genesis it was not until the seventh pre-Diluvial Patriarch (in a line that began with Adam and ended with Noah) that the Elohim engaged in a direct Divine Encounter; it had to do with Enoch, who at age 365 (a number of years paralleling the number of days in a year) "walked with the Elohim" and then was gone "for the Elohim had taken him" to join them in their abode.

But if God so rarely revealed himself, yet Humankind - according to the Bible - continued to "hear" him, what were the channels of indirect encounters?

To find answers regarding those early times, we have to fish for information in the extra-biblical books, of which the Book of Jubilees is one. Called by scholars Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, may include the Book of Adam and Eve that survived in several translated versions ranging from Armenian and Slavonic to Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic (but not the original Hebrew).

According to this source, the slaying of Abel by Cain was foretold to Eve in a dream in which she saw "the blood of Abel being poured into the mouth of Cain his brother." To prevent the dream from coming true, it was decided to "make for each of them separate dwellings, and they made Cain an husbandman and Abel they made a shepherd."

But the separation was to no avail. Again Eve had such a dream (this time the text calls it "a vision"). Awakened by her, Adam suggested that they "go and see what has happened to them." "And they both went, and found Abel murdered by the hand of Cain."

The events, as recorded in the Book of Adam and Eve, then describe the birth of Sheth (meaning "Replacement" in Hebrew) "in place of Abel." With Abel dead and Cain banished, Seth (as the name is spelled in English translations of the Bible) was now the patriarchal heir and successor to Adam.

And so it was that when Adam fell sick and was close to death, he revealed to Seth "what I heard and saw after your mother and I had been driven out of paradise:"

There came to me Michael the archangel,
an emissary of God.
And I saw a chariot like the wind,
and its wheels were as on fire.
And I was carried up unto
the Paradise of the Righteous Ones
and I saw the Lord sitting;
But his face was a flaming fire
that could not be endured.

Though he could not face the awesome sight, he could hear God’s voice telling him that because he had transgressed in the Garden of Eden, he was fated to die. Then the archangel Michael took Adam away from the vision of Paradise and brought him back to whence he had come. Concluding the account, Adam admonished Seth to avoid sin and to be righteous and to follow God’s commandments and statutes that will be delivered to Seth and his descendants when "the Lord shall appear in a flame of fire."

Since the death of Adam was the first natural passing of a mortal. Eve and Seth knew not what to do. They took the dying Adam and carried him to the "region of Paradise," and there sat at the Gates of Paradise until Adam’s soul departed from his body. They sat bewildered, mourning and crying. Then the Sun and Moon and the stars darkened, "the heavens opened," and Eve saw celestial visions.

Raising her eyes she saw "coming from the heavens a chariot of light, borne by four bright eagles. And she heard the Lord instruct the angels Michael and Uriel to bring linen cloths and shroud Adam as well as Abel" (who has not yet been buried); so were Adam and Abel consecrated for burial. Then the two of them were carried by the angels and buried, "according to the commandment of God, in the place where the Lord obtained the soil-dust" for the creation of Adam.

There is a wealth of pertinent information in this tale. It establishes prophetic dreams as a channel for divine revelations, a Divine Encounter through telepathic or other subconscious means. It introduces into the realm of Divine Encounters an intermediary: an "angel," a term known from the Hebrew Bible whose literal meaning was "emissary, messenger." And it also brings into play yet another form of Divine Encounter, that of "visions" in which the "Chariot of the Lord" is seen - an "awesome sight" of a "chariot like the wind," whose "wheels were as on fire" when seen by Adam and as a "chariot of light, borne by four bright eagles," when seen by Eve.

Since the Book of Adam and Eve, as the other Pseudographic books, was written in the last centuries before the Christian era, one could of course argue that its information regarding dreams and visions could have been based on knowledge or beliefs from a much closer time to the writers than the pre-Diluvial events. In the case of prophetic dreams (of which more later) such a throwback in time would only serve to reinforce the fact that such dreams have indeed been deemed an undisputed channel between the deities and humans throughout recorded history.

