[Chapter 1] Great Cities of the Bible: Babylon; The City of Occult

The Moody Church ^ | Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer

[caww]

I watched a video last night of a Military man in charge over Babylon who interestingly is also a layman historian so to speak and showed pictures and some very interesting comments concerning his time in Babylon.

Though he said there is some dispute....”Nimrod” seems to have been the first one to lay a brick in the building of Babylon. He explained how Babylon is built one city on top of the other and you can still see the walls 60 ft. down from those all the others have built ontop...including Saddams. Amazing how much of the ruins are still “pristine” as he said...and it was interesting seeing right where Daniel had walked and such.

The tour he gave was one of the most enjoyable speakers I’ve heard in this type of documentary as he was humble about what he knew...and mixed his talking points with what he had seen there from a Military position. Very interesting photos unlike those done and screened by professionals.

But Nimrod was a very evil type of guy. So many pagan and occult practices flourished then.

[caww]

No...we’ll just have to disagree as especially after a careful reading of Revelations the two witnesses are indeed people who walk, talk and eventually are killed and lay in the streets...who then God raises up.

[wmfights]

No...we’ll just have to disagree as especially after a careful reading of Revelations the two witnesses are indeed people who walk, talk and eventually are killed and lay in the streets...who then God raises up.

FWIW, I'm with you.

I don't see how The Revelation of Jesus Christ can make any sense if it's all thought of as figurative. The Book opens up like never before when it's read literally and with the understanding it's about God bringing Israel home to Him.

[Cronos]

BAbylon should not be confused with the place of the tower of Babel. What we call Babylon is a comparatively newer city in Mesopotamia.

The earliest source to mention Babylon may be a dated tablet of the reign of Sargon of Akkad (ca. 24th century BC short chronology). The so-called "Weidner Chronicle" states that it was Sargon himself who built Babylon "in front of Akkad" (ABC 19:51). Another chronicle likewise states that Sargon "dug up the dirt of the pit of Babylon, and made a counterpart of Babylon next to Agade". (ABC 20:18-19). More recently, some researchers have stated that those sources may refer to Sargon II of the Neo-Assyrian Empire rather than Sargon of Akkad

This indicates that it was an Akkadian city, not the older Sumerian. The tower of Babel should instead be associated with what was the city of Eridu. Eridu is older -- a Sumerian city from the 4th millenium BC, probably as old or older than Uruk

[caww]

and your source for this information Cronos? I want to check further.

[Cronos]

Of course.

1. To see why Babylon got confused with Eridu you can refer to http://oi.uchicago.edu/pdf/saoc62.pdf "http://oi.uchicago.edu/pdf/saoc62.pdf"

Another city whose name became interchangeable with BAbylon was Eridu. The lexical list Erinhus V 26 and the topographical list TIN.TIR I 21 show that Eridu was a name for Babylon proper. A version of the Sumerian King List gives Eridu as the first city ever to receive kingship from heaven, where the first king was Alulim. This man was called Aloros in the text attributed to Berossus, who wrote in the fourth century B.C. but Berossus named the city ruled by Aloros as Babylon, not Eridu. Eridu is the city in which Hammurabi king of BAbylon was crowned, and this may be a reason to date the phenomenon early in the Old Babylonian period

2. Now Eridu is an ANCIENT city, terribly old, much older than the city of Babylon. Now to understand this you must realise that the origins of Mesopotamia lie with the ancient Sumerians who formed their cities in 5000 BC or earlier. Eridu dates from 5400 BC.
According to the Sumerian Kinglist, Eridu was the first city in the world. The opening line of the Kinglist reads

"[nam]-lugal an-ta èd-dè-a-ba [eri]duki nam-lugal-la"
"When kingship from heaven was lowered, the kingship was in Eridu."

In Sumerian mythology, it was said to be one of the five cities built before the Deluge occurred. This was initially dedicated to the god of waters Enki in Sumerian(Ea in Akkadian -- see point 3 below) who had married the god of sky (can't remember the name) to form the earth.

it was the chief seaport of Sumer and Babylonia and was located on the Euphrates River near the city of Ur, siltation has since moved the coastline southward and the city's remains are now some distance inland, in modern Iraq. It was revered as the oldest city in Sumer, and its patron god was Enki ( Ea). Founded on sand dunes circa 5th millennium BC , its ruins show the sequence of the preliterate Ubaid civilization, with a long succession of superimposed temples portraying the development of an elaborate mud-brick architecture. It was occupied until circa 600 BC .

