The Garden of Eden
Most languages stem from a common, ancient source. The same applies to religion.
Psamtik I, Pharaoh of Egypt in the seventh century BC had two children brought up to hear no spoken word in the hope that they would instinctively develop the pure and godlike language. They spontaneously spoke Phrygian, and ancient language from Asia Minor. The same experiment was carried out more than two thousand years later by King James IV of Scotland with the resulting language being Hebrew. Unconvincing.
The first language has been labeled Proto-Indo-European.
The book of Genesis was written 2,700 years ago, well after the time of King Solomon. Writing began more than twice as far back in history in Sumer, the accepted birthplace of civilization. By the fourth millennium BC, Sumer had written records.
The most important invention of these people was the wheel.
The Cities of Sumer
For the Sumerians the land was God’s. At the centre of each city was their god’s house – the temple, from which the priest controlled every aspect of life in the community, including the dispensing of justice, land administration, scientific and theological learning and religious ritual.
The Sumerian language was one of the few tongues completely unconnected with Proto-Indo-European.
Today the English language still contains a few almost pure Sumerian words, such as alcohol, cane, gypsum, myrrh and saffron.
The Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis is the story of Sumer.
The Babylonian account of the creation was known as ‘Enuma Elish’ meaning ‘when on high’. It was written in both Babylonian and Sumerian nearly a thousand years before Genesis and survives almost complete on seven cuneiform tablets:
’All the lands were sea. Then there was a movement on the midst of the sea; At that time Eridu was made…Markuk laid a reed on the face of the waters, He formed dust and poured it out beside the reed. T6hat he might cause the Gods to dwell in the dwelling of their heart’s desire, He formed mankind. With him the goddess Aruru created the seed of mankind.
This Mesopotamian epic of creation is the source of the Genesis creation legend. The God of Genesis, Yahweh, did not come into existence for several hundred years after the writing of these cuneiform tablets.
The gods of later civilizations are developments of the Sumerian fertility and storm gods. The storm god had a large part to play in the legend of Noah. Storm gods had to be placated.
Freemasons were interested in storm gods and floods with a complete a detailed ritual to preserve the story of Captain Noah and the legend of the Flood.
The flooding of the low plains through which the Tigris and the Euphrates flowed must have been unusually cataclysmic.
Further analysis of Genesis, especially the genealogy of Seth and Cain, clearly traces the creation story back to Sumer. There are lists of Sumerian kings from Larsa which name ten kings who reigned before the Flood, and give the length of their reigns, ranging from10,000 to 60,000 years. The Larsa list ends with the words, “After the Flood kingship was sent down from on high.’ A new beginning was made after the Flood. The last name in the second Larsa list is Ziusundra, which is another name for Utanapishtim, the hero of the Babylonian story of the Flood written on the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic. The seventh king in the Sumerian list was regarded as possessing special wisdom in matters pertaining to the gods and as being the first man to practice prophecy; that seventh name is Enoch, of whom scripture says ‘he walked with God’, and who in later Jewish tradition was held to have been taken to Heaven without dying. The writer of Genesis was using Sumerian materiel which had passed into early Jewish tradition. The original writer assigned longevity to Seth’s descendants before the Flood. The astronomical numbers in the Sumerian king-lists may be the product of astrological speculations which applied measurements derived from the observation of the stars to the calculation of mythical regnal periods. The early Jewish writers arranged the numbers of the list to correspond with a chronology which assigned a fixed number of years from the Creation to the foundation of Solomon'’ Temple, and divided this period into epochs, the first of which, from the Creation to the Flood, contained 1,656 years. (1)
Ur,the City of Abraham
Ur, famous today for its great ziggurat, was one of the great city-states of the world. The Euphrates and the sea were much closer to the city 4,400 years ago than it is now. The ziggurat was inset with mosaics and planted with shrubs and trees. At the summit was the temple of the city'’ own deity – Nanna, god of the moon.
During a period of decline the concept of personal gods grew in importance.