In regard to visions of divine chariots, one could also argue that what the author of the Book of Adam and Eve had attributed to prehistoric, pre-Diluvial times also reflected much later events, such as Ezekiel’s vision of the Divine Chariot (at the end of the seventh century B.C), as well as familiarity with extensive references to such aerial vehicles in Mesopotamian and Egyptian texts. But in this matter, visions or sightings of what we nowadays call UFOs, there exists actual, physical evidence of such sightings from the days before the Deluge - pictorial evidence whose authenticity is undeniable.

Let us be clear: We are not referring to Sumerian depictions (starting with the pictograph for GIR) and other depictions from the ancient Near East in the post-Diluvial era. We are talking about actual depictions - drawing, paintings - from an era preceding the Deluge (that had occurred, by our calculations, some 13,000 years ago), and preceding it not by a short time but by thousands and tens of thousands of years!

The existence of pictorial depictions from that far back in prehistory is no secret. What is virtually a secret is the fact that besides animals, and some human figures, those drawings and paintings also depicted what we nowadays call UFOs.
We refer to what is known as Cave Art, the many drawings found in caves in Europe where Cro-Magnon Man made his home. Such "decorated caves" as scholars call them have been found especially in the southwest of France and the north of Spain. More than seventy such decorated caves have been found (one, whose entrance is now under the waters of the Mediterranean sea, as recently as 1993) there.

Stone Age artists used the cave walls as giant canvases, sometimes talentedly using the natural contours and protrusions of the walls to attain tridimensional effects. Sometimes using sharp stones to engrave the images, sometimes clay to mold and shape, but mostly a limited assortment of pigments - black, red, yellow, and a dull brown - they created astoundingly beautiful works of art.

Occasionally depicting humans as hunters, and sometimes their hunting weapons (arrows, lances), the depictions by and large are those of Ice Age animals: bison, reindeer, ibexes, horses, oxen, cows, felines, and here and there also fish and birds (Fig. 9). The drawings, engravings, and paintings are sometimes life-size, always naturalistic. There is no doubt that the anonymous artists painted what they had actually seen. Time-wise they span millennia, from about 30,000 to 13,000 years ago.

Figure 9

In many instances the more complex, more vividly colored, more lifelike depictions are in the deeper parts of the caves, which were, of course, also the darkest parts. What means the artists used to light the inner recesses of the caves so that they could paint, no one knows, for no remains of charcoal or torches or the like have been found. Nor, to judge by the absence of remains, were these caves habitats.

Many scholars, therefore, tend to view these decorated caves as shrines, where the art expressed a primitive religion - an appeal to the Gods, by painting the animals and hunting scenes, to make forthcoming hunting expeditions successful.

The inclination to view the Cave Art as religious art also stems from the plastic finds. These consist mainly of "Venus" figurines - statuettes of females known as the Willendorf Venus (Fig. 10a) whose date is approximately 23000 B.C. Since the artists could also render the female shape perfectly naturally, as this find in France from circa 22000 B.C. shows (Fig. 10b), it is believed that the ones with exaggerated reproductive parts were intended to symbolize or seek - "pray for" - fertility; so that while the natural ones represented "Eves," the exaggerated ones ("Venuses") expressed veneration of a Goddess.

Figures 10a and 10b

The discovery of another "Venus" at Laussel in France, dating to the same period, reinforces the deity rather than the human identification, because the female is holding in her right hand the symbol of a crescent (Fig. 11). Although some suggest that she is merely holding a bison’s horn, the symbolism of a celestial connection (here with the Moon) is inescapable, no matter of what material the crescent was made.

