Thank you all for giving me the time to polish my reply-to-self before it was hurled into the Pit of the No Longer Editable.
Minor correction to an earlier comment: Lord isn’t a rare title for gods in Mesopotamia, Great Lord is – EN GAL in Sumerian and bēl rabû in Akkadian. It’s only Enki and Enlil who are titled ‘Great’. (I think that’s where Hayya Rabbu, ‘The Great Living [God/One]’ and Hayyi Rabba, ‘The Great Life’ get their Great from.)
And a little bit on my methods. To arrive at the potential names above, you have to be very specific. For example:
Abram
Country, People, And Father’s Household: Harran, per Genesis 12:1-4. (countryside of Amorite era-Ebla)
Foreign Land of Residence: Ur of the Chaldees, per Genesis 15:7. (Akkadian-era Ur)
Estimated Period: c. 1750 BCE, per Dr. Phillipe Bohstrom. (Abram in Ur)
Some names I found online from credible sources and then back-checked, and many I arrived at independently by focusing at that level of granularity on archaeological finds. It is acknowledged that the Bible updates different types of names, and sometimes Dr. Ehrman calls those anachronisms. And Yah, for instance, is considered an ‘earlier form’ of Yahweh.
I had an epiphany yesterdayish – the Exodus narrative seems to be a Baal fest?
Exodus 14:2
Tell the people of Israel to turn back and encamp in front of Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, in front of Baal-zephon; you shall encamp facing it, by the sea.
• Pi-Hahiroth ‘Mouth of The Canal’ Canal of The Pharaohs
• Migdol ‘Fortress’
• Baal-Saphon – in the Egyptian vernacular, this broadened to mean any ‘high place holy to Baal’
• Sea – ‘Sea of Reeds’ (academic consensus is that Septuagint scribes errored in transliterating the ancient Egyptian toponym Yam Suph as ‘Red Sea’.)
This seems to center the original camp facing ‘Waters of Baal,’ what is now Ballah Lake, proposes Egyptologist Dr. James K. Hoffmeier:
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Baal’s epic myth finds him controlling the sea deity, and indeed there was hydraulic technology in Egyptian canals since the Middle Kingdom:
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Exodus 20:18
When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance…
Compare this with the Baal Cycle:
Ba[al gives] forth his holy voice,
** Baal discharges the ut [terance of his li]ps.**
His h[oly] voice [convulses] the earth,… the
** mountains quake,**
** A-tremble are…**
East and west, earth’s high places reel.
Baal’s enemies take to the woods,
** Hadd’s foes to the sides of the mountain.
The trumpet is a ram’s horn. Bull, ram, and thunderbolt – these are the three symbols that Wiki gives for Baal.
Psalm 18:8
Smoke rose from his nostrils; consuming fire came from his mouth, burning coals blazed out of it.
This is considered to be one of the earliest Psalms:
Psalm 68:4
Sing to God, sing praises to his name; lift up a song to him who rides upon the clouds— his name is the LORD— be exultant before him.
Back to Baal and the Wiki:
Baʻal’s widely used epithet is “rider (or mounter) of the clouds.” (rkb ʿrpt, cf. rkb bʿrbt in Ps. 68:5; Ugaritic rkb ʿrpt)
In Psalm 68:4, the Lord is Yah, and not the full Yahweh.
While El is the original dominant deity (oak groves) in Canaan, Baal’s surge to become dominant deity in the 18th C BCE-15th C BCE period coincides with the 14th Dynasty Amorites and 15th Dynasty Hyksos. Again, the Yah deity reaches its height of popularity with the Hyksos. Imo, Baal pole-positioning El results in the Baal Saphon-El syncretism.
What do you do if your people are freed from a Storm God after a thousand years, but all your texts say to obey Him?
The Josian Reform
In 622 BCE, a scroll is miraculously found by a priest named Hilkiah that is immediately confirmed by King Josiah to be the direct words of Moses. Most scholars think it to be proto-Deuteronomy:
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In it, a smoke, thunder, and lightning God is no longer ascended to on the mountains, with um blood sprinkled on worshippers; now God is almost a middle-manager type that protects from desert bugs and provides a grain miracle – may store better but goes bad faster. (I like this update.)
Deuteronomy Moses wants to stop the worship on high places that the Moses of the last four books just took a lot of donks to get to.
Another miracle – Deuteronomy Moses is now able to speak in 7th Century BCE language. There is one section in Deuteronomy that I think may build on a new find or a revealed document, and it’s the Mosaic Covenant. Scholars often say it’s very close to a Hittite-type suzerainity treaty. Foundational study here:
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This fits perfectly to a tiiiiiny window of Hittite suzerainity in parts of Canaan circa the 1350-1322 BCE reign of Suppiluliuma. He and Akhenaten’s daughter Ankhesenamun agreed to unite the two kingdoms Egypt-Hatti in a marital alliance with his son, and this idea quickly falls apart. We’re back at the post-Amarna period, you all!
But the rest of Deuteronomy seems to be in the 7th C BCE. It reminds of this Epiphanius quote in the Panarion:
They acknowledged Moses and believed that he had received laws—not this law, however, but some other[…]They claim that these Books are fictions, and that none of these customs were instituted by the fathers. This was the difference between the Nasaraean and the others…
More miracles – the administration that Moses constructs in Deuteronomy is a perfect fit for King Josiah’s (reign 640-609 BCE) situation. Ashurbanipal’s (reign 669-627 BCE) Assyrian gov of Amorite descent is the last to cultically worship Baal, and it collapses in civil war, never to control Canaan again.
For narrow windows of opportunity, like between the Assyrian and Babylonian periods, or its bookends when the internal affairs of a hegemon were in flux, a hypothetical king with Egyptian noble lineage through Asenath, Bithiah, or the Pharaoh’s daughter that married Solomon could sport Egyptian symbols on his bulla like the Yahwist King Hezekiah. Just don’t ally like Jehoiakim did with a damnatio’d pharaoh, like the Assyrian-installed Necho II.
The challenge is that the Egyptian deity Yah/Iah on its own never had Lord titles afaik, and in the ANE, generally speaking, a god must be a lord to make a king/kingdom. So this is where I hypothesize (but do not do so concretely) that the syncretization of the Lord of Foreign Lands/Lord of the Desert that replaces Seth might maybe be involved, as Ha’s miracle is food in the desert: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
1 and 2 Kings is also considered a Deuteronomist reframing stemming from Josiah’s reforms. It has 9th C BCE Elijah the sojourner from Gilead (archaeologically under Midianite-Kenite hegemony) contest Baal’s prophets with fire that burns with a large amount of water. I’d compare that event to the priestly secret of naptha revealed centuries later in a more transparent age:
2 Maccabees 1:34-36
…a liquid had been found in the place where the priests had hidden the altar fire, just before they were taken into exile. He also heard that Nehemiah and his friends had used this liquid to burn the sacrifice on the altar. Nehemiah and his friends called the liquid [nephthar,] which means “purification,’ but most people call it “naphtha.’
