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Chapter Seven
SECRET KNOWLEDGE,
SACRED TEXTS
"...."Everything that we know was taught to us by the gods," the
Sumerians stated in their writings; and therein lies the foundation,
throughout the millennia and unto our times, of Science and
Religion, of the discovered and the occult.
"First there was the
Secret Knowledge, that was revealed when
Mankind was granted Understanding became Sacred Wisdom, the
foundation of human civilizations and advancement. As to the secrets
that the gods had kept to themselves - those, in the end, proved the
most devastating to Mankind. And one must begin to wonder whether
the unending search for That Which Is Hidden, sometimes in the form
of mysticism, stems not from the wish to attain the divine but from
a fear of what Fate the gods - in their secret conclaves or in
hidden codes - have destined for Mankind.
"....The
biblical Lord challenged Job (in chapter 28) to stop
questioning the reasons for his Fate, or its ultimate purpose; for
Man’s knowledge - Wisdom and Understanding - fall so far short of
God’s, that it serves no purpose to question or try to fathom divine
will.
"That ancient treatment of Wisdom and Understanding
of the secrets
of the heavens and the Earth - of science - as a divine domain to
which only a few selected mortals can be given access, found
expression not only in canonical writings but also in such Jewish
mysticism as the Kaballah....
"....When
the Lord granted wisdom to selected humans, the Bible
held, He in fact shared with them secret knowledge concerning the
heavens and the Earth. The Book of Job describes such knowledge as
"Wisdom’s Secrets," which had not been revealed to him.
"Revelation, the sharing of secret knowledge with humanity through
chosen initiates, began before the Deluge. Adapa, the offspring of
Enki, to him was attributed the authorship of a work known by its
English title Writings Regarding Time, [from] Divine Anu and Divine
Enlil - a treatise that dealt with time reckoning and the calendar.
The
Tale of Adapa, on the other hand, specifically mentions that he
was taught, back in Eridu, the arts of medicine and healing.
"....Sumerian records spoke of another,
pre-Diluvial Chosen One....
Known in the texts as EN.ME.DUR.ANNA as well as EN.ME.DUR.AN.KI
("Master of the Divine Tablets Concerning the Heavens"
or "Master of the Divine Tablets of the Bond Heaven-Earth").
"....Though the
Tale of Adapa does not say so explicitly, it appears
that he was allowed, if not actually required, to share some of his
secret knowledge with his fellow humans, for else why would he
compose the renowned book? In the case of Enmeduranki the
transmission of the learned secrets was also mandated - but with the
stricture that it must be limited to the line of priests, from
father to son, begun with Enmeduranki:
The learned savant
who guards the secrets of the great gods
will bind his favored son with an oath
before Shamash and Adad.
By the Divine Tablet, with a stylus,
he will instruct him in the secrets of the gods.
"....The Bible also recorded the heavenward ascent of the
pre-Diluvial
patriarch Enoch.... Fortunately, the extrabiblical
Book of Enoch,
handed down through the millennia and surviving in two versions,
provide much greater detail....
"....From these sources (Book of Jubilees also) it emerges that
Enoch made not one but two celestial journeys.... He was taught the
Secrets of Heaven, and was instructed to impart the
knowledge on his
return to Earth to his sons. Ascending toward the Divine Abode, he
was lofted through a series of heavenly spheres.... in the Tenth
Heaven was the Divine Throne of God.... the abode of Anu, according
to Sumerian texts, was on Nibiru.... tenth planet of our Solar
System.
".... he was clothed in divine garments and
anointed by the
angels.... On the Lord’s command, the archangel Pravuel brought out
"the books from the sacred storehouse".... the archangel would
dictate to him. For thirty days and thirty nights.... Enoch wrote
down,
"the secrets of the working of heaven, of the Earth and of the
seas; and of all the elements, their passages and goings, and the
thundering of the thunder; and [the secrets] of the Sun and the
Moon, and the goings and changings of the planets; the seasons and
the years and the days and the hours . . . and all the things of
men, the tongues of every human song . . . and all the things fit to
learn."
"....Another aspect that stands out - though not so explicitly in
the case of Enoch - is the tradition that the granting of the
Wisdom
and Understanding made the chosen individual not just a scientist
but also a priest, and moreover the progenitor of a priestly line.
We find this principle employed in the Sinai wilderness during the
Exodus, when Yahweh, the biblical Lord, chose
Aaron (the brother of
Moses) and his sons to be the Lord’s Priests (Exodus 28:1)....
Moses
and Aaron were initiated into magical powers that enabled them to
perform miracles as well as trigger the calamities that were meant
to convince the Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave.... Knowledge
that was granted to Aaron and his sons, it included secrets of the
calendar (quite complex, since it was a lunar-solar calendar), of
human maladies and healing, and veterinary knowledge. Considerable
anatomical information is included in the relevant chapters of
Leviticus, and the possibility that the Israelite priests were given
"hands-on" lessons cannot be ruled out in view of the fact that clay
models of anatomical parts, inscribed with medical instructions,
were current in Babylon even before the time of the Exodus.
"(The
Bible described King Solomon as the "wisest of men" who could
discourse on the biodiversity of all the plants, "from cedars of
Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of a wall, and animals, and
birds, and creeping things, and fishes." He could do so because in
addition to the Wisdom and the Understanding (intelligence) that
were God-given, he also acquired Da’ath - learned knowledge).
"The priestly line begun with Aaron was subjected to rigorous laws
imposing marital and procreation constraints. Who they could have
conjugal relations with and especially whom they could marry
required that "the priestly seed shall not be profaned," and if
one’s seed shall be imperfect - "shall have a blemish," a mutation,
a genetic defect - that man was prohibited through all generations
to perform priestly duties, "for I Yahweh sanctified the priestly
line" of Aaron.
"These strictures intrigued generations of biblical scholars; but
their true significance became evident only with the advent of DNA
researchers. It was only in January 1997, in the journal Nature,
that an international group of scientists reported the existence of
a "Priestly Gene" among Jews whose lineage can be traced back to
Aaron. Unchanged Jewish traditions require that certain rituals and
blessings called for on the Sabbath and High Holidays services must
be performed only by a Cohen. The term, meaning "priest," was first
used in the Bible to describe Aaron and his sons....
"....It was this aspect of
the patrilineal nature of the Jewish
Cohen tradition that intrigued a research team from Israel, England,
Canada, and the USA. Focusing on the male ("Y")
chromosome that is
passed from father to son, they tested hundreds of "Cohens" in
different countries and found that by and large they had two unique
"markers" on the chromosome. This proved to be the case for
Ashkenazi (East European) and Sephardi (Near Eastern/African)
Jews
who had branched out after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple
in A.D. 70, indicating the antiquity of the genetic markers.
""The simplest and most straightforward explanation is that these
men have the Y chromosome of Aaron," explained Dr. Karl Skorecki of
the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.
"The tales of those who were
initiated into the secret knowledge
assert that the information was written down in "books." These, for
sure, were not what we now call "books".... The many texts
discovered in caves near the Dead Sea in Israel are referred to as
the Dead Sea Scrolls, for they were texts inscribed on sheets of
parchment (made mostly of goat skins).... Ancient Egyptian texts
were written on papyrus - sheets made from reeds growing in the Nile
River. And the earliest known texts, from Sumer, were inscribed on
clay tablets....