Figure 11

Many researchers (e.g. Johannes Maringer in The Gods of Prehistoric Man) believe that "it appears highly probable that the female figurines were idols of a ‘great mother’ cult, practiced by non-nomadic Upper Stone Age mammoth hunters." Others, like Marlin Stone (When God Was A Woman) considered the phenomenon "dawn of a Stone Age Garden of Eden" and linked this worship of a Mother Goddess to the later Goddesses of the Sumerian pantheon.

One of the nicknames of Ninmah, who had assisted Enki in the creation of Man, was Mammi; there is no doubt that it was the origin of the word for "mother" in almost all the languages. That she was revered already some 30,000 years ago is no wonder - for the Anunnaki had been on Earth for far longer, with Ninmah/Mammi among them.

The question is, though, how did Stone Age Man, more specifically Cro-Magnon Man, know of the existence of these "Gods"?

Here, we believe, come into play another type of drawings found in the Stone Age caves. If they are mentioned at all (which is rarely), they are referred to as "markings." But these were not scratches or incoherent lines. These "markings" depict well-defined shapes - shapes of objects that, nowadays, are referred to as UFOs...

The best way to make the point is to reproduce these "markings." Fig. 12 reproduces depictions by Stone Age artists - the illustrating reporters of their time - in the Altamira, La Pasiega, and El Castillo caves in Spain, and the Font-de-Gaume and Pair-non-Pair caves in France.

These are by no means all of the illustrations of this kind, but the ones that, in our view, are the most obvious Stone Age depictions of celestial chariots. Since all the other depictions in the decorated caves are of animals, etc., actually seen and most accurately rendered by the cave artists, there is no reason to assume that in the case of the "markings" they depicted objects that were abstract imaginings. If the depictions are of flying objects, then the artists must have actually seen them.

Figure 12

Thanks to those artists and their handiwork, we can rest assured that when Adam and Eve - in pre-Diluvial times - claimed to have seen "celestial chariots," they were recording fact, not fiction.

Reading the biblical and extra-biblical records in the light of Sumerian sources will add greatly to our understanding of those prehistoric events. We have already examined such sources in respect to the tale of the creation of The Adam and of Eve and the Garden of Eden. Let us now examine the Cain-Abel tragedy. Why did the two feel obliged to offer the first fruits or yearlings to Yahweh, why did he pay heed only to the offering of Abel, the shepherd, and why did the Lord then rush to appease Cain by promising him that he, Cain, would rule over Abel?

The answers lie in a realization that, as in the tale of creation, the biblical version compresses more than one Sumerian deity into a single, monotheistic one.

Sumerian texts include two that deal with disputes and conflicts between farming and shepherding. They both hold the key to an understanding of what had happened by going back to a time before the domestication of either grains or cattle, a "time when grains had not yet been brought forth, had not yet vegetated... when a lamb had not yet been dropped, there was no she-goat."

But the "black-headed people" had already been fashioned and placed in the Edin; so the Anunnaki decided to give to NAM.LU.GAL.LU - "civilized Mankind" - the knowledge of and tools for "the tilling of the land" and the "keeping of sheep"; not, however, for the sake of Mankind but "for the sake of the Gods," to assure their satiation.

The task of bringing forth the two forms of domestication fell to Enki and Enlil. They went to the DU.KU, the "purification place," the "creation chamber of the Gods," and brought forth Lahar ("woolly cattle") and Anshan ("grains").

"For Lahar they set up a sheepfold ... to Anshan a plough and yoke they presented."

Sumerian cylinder seals depicted the presentation of the first-ever plough to Mankind (Fig. 13a) - presumably by Enlil who had created Anshan, the farmer (although a presentation by Enlil’s son Ninurta, who was nicknamed "the ploughman," should not be ruled out); and a ploughing scene in which the plough is pulled by a bull (Fig. 13b).

Figures 13a and 13b

After an initial idyllic period, Lahar and Anshan began to quarrel. A text named by scholars The Myth of Cattle and Grain reveals that in spite of the effort to separate the two by "establishing a house," a settled way of life, for Anshan (the farmer) and putting up sheepfolds in the grazing lands for Lahar (the shepherd), and in spite of the abundant crops and bountiful sheepfolds, the two began to quarrel.