This could be the first showdown, brought to you by the providers of naptha. What if Elijah’s the first rebel in the Yahwistic movement?
This refines my hypothesis: Could the Josian Reform’s scribal influence on Deuteronomy and the written Hebrew Bible be a compassionate act to replace the formerly dominant deity Seth/Baal Saphon-El/Hittite Storm God with a household deity of Hyksos, Yah?
Hosea 2:16
And in that day, declares the LORD, you will call me ‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call me ‘My Baal.’
Baal replaces El as the protagonist in El’s stories in the Ugaritic cycle when his faction rises. Marduk does the same to Enki in Babylonian literature. Could a similar process possibly have occurred in a book that rhymes with The Ible?
As an oral tradition, the Hebrew Bible’s stories would be well-known to Jews, so there may be less latitude there for corrections than for a miraculously found scroll, maybe just some new exposition. Thus core traditions that are Baal-branded, like burnt sacrifices, persist despite a new iteration of God in Hosea 6:6 desiring “mercy, not sacrifice.”
Jesus knows.
Matthew 9:13
But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice…’
Hosea 6:1-2
“Come, let us return to the Lord;
for he has torn us, that he may heal us;
he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him.
Q: What if it takes knowing which deities were syncretized into the Yahweh Elohim titulary for Jesus to use apotropaic rituals to fulfill the covenants that were sealed with them, and in doing so, be able to invite his lost flock to return to the original Lord of Love?
I found it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This academic book shows that ‘bd/hy “Servant of The Life” and grrlhy “Of The Great Life” are theonyms probably alluding to Nabataea’s Dushara:
But it seems that there exists the possibility that in names like ‘bd/hy and grrlhy, the deity being alluded to is one of the main gods, probably Dushara.
p 24, The Religion of The Nabataeans: a conspectus, Dr. John F. Healey, Brill 2001
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(It’s also on Internet Archive, linking to it is not happening for me).
Remember how John the Baptist’s followers the Mandaeans worship the deity Hayyi Rabba, meaning “The Great Life”?
BYU recap here, The Israelite Origin of the Mandaean People: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
Mandaean tradition paints Jesus as a kind of ‘failed initiate’, baptized by John into the Hayyi Rabba faith but ultimately rejected for lacking purity.
It would take me a whole book to explain why I think that John teaches the ancient traditions accurately, while Jesus teaches the spirit accurately. But wait, I can do it in a sentence — think Colonial America Historic Re-Enactment Village vs the innovative spirit of Colonial America transplanted into the modern day – the innovations on mass vaccination, a public library, a free press, and systemized emergency services.
The world’s oldest documented religion is that of the water ablution deity Enki in the now silted-up Eridu – which is adjacent today’s Mandaean mothership of Nasoriyah which still has water. Eridu held the Mes which are the blueprints of installing a civilization. What was in the initial blueprint myth was world-changing, and the blueprints evolved in complexity and scope over the millennias of the myths.
I had theorized that the name Dushara – the supreme deity of Herod Antipas‘ first wife Phaesalis – may be merely an epithet related to the Mandaean Hayyi Rabba, “The Great Life” and/or the earlier Eblaite water ablution deity Hayya Rabbu, “The Great Living [God/One]”.
Well, it turns out that is not even too much of a stretch – the catchphrase blessing for Dushara starts with:
‘l hayya [insert your name here].
Additionally, I theorised that if it is an epithet, Dushara might be something like, ‘Of The Ruler’, Du SR, and not just ‘Of The Shara Mountains’:
More central, and indisputably secure, is the notion of Dushara as the dynastic god, “the god of our lord the king”. p 13, again Religion of the Nabataeans: a conspectus, John F. Healey, Brill 2001
Judaea’s neighbors the Nabs are hypebeasts of cultic water purification like the Mandaeans, but there’s a big difference showcased in their continuously-running-water, hydraulics-supplied Petra Pool and Garden Complex. This is the big Mandaean baptism controversy today – natural river or convenient running-water pool? Pool with continuously running water is winning favor among the young Mandaeans.
Merchants like Nabataeans cannot travel the Spice Route if they have to stay near the right kind of river n-teenth. times. a. day.
Mark 2:27
Then Jesus said to them, “The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people, and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath.”
I take this as ‘guidelines are made to help, and can be changed if they don’t.’
The ‘living water’ that Jesus so often talks about has a spiritual meaning and a material meaning; in its material meaning it is about running water purification. When you look at the mechanics of Nabataea’s water purification faith, virtually all of the sites are supplied with it:
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The association between cult and water springs is evident in other Nabataean sites. A sanctuary was built near the spring of ‘Ayn esh-Shellaleh in Wādī Rum.”
-Healy, 2013
Almost every Nabataean shrine or temple has a nearby hydrological installation or a source of water of some size.”
-Erickson-Gini 2015, 317
About that ‘almost’ – Nabataea is formally acquired by Rome in 106 CE (though they still ruled in Osroene). Archaeologically, most of the residents of at least Petra did a planned move at that time. Yet some researchers often include the entire lifetime of the towns into the 5th C.
The numerous basins found in a cultic context at Petra reveal the importance of water and purification for ritual practices.”
– Alpass 2011, 56
Water was most likely used in the temple as some kind of offering to the deity … and it may also be associated with rites of purification.”
(Eddinier 2004, 23–24)
Religious monuments in Petra, for example, are located near water sources, aqueducts, cisterns, and channels, and this seems to indicate a desire to place the water supply under divine protection.”
(Alpass 2011, 114)
Nabataea’s First Century triad of deities on their coins and at their capitol of Petra just might help answer the question that only one beautiful human so far has asked, “Why in the world does the Vatican collect Nabataean artifacts?”
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• Dushara/Dusares – personal name is probably “The Great Life”
Attributes: water purification, extra-curly beard which may resemble Ea/Enki’s extra-curly beard flowing like water
• Theandrios – “Half-Man, Half-God”
Attributes: new deity, particularly venerated at Mount Hermon (the scholarly choice for the site of the Transfiguration)
• Ares – the interpretio graeca of ‘Attar, the masculine Ishtar that was the common deity of pre-Islamic Arabia.