Personal gods were nameless, related directly to the individual – a guardian angel. A person would inherit their god from his father, so he ‘worshipped the god of his fathers’. This personal god would look after him and take his cause to the greater gods when necessary, but he demanded obedience and close attention in return. His god might desert him or if he did wrong, he was in fear of his god’s reaction, but if he did something that all the world except himself thought was wicked, he was safe.
Between 2000 and 1800 BC a man called Abram decided to leave Ur. At some point in Jewish history Abram became Abraham, the father of the Jewish people. Abraham and his god represent the earliest encounter in the Bible between a real man and the deity that became the god of the Jews.
The Celts settled in coastal areas of western Spain, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and Scotland where some social groups remain genetically undiluted by the virtual absence of inter-marriage with other peoples. DNA analysis of some modern-day Celts from remote communities has been shown to be a match with North African tribal groups.
God,the King, the Priest and the Builders
In a Mesopotamian flood myth, King Utanapishtim saves seeds as well as animals. In Greek mythology, Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha build the Ark to escape the devastating wrath of Zeus.
A layer of water-laid clay two and a half metres deep covers an area of more than100,000 square kilometres across the entire width of the Tigris-Euphrates valley from north of modern Baghdad to the coast of the Persian Gulf in what now includes parts of Iraq, Iran and Kuwait. Dating for the Flood explains why the Sumerians seemed to have appeared from nowhere in around4000 BC.
The earlier period in the history of Sumer was all but lost in the cataclysm. The surviving Sumerians had to rebuild everything. The problem was to find survivors who were ‘keepers of royal secrets’ and knew the science of building. The sudden and urgent need to reconstruct created a new outlook based on building the square, level and upright foundations of a new order. The connection between the science of masonry and the concept of resurrection was inseparable.
The concept of a pillar or holy mountain connecting the centre of the Earth with the sky (Heaven) is a Sumerian concept. The Tartars, Mongold, Buryat and the Kalmyk peoples of northern Asia possess a legend that claims their holy mountain was a stepped building consisting of seven blocks, each one smaller than the last. Its summit is the pole star, ‘the navel of the sky’ that corresponds to the base below, ‘the navel of the Earth.’ The description of the Sumerian ziggurat. The name these northern nomads gave this sacred, mythical tower was simply ‘Sumer’. (2) The most famous Sumerian temple is known as the Tower of Babel, the great building closely associated with the descendants of Noah. This tower was built in Babylon by Nabopolassar and was a seven-story ziggurat some t6hree hundred feet in height with a shrine to the god Marduk on its summit. Genesis tells the story of the Tower of Babel, startlingly by acknowledging that there was once only one language:
’And the earth was of one tongue, and of the same speech. And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Sennaar [Hebrew for Sumer], and dwelt in it.
…And He said: Behold, it is one people, and all have one tongue; and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off from their designs, till they have accomplished them in deed.
Come ye, therefore, let us go down, and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
As so the Lord scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city.’
From His beginnings in Sumer, ‘God’ took different pathways – giving rise to the great religions of the world. All this happened in very ancient times and one of the very latest variations of Sumerian theology was the god of the Jews.
The Figure of Abraham, the First Jew
the Old Testament tells us that until Abraham arrived on the scene the ancestors of Israel ‘served other gods’ (Joshua 24:2). Yahweh, the god of the Jews (and eventually the Christians) was far in the future for them. Even after Yahweh had made Himself known to His ‘chosen people’ allegiance to Him was at best patchy for almost a thousand years – other gods of all descriptions were just as popular.
Abraham left his native city of Ur because the ‘godless’ nomads from the North were taking over daily life. Political discontent expressed as theological discontent. The Bible states that Abraham came out from man made order where the rule of God had been rejected. This refers to the unseating of God’s representatives upon Earth – the king of Ur and his priests.
Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel and Noah are representatives of peoples and times that embody early Hebrew ideas and traditions concerning the beginnings of life on Earth.