The quarrel began as the two offered those abundances to the "storehouse of the Gods." At first each just extolled his own achievements and belittled those of the other. But the argument became so volatile, that both Enlil and Enki had to intervene. According to the Sumerian text, they declared Anshan - the farmer - the more surpassing.

More explicit in its choice between the two food producers and two ways of life is a text known as The Dispute Between Emesh an Enten, in which the two come to Enlil for a decision as to who of them is the more important. Emesh is the one who "made wide stalls and sheepfolds"; Enten, who dug canals to water the lands, asserts that he is the "farmer of the Gods." Bringing their offerings to Enlil, each seeks to be granted primacy.

Enten boasts how he made "farm touch farm," his irrigation canals "brought water in abundance," how he "made grain increase in the furrows" and be "heaped high in the granaries." Emesh points out that he "made the ewe give birth to the lamb, the goat to give birth to the kid, cow and calf to multiply, fat and milk to increase," and also how he obtained eggs from nests made for the birds and caught fish from the sea.

But Enlil rejects the pleas of Emesh, even reprimands him: "How could you compare yourself to your brother Enten!" he tells him, for it is Enten ‘who is in charge of the life-producing waters of all the lands." And water spells life, growth, abundance. Emesh accepts the decision,

The exalted word of Enlil,

whose meaning is profound;

A verdict that is unalterable,

no one dares transgress it!

And so, "in the dispute between Emesh and Enten, Enten, the faithful farmer of the Gods, having proved himself the winner, Emesh his knee bent before Enten, offered him a prayer," and gave him many presents.

It is noteworthy that in the above-quoted lines Enlil calls Emesh a brother of Enten - the same relationship as that between Cain and Abel. This and other similarities between the Sumerian and biblical tales indicate that the former were the inspiration for the latter.

The preference of the farmer over the shepherd by Enlil can be traced to the fact that he was the one to introduce farming while Enki accounted for the domestication of livestock. Scholars tend to translate the Sumerian names as "winter" for Enten and "summer" for Emesh. Strictly speaking EN.TEN meant "Lord of Resting," the time after the harvests and thus the winter season, without a clear affinity to a specific deity. E.MESH ("House of Mesh"), on the other hand, is clearly associated with Enki, one of whose epithets was MESH ("Proliferation"); he was thus the God of shepherding.

All in all, there can be little doubt that the Cain-Abel rivalry reflected a rivalry between the two divine brothers. It flared up from time to time, as when Enlil arrived on Earth to take over command from Enki (who was relegated to the Abzu), and on subsequent occasions. Its roots, however, went back to Nibiru, their home planet. Both were the sons of Anu, Nibiru’s ruler. Enki was the firstborn, and thus the natural heir to the throne. But Enlil, though born later, was born by the official spouse of Anu (and presumably a half sister of his) - a fact that made Enlil the legal heir to the throne. Birthright clashed with succession rules; and though Enki accepted the outcome, the rivalry and anger often burst into the open.

A question rarely asked is, where did Cain obtain the very notion of killing? In the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were vegetarians, eating only fruits of the trees. No animal was slaughtered by them. Away from the Garden there were only four humans, none of whom has yet died (and certainly not as a result of foul play). In such circumstances, what made Cain "come upon his brother Abel and kill him"?

The answer, it seems, lies not among men but among the Gods. Just as the rivalry between the human brothers reflected a rivalry between the divine brothers, so did the killing of one human by another emulate the killing of one "God" by another. Not of Enki by Enlil or vice versa - their rivalry never reached such vehemence - but still the killing of one leader of the Anunnaki by another.