Attributes: Venus and dove symbols
An Arabian Trinity, Dr. G.W. Bowersock, The Harvard Theological Review, 1986:
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Interestingly, the feminine persona original to Ishtar was popular in Syria, and the Holy Spirit has feminine pronouns in Early Syriac texts.
bonus: image of a coin (249-251 CE) from the Actia-Dusarian games held by Roman Emperor Phillip the Arab and continued by Trajan Decius that honors Dushara via an aniconic betyl flanked by two minor aniconic betyls:
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all copyright sereney
I was digging around for something to make as a thank you for your appreciation Colin! I hope you like it
Our Father In Heaven may your name be revered as holy
Grandiloquent Lord of Heaven and Earth, self-reliant Father Enki
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May your kingdom come
…Dushara, the god of our Lord, and his sacred throne…
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May your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven
Let man assume the drudgery of the god
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Give us today our daily bread
Enki said to Ninmah: “For your creatures I have decreed a fate, I have given them their daily bread.”
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(There is no pre-Christian usage of ἐπιούσιος ‘daily bread’ in Jewish literature.)
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors
In the several centuries surrounding the coming of Christ, however, a second period saw two millennia of waning enthusiasm for compelled debt forgiveness.[…]
The high aspirations for debt clemency in the Torah faced increasing challenges in practice over time until, just before the advent of the Common Era, one of the greatest rabbis in history all but eviscerated the sabbatical-year debt release. Rabbi Hillel simplified and facilitated an exemption for debts accompanied by a simple legal formulation called a prosbul, which rendered debt clemency all but a dead letter in Jewish law.
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The So-called Reform Texts of Urukagina[…]Sections 5 and 6 mention a general amnesty, a debt cancellation and an agreement with Ningirsu “not to deliver the orphan and widow to the powerful.”
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Enmetena, a ruler of Lagash c. 2404-2375, promulgated the earliest Sumerian debt cancellation on record, c. 2400 BC – Professor Michael Hudson, 2010
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…Enmetena, Urukagina, Elili and Lugalzagesi mention Enki in different aspects…
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And do not bring us to the time of trial
James 1:13
No one, when tempted, should say, “I am being tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one.
Compare:
Exodus 16:4
…that I may test them, that they will walk in my law
Judges 2:22
…in order to test Israel by them, whether they will keep the way of the Lord to walk in it as their fathers did, or notPsalm 11:5
The Lord tests the righteous
but rescue us from evil
As Ea was master of the exorcists’ ritual knowledge, he often featured in first-millennium incantations performed by exorcists to remove evil or to prevent it from visiting in the first place (examples in Foster 2005: 954-992). In one Neo-Assyrian prayer against evil from the city of Huzirina, a man named Banitu-tereš asks Ea to remove the “evil of ominous conditions (and) bad, unfavourable signs” that are present in his house because he is “constantly terrified” of what will happen (STT 1, 67).
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all copyright the coolest person in the universe
There is no pre-Christian usage of ἐπιούσιος ‘daily bread’ in Jewish literature.)
Wonderful commentary, thanks to you again Serene.
επιουσιος : ιος-adjective suffix meaning “belonging to, pertaining to” (page 265 CGCG)
: επι-prefix meaning “during, in the time of” (page 388, CGCG)
Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (CGCG). Morphological grammar stuff.
Pertaining to the time of ουσια.
ουσια is a noun, επιουσιος is a adjective. Whatever ουσια it means.
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αἱ οὐ. fire-resisting substances, Zos.Alch. p. 168B.; of the four σώματα (copper, tin, lead, iron), Ps.-Democr. ap. eund. p.167 B.
in Magic, a material thing by which a connexion is established between the person to be acted upon and the supernatural agent, e.g. a hair, λαβὼν βελόνην διείρων τὴν οὐ. εἰς αὐτήν PMag.Par. 1.2949, cf. PMag.Osl. 1.73; mould from a tomb, PMag.Par. 1.435; κυνοκεφάλου οὐ., . . κυνὸς οὐ., = κόπρος (cf. 2460), ib. 2687, etc.
Good find! Good breakdown on the word parts, Colin:
in Magic, a material thing by which a connexion is established between the person to be acted upon and the supernatural agent
The full ἐπιούσιος ‘daily bread’ with its various intended meanings seems like the beauty of Sumerian religious texts, where logograms can recursively pun because of shape to offer a ‘revealed meaning’. I just don’t know if it’s the actual physical molecules of the man or not, because why would someone go there.
Jesus’ mystical side is perhaps revealed in the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts. As far as which of those may be authentic, idk, but it’s clear that there is some kind of tiered information:
“To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.”
– Jesus, Matthew 13:11
It’s pretty smart of him to not be mystical on main. It was the mystical Chaldeans who debricked the First Temple.
So, my working hypothesis can be called,
How Government Made God
If Abraham signed a contract with the 14th Dynasty Amorites (because the Covenant rituals seem to be Amorite-Egyptian), they are not so much poetic repetition, metaphors, and dream interpretation people. They are legal and militarized language with an Egyptian majesty people. They are the managers of foreign resources and roads for Thebes, and they subcontracted out to tribal chieftans. Hypothetically, one from the mystical Sumerian-steeped, ʻUr of the Chaldees.’
From the Delta-adopted Moses with his military hand signals, until the mystical Chaldean Dynasty (Nebuchadnezzer, Belshazzar) steps into the picture, the Hebrew Bible is a log of troop maneuvers of the Lord of Armies. It’s possible that dream duo Jacob (apparently excellent at wrestling a god/angel in the form of a man all night long) and Joseph wouldn’t meet the criteria of Miraculously Found Deuteronomy’s 13:1-5.
Moses as a military general/commander is expounded upon by Josephus in Antiquities 2.10:
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and in Signaling in Biblical Warfare and Moses’ Role As Military Commander, S. H. Blondheim and Uri C. Cohen:
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Expanded hypothesis for this period:
• Moses = Thutmose the Overseer of Foreign Lands and Frontier Lands (has an Ethiopian campaign)
• Amenôphis = Amenhotep (III)
• same-named prophet scribe Amenôphis Son of Paapis = Amenhotep Son of Hapu, Apis
• Thermuthis = Mutemwiya
Mystical language in the Hebrew Bible then goes through the roof when the Chaldean Dynasty shows up in the 7th C BCE.
The Chaldean Dynasty, also known as the Neo-Babylonians, rose from the ‘Kaldu’, the West Semetic-speaking shepherd kings that arrived around the 9th C BCE to the marshlands of:
• Ur
• Eridu
• Sealand (Sealand contained the Eridu Genesis ‘Garden of Eden’ which is Dilmun, and it had Ea-theonymed kings)
Or, we can just say what is now modern Mandaean Nasiriyah. John the Baptist’s Mandaeans.
according to Macuch the script that is still the closest to the Mandaean script is that of the Nabataeans
Gnostic Ethics and Mandaean Origins, Yamauchi 2004
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Adding to the weight of evidence that Jewish lineages who escaped Jerusalem and reappeared in the Median hills might have sheltered in the Nabataean Haran instead of teleporting.