3. Anyway, the Sumerians were nicely chugging along for 3000 years until the Akkadians or Amorites came. These were Semitic peoples (the ancestors of Abraham). They were nomads and initially did not stay in the cities but traded. then, slowly they took over, culminating in the reign of Sargon of Akkad --> he may be the biblical Nimrod. Read up on him -- he was the first conqueror in 2200 BC ruling all of what is now Iraq and Syria -- huge territories in an age before the saddle or chariots. BUT the Amorites still retained the Sumerian religion -- and the Sumerian language regressed to being a religious language, but the Sumerian holy cities were respected as now Akkadian holy cities.

4. So the place where the king would be crowned in Babylonia would be the holy city Eridu, the ancient one.


As an aside, the Sumerian king list also has this fantastic line

Five cities; eight kings ruled for 385,200^sic years. Then the Flood swept over.

Assyriology and Sumerian history is a bit of a side-hobby of mine and it is fascinating how this ties in to the Bible -- every word of the Bible even the ones dating back to 2000 BC (Abrahams) can factually, logically be proven true. And this was handed down by people orally and then on written texts for 1000s of years, yet are utterly true -- provably so. Ur of the Chaldeans (a later term for Sumerians) is almost as old as Eridu. It is 12 km away from Eridu. Ur or Uruk was the reason why we call Mesopotamia Irak now.

[Cronos]

From the Sumerian King-list

Adapa U-an, elsewhere called the first man, was a half-god, half-man culture hero, called by the title Abgallu ( ab =water, gal =big, lu =man) of Eridu. He was considered to have brought civilization to the city from Dilmun (probably Bahrain), and he served Alulim.

In Sumerian mythology, Eridu was the home of the Abzu temple of the god Enki, the Sumerian counterpart of the Akkadian water-god Ea. Like all the Sumerian and Babylonian gods, Enki/Ea began as a local god, who came to share, according to the later cosmology, with Anu and Enlil, the rule of the cosmos. His kingdom was the waters that surrounded the world and lay below it (Sumerian ab =water; zu =far).

The stories of Inanna, goddess of Uruk, describe how she had to go to Eridu in order to receive the gifts of civilisation. At first Enki, the god of Eridu attempted to retrieve these sources of his power, but later willingly accepted that Uruk now was the centre of the land. This seems to be a mythical reference to the transfer of power northward

Babylonian texts also talk of the creation of Eridu by the god Marduk as the first city, "the holy city, the dwelling of their [the other gods] delight".

[Cronos]

One recent school of thought, following David Rohl, has conjectured that Eridu, to the south of Ur, was the original Babel and site of the Tower of Babel, rather than the later city of Babylon, for a variety of reasons

1. The ziggurat ruins of Eridu are far larger and older than any others, and seem to best match the Biblical description of the unfinished Tower of Babel.
2. One name of Eridu in cuneiform logograms was pronounced "NUN.KI" ("the Mighty Place") in Sumerian, but much later the same "NUN.KI" was understood to mean the city of Babylon.
3. The much later Greek version of the King-list by Berosus (c. 200 BC) reads "Babylon" in place of "Eridu" in the earlier versions, as the name of the oldest city where "the kingship was lowered from Heaven".

[Captain Beyond]

Thanks for the ping wmfights.

Hey SunkenCiv kinda a GGG ping. Thought you might like to check it out.

[Cronos]

Even this bit about Babylon being the beginnings of occult is specuous.

Firstly, as proven above, Babylon is a younger city, Akkadian, not Sumerian

Secondly, the argument given that they were primarily interested in astroLOGY rather than astroNOMY is incorrect -- the Sumerians gave us a studied description of the night-sky. THEY were the ones who first divided the year into 360 days + 5. They were then the ones who invented geometry (hence 360 degrees in a circle). They were the ones who did this to enable them to plant crops.

Remember that agriculture mostly started in Sumeria and agriculte depends on you knowing the seasons exactly

They invented astronomy to predict this, they invented irrigation (dams, canals) to water their crops.

3. Astrology -- you have 3 main kinds: Western, Chinese and Indian and no they are not related. THe Hindu astrology has two non-existent planets Raghu and Ketu which are not there in Western or Chinese astrology for instance. There is NO indication of astrology in Sumeria at all. The first instances of astrology in Mesopotamia are in the 2nd millenium BC, yes in Babylon. And yet if you read their astrology and compare it with modern Western astrology you'll find they are quite different. Western astrology is derived from Greek Hermesism (Hermes Trismegistus.) which are not related to the Babylonian. He was the first to outline the houses and their meaning, and thus the houses are usually thought to date back to the very beginning of the Hellenistic tradition and indeed they are one of the major defining factors which separate Hellenistic astrology and other forms of horoscopic astrology from Babylonian astrology and other traditions in different parts of the world. This system of horoscopic astrology was then passed to another mythical figure named Asclepius to who some of the Hermetic writings are addressed.