"....In which form were the "books" written by
Adapa, Enmeduranki,
and Enoch (360 of them by the latter!)? Bearing in mind that they
are attributed to a time before the Deluge - thousands of years even
before the Sumerian civilization - probably in none of the post-Diluvial
forms, although the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal did boast that he
could read "writing from before the Flood....." It would be logical
to wonder whether the writing was done in what some Sumerian and
Akkadian texts call Kital Ilani - "writing of the gods." References
to such writings by the Anunnaki may be found, for example, in
inscriptions dealing with the rebuilding of run-down temples, in
which the claim was made that the reconstruction followed "the
drawings from olden times and the writing of the Upper Heaven."
"....In Egypt it was Thoth who was venerated as the
Divine Scribe.
It was he who, after the Council of the Gods resolved to recognize
Horus as the legitimate heir, inscribed on a metal tablet the
Decree
of the Gods, and the tablet was then lodged in the "divine Chamber
of Records."
"....In the
Tales of the Magicians.... it was said that the living
but inanimate king and queen whom Thoth had punished guarded, in the
subterranean chamber, "the book that the god Thoth has written with
his own hand" and in which secret knowledge concerning the Solar
System, astronomy, and the calendar was revealed. When the seeker of
such "ancient books of sacred writings" penetrated the subterranean
chamber, he saw the book "giving off a light as if the Sun shone
there."
"What were those divine "books" and what kind of writing was on
them?
"The epithet-name of Enmeduranna, "Master of the Divine Tablets
Concerning Heaven," draws attention to the term ME in his name,
translated here as "Divine Tablets." In truth no one can be sure
what the ME’s were, whether tablets or something more akin to
computer-memory chips or discs. They were objects small enough to be
held in one hand, for it was told that Inanna/Ishtar, seeking to
elevate her city Uruk, to capital status, connivingly obtained from
Enki scores of the ME’s that were encoded with the secrets of
Supreme Lordship, Kingship, Priesthood, and other aspects of a high
civilization. And we recall that the evil Zu stole from Enlil’s
Duranki the Tablets of Destinies and the ME’s which were encoded
with the Divine Formulas. Perhaps we will grasp what they were if we
look to technology millennia ahead.
"....The Bible provides greater - and mind boggling - details
regarding that first instance of sacred writings; then, the Bible
explicitly states, God himself did the inscribing!
"The tale begins in chapter 24 of the book of
Exodus, when Moses and
Aaron and two of his sons, and seventy of the Elders of Israel, were
invited to approach Mount Sinai on the peak of which the
Lord had
landed in his Kabod. There the dignitaries could glimpse the divine
presence through a thick cloud, blazing as a "devouring fire." Then
Moses alone was summoned to the mountaintop, to receive the
Torah
("Teachings") and the Commandments that the
Lord God had already
written down.
"....And Moses went into the midst of the cloud, and ascended the
Mount; and he stayed there forty days and forty nights."
Then Yahweh
Gave Moses,
when he had finished speaking with him,
the two Tablets of Testimony -
stone tablets,
inscribed with the finger of Elohim.
Exodus 31:17
"Additional astounding information regarding
the tablets and the
manner in which they were inscribed is provided in Exodus 32:16-17
that describe the events that took place as Moses was coming down
the Mount after long and (to the people) inexplicable absence....
"....Two tablets made of stone, divinely handcrafted. Inscribed
front and back in the "writing of the Elohim" - which must mean both
language and script; and so engraved into the stone by God himself!
"And all that in a language and in a script that Moses could read
and understand, for he was to teach all that to the Israelites . . .
"....the Torah scrolls that are taken out of their ark in synagogues
are read on the Sabbath and High Holidays must be copied (by special
scribes) precisely the way they have come down through the ages -
book by book, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, word by word,
letter by letter. An error of one letter disqualifies the whole
five-book scroll.
"While this letter-by-letter precision has been studied by Jewish
sages and biblical scholars throughout the ages (long before the
latest interest in "secret codes" in the Torah), an even more
challenging aspect of the long and extensive dictation and the
required letter-by-letter accuracy has been completely ignored:
"And that is, that such a method of writing upon Mount Sinai
could
not have been the slow cuneiform script of Mesopotamia that was
usually written with a stylus on wet clay, nor the monumental
hieroglyphic picture-like script of Egypt. The volume and speed and
the letter-by-letter accuracy required an alphabetic script!
"The problem is that at the time of the
Exodus, circa 1450 B.C.,
nowhere in the ancient world did an alphabetic script yet exist.
"The concept of an alphabet is the work of genius; and whoever the
genius was, he based it on existing foundations.... Sumerian
writings advanced from its original pictographs to cuneiform and the
signs acquired a syllabic sound.... The genius combined cuneiform
ease with Egyptian advances to consonants, and achieved it with just
twenty-two signs!
"Starting with that, the
ingenious inventor asked himself as well as
his disciple: What is the word for what you see? the answer - in the
language of the Semitic Israelites - was Aluf. Fine, said the
inventor; Let us call this symbol Aleph and simply pronounce it "A."
He then drew the pictograph for house. What do you call that? he
asked, and the disciple answered: Bayit. Fine, said the inventor,
from now on we will call this sign "Beth" and pronounce it simply as
"B."
"We cannot vouch that such a conversation actually took place, but
we are certain that this was the process of creating and inventing
the Alpha-Bet. The third letter, Gimel (pronounced "G") was the
image of a camel (Gamal in Hebrew); the next one,
Daleth for "D,"
represented Deleth, "door" (on its hinges); and so on through the
twenty-two letters of the Semitic alphabet, all of which serve as
consonants and three of which can double up as vowels.
"Who was the
ingenious innovator?
"....No doubt that the alphabet originated there (in the
western
Sinai, near the Red Sea).... it spread to Canaan and then to
Phoenicia.... Beautifully executed, the original "Sinaitic script"
served as the Temple script in Jerusalem and as the royal script of
Judean kings until it was replaced, during the time of the Second
Temple, with a square script borrowed from the Aramaeans (the
script
used in the Dead Sea scrolls unto modern times).
"....If we have imagine right the conversation that had led to this
alphabet, then it was Moses to whom the first lesson was given. He
was in the Sinai; he was there at the right time; he engaged in
extensive writings; and he had the supreme teacher - God himself.
"....The dictating and writing down had thus began before the
ascents of Moses to the mountaintop and the two separate writings on
the stone tablets (so it is recorded in Exodus 17:14; 24:4; and
24:7).... One has to look to the earlier chapters of Exodus....
there we read that Moses, adopted as a son by the Pharaoh's daughter,
fled for his life after he had killed an Egyptian official. His
destination was the Sinai peninsula....
"....The
Bible relates extensive communications between Yahweh and
Moses and Aaron from the moment Moses had been summoned to the
burning bush onward. Whether the divine messages, sometimes
involving detailed instructions, were ever in writing the Bible does
not say; but it might be significant that the "magicians" in the
Pharaoh’s court thought that they had been written instructions:
"And the Pharaoh’s magicians said to him: This is the finger of god.
"The finger of God," it will be recalled, was the term used in
Egyptian texts regarding the god Thoth, to indicate a writing by the
god himself.