So, in my original and evolving hypothesis, this is what it could mean for the Gospels:
• Kingdom of Heaven, the Haran (titulary deity, Lord of Heaven Baalshamin). The Gospel of Matthew’s message may be addressing the escaping Jews specifically.
• Kingdom of God, Nabataea (the titulary deity Dushara is often simply referred to as The God).
(What’s funny is that in this study at least, the helpful Professor Yamauchi argued against a Jerusalem origin for the Mandaeans because of their Haran commonalities. Um, their origin story is obsessed with Jerusalem and Jesus’ earthly and spiritual actions from a perspective of duality.)
To circle back, Josiah the Yahwist gets his Miracle Scroll from Hilk-IAH. (My emphasis). Josiah gets his Miracle Information from a prophetess whose name has no prior precedent in the Hebrew Bible, named Huld-AH. (My emphasis). This resembles the Iah theophoric element variant ‘Ah’ in the name Ahmose II who oofs out Necho II’s damnatio’d successor Apries (Hophra in Jeremiah 44:30).
Might there be any link to the Chaldeans who unmasoned the First Temple and the Theban matrilineally-associated Iah? Yes, Serene there is:
Nitocris II, Ahmose II’s daughter. God’s Wife of Amun at Thebes.
And Nitocris of Babylon, the woman that Herodotus wrote of as Nabonidus’ family.
God created man. […] men create God. That is the way it is in the world – men make gods and worship their creation. It would be fitting for the gods to worship men!
– narrator of the Gospel of Phillip, papyri dated to 2nd or 3rd C CE
copyright held by a woman so technically don’t have to worship the gods
I don’t think my working hypothesis is too different than academics who believe that the character of God may be presented differently in the Persian Period than in the Roman Period, I just think I have some interesting ideas as to why.
What does a God’s Wife of Amun like Nitocris II do, and why does this role seem – to me – to be well-referenced in the Book of Isaiah? A text so important to Jesus’ earliest followers that it was nicknamed the Fifth Gospel.
(Per The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity, John F. A. Sawyer, Cambridge, 1996)
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…she plays a role in execration rights, burning images of the enemy…
– Egyptologist Dr. Gay Roberts
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The God’s Wife of Amun served as the human embodiment of the deity Mut, who was wife of the national deity Amun. In Thebes especially, Mut absorbed the vengeance persona of Sekhmet the lionness:
Isaiah 5:29
Their roaring will be like a lioness…
Sekhmet is dressed in red: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
Isaiah 63:1
“Who is this that comes from Edom, from Bozrah in garments stained crimson? Who is this so splendidly robed, marching in his great might?” “It is I, announcing vindication, mighty to save.”
Sekhmet is also the vengeance persona of Hathor in the Festival of Drunkenness that celebrates Sekhmet becoming drunkenly pacified from red-dyed beer, instead of drunk from blood. This becomes re-enacted with both red-dyed beer and wine by the time of Amenhotep III, per Egyptologist Betsy Bryan:
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Isaiah 63:2-5
Why are your garments red,
like those of one treading the winepress?[…]
their blood spattered my garments,
and I stained all my clothing[…] in my wrath I made them drunk
and poured their blood on the ground.”
Smh, and, might wine metaphors for blood instead of a fermented grain drink dyed with Egypt’s desert ‘red soil’ be more relatable in communicating to a viticulture-rich, beer-light Canaan?
Joel 3:13
Come, tread, for the winepress is full; the vats overflow, for their wickedness is great.”
Isaiah 5-6 seems to infer cleansing and bandaging as a reward for ceasing rebellion:
Isaiah 5:6
…Why do you persist in rebellion?
Your whole head is injured,
your whole heart afflicted.
6 From the sole of your foot to the top of your head
there is no soundness—
only wounds and welts
and open sores,
not cleansed or bandaged
or soothed with olive oil.”
Which to me seems to be similar to Sekhmet’s role of healing once appeased:
When she was appeased, her powers of destruction could be used to protect, and in this aspect she became a goddess of healing.
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Mut, when not in the vengeance persona of Sekhmet, which is a lot hopefully, wears the vulture crown:
Isaiah 34:15
…there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate.
Both Mut and Sekhmet sometimes have added male characteristics, which would allow for “hairy human pronouns”. The added male characteristics are discussed here with scholarly references:
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Q: Doesn’t Isaiah 31:3 outright say,
“The Egyptians are mere mortals and not God”?
A: The majority of biblical scholars divide the book of Isaiah into multiple authors across several centuries:
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Q: Ok, but wouldn’t they delete delete delete “The Egyptians are mere mortals and not God” if, in your working hypothesis, the Josian Reform initiated a direct relationship with the new (non-Assyrian-installed, ethnically-Egyptian, Iah-theonymed, hyper-deified) rulers in Thebes?
A: Well, the Josian Reform doesn’t necessarily delete delete delete the oral traditions that are Very Storm God, the scribes just seem to pivot by adding adding adding. Platinum Post on the Miraculously Found Deuteronomy here: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
It may be an additive process. For example, academic consensus considers Mandaean texts to generally be of a composite nature. Academics do not currently consider the first passage of Haran Gawaitha (also called Scroll of Great Revelation, you know, like Revelation) to retain something pro-Jesus. That’s likely because they interpret the broader Mandaean corpus as polemical. But imho, it starts out with something creedal-ish (like Deuteronomy 26:5):
And they loved the Lord, that is, Adonai, until in the House of Israel there was created something which was not placed in the womb of Mary, a daughter of Moses. It was hidden in her womb for nine months and bewitched her until the nine months were fulfilled and she was in labour and brought forth a messiah.
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There it says “messiah” and not “false messiah,” like in the later portions, which might have been enough to satisfy the anti-Christian Persian Empire that sheltered the early refugees.
And you know, the 8th C BCE is a century where Egyptian deification is gone. The Nubian Pharoahs don’t claim to be the Living Image of Horus, or the Son of Aten, or use any “I am” phrases embodying Iah; instead they just title themselves “Guardians of Ma‘at” or at best, “Servant of Amun.” This flips with the:
• Saite Dynasty – 664 BCE-525 BCE
which chronologically coincides with Josiah’s reign and reform through to Messiah Cyrus the Great’s Edict of Restoration:
• Josiah-Cyrus – 640 BCE-538 BCE
The Saite Dynasty was the height of God’s Wife of Amun’s ceremonial power. This role rose as Assyria’s fell. God’s Wife of Amun is a priest and a powerful co-regent; wealthier with her own property than most kings. It is her role that skyrockets deification – now it is through her power that the king is a god from the moment of birth, and not just from his ascension to the throne, unlike earlier ethnically-Egyptian eras.