The name Hebrew derives from the term ‘Habiru’ which was a derogatory term used by the Egyptians to describe the Semitic tribes that wandered like the Bedouin.
Jews claim descent from Sem, the son of Noah, who was himself a character from Sumerian legend, and later from Abraham who left Sumer to find ‘the promised land’. The wandering peoples became the Jewish nation. The Jews are not a race or even a historical nation as they have come to believe; they are an amalgam of Semite groups who found commonality in their statelessness. Abraham was not the only Sumerian to travel in Canaan and Egypt during the second millennium BC.
Abraham is considered to be the key to the founding of Israel. Abraham was a priest with a particular god who was his companion and guardian.
The average Jew or Christian thinks the land of Canaan was a rightful gift of God to His chosen people, but the eventual taking of this ‘promised’ land was nothing less than theft. If the words of the Old Testament are to be taken at face value, then the Jews and their god are nothing less than wicked. No supernatural justification can excuse the slaughter of so many of the original inhabitants, which is what the Old Testament claims happened.
Canaan was no uninhabited wilderness where noble wanderers could carve out a new homeland, and Yahweh was no sweet benefactor. He was a storm god, a god of war.
The Canaanites had an advanced civilization. The original God of the Hebrews was in reality a figurehead who justified invasion, theft and slaughter.
Christians believe that the Old Testament is a real historical record of events, despite the fact that it portrays God as a vain, vengeful maniac without a drop of compassion. In Exodus 4:24-25 Yahweh decided to kill Moses shortly after commanding him to make his way to Egypt to rescue the ‘enslaved’ Israelites. He was talked out of this behavior by a woman that claimed Moses as her bridegroom. This was later rewritten to move the blame from Yahweh to a spirit called Mastema, which is only a word meaning the ‘hostile’ side of Yahweh’s nature. God did murder Moses’s son when the mood took him.
Abraham existed no earlier than 1900 BC and no later than 1600 BC. At the later end of this period was the occupation of Egypt by the so-called ‘Hyksos’ or ‘Shepherd Kings’, who invaded and oppressed the Egyptians for over 200 years, from around 1786 to 1567 BC.
Somewhere en route Abraham felt that his personal god was unhappy with him. He rationalized calamity as his god removing protection. Abraham felt that the only way out was to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. Micah 6:7
’Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’
Fortunately for the young Isaac, the problem must have eased and his deeply superstitious father changed his mind about the need to kill him. There is a later story that Isaac was sacrificed by Abraham but resurrected and Isaac, like Jesus the Christ, is portrayed as a ‘suffering servant’ who brings salvation and redemption to others.
Thirteen hundred years passed before the story of Abraham was first written down. It seemed natural that Abraham’s god must be Yahweh despite the fact that Yahweh was not introduced until the time of Moses. The terminology of Moses when he led the Israelites out of Egypt, telling them that his message came from ‘the god of their fathers’, is a uniquely Sumerian way of referring to a personal god that belongs to the offspring of Abraham. (3) These displaced Asiatics (proto-Jews) bought into the legend.
If Moses had stood in front of these slaves in Egypt and told them his message had come from Yahweh or a god of the whole world who cancels out all other gods, he would have been thought mad.
Abraham did not become the source of a whole tribe that took his name; instead his personal god, ‘the god of Abraham’ became the distinguishing characteristic of his future people. One Sumerian man’s psyche has formed the basis for the three great monotheistic religions of the world.
CONCLUSION
The Sumerians were the inventors of the pillar and the pyramid which spread far beyond their own land. The story of the Genesis account of the Flood turns out to be predated by nearly a thousand years by the Sumerian account of creation known as the Enuma Elish.
It was from the Sumerian city of Ur that Abraham came bringing with him his personal god known as the ‘God of his fathers’ sometime between 2000 and 1600 BC.
(1)Peake’s Commentary on the Bible
(2) Mircea Eliade: Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
(3) John Sassoon: From Sumer to Jerusalem