"If all this leads to the suggestion that
alphabetic writing began
in the Sinai peninsula - it should not be surprising that
archaeologists have reached that same conclusion, but without being
able to explain how such a tremendous and ingenious innovation could
have originated in a wilderness.
"....But the repeated references to
Divine Writing, writing by God
himself, and Moses only taking dictation, suggest that the
alphabetic writing and language system were one of the "secrets of
the gods." Indeed, it was to the same Yahweh that the Bible
attributed the invention/innovation of other diverse languages and
scripts on a previous occasion - in the aftermath of the incident of
the Tower of Babel.
"One way or another, we feel that
Moses was the initiate through
whom the innovation was revealed to Mankind. And thus we can rightly
call it The Mosaic Alphabet.
"There is more to the first alphabet as a "secret of the gods." It
is based, in our opinion, on the most sophisticated and ultimate
knowledge - that of the genetic code.
"....Indeed, as we contemplate this limitation of twenty-two - no
more, no less - we cannot help recalling the constrictions applied
to the sacred number twelve (requiring the addition or dropping of
deities in order to keep the "Olympian Circle" to precisely twelve).
Did such a hidden principle- divinely inspired - apply to the
restriction of the original alphabet to twenty-two letters?
"The number ought to be familiar in this day and age. It is the
number of human chromosomes when the Adam was created, before the
second genetic manipulation had added the sex chromosomes "Y" and
"X".
"Did the Almighty who had revealed to
Moses the secret of the
alphabet, then, use the genetic code as the secret code of the
alphabet?
"The answer seems to be Yes.
"If this conclusion seems outlandish, let us read the
Lord’s
statement in Isaiah 45:11: "It is I who created the Letters . . . It
is I who made the Earth and created the Adam upon it," sayeth
Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel. Whoever was involved in the creation
of Man was involved in the creation of the letters that make up the
alphabet.
"Present-day computer systems construct words and numbers from just
two "letters," a Yes-No system of ones and zeroes matching an On-Off
flow of electrons (and thus called binary). But attention has
already shifted to the four-letter genetic code and the much greater
speed with which the transactions take place within the living
cell....
The problem and the challenge is how to create and read
computer chips that are coated not with "0" and "1"
electrons but
with bits of genetic material. Advances since 1991 at various
academic institutions as at commercial enterprises involved in
genetic treatments have succeeded in creating silicon chips coated
with nucleotides. Comparing the speed and the capabilities of
DNA
computing, as the new science is called, "the information storage
capacity of DNA is huge...
"In nature, the genetic information
encoded in the DNA is decoded,
at lightning speed, by a messenger called RNA that transcribes and
recombines the DNA "letter" into "words" consisting of three
letters.
These three-letter groupings, it has been established, lie
at the core of all life forms on Earth because they spell out
chemically and biologically the twenty amino acids whose chains form
the proteins of which all life on Earth - and probably elsewhere in
the cosmos - consists.
"....The rich and precise Hebrew language is based on "root"
words.... from where all other grammatical variants derive. For
reasons that no one has been able to explain, these root words are
made up of three letters. This is quite a departure from the Akkadian, the mother-language of all Semitic languages, which was
formed from syllables - sometimes just one, sometimes two or three
or more.
"Could the reason for the three-letter Hebrew root words be the
three letter DNA-language - the very source, as we have concluded,
of the alphabet itself? If so, then the three letter root words
corroborate this conclusion.
"Death and life are in the language," the
Bible states in Proverbs
(18:21). The statement has been treated allegorically. It is time,
perhaps, to take it literally: the language of the Hebrew Bible and
the DNA genetic code of life (and death) are but two sides of the
same coin.
"The mysteries that are encoded therein are vaster than one can
imagine; they include among other wondrous discoveries the secrets
of healing.
Return
Chapter Eight
HIDDEN CODES,
MYSTIC NUMBERS
"It was probably inevitable that with the advent of the modern
computer age, some masters of the craft would turn their
capabilities to a novel new goal: the search for a "secret code" in
the Bible.
"While this is presented in scientific papers and even books as the
epitome of modern sophistication, the fact is that this search is
actually a renewed, not a new, search, albeit with new and more
advanced tools.
"The Hebrew Bible consists of three parts:
-
Torah ("Teachings"),
which comprises the Pentateuch (the Five Books of Moses) and,
historically and chronologically, covers the time from Creation
through the wanderings of the Exodus and the death of Moses
-
Neviyim
("Prophets"), encompassing the books of Joshua and the Judges, Samuel
and the Kings, and then the major and minor Prophets, the Psalms and
Proverbs and Job - historically from the Israelite settlement in
Canaan through the destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem
-
Ketuvim ("Writings"), starting with the Song of Songs through the
books attributed to the two leaders who led the exiles back to Juda
to rebuild the Temple (Ezra and Nehemiah) and (in the arrangement of
the Hebrew Bible’s canon) ending with 1 and 2 Chronicles. All
together the three parts are called by the acronym TaNaKh; and it
was already in the time of Prophets that interpretive references to
the first part, the Torah, were made
"Discussions by Jewish sages and religious leaders intended to "read
between the lines" of the words of the Torah, then of the
Prophets,
intensified during the exile after the destruction (by the
Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar) of the First Temple, and even more
so after the destruction of the Second Temple (by the Romans). The
record of those deliberations is the Talmud ("The Study").
Jewish
mysticism, known as the Kaballah, took over and built upon those
earlier searchers for hidden meanings.
"That such hidden meanings did exist, the Bible itself attests. The
key was the alphabet, the twenty-two letters.
Mr. Sitchin, in his book, gives several examples of coded passages
from the Bible, only a few examples will be given here.
"....The authenticity of certain verses in Psalms could be verified
by noticing that each verse has two parts, each of which starts
alphabetically (e.g., Psalm 145); the same clue is hidden in the
verse arrangements of Proverbs 31. In Psalm 145, moreover, the three
verses (11, 12, 13) that extol the kingship of Yahweh begin with the
letters Kh-L-M, which read backward spell McLeKh, "King."
"The use of acrostics as a hidden code, evident in other books of
the Bible as well, is also found in post-biblical books (some of
which are included in the Christian arrangement of the Old
Testament). A prominent example comes from the time of the revolt
against Greek rule in the second century B.C. The revolt bears the
name of its leaders, the Maccabees - a name which was in fact an
acronym based on the verse in the Song of Moses (Exodus 15:11) -"who
is like thee among the gods, oh Yahweh" - the first letters of the
four Hebrew words forming the acronym M-K-B-I, pronounced "Maccabee."
"After the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in A.D.
70, the spiritual and religious mainstream for the Jews were the
Holy Scriptures - the treasure of divine and prophetic words. Was it
all fated, was it all predicted? And what is still destined, what is
yet to come? The keys to the past and to the future had to be hidden
in the sacred writings, by then canonized not only as to content but
also as to every word and every letter. That search for hidden
meanings obscured by secret codes became known after the Temple’s
destruction as "entering the forbidden grove," the word for "grove"
- PaRDeS - in itself being an acronym created from the first letters
of four methods of extracting the scriptures’ message: Peshat
(literal meaning), Ramez (hint), Drash (interpretation) and
Sod
(secret).