Unlike Ramses II stylizing himself as ‘The Great God’ even in his statuary at Beth Shean, Necho II and Hophra/Apries don’t have divine epithets or regalia, but God’s Wife of Amun does.
So, the God of Isaiah seems to maybe be saying, “stop with the old ways (and start being nicer to the less advantaged than yourself, jfc)”
Isaiah 1:11
What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.
And ugg with that Moses stuff it looks like. This God dislikes it more than Manetho:
Isaiah 1:13-14
bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation— I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them.
(Again, my working hypothesis, so far, is that Baal Saphon-El was Abraham and Moses’ Covenant deity, and was overwritten to Yahweh in the Josian Reform. This would be how like Enki was overwitten to Marduk as the new protagonist in Enki myths, reflecting factional change).
God’s Wife of Amun arose from the semi-powerful, easier-to-say God’s Wife role – and central to the initiation ceremony of both is the depiction of her as an “orphan who had nothing” who is made rich through the kindness of this adoption. (Ceremonial because at some point forward, the wives and daughters of nobles took the role, but they performed the orphan part.)
The office itself was so separate that as god’s wife Ahmose Nofretari was “an orphan who had nothing”.
– also from Property and the God’s Wives of Amun, Dr. Betsy Bryan
Isaiah 1:17
Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow
The Book of Isaiah is very interested in the Judaean-Egyptian relationship from the beginning. Isaiah 1:8 describes Zion as
Isaiah 1:8
…a hut in a cucumber field…
a quintessentially Egyptian picture.
And I think we can unlock Isaiah 3:1 by asking ourselves, “Where did Abraham go in times of drought and famine?” (Acts 7:11-13 if you need a hint):
Isaiah 3:1For now the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts, is taking away from Jerusalem and from Judah support and staff—
all support of bread
and all support of water
This happens to be similar to the support that Egypt gave its vassals. And who are the Lord’s people?
Isaiah 19:25
whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people…”
Q: But Isaiah’s God talks down on Egyptians sometimes?
Isaiah 10:24
Therefore this is what the Lord, the Lord Almighty, says My people who live in Zion, do not be afraid of the Assyrians who beat you with a rod and lift up a club against you, as the Egyptians did.
A: Egypt in the 8th C BCE was essentially an occupied territory ruled by non-Egyptians, even through to the Assyrian appointees Necho II and Apries/Hophra – except for the holdouts in Thebes, like the originally matrilineally-associated Iah priesthood and God’s Wife of Amun.
Mut means mother:
Isaiah 42:15
For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant.
Isaiah 46:3
…you whom I have upheld since your birth, and have carried since you were born.
Isaiah 49:15
Can a woman forget her nursing child
or show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these might forget,
yet I will not forget you.
Isaiah 66:12-13
For thus says the Lord[…]As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you…
And in fact, the Lord’s first direct words in Isaiah are in the metaphor of child rearing:
Isaiah 1:2
…For the LORD has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me.
God is a midwife:
Isaiah 66:9
“Do I bring to the moment of birth and not give delivery?” says the Lord. Do I close up the womb when I bring to delivery?” says your God.
Be nice to God on God’s Shark Week:
Isaiah 30:22
…you will throw them away like a menstrual cloth…
Instead of how in the earlier texts of the Bible, the focus is on the sons of Israel, now in Isaiah the focus is on the daughter(s) of Zion:
Isaiah 1:8
Daughter Zion is left…
Which seems to mirror the uniqueness of how the God’s Wife of Amun relationship is passed down by adoptive mother to ‘orphaned’ daughter. (Woman-to-woman. And this role is not inherited by lineage.)
God’s Wife lore is stuffed with Iah theonyms (again for context, the Canaanite-origin Hyksos preferred the Yah spelling for the deity Iah, and Ah- and -iah were popular theophoric prefixes and suffixes for Iah.) Ahmose I (Hellenized as Amasis) is the first regent that this office is officialized under; it’s for his wife Ahmose-Nefertari, and their children’s names with Ah- theophoric elements are Ahmose-ankh, Ahmose-Meritamun, and Ahmose-Sitamun.
Isaiah 13 seems to predict the rise of the Chaldaean Dynasty in Babylon with the rebellion of Nabopolassar. Who installed Ahmoses II in his own rebellion, and thus Nitocris II, which would allow her to perform any execrations? Nabopolassar’s son Nebuchadnezzer, per Josephus in AJ 10.9.7 in summarizing the work of the Babylonian priest Berossus:
For on the fifth year after the destruction of Jerusalem, which was the twenty third of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, he made an expedition against Cele Syria; and when he had possessed himself of it, he made war against the Ammonites, and Moabites: and when he had brought all those nations under subjection, he fell upon Egypt, in order to overthrow it. *And he slew the King that then reigned, (23) and set up another*: and he took those Jews that were there captives, and led them away to Babylon.
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The tandem rise of the Yah theonyms in the Josian Reform and the Iah theonyms of the Saite Dynasty coincides with the temporary collapse of other nations’ presence in Canaan:
Isaiah 63:3
I have trodden the winepress alone;
from the nations no one was with me.
Let’s double-check to see if God’s Wife of Amun Nitocris II was in the right time period and role to perform any execration rights before/during Nabonidus’ historical campaign that removed the Edomites from Edom – an event which seems to fulfill the prophesy of Isaiah 34. What year does Nabonidus begin his campaign?
This article argues that, based on
the few fragmentary lines of the accompanying inscription, the attack of Nabonidus on
Edom can be more precisely dated to his fifth year, or 551 b.c.e.
– From Nabonidus, as-Silaº, and the Beginning
of the End of Edom –
Professor Bradley L. Crowell
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Let’s say 551 BCE is the start of Nabonidus’ Edom campaign. Wiki says Nitocris II may have attained a related title, High Priest of Amun, around 560 BCE. It cites Kenneth Kitchen’s Third Intermediate Period in Egypt, 2009 as a source, but my control F isn’t working for it:
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Since Nitocris II may have attained the related title circa 560 BCE, and the God’s Wife of Amun title became acquired in adolescence, and her father’s reign begins in 570 BCE, even though there hasn’t been found an inscribed date yet for her initiation into God’s Wife of Amun, I think it is reasonable that she’d be able to perform execration rights for a 551 BCE campaign. And the Bible documents Egypt’s involvement in the Levant for that century.