The tale is well documented in Sumerian literature. Scholars called it The Myth of 7M. It relates events that took place after the rearrangement of the command on Earth, with an ample production of gold ores in the Abzu under Enki’s direction and their processing, smelting, and refining in the Edin under Enlil’s supervision. Six hundred Anunnaki are engaged in all of these operations on Earth; another three hundred (the IGI.GI, "Those Who Observe and See") stay aloft, manning the shuttlecraft and spacecraft that transport the purified gold to Nibiru.

Mission Control Center is in Enlil’s headquarters in Nippur; it is called DUR.AN.KI, "The Bond Heaven-Earth." There, atop a raised platform, the vital instruments, celestial charts and orbital-data panels ("Tablets of Destinies") are kept in the DIR.GA, a restricted innermost holy-of-holies.

The lgigi, complaining that they get no respite from their orbital duties, send an emissary to Enlil. He is an AN.ZU, "One Who Knows the Heavens," and is called ZU for short. Admitted into the Dirga, he finds out that the Tablets of Destinies are the key to the whole mission. Soon he begins to think evil thoughts, "to plot aggression:" to steal the Tablets of Destinies and "govern the decrees of the Gods."

At first opportunity he carried out his scheme, and "in his Bird" took off to hide in the "Mountain of Skychambers." In the Duranki, everything came to a standstill; the contact with Nibiru was disrupted, all operations were thrown into havoc. As one effort after another to recapture the tablets fails, Ninurta, Enlil’s Foremost Son and warrior, undertakes the dangerous mission. Aerial battles with weapons that emit brilliant rays ensue. Finally, Ninurta managed to penetrate Zu’s protective force-field shields and shot Zu’s "Bird" down. Zu was captured and put on trial before the "seven Anunnaki who judge." He was found guilty and was sentenced to death. His vanquisher, Ninurta, carried out the sentence.

The execution of Zu has been depicted on an archaic sculpted relief found in central Mesopotamia (Fig. 14). It all happened long before Mankind was created; but as these texts show, the tale was recorded and known in ensuing millennia. If that is where Cain obtained the notion of killing, Yahweh’s anger was understandable, for Zu was killed after a trial; Abel was just murdered.

Figure 14

Sumerian texts, the origin of and inspiration for the tales of Genesis, not only fill the bare-bones biblical versions with details; they also provide the background for understanding the events. One more aspect of the human experience thus far can be explained by the divine records. The sins of Adam/ Eve and of Cain are punished by nothing more severe than Expulsion. That too appears to be an application of an Anunnaki form of punishment to the created humans. It was once meted out to Enlil himself, who "date-raped" a young Anunnaki nurse (who in the end became his wife).

By combining the biblical and Sumerian data, we are now in a position to put the record of Mankind’s beginnings in a time frame supported by modern science.

According to the Sumerian King Lists, 120 Sars ("Divine Years" or orbits of Nibiru), equaling 432,000 Earth-years, passed from the arrival of the Anunnaki on Earth until the Deluge. In chapter 6 of Genesis, in the preamble to the tale of Noah and the Deluge, the number "one hundred and twenty years" is also given.

It has been generally held that it refers to the limit God had put on the extent of a man’s life; but as we have pointed out in The 12th Planet, the Patriarchs lived after the Deluge much longer - Shem, the son of Noah, 600 years; his son Arpakhshad 438, his son Shelach 433, and so on through Terah, Abraham’s father, who lived to be 205. A careful reading of the biblical Hebrew verse, we have suggested, actually spoke of the deity’s years completing 120 by then - a count of Divine Years, not those of Earthlings.

Out of those 432,000 Earth-years, the Anunnaki were alone on Earth for forty Sars, when the mutiny occurred. Then, some 288,000 Earth-years before the Deluge, i.e. about 300,000 years ago, they created the Primitive Worker. After an interval whose length is not stated in those sources, they gave the new being the ability to procreate, and returned the First Couple to southeast Africa.