"....Instances of encoding and encryption have been found in
non-Hebrew texts from Mesopotamia, both from Babylonia and from
Assyria. They included texts that begin with the warning that they
are secret, to be shown only to the initiated (or, conversely, not
to be revealed to the uninitiated), under penalty of death in the
hands of the gods. Such texts sometimes employed decipherable
encoding methods (such as acronyms), and sometimes encrypting
methods that remain an enigma. Among the former is a hymn by the
Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in praise of the god Marduk and Marduk’s
spouse Zarpanit. It uses the cuneiform syllabic signs at the
beginning of lines to spell out a hidden message to the god Marduk.
Apart from the acronymic encoding the king employed a second method
of encryption" The syllables that formed the secret message began on
line 1, skipped line 2, used line 3, skipped line 4 and so on,
skipping one line through line 9. Them the coded message, skipped
two lines at a time, returning to a single line skip on line 26,
returning to a two-line skip from line 36, and then back to a
one-line skip through the rest of the tablet (including its reverse
side).
"In this double-encoding, the Assyrian king spelled out the
following secret message to the god (we provide the translation
horizontally, though the message in the tablet is read vertically,
from top to bottom):
[Mr. Sitchin’s note].
A-na-ku Ah-shur-ba-an-ni-ap-li
I am Ashurbanipal
Sha il-shu bu-ul-li-ta ni-shu-ma Ma-ru-du-uk
Who to his god called give me life Marduk [and]
Da-li-leka lu-ud-lu
I will praise thee
"The association of hidden messages and secret meaning not with
words alone but with numerals and numbers was even more prominent in
the writings of Sargon II, the grandfather of Ashurbanipal. During
his reign (721-705 B.C.) he established a few
administrative-military capital on the site of a village some twelve
miles northeast of the ancient royal capital and religious center
Nineveh. His Assyrian name was Sharru-kin ("Righteous King") and he
named the new city Dur Sharrukin ("Fort Sargon" - an archaeological
site now known as Khorsabad). In the inscription commemorating this
achievement, he wrote that the mighty wall he had built around the
city was 16,283 cubits long, "which is the number of my name."
"Such a use of numbers to encode word-syllables appears in a text
known as An Exaltation to Ishtar, where the worshipper signed his
name not with letters but with numbers:
21-35-35-26-41
the son of 21-11-20-42
"The key to such
numerical encoding remains undeciphered. But we
have reason to believe that such Mesopotamian encoding methods were
known to the Hebrew Prophets.
"One of the most difficult passages in the
Bible is the prophecy of
Isaiah about the time of Retribution, when "it shall come to pass
that a great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall return those who
were lost in the land of Assyria and those who were cast out of the
land of Egypt, and they shall bow down to Yahweh on the Holy Mount
in Jerusalem." At that time, Isaiah prophesied, confusion shall
reign and people will ask each other, "Who shall be given the
understanding" of the message which was somehow been altered to hide
its meaning:
For precept is upon precept,
precept is within precept;
Line is upon line,
line is with line -
A little here, somewhat there;
For with a confused
language
and in a strange tongue
will He address his people.
"....What language could be confused, or its written signs given a
strange meaning, by changing the "order" and a "line" here and
there? It is our suggestion that what the Prophet Isaiah - a
contemporary of Sargon II and Sennacherib - was talking about is the
cuneiform script of the Assyrians and the Babylonians!
"....Isaiah, whose prophecies were attuned to the international
arena and the encryption of royal messages of his time, may have
given away the very clue to the existence of a "Bible Code." Three
times he revised the word Ototh ("signs") that is used in the Bible
to denote divine or celestial signs to read Otioth - a plural of
Oth
that means both "sign" and "letter," conveying the meaning of
letters in his prophecy.
"We have already mentioned the reference by
Isaiah to Yahweh as the
creator of the Letters (of the alphabet). In verse 45:11 [of the
Book of Isaiah], the Prophet, extolling the uniqueness of Yahweh,
states that it was Yahweh who "hath arrayed by letters that which
shall come to pass." And that such an arrayment was encoded ought to
be the way to understand the enigmatic verse 41:23. Describing how
the bewildered people of the Earth seek to divine the future from
the past, Isaiah quotes them as begging God:
Tell us the letters backward!
"Were the word the usual
Ototh, it would have meant, "tell us the
signs back from the beginning of things." But the Prophet has chosen
- three times - to write Otioth, "letters." And the clear request is
to be enabled to understand the divine plan by being shown the
letters backward, as in a code, in which the letters have been
scrambled.
"But as the Mesopotamian examples indicate, acrostics was too simple
a device, and the real encodement - still undeciphered in the case
of Sargon II - relied on the numerical values of cuneiform signs. We
have already mentioned the "secret of the gods"
concerning their
rank numbers - numbers which sometimes were written or invoked
instead of the god’s names. Other tablets in which Sumerian
terminology was retained even in Akkadian texts (many remaining
obscure because of breaks in the tablets) point to the early use of
numerology as a secret code, especially when the gods were involved.
"Beginning in the time of the Second Temple, the
numerological Gematria (when the Greeks adopted the alphabet, the art of and rules
for the interpretation of letters, words or groups of words by their
numerical values was given the name Gematria), became a toll in the
hands of scholars as well as gnostics to pry out of the biblical
verses and words untold numbers of hidden meanings or bits of
information or for drawing new rules where the biblical ones were
incomplete. Thus, it was held that when a man took an oath to be a
Nazarite, the unspecified period of abstention should be 30 days,
because the defining word YiHYeH ("shall be") in Numbers chapter 6
has the numerical value 30. Comparing words and their implications
by their numerical equivalents opened up countless possibilities for
hidden meanings. As an example, it was suggested that Moses and
Jacob had a similar divine experience, because the ladder to heaven
(Sulam in Hebrew) that Jacob saw in the nighttime vision and the
mount (Sinai) on which Moses received the Tablets of the Law had
both the same numerical value, 130.
"....How much value should one attach to numerical codes or meanings
- a code inherent in the letters themselves and not an arbitrary
spacing between them? Because such usages lead back to Sumerian
times, were valid in Akkadian times, and were deemed al all times to
be "secrets of the gods" not to be revealed to the uninitiated, and
because to the link to DNA, we believe that numerical codes are the
secret code!
"In fact, one of the most obvious (and thus, as in detective tales,
the most ignored) clues is the very term for "book,"
SeFeR in
Hebrew. Stemming from the root SFR, its derivations were the words
for writer/scribe (Sofer), to tell (Lesapher), a tale or a story (Sippur),
and so on.
"But the very same root SFR also denoted everything connected with
numbers! To count was Lisfor, numeral is Sifrah, number is
Mispar,
counting is Sephira. In other words, from the very moment that the
three-letter root words of the Hebrew emerged, to write with letters
and to count with numbers were considered one and the same.
"....As times became more turbulent in Judea, with one revolt (that
of the Maccabees against Greek rule) followed by another (against
Roman oppression), the search for messages of hope - Messianic
bodings - intensified. The scanning of earlier texts for coded
numbers evolved into the use of numbers as secret codes. One of the
most enigmatic and best encrypted instances found its way into the
New Testament:
The number of a "beast" encoded as "666" in the
Book
of Revelation,
Here is Wisdom;
Let him that hath Understanding
count the number of the beast,
for it is the Number of a Man;
And his number is six hundred and three score and six.