Q: Where would those execration announcements be kept?
A: Idk, maybe in the Book of Isaiah?
There was originally some Egyptian smoke with the Neo-Babylonians, then it is quietly called off. Interestingly, the ancient historian Herodotus calls Nabonidus’ wife (and his son and co-regent Belshazzar’s mother) ‘Nitocris’ in his book Histories (and both the ‘of Babylon’ and the ‘II’ are modern conventions.) For such a historically-rare name during the exactly-right period, it is my original hypothesis that these Nitocrises may be related or even the same person:
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Scholarship used to assume that God’s Wives of Amun were celibate with no backing information, but:
Since the cultural notion of “virginity” cannot really be identified in Egypt, this is probably not the correct term to use. However, the question of celibacy may be debated, but it has never been positively proved by the citation of any text. In recent years work on women’s in Egypt has demonstrated that women’s monuments routinely excluded representations and references to their male family members, particularly their husbands.
– from Property and The God’s Wives of Amun, Betsy Bryan, Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies, 2005
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Egyptologist Dr. Emily Teeter gives great examples here:
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Soon history would record Nabonidus ceding to Cyrus. The circumstances are giving “the gates to the city and the canal are open, and there was no resistance” as if there had been prior negotiation. Herodotus explains that the Persians knew how to drain down Nitocris’ canal that she had installed on the Euphrates river as a defense.
Two ancient accounts of Nabonidus say that he was resettled in another land. One being specific, that Nabonidus received the [golden parachute kingdom] of Carmania [a very lucrative node on the maritime Silk Road].
The last time that Egypt was about to fall, Akhenaten’s daughter, likely Ankhesenamun, wrote to a powerful king asking for a son in marriage to unite Hatti-Egypt. Being that:
1. This was the situation in Egypt, again
2. Egypt was a hydraulic civilization that considered canals great public works
3. Nitocris of Babylon posts a riddle on her tomb
(per Darius and the Tomb of Nitocris, Professor John Dillery
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4. No tomb has been found for Egypt’s Nitocris II
It is my bet that if you got Nabonidus’ wife Nitocris drunk on red, red wine that she could speak perfect Egyptian.
Note that the Chaldaean Dynasty that governed Babylon explicitly disavowed Babylonian lineage theirselves, with Nabopolassar going as far as to inscribe that he was the “son of a nobody,” which scholars (ok, Wiki) suggests was to distance himself from the collapsing Assyrian administration who had installed his father in Uruk. But imo it’s also probably because Babylon was founded by Amorites, which were now not in favor. The Chaldaean Dynasty instead preferred to resurrect Akkadian glory. (Revelation, to me, seems to refer to some Akkadian glory too.)
In that case, Nabonidus’ national deity Sin (national deity meaning that perhaps this is not his supreme deity of the entire world) would be potentially syncretic with Nitocris II’s presumed household diety Iah as they were both lunar, a type typically favored by the semi-nomadic folks like part-Aramean Nabonidus.
Before ceding, Nabonidus had already sojourned for about ten years, subduing the Quedarites and building his royal residence in the Quedarite territory of Teima/Tayma. These buildings correspond to the ‘first Nabataean architecture,’ just in the locally available material of mud-brick. Tayma then is Nabataean-administered:
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What I’m trying to say is that the academically surmised:
• Aramean
• Mesopotamian
• Quedarite
influences for the origin of the Nabataeans may possibly, maybe, possibly have something to do with the matrilineally Aramean Nabonidus (whose accounts also find him preferential to Aramaeans) who was the ruler of Mesopotamia, and who had a royal residence in Quedarite territory. Also, the Nabonidus Cylinders discuss his sojourns in areas that become important as Nabataea’s Incense Route:
I mustered my numerous troops, from the country of Gaza on the border of Egypt, near the Upper Seanote [Mediterranean] on the other side of the the Euphrates, to the Lower Sea [Persian Gulf].
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Nabonidus’ seal also remained topmost at Nabataea’s original capitol of Sela:
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Another theory is that the Nabataeans were a group of Babylonian and Arameans who migrated to Arabia.
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Since my general hypothesis is ‘How Government Made God,’ what happens when the Native Egyptians who had claimed to be the hegemon of Syrio-Canaan since Narmer c. 3000 BCE are now gone forever?
Here Dr. McGrath discusses Dr. van Bladel:
…positing that Babylonian pagans invented new religions in this period…
– From Dr. McGrath’s review of Dr. van Bladel’s book, Sasanian Mandaeans to Sabians
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Another name for the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty again, is the Chaldean Dynasty:
In his Nukhbat al-dahr, al-Dimashqī (ca. 1200-1300) noted that the Chaldeans were known as “Kāldan, Kasdān, Janbān, Jarāmiqa, Kūthārūn, and Kanʿānūn; these were Nabataeans who constructed buildings, founded cities, dug canals, planted trees… They were all Sabeans who worshipped stars and idols.”
It must be stressed that, early Islamic writers (see. al-Masʿūdī) geographically positioned this Chaldean community in southern Mesopotamia, precisely in Wāsiṭ and Basra where the Mandaeans form a significant community today. It is for this reason that, Prof. Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila of the University of Edinburgh asserted that “one might tentatively identify these [Chaldeans] [not my brackets] as the ancestors of modern Mandaeans…”
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Once Mandaeans immigrated as foreign refugees under Persian Zooroastrian monotheism, the Mandaean Sabaeans (bathers) would potentially feel a lot of pressure to disavow other Sabaeans with their ‘multi-nuanced’ belief systems. In Mandaean literature, dialog about a Messiah is sometimes prefixed with Nbu, and that is the deity Nabu of the Chaldaean Dynasty. Nebuchadnezzer means “Nabu, watch over my heir”, and Nabonidus means “May Nabu be Exalted/Nabu is Praised.”
Mandaepedia for ease of discussion:
Nbu is associated with learning and scribes, as well as Christ and Christianity. Other names for Nbu include Maqurpiil, Mšiha (i.e., Jesus the Messiah), and ʿaṭarid (of Arabic origin). Nbu’s name is derived from the Akkadian Nabû
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Like, what if there was a lightbringer with a secret princess sister from Nabu? That would make a great film.
Dr. McGrath also affirms a likely Judaean-area origin for the Mandaeans:
Nevertheless, it is likely that, whenever it occurred, the Mandaeans did emigrate from Judaea or its vicinity.