A point that is usually ignored, but which we find highly significant, is that all through the narratives concerning Man’s creation, the Garden of Eden episode, and - most intriguing - in the story of the birth of Cain and Abel, the Bible refers to the human as THE Adam, a generic term defining a certain species. Only in chapter 5 of Genesis, that begins with the words "This is the book of the genealogies of Adam," does the Bible drop the "the."

It is only then that it starts to deal with a specific forefather of the human generations; but significantly, this listing omits Cain and Abel and proceeds from the person called Adam straight on to his son Seth, the father of Enosh. And it is only for Seth’s son Enosh that the Hebrew term meaning "human being" is employed; for that is what Enosh meant: "He who is human." To this day the Hebrew word for "Humankind" is Enoshut, "that which is like, that which stems from, Enosh."

The link between the biblical narrative and its Sumerian origins emerges most interestingly in this name of the son of Adam, Enosh, whom the Bible considers the real progenitor of Humankind as it came to be in the ancient Near East. A list of months and the Gods associated with them (known as IV R 33), which begins with Nisan as the month associated with Anu and Enlil (the first month of the Assyrian-Babylonian year), lists next the month Ayar with the notation "sha Ea bel tinishti" - "That of Ea, lord of Mankind."

The Akkadian term tinishti has the same meaning as the Enoshut in Hebrew (which derived from the Akkadian). The Akkadian term, in turn, was paralleled in the Sumerian by the term AZA.LU.LU which can best be translated as "the people who serve"; and once again, this conveys - and explains - the biblical statement that expounds on Enosh, the meaning of his name, and his time.

It is in respect to Enosh that the Bible states (Genesis 4:26) that it was in his time that Humankind "began to call upon the name of Yahweh." It must have been an important development, a new phase in Humankind’s history, for the Book of Jubilees states in almost identical words that it was Enosh "who began to call on the name of the Lord on Earth." Man has discovered God!

• Who was this new human, "Enosh-man," from a scientific point of view?

• Was he the progenitor of what we call Neanderthal Man, the first true Homo sapiens?

• Or was he already the ancestor of Cro-Magnon Man, the first true Homo sapiens sapiens that still walks the Earth as the current human beings?

Cro-Magnon Man (so named after the site in France where his skeletal remains were found) appeared in Europe some 35,000 years ago, replacing there the Neanderthal Man (so named after the discovery site in Germany) who can be traced there to 100,000 years ago.

But, as skeletal remains discovered in recent years in caves in Israel reveal, Neanderthals were migrating through the Near East at least some 115,000 years ago, and Cro-Magnons had dwelt in the area already 92,000 years ago.

• Where do The Adam and Eve, the first created humans, and Adam and Eve, the progenitors of Seth and Enosh, fit into all that?

• What light do the Sumerian King Lists and the Bible shed on the issue, and how does it all correlate to modern scientific discoveries?

While fossil remains discovered in Africa, Asia, and Europe suggest that hominids first appeared in southeastern Africa and then branched out to the other continents possibly half a million years ago, the true predecessors of today’s humanity made their appearance in southeastern Africa somewhat later.

The genetic markers for Homo sapiens, first studied through the Mitochondrial DNA that is passed by the female alone, and then through studies of Nuclear DNA that is inherited from both parents (reports at the April 1994 annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists) indicate that we all stem from a single "Eve" that had lived in southeast Africa between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago. Studies released in May 1995 of the Y chromosome indicate a single "Adam" ancestor some 270,000 years ago.

The Sumerian data, we have concluded, places the creation of The Adam at about 290,000 years ago - well within the time scales for the two progenitors that modern science now suggests. How long the stay at the Garden of Eden, the attainment of the ability to procreate, the expulsion back to southeast Africa, and the Cain-Abel birth had taken place, the ancient texts do not state. Fifty thousand years? One hundred thousand years? Whatever the exact time lapse, it seems evident that the "Eve" who was back in southeast Africa, bearing offspring to The Adam, fits well chronologically with the current scientific data.