Revelation 13:18
"The passage deals with Messianic expectations, the downfall of
evil, and in its aftermath a Second Coming, the return of the
Kingdom of heaven to Earth.
"Countless attempts have been made over the millennia to decipher
the numerical code of "666" and thus understand the prophecy. The
number clearly appears in the early (Greek) manuscript of the book
whose full title is The Gospel According to St. John, which begins
with the statement "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God" and which is filled with numerical
references. Using the numerical values of the Greek letters (which
follow closely the Hebrew arrangement) and the methods of Gematria,
it has been suggested that the "beast" was the evil Roman empire
because the numerical value of LATEINOS was 666. Others have
suggested that the numerical code meant the evil emperor himself (Trajan)
whose middle name, ULPIOS, also added up numerically rendered to
666. Still another suggestion was that the code was in Hebrew,
standing for Neron Qesar ("Nero the Emperor"), whose Hebrew spelling
N-R-W-N- + Q-S-R also added up to 666; and so on, in a variety of
Gematria approaches both using straight addition as well as
triangulation.
"The possibility that the encoded secret of "666" uncovered in
Hebrew rather than Greek or Roman word meanings might well be the
key to finally resolving the enigma. We find that 660 in Hebrew is
the numerical equivalent of SeTeR - a hidden thing, an occult
mystery; it was employed in the Bible in connection with divine
Wisdom and Understanding that were hidden and occulted from Man. To
make 666, the letter Wav (= 6) has to be added, changing the meaning
from a "secret" to "his secret,"
SiTRO, "his hidden thing." Some
find this rendition of "his secret" to describe a "watery darkness"
where the Celestial Battle with Tiamat is recalled:
The Earth shook and trembled,
the foundations of the hills were shaken . . .
There went up smoke from his nostrils,
a devouring fire out of his mouth . . .
He made darkness his secret,
by a watery darkness and celestial clouds covered.
Psalms 18:8-12
"There are repeated references in
the Bible to that Celestial
Battle, which in the Mesopotamian Epic of Creation took place
between Nibiru/Marduk and Tiamat, and in the Bible between
Yahweh as
the Primeval Creator and Tehom, a "watery deep."
Tehom/Tiamat was
sometimes spoken of as Rahab, the "haughty one," or rendered with an
inversion of letters RaBaH ("the great one") instead of
RaHaB. The
wording in Psalm 18 echoes a much earlier statement in Deuteronomy
29:19, in which the judgments of Yahweh "on the last generation"
are prophesied as a time when "smoke shall go up from the nostrils"
of God. That time of final accounting is often referred to in the
Bible by the adverb Az - "then," at that particular future time.
"If the author of Revelation, as is evident, also had in mind that
Az, that "then" at the time of the Last Generation, when the
Lord
shall reappear as He had when Heaven and Earth were created at the
time of the battle with Tehom Rabah ( a term used in communication
in Amos 7:4, Psalms 36:7, Isaiah 5:10), then a numerical approach to
the enigma of the "666" would suggest that the book of
Revelation
was speaking of the Return of the Celestial Lord in a reenactment of
the Celestial Battle; for the sum total of the numerical value of
Az
+ Tehom + Rabah is 666.
"....Such language/letter/number transfigurations reinforce the
question (and the possibility) - and not only in regard to the
reason for "666" - of whether the codes might have included
allusions to other deities of pantheons known in antiquity.
"....An approach that accepts the possibility that the
Old Testament
as well as the New Testament borrowed for their encodings from
earlier Mesopotamian secret writings and divine rankings leads to
another possible solution of the "666" enigma.
"One of the rare (discovered) instances where the number
"6" was
revealed as a divine rank was in a tablet that was put together by
Alasdair Livingstone in Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works
of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars. The reconstructed tablet -
which bears the admonition regarding the undisclosable secrets it
contains - begins with 60 as the rank of "the preeminent god, father
of the gods" and then, in a separate column, reveals his identity:
Anu. Followed by Enlil (50), Ea/Enki (40),
Sin (30) and Shamash
(20), it lists Adad, the "god of rain and thunders" as "6." As the
listing continues on the obverse as well as the reverse sides, it
lists "600" as the secret number of the Anunnaki.
"What emerges from that Mesopotamian tablet regarding the secret
numbers of the gods may well have the key to finally solving the
mystery of "666" by looking at it as a Sumerian-based encoding:
600 = The
Anunnaki, "Those Who From Heaven to Earth
Came"
60 = Anu, their supreme ruler
6 =
Adad, one of the gods who teaches initiates
-----
666 = "Here is Wisdom," "Counted by him who has
Understanding"
"....While attention has been focused on the meaning of "666," we
find in the cryptic verse in Revelation a statement of utmost
significance. The secret code, it states, is what Wisdom is all
about, and it can be deciphered only by those who have
Understanding.
"These are precisely the two terms used by the Sumerians, and those
who came after them, to denote the secret knowledge that only
privileged initiates had been taught by the Anunnaki.
"....In considering numerical and counting systems, the decimal
system ("base ten") is the most obviously "manfriendly," resulting
from counting on the fingers of our hands.... But from where did the
Sumerians take the sexagesimal ("base 60") system whose lasting
expression is still extant in time reckoning (60 minutes, 60
seconds), astronomy (a celestial circle of 360 degrees), and
geometry?
"In our book
When Time Began we have suggested that the
Anunnaki,
coming from a planet whose orbital period (one year on Nibiru)
equaled 3,600 orbits of the planet Earth, needed some kind of a
common denominator for such diverse periods - and have found one in
the phenomenon of Precession (which only they, not men with the
shorter life spans dictated by Earth’s cycles, could have
discovered). When they divided the celestial circle into twelve
parts, the precessional retardation - that could be easily observed
by them - was 2,160 years per "house." That, we have suggested, led
to the ratio of 3,600:2,160 or 10:6 (the eventual golden Ratio of
the Greeks), and to the sexagesimal system that ran 6 x 10 x 6 x 10
and so on (resulting in 60, 360, 3600 and so on to the immense
number 12,960,000 [the complete circling of the twelve houses of the
zodiac has been named a Great Year, the astronomical number
12,960,000 represented 500 of such Great Years).
"In this system, several numbers of celestial or sacred import seem
to be out of place. One is the number seven.... the seventh or
Sabbath day.... the Seven Who Judge.... the Seven Sages.... the
Seven Gates of the Lower World.... the Seven Tablets of Enuma elish
.... "Enlil is Seven".... the planetary number of Earth....
"....The number "7" is a key number in
Revelation (7 angels, 7
seals, and so on); so was the next extraordinary number - 12 - or
multiples thereof, 144,000 in Revelation 7:3-5, 14:1 etc. We have
already recounted its applications and its significance, as stemming
from the number of the members of our Solar System (Sun, Moon, and
10 planets - the 9 we know of plus Nibiru).
"And then - hardly realized - was the peculiar number
72.
"....We have already observed that the mystics of the
Kaballah
arrived through Gematria methods at the number 72 as the numerical
secret of Yahweh (Mr. Sitchin has explained this from the
Book of
Exodus as Moses was summoned to the Holy Mount....)