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And on the previously secret text Haran Gawaitha he says,
Since the Mandaeans are baptizers, if they originated in the Jordan valley and moved East, they would have to stick to a route that provided access to flowing water. The Wadi Haran seems like a good candidate, depending on seasonal considerations, but perhaps that very issue of the presence of water explains why inner Haran “received him” (whoever “him” is in this context).
Following the wadi would have taken them, unless I am mistaken, through Nabataea, and the Nabataean alphabet presumably contributed something to the script that the Mandaeans came to use. The Mandaic script seems, however, to have been artificially created for the purpose of ritual use, keeping the content of their scriptures and religious texts secret, and adding an air of mystique to their magical writings.
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These Chaldean Mystics, to me, seem to have their glowy aura all over the Intertestimental Period both overtly (Maccabees) and covertly (Enoch, which is Enosh in Mandaean).
Compare Revelation and the Mandaean Right Ginza:
Revelation 1:18-23
I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.Right Ginza
He is the Living One, there is no death in Him…
He is the First Life, from whom all lives proceeded.
And last but not last, compare Ea:
Ea
2.2.2. É-a Translated “Living”Following the interpretation
of Kienast, the original meaning of the name would then not be “a Living” but “the
Living one (as a deity).
– again Dr. Peeter Espak, Ancient Near Eastern Gods Enki and Ea a Diachronical Analysis
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Behold, the copyright holder of the history of humanity, as kawaii as a kitten!
I read Isaiah through to the end for the first time last night (reminder that I’m newish at the Bible).
The Book of Isaiah seems to first engage with the Egyptian myth “The Destruction of Humanity” (also called the “Myth of the Heavenly Cow”) which is that story of the Mother Deity that responds to humanity’s rebellion, and then it seems to engage with Father Enki/Ea/Hayya myths like “Eridu Genesis” as the Redeemer of humanity.
(Yeah, I was wondering what a lionness had to do with Jesus’ movement, too.) Maybe this is because the Book of Isaiah spans a period of documented Egyptian involvement with the Kingdom of Judah to a period of documented Mesopotamian involvement with the kingdom of Judah, and the scribes of the Babylonian Exile may have been exposed to Mesopotamian literature?
Isaiah 11:6
The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kidEnki and Ninhursag
The lion did not slay, the wolf was not carrying off lambs, the dog had not been taught to make kids curl up
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Isaiah 54:11
…I will rebuild you with precious jewels and make your foundations from lapis lazuli…
Enki’s Journey to NibruEnki, the lord who determines the fates, built up his temple entirely from silver and lapis lazuli…
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Installing the ‘Mes’ of civilization would involve building a highway, terraforming, supplying running water, and planting sacred trees. (Without the highway part, this is like how Enki made his Garden of Eden in Dilmun.)
Isaiah 40:3-4
…make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain…
This will be done via Israelites, God will not be just willing it into existence:
Isaiah 41:15
I will make of you a threshing sledge, sharp, new, and having teeth; you shall thresh the mountains and crush them,and you shall make the hills like chaff.
Isaiah 41:18-19
I will open rivers on the bare heights and fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water and the dry land springs. I will put in the desert the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive. I will set junipers in the wasteland, the fir and the cypress together
I wonder if this is smoothed into monotheism with the Persians, maybe? If so, I think that the Jewish scribes really did amazingly well with preserving the palimpset and helping those that seek, reach a deeper understanding. This reads like multi-person dialog to me:
Isaiah 48:12-16
“Listen to me, Jacob,
Israel, whom I have called:
I am he; I am the first and I am the last. Come near me and listen to this:
“From the first announcement I have not spoken in secret;
at the time it happens, I am there.”
And now the Sovereign Lord has sent me [Another God speaking?]
endowed with his Spirit.
This is what the Lord says—
your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel:
“I am the Lord your God…”
I’m about to read more of Dr. Michael Heiser’s Monotheism, Polytheism, Monolatry, or Henotheism? Toward an
Assessment of Divine Plurality, 2008 on this (apparently it posits a Divine Council appearing in Isaiah):
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Comfort is the theme that scholars conjecture to be written either during or after the scribal stay in Mesopotamian Babylon (scholars like John D. W. Watts in the Word Biblical Commentary I will read):
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Isaiah 40:1
“Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God.
And there’s even a lovely call back to Noah, whose root in Classical Hebrew נ-ח-ם , naḥam means ‘to comfort’ (and whose Mesopotamian parallel, Ziusudra, was saved by Enki/Ea):
Isaiah 54:9
This is like the days of Noah to me: Just as I swore that the waters of Noah would never again go over the earth, so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you and will not rebuke you.
Nice God is Back
all copyright me 2025
Nice catch there on Isaiah 48:12-16, cf. Zechariah 7:8-12.
3 in Isaiah 48: I am the First and I am the Last.
LORD your Redeemer the Holy One of Israel.
his Spirit
3 in Zechariah 7: the word of the LORD.
the LORD of hosts.
his Spirit.
There is 3 of something of common origin being written about.
Yes yes! Chat has repeatedly given me Zechariah and Daniel to check out. Of course I’ve flipped through these texts like anyone, but I’ve never sat down and read them as a grown, so that is on the menu.
Currently working on the question, “What guidelines did the hegemons have to undo a temple in the Levant?” Because Josiah has a prophetess tell him that the Kingdom of Judah will be spared until end-of-reign, and the end of the Second Temple happens to coincide with King Malichus II, my candidate for Jesus after ascension, um becoming pure light.
This paper presents a new Nabataean inscription dedicated to the Nabataean chief god Dushara and dated to the thirteenth year of the reign of the Nabataean king Malichus II (ad 40–70). It mentions the dedication of ʿlyʾ, a cultic feature rarely attested in Nabataean.
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This seems to read “most high”
Hi all! I haven’t gotten around to deep-diving Zechariah or Daniel yet.
I did make discoveries.
The closer we get to the modern day, the more historical evidence exists. To me it seems that new religion formation is less and less considered to be ‘completely new’ when there is more and more historical evidence. I am looking for physics-based explanations, and as I am not an athiest, perhaps tapped into a kind of guidance.
My working hypothesis, ‘How Government Made God’ examines the potential relationship between deified hegemons and special tribal individuals. I think the Christian Aksumite Kingdom and its sheltering of Muḥammad ﷺ ‘s followers in The First Hijra (c. 613-615 CE) may offer one of the clearest examples? The surahs attribute this to the mercy of Allah, and historians attribute this to the mercy of Aksumite king al-Najāshī.