With those early humans gone from the stage, the time came for the specific Adam and his line to appear. According to the Bible the pre-Diluvial patriarchs, who enjoyed life spans ranging in most cases almost 1,000 years, account for 1,656 years from Adam (the specific individual) to the Deluge:

• Age of Adam when he begot Seth 130 years

• Age of Seth when he begot Enosh 105 years

• Age of Enosh when he begot Kenan 90 years

• Age of Kenan when he begot Mahalalel 70 years

• Age of Mahalalel when he begot Jared 65 years

• Age of Jared when he begot Enoch 162 years

• Age of Enoch when he begot Metushelah 65 years

• Age of Metushelah when he begot Lamech 187 years

• Age of Lamech when he begot Noah 182 years

• Age of Noah when the Deluge occurred 600 years

  
  Total time from birth of Adam to Deluge 1,656 years

There has been no shortage of attempts to reconcile these 1,656 years with the Sumerian 432,000, especially so since the Bible lists ten pre-Diluvial patriarchs from Adam to Noah, and the Sumerian King Lists also name ten pre-Diluvial rulers the last of whom, Ziusudra, was also the hero of the Deluge.

More than a century ago, for example, Julius Oppert (in a study titled the Daten der Genesis) showed that the two numbers share a factor of 72 (432,000 : 72 = 6,000 and 1656 : 72 = 23) and then engaged in mathematical acrobatics to arrive at a common source for the two. About a century later the "mythologist" Joseph Campbell (The Masks of God) noted with fascination that 72 represented the number of years Earth, in its orbit around the Sun, retards by 1° (the phenomenon called Precession) and thus saw a connection to the zodiacal houses of 2,160 years each (72 x 30° = 2,160).

These and other ingenious solutions fail to recognize the error in comparing 432,000 with 1,656 because of treatment of all the ancient texts as just "myth." If the ancient records would be treated as reliable data, it should be noted that the Primitive Worker (still only THE Adam) was brought forth not 120 Sars before the Deluge but only 80 Sars before the watery ordeal, i.e. only 288,000 Earth-years before the Deluge. Moreover, as we have shown earlier in this chapter, THE Adam and the person Adam were not one and the same.

First there was the interlude in the Garden of Eden, then the Expulsion. How long that interlude lasted, the Bible does not say.

Since, as we have shown, the biblical narrative is based on Sumerian sources, the simplest solution to the problem is also the most plausible. In the Sumerian sexagesimal ("base 60") mathematical system, the cuneiform sign for "1" could mean one or could mean sixty, depending on the position of the sign, just as "I" could mean one or ten or one hundred depending on the digit’s position in the decimal system (except that we make distinction easy by the use of "0" to indicate position, writing 1, 10, 100 etc.).

Could it not then be that the redactors of the Hebrew Bible, seeing in the Sumerian sources the sign "1", took it to mean One rather than Sixty?

Based on such an assumption, the numbers 1,656 (the birth of Adam), 1,526 (the birth of Seth) and 1,421 (the birth of Enosh) are converted to 99,360, 91,560 and 85,260 respectively. To determine how long ago that was, we have to add the 13,000 years since the Deluge; the numbers then become,

• Adam born 112,360 years ago

• Seth born 104,560 years ago

• Enosh born 98,260 years ago

The solution offered here by us leads to astounding results. It places the Adam-Seth-Enosh line right in the time slot when Neanderthals and then Cro-Magnons passed through the Lands of the Bible as they spread toward Asia and Europe.

It means that the individual (not the generic) Adam was the biblical Man whom we term Neanderthal, and that Enosh, whose name meant "Human," was the biblical term for what we call Cro-Magnon - the first Homo sapiens sapiens, indeed the forefather of Enoshut, today’s humanity.

It was then, the Bible asserts, that humanity "began to call upon the name of Yahweh." Man was ready for renewed Divine Encounters; and some that then occurred were truly astounding.

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