"....Of all places we also find this odd number
72 in the Egyptian
tale of dealing with the contending of Horus and Seth.... that when
Seth tricked Osiris into the doomed chest, he did so in the presence
of 72 "divine comrades."
"Why then 72 in these various instances? The only plausible answer,
we believe, is to be found in the phenomenon of Precession, for it
is there that the crucial number 72 is to be found, as the number of
years it takes to retard the Earth by one degree.
"To this day it is not certain how the concept of a Jubilee had come
about, the 50-year period decreed in the Bible and used as the time
unit in the Book of Jubilees. Here is the answer: to the Anunnaki,
whose one orbit around the Sun equaled 3,600 Earth years, the orbit
passed through 50 precessional degrees (50 x 72 = 3,600)!
"....Enlil’s secret rank number - and the number sought by
Marduk -
was also 50.
"....The
Sumerian King List asserts that 432,000 years (120 orbits
of Nibiru) had passed from the arrival of the Anunnaki on Earth
until the Deluge. The number 432,000 is also key in the Hindu and
other concepts of Ages and the periodic catastrophies that befall
Earth.
"The number 432,000 also embraces 72 precisely 6,000 times. And it
is perhaps worth keeping in mind that according to Jewish sages the
count of years in the Jewish calendar - 5,758 in A.D. 1998 - will
come to a completion, a terminus, when it reaches 6,000; it is then
that it will all come full cycle.
"....If there was once a single universal language on Earth (as the
Sumerian texts and the Bible assert), it had to be mathematically
based; and if - or rather, when - we communicate with
extraterrestrials, as had once been done with the Anunnaki on their
visits here, and we shall do when we venture into space - the cosmic
language will be one of numbers.
"....And if one takes seriously the Sumerian and biblical statements
about inclusion of medical knowledge in the Knowledge and
Understanding passed on to us - is there somewhere in all the
ancient texts, so meticulously copied with precision because they
had been "canonized," the key to sharing with us the genetic
knowledge that went into our creation, and thus still accompanies us
in health and in sickness and in death?
"We have reached the point where our scientists have identified a
specific gene - calling it, say, P51 - at a specific site on
chromosome number 1 or 13 or 22, that is responsible for a trait of
malady. It is a gene and a location that can be expressed on
computers - now as numbers, or wholly in letters, or in combination
thereof.
"Is there already in those ancient texts, and especially the Hebrew
Bible, such coded genetic information? If we could only decipher
such a code, we could become beings like the "Perfect Model" that
Enki and Ninharsag had intended to create.
Return
Chapter Nine
PROPHECY: WRITINGS FROM THE PAST
"Mankind’s enduring belief that someone in the past could foresee
the future - that, in Sumerian parlance, someone had known Destiny
and could determined Fate - was founded upon the Written Word.
Revealed or secret, straightforward or encrypted, the information
had to be recorded, written down. A covenant, a treaty, a prophecy -
what value to those then present or to those who will inhabit the
future unless the words be written down?
"When archaeologists excavate an ancient site, nothing is deemed
more exciting and significant than "something" with writing on it -
an object, a brick, a stone slab, pottery shards, and needless to
say a text or part thereof inscribed on a clay tablet or a papyrus
sheet. What was the place, what was its ancient name, to what
culture did it belong, who were its rulers? A few scribbled letters,
a couple of words offer answers; and so much more, of course, fuller
texts.
"....Certainly missing - for none has been duplicated elsewhere -
are what Ashurbanipal identified as "writings from before the
Deluge"; we know that they had existed because Ashurbanipal had
boasted that he could read that writing.
"The king’s assertion, one might note here, has not been taken
seriously by modern Assyriologists. Some have amended the king’s
statement to read "writings in Sumerian," for it seems incredible
not only to claim that there had been writing millennia before
Mesopotamian tablets, but that such writing (on whatever tablets)
had survived the global catastrophe.
"....Adapa - a pre-Diluvial initiate - wrote a book whose title,
rendered in Sumerian U. SAR Dingir ANUM Dingir ENLILA (Writings
Regarding Time [from] divine Anu and divine Enlil).
"Enoch, another
pre-Diluvial ancestor, returned from heaven with 360
"books"....
"....Having been given knowledge of the heavens and the Earth and
their mysteries, Enoch was told to write down prophecies of future
events (according to the Book of Jubilees, Enoch was shown "what was
and what will be").
"....Even more emphatic in asserting that
Enoch brought down with
him books that contained not only scientific knowledge but also
prophecies of the future is the version known as 2 Enoch or by the
full title
The Book of the Secrets of Enoch.... God disclosed to him
the "secrets of Creation" and the cycles of events on Earth. "At the
beginning of the eighth thousand of years there will be a time of
Not-Counting, [a time] with neither years nor months or weeks, nor
days or hours" (2 Enoch 33:1-2).
"A reference is then made to even earlier writings that belonged to
Enoch’s ancestors Adam and Seth - "handwriting that should not be
destroyed till the end of time." There is also reference to a
"chart" that God has "put on Earth" and "ordered that it be
preserved, and that the handwriting of thy fathers be preserved, and
it perish not in the Deluge which I shall bring upon thy race."
"....If such "handwritings" ever existed, they must be counted among
the missing pre-Deluvial writings. At the time of the Second Temple
it was held that among such pre-Diluvial writings were the
Books of
Adam and Eve, in which many details were provided, augmenting the
biblical tale.
"Scholars agree that I Enoch has clearly incorporated, verbatim,
sections from a much earlier manuscript called the Book of Noah, a
work that was mentioned in other writings besides the
Book of Enoch.
It could well have been the source of the very enigmatic eight
verses in Genesis chapter 6; preceding the biblical version of the
Deluge and its hero Noah, those verses speak of
the Nefilim, the
"sons of the Elohim" who had married the Daughters of the Adam as
the background for God’s decision to wipe mankind off the face of
the Earth. In it, the tale is fully told, the Nefilim are
identified, the nature of the divine wrath is explained. Harking
back in all probability to Sumerian times and sources, it includes
some details otherwise known only from the Mesopotamian
Atra Hasis
text.
"....Interesting and intriguing light on what the
Book of Noah might
have contained is to be found in the Book of Jubilees, another one
of the Apocrypha (extrabiblical) books from the time of the Second
Temple (or earlier). It states that the Angels "explained to Noah
all the medicines, all the diseases and how he might heal them with
herbs of the earth; and Noah wrote down all things in a book,
concerning every kind of medicine." And after the Deluge,
Noah "gave
all that he had written to his son Shem."
"....The existence of a book that we might arbitrarily title
The
Book of Shem or, more specifically, the Book of Arpakhshad, is
suggested by yet another tradition concerning writings from before
the Deluge. The reference is found in the Book of Jubilees; it
informs us that Arpakhshad, a grandson of Noah, was taught by his
father Shem to write and read; and seeking a place to settle "he
found a writing which former generations had carved on a rock, and
he read what was thereon, and he transcribed it." Among other
information "it included the teachings of the Nefilim concerning
how
to observe the omens of the sun and of the moon and of the stars and
the signs of heaven." This description of the contents of the
writings by the Nefilim - and thus from before the Deluge -
parallels the wording in the Book of Enoch about he knowledge of the
Sun and the Moon and the stars/planets that he was taught from "the
heavenly tablets, and all that was written thereon." All that
Enoch
passed on to his son Methusela....