[RegulatorCountry]

... and then you have the twelve tribes each being cognate with their respective zodiacal “sign,” Leo for Judah, etcetera.

The Bible has clear reference to that which many presume to be utterly condemned by the very same Bible, and yet from Genesis onward, it’s clear that stars were intended to convey information. There are even overt references, from the OT right through to Revelation.

I’d suggest that the word “astrology” represents the loss of a critical shade of meaning in translation. In antiquity, astronomy and astrology were not divorced from one another as in modernity. The condemnation thus has to pertain to intent and what is done with any knowledge ascertained in this manner.

Or, that’s my thinking upon the matter. It’s a controversial topic. But, any serious student of the Bible, prophecy in particular, will come to recognize the use of apparent astrological symbolism, and so it’s a conflict that should be resolved in order to further prophetic understanding for the benefit of all His believers.

[Cronos]

hmm... well, I've never heard of any linkages between the twelve tribes and the zodiac signs (that doesn't mean it's not true, just that I've not heard of it) -- do you have more information? Like Sagitarrius or the twins or others -- which tribes do they link to?

You're right about stars being used to reveal information -- like the Star of Bethlehelm. But which others?

In antiquity, astronomy and astrology were not divorced from one another as in modernity. 100% accurate -- Neil Postman says the same in one of his books.

[RegulatorCountry]

There are numerous sites that can tell you more about this, but it’s very late on the east coast, so I’ll just toss out a few terms that will help with any search. The Hebrew zodiac is known as the Mazzaroth.

Above and beyond the twelve tribes, there is linkage as well with the twelve single letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Twelve is a highly significant number.

There is a lot of peculiarity swirling about this topic, so be wary of information you encounter and pay attention to motivation of the source.

Beyond that, I’ve got to get to bed, I’ve got to be up and about in three hours, lol.

Good night.

[Cronos]

ouch — good night. Will talk next time. it’s 9 am for me here and we have a holiday! Feast of the three kings!

[mitch5501]

"There is a lot of peculiarity swirling about this topic, so be wary of information you encounter and pay attention to motivation of the source."

Sound advice.

I've read that the twelve zodiac signs actually tell the story of Christ.ie: If Virgo is used as the starting point and Leo as the ending.,The main star in Virgo (the virgin)is called "Spica" which means seed.Seed of the virgin...through the twelve consellations arriving at Leo (the Lion).

That's obviously a very sparse outline but a story which starts with the seed of a virgin and progresses through to a lion does tend to make your spititual ears prick up.From what I've read over the years the whole thing is very detailed and well worth a discerning read.Just google "gospel in the stars" and you should find plenty.

It's no small wonder the enemy would seek to cloud the original message with the worship of the hosts themselves rather than the message they are conveying.

I've always admired the night sky but this sure added to my appreciation of it!

God bless you.

[SunkenCiv]

Uh, no.

[SunkenCiv]

(whoops, blush) but thanks Captain Beyond.

[Cronos]

sound advice — most of the google sites reveal loony fringe or new-age websites.

[Cronos]

Maybe not a GGG, but this got me thinking. The population of the world around 1 AD was 200 million folks. The population when the Sumerian cities were founded (5000 BC) must have been 2 million or less.

I'm taking a rule of thumb that population before the industrial revolution was 1 billion from 200 million in 1 AD, due to more land being brought under cultivation. So 2000 BC population = 40mill, 4000 BC = 8 mil, and 5000BC = 4mil, but then agriculture only spread in 4000-2000 BC, and hunter-gatherer societies can support far fewer people, so the population of the world could have been as low as 1 million.

Anyway, can you imagine life in those days when setting up the cities of Sumeria? They were the only civilisation around! Europe was a big forest with next to no people (any peoples would have not been Indo-European definitely!), Rome, Greece were non-existent.

The pyramids and Stonehenge wouldn't be built for another 3000 years, Christ wouldn't be born for another 5000 years, Abraham wouldn't be born for another 3000 years.

These people were living in an empty world - they would have traded at the most with the Harappan civilisation (which I believe is linked to the Sumerian) and Elamites through Dilmun (Bahrain).

these people would have looked out on the oceans and the sand seas and wondered if there were any voices out there, just as we look into space.

What a people the Sag-gig-ga were!

[blam]

"Anyway, can you imagine life in those days when setting up the cities of Sumeria? They were the only civilisation around! Europe was a big forest with next to no people (any peoples would have not been Indo-European definitely!), Rome, Greece were non-existent.

My grandmother is related to 9,000 year old Cheddar Man(U5a)

My yDNA (R1b) has been in Europe at least 25k...possibly 45k years.
R1b is presently the largest European yDNA haplogroup. 'H' is the female equilivent.(mtDNA)