"An unambiguous reference to the
pre-Diluvial writings and what
happened to them as far as the destruction by the avalanche of
waters was concerned is found in the writings of Berossus....
(describing events from the splash landing of Ea to the Deluge, he
called the hero of the Great Flood by his Sumerian name, Ziusudra).
In the fragments of Berossus’s writings that are available from
Greek historians, it is stated that after Ea/Enki had revealed to
Sisithros (= Ziusudra) that there would be a Deluge, "he ordered him
to conceal every available writing in Sippar, the city of
Shamash. Sisithros accomplished all these things, sailed immediately to
Armenia, and thereupon what the god had announced did happen." Those
writings were about "beginnings, middles, and ends."
"Berossus continued to relate that among those who were in the ark
and survived the Deluge was Sambethe, the wife of one of the sons of
Ziusudra/Noah - her name probably a corruption of the Sumerian or Akkadian
Sabitu ("The Seventh"). According to Berossus "she was the
first of the Sybils, and she had prophesied concerning the building
of the Tower of Babylon and all that happened to the enterprises of
its planners; this was before the division of the languages."
"To this first of line of oracle prophetesses (the most renowned of
which was the Sybil in Delphi) was attributed the role of
intermediary between the gods and the survivors of the Deluge. She
uttered to them the words that were "a voice from the air," which
directed them how to survive after the Deluge and "how to recover
from Sippar the books that described the future of Mankind."
"....Indeed, as one reviews the beliefs underlying all these diverse
statements, one begins to understand why the editors of Genesis in
its Hebrew version had omitted the Aleph to make the beginning start
with Beginning, with a "B" (Beth). For the very notion of a
beginning incorporates within it a notion of an end. The very
admonition that the ancient writings, containing all that there is
to be known - those ancient "data banks" to use computer lingo -
must be preserved until the "end times" or "end of days"
implies
that such an end has been destined. By starting with Beginning, the
Bible’s editors subscribed to that belief.
"....The prophet
Jeremiah clearly explained that what shall be "at
the end of days" had been planned "in Yahweh’s heart" from the very
beginning (23:20). "He tells the End at the Beginning,"
Isaiah
extolled the Lord God (46:10).
"God was the ultimate prophet and the source of all prophecy. That
biblical view found expression even where the text seems just to
report events. The punishment imposed on Adam and Eve after they had
eaten the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden foresaw the future
ways of human beings. Cain was given a protective mark, for
otherwise he and his descendants would be avenged for seventy and
seven generations. In a covenant made by God with Noah and his sons,
He promised that there would never again be a Deluge. In a covenant
with Abraham, God foretold his future as the father of multitudes of
nations; but predicted that a time would come when his offspring
would be enslaved in a foreign land - a bitter experience that would
last 400 years (as the Israelite sojourn in Egypt eventually did).
And regarding the barren Sarah, God predicted that she would have a
son and that out of her womb there would come nations and kings
thereof.
"Encompassing the human story from Adam and Eve through the
destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem and its rebuilding by
returning exiles in the sixth century B.C., the Old Testament also
tells, indirectly and almost imperceptibly, the shift of prophecy
from a direct communication from God to one through Angels
(literally: Emissaries) and then through Prophets.
"....A case of prophecy based on past
prophecies was the future
great battle of Gog and Magog that was revealed to the Prophet Ezequiel (chapters 38 and 39) - a battle that in the apocalyptic
literature of the time assumed the role of the final battle in the
last millennium, the Armageddon of the New Testament. Though in
later writings Gog and Magog were treated as two different persons
or nations, Ezequiel speaks of Gog as the ruler of the land Magog,
and predicts that the end of his domination shall come when he will
attack the land of Jerusalem, "the navel of the Earth." Predicting
that this shall take place at, and be a sign of, "the End of Days,"
Yahweh declared through Ezequiel:
Though thou shalt come only at the
end of days, Gog -
It is thou
of whom I have spoken
in the olden days
through the Prophets of Israel
who had prophesied in those days.
"In those final times,
Yahweh announced through Ezequiel there shall
be a great earthquake and great destruction, and plagues and
bloodshed, and torrents of rains, and fire and brimstones from the
skies.
"....The quest for the hidden past in order to divine the future
permeates not only the books of the Prophets but also the biblical
books of Psalms, Proverbs, and Job.
"....This approach, of "Let’s find out what has happened in the past
so that we might know what’s coming," was based on Mankind’s
experience throughout the millennia of human memory - "myths" - to
most, recollections of actual events to us. To anyone aware of the
ancient tales - anyone not only now but also in biblical times - it
had to be obvious that at every twist and turn Mankind depended on
the plans and whims of its creators, the Elohim.
"In the Beginning, we today and people (and certainly
Prophets)
millennia ago have been informed that we have come into being as a
result of discussions in a council of the gods, meeting to resolve a
mutiny in the gold mines. Our genetic makeup was determined as two
Anunnaki - Enki and Ninmah - acted both seriously and frivolously.
It was at the Council of the Great Gods that they voted and swore to
bring the creative experiment to an end and let Mankind perish in
the Deluge. And it was that, meeting in council, the Anunnaki gods
decided after the Deluge to give Mankind "Kingship" in the three
regions - the civilizations of Mesopotamia, of the Nile Valley, and
of the Indus Valley.
"Curious about the records of the
Beginnings, the human story from
Creation through the Deluge and the rise of nations, the people of
the last millennium B.C. - the time of the biblical prophets - also
wondered about the Olden Days, the events in the previous millennium
or two - the time when the Bible switched to Ur of the
Chaldees in
Sumer, and Abraham, and the War of the Kings, and the upheaval of
Sodom and Gomorrah. Tell us of those Olden Days so that we would
know what to expect, the people demanded of those entrusted with
prophecy and knowledge.
"The Bible mentions several such
records - "books" - that may have
held answers but that have completely vanished. One is the Book of Jashar, the
Book of Streightness if literally translated but
probably meaning the record of the Right Things. The other and
probably much more important was the Book of the Wars of Yahweh,
implying by its enigmatic title that it dealt with wars and
conflicts among the Elohim.
"....Such writings from the past were truly
divine Words, for the
texts were either written down by the Divine Scribes or dictated by
the gods to human scribes. Originally recorded by the gods
themselves were the events on Nibiru that involved the seizing of
the throne there by Anu and the continuation of the struggle for
succession to another planet, Earth.... In that category, of
writings by the gods themselves, belonged a "Prophecy Text" that has
come to us in the Akkadian version.... an autobiography by Marduk.
In the other category, that of books directly dictated by a deity,
was a text known as the Erra Epos, a record as told by Nergal....
"....It was more than ironic that the events that had triggered the
end of the great Sumerian civilization coincided with its most
glorious epoch. An "olden book" - a Sumerian text - recorded the
Council of the Great Gods at which the grant of Kingship
(civilization) to Mankind was decided upon....
"....But in compliance with the gods’ decision,
Kingship of Men had
to begin at a City of Men, and that one was a new settlement called
Kish. The date was marked by the grant of a calendar to Mankind, a
calendar designed at Enlil’s "cult center,"
Nippur. It began to tick
in 3760 B.C.
"....There was indeed no Peace on Earth until
Marduk - having caused
the death of Dumuzi - had his sentence to be buried alive inside the
sealed Great Pyramid commuted to exile....
"....It was during that relative period of peace that began with the
start of the third millennium B.C. that the Sumerian civilization
expanded to neighboring lands and flourished under great kings, such
as Gilgamesh.... and Sargon I.... of the unified kingdom of Sumer
and Akkad.
"Numerous texts, mostly fragmented, have been found that record the
course of events - the affairs of both gods and men - in the ensuing
centuries.... Finally, in 2113 B.C., the most glorious chapter in
the history of Sumer and Akkad began. Historians refer to the era as
the Ur III period, for it was the third time that
Ur had become the
empire’s capital....
"....All the while, from his exile,
Marduk was watching these
developments with a growing sense of frustration and anger....
"....Fate, we have said, has twelve stations; the Fate-Station
(zodiacal house) of Marduk was the constellation of the
Ram (Aries);
and as Precession kept shifting the first day of spring away from
the constellation of the Bull (Taurus) - Enlil’s zodiacal house - it
became ever closer to "entering" the Fate-Station of Marduk’s Ram.
Sure that the time has come for his Destiny to be fulfilled....
Marduk envisioned himself returning to Babylon with pomp and
circumstance, appointing a worthy king, watching the nations at
peace and the peoples prosper - a prophetic vision of what shall
come at the Latter Days when Babylon shall live up to its name:
Bab-ili, "Gateway of the Gods."
"Other texts from that time, that scholars consider part of the
collection of Akkadian Prophecies, recorded reports of astronomers
who watched the heavens for planetary omens connected with the
constellations of the Ram. The omens, however, were mostly ones of
warfare, slaughter, plunder, destruction; and it was those
prophecies, rather than Marduk’s rosy ones, that have come to
pass.... Impatient, Marduk sent his son Nabu to raise a human army
from among their followers in the Lands of the West - the lands west
of the Euphrates River. In 2024 B.C. Nabu launched a successful
invasion of Mesopotamia and opened the gates of Babylon to his
father Marduk.
"....Seeing no other way to stop
Marduk and Nabu, the Council of the
Great Gods authorized Nergal and Ninurta to unlock the "Seven
Awesome Weapons" that had been hidden under lock and seal in the
Abzu (Enki’s abode in southeastern Africa). A
nuclear holocaust was
unleashed; it vaporized the spaceport, leaving a huge gash in the
peninsula’s face and a vast blackened area all around it. The
"sinning cities" that sided with Nabu in what was then fertile
valley south of the Dead Sea were likewise obliterated - an upheaval
that Abraham could see from his abode in the south of Canaan.
"....But as fate would have it, the winds, as they reached
Mesopotamia, changed course to the southeast. And while
Sumer and
its great olden cities lay prostrate and desolate, the city of
Babylon to the north was completely spared.
"Until then
Marduk had looked to the heavens to divine his Fate. The
miraculous sparing of Babylon from the nuclear death and desolation
led him to wonder whether his now unobstructed way to supremacy was
more than Fate - whether it was his Destiny.
"Were
Marduk not a deity already, one could have said that what
ensued was his deification. In the circumstances, let us call it his
Celestialization. The vehicle for that was an alteration
("falsification" is equally applicable) of the hallowed text of
Enuma elish: to call
Nibiru "Marduk" and thereby make the supreme
planetary god and the supreme god on Earth one and the same....
"....The coronation - to use an understable term - of
Marduk as
"king of the gods" took place in a solemn ceremony, at an assembly
of the Fifty Great Gods and the "Seven Gods of Destiny," and with
hundreds of rank and file Anunnaki present. Symbolically,
Enlil laid
before Marduk his divine weapon, the Bow (which in the heavens had
the Bow-star as its counterpart). Then the transfer of the Enlil-powers to
Marduk was further celebrated by the transfer to
Marduk of the secret numerical rank of 50. That was done by a
recitation, one by one, of the "fifty names." They start with
Marduk’s proper name, asserting that it was Anu himself who had so
named Marduk when he was born, and, running through the rest of the
epithet-names, ends with Nibiru - the transformation of the god on
Earth into the supreme planetary god.
"The fifty names are made up from Sumerian words or syllable
combinations - epithets of whoever had possessed the fifty names
before the Epic of Creation was falsified to accommodate Marduk; and
although the Babylonian editors of the text (written in the
Akkadian
language) attempted to explain to their contemporaries the enigmatic
Sumerian syllabic words, it is evident that even they could not
fully grasp what secret message each name had conveyed. That such
secret meanings or encoding underlay the fifty names was recognized
by the renowned Assyriologist and biblical scholar E. A. Speiser....
he observed that "the text etymologizes the names in a manner made
familiar by the Bible; the etymologies, which accompany virtually
every name on the long list, are meant to be cabalistic and symbolic
rather than strictly linguistic."
"There is more in the
Fifty Names of a "Kabbalistic" nature than the
above observation allows. The first nine names are listed at the
seventh tablet of Enuma elish, and are accompanied by several
accolade verses. As had been noted by Franz M. Th, Bohl.... the
utterance of those first nine names was attributed to forefathers
not only of Marduk but even of Anu himself; three of them contained
triple meanings each; and in one such meaning-within-meaning, the
unique (and otherwise unreported) ability to "revive the dead gods"
was attributed to Marduk. That, Franz Bohl suggested, could be a
reference to the death and resurrection of Osiris (of Egyptian
lore), because the ensuing three names (numbers 10, 11, 12) are
variants of the epithet-name ASAR (Asaru in Akkadian) and, according
to Bohl, three epithets that paralleled three epithets of the
Egyptian god.
"With those three epithet-names Enuma elish moves on to the seventh
tablet - not without implications for the seven days of Creation in
Genesis (of which the first six were periods of activity and the
seventh a day of rest and divine contemplation); and seven was, we
will recall, the planetary designation of Earth and of Enlil as
Earth’s Commander.
"The three ASAR epithets, after which the epithet-names become
varied and diverse, bring the total of names to twelve. They are
additional explained in four verses giving the fourfold meaning of
the three ASAR names, suggesting again an attempt to incorporate
twelve into the text. The recitation of the fifty names thus
incorporates the divine rank of Enlil and his planetary number, the
number of the members of the Solar System, and of the
constellations.
"All of my instructions are embodied in the
fifty names," Enki
announced at the conclusion of the ceremony. In those names, "all
the rites have been combined." In his own hand "he wrote it down,
preserved for the future," and ordered that the writing be lodged in
the Esagil temple that the gods shall build for Marduk in
Babylon.
There the sacred knowledge shall be safeguarded by a line of
priestly initiates, passed from father to son:
"Let them be kept
[there] let the elder explain them; let the wise and knowing father
impart to the son."
"With deeper meanings,
what secret knowledge do the fifty names hold
that, according to Enki, combined in them all that there was to
know?
"Perhaps one day, when a new discovery will enable us to
decode the numerical encryptions of Assyrian and Babylonian kings, we too will
know.
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