All historical Islamic sources agree that the Muslim refugees, sometimes referred to as
ṣaḥāba (supporters, followers, companions of Muhammad), found protection under the Negus…
– ‘Selective Appeal to the Negus Narratives: A Case Study in Interreligious Relations, Dr. Paul D. Numrich
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This reads like the Biblical attribution of coordinated troop movements in the Levant to the Lord of Armies, when historically such campaigns were directed by an empire’s Commander of Armies. Often a Lord of some kind, such as Lord of Foreign Lands and Frontier Lands, or Lord of Northern Lands.
The Aksumite royals traced early ancestral lineage to Sabaʾ (modern Yemen), the dominant power of ancient South Arabia. As the Maʾrib Dam in the Sabaean lowlands suffered repeated breaches —foretelling its eventual collapse — Aksum’s chronicles claimed a migration to the Ethiopian highlands, while continuing to control South Arabian ports.
al-Najāshī is simply a title, The Negus, the Arabization of the Ethiopian Ge’ez term Negus meaning ‘King’, but the ‘The’ isn’t arbitrary. Arabic tends to reserve the definite article for divinely sanctioned or historically unique offices:
• al-Masīḥ — The Messiah
• al-Rabb — The Lord
• al-Malik — The Sovereign (used for God)
al-Najāshī’s’s name is given as ‘Ella Saham.
Wiki for ease: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
A straightforward reading of this theonym could be ‘God Shining.’ Unlike other theonyms, ‘Ella does not refer to a specific deity, it just means god. Geʿez lacks a standalone article for ‘The,’ but for the most ritually elevated Negus in history — which he is — this could be conveyed via the prestige ‑h suffix, drawn from the Aramaicized/Syriac theological register. There are many ‘Ella theonymed kings, and this theonym becomes ‘Alla on the coins of Negus ‘Alla Amidas (547-550 CE):
Wiki for ease: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
And in Quranic Arabic, with foreign proper names, the initial glottal stop is sometimes omitted. For example, ‘Ab becoming Ab.
al-Najāshī, The Negus ‘Ella Saham (614-630 CE) does not appear heirarchically different from Narām-Sîn, the first emperor to declare himself a god while living:
Inscription R2:114
Because he secured the foundations of his city in times of trouble, his city requested of [Divine Council for brevity] that he [Narām-Sîn] be made a god…
Inscription in: Religion and Power, Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, University of Chicago 2008, edited by Dr. Nicole Brisch
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(Honestly, I haven’t read this book but I plan to. Found it today looking for the inscription which is also on Wiki.)
Or Akhenaten, Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar. Interiorly, you’re not considered a god, you’re a god to your tribal vassal(s) in the East.
To me it also looks like a triple heirarchy structure is a basic requirement for deification, king-of-kings-of-kings. This is a structure not present in the non-deified Neo-Babylonian, Assyrian, and Persian empires, which instead had a dual layer of governors/satraps. It was easier to achieve The Triple where tribal cheiftans were considered heads of state.
Mani, founder of Manichaeism, in the 3rd C CE saw Aksum as one of the four powers that included Rome, Persia and China. Modern scholarship sees them as a confederacy with a King-of-Kings structure, albeit with a likely third layer of tribal cheiftans known to their people as kings. The Wiki states it as, “The Kingdom of Aksum, or the Aksumite Empire…” My use of the words ’empire’ or ’emperor’ acknowledges that these are modern terms derived from Rome — and that all these Eastern empire leaders, even when acknowledged as such, just liked to use the local word for king.
The First Aksumite Emperor to Reportedly Convert To Christianity
If you want to read something fun, the Aksumite trilingual Ezana Stone (c. 330-360 CE) is written in Greek, Sabean and Ge’ez, but it isn’t a literal translation between the three. In it, it swaps out the divine personages credited by Aksumite king Ezana, and also uses different discourses appropriate for each language:
Wiki for ease: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
In the Sabean text
By the power of the Lord and by the grace of Jesus Christ, the son of the Lord
In the Greek text
Ezana is the ‘son of Ares’ and credits ‘Ares who begat me’
In the Ge’ez text
Ezana credits the ‘Lord of Heaven’
It’s an interesting window into the spectrum of conversion-syncretism.
Year Of the Elephant-the First Hijra (c. 570 CE-c.613-615 CE)
Does the mechanism even matter as to how God assumes a body for the purpose of walking besides a lucky someone? How could a Christian Ethiopian emperor embodying the divine theonym ever befriend an illiterate man without a father from Mecca? (A helpful station perhaps, for a new beginning.)
The Arab writer, Qutayba (d. 889), mentions the fact that the Prophet’s nurse was an Ethiopian lady named Umm Ayman Baraka, whose son,
Usāma b. Zayd, was given by the Prophet the command of an expedition.”
– Aksum in Muslim Historical Traditions, Professor Hussein Ahmed, Journal of Ethiopian Studies, Dec ’96.
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The Aksumite viceroy Abraha entered Mecca in the year of Muḥammad ﷺ’s birth (c. 570 CE), reportedly aiming to challenge the polytheistic worshippers of the Kaʿaba in favor of Ethiopian-Christian monotheism.
Then al‑Najāshī (614-630 CE) the Nagus, at the apex of the Aksumite empire, granted asylum to Muḥammad ﷺ ‘s early followers in The First Hijra (c. 613-615 CE).
Secondly it [the First Hijra] influenced the Prophet and his
followers’ affection for Ethiopians in general, as
the following saying attributed to the Prophet
illustrates:Who brings an Ethiopian man or an
Ethiopian woman into his house brings the blessings of God there. 7 Thirdly, there are a number of Ethiopie loanwords in Qur’ânic Arabic some of which were transmitted through the Muslim returnees: for instance, sana from the Ethiopie sannay
(beautiful) , mishkat from Eth. maskot (window) ,
kif lavn. dual of Eth. kefel (portion, part) ,
hawarivvun. Eth. disciples, apostles. má* ida,
table, and minbar . pulpit, from Eth. manbar ♦ 8
Thus, Aksum possesses the unique distinction of
being at once the cradle of both Christianity and
Islam in Ethiopia…”
-again, Aksum in Muslim Historical Traditions, Professor Hussein Ahmed, Journal of Ethiopian Studies, Dec ’96.
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The Qu’ran is just remarkable for faithfully preserving a place in time. I’ll next see if my working hypothesis can tie all these threads together (with all my new discoveries, I think it can) in a Recap.
My newest discovery
If Orthodox yeshiva Ohr Somayach’s and archaeologist Dr. Phillippe Bohström’s datings are correct (arrived at independently), all three major figures of the Bible lived in the same lifetime as the GOAT emperor. These empires lasted thousands of years – and there’s just a tiny window for the GOAT.
• Jesus Christ (c. 4 BCE-? academic consensus dating) – Augustus (63 BCE-14 CE), Roman Empire
• Moses ( ~1312-1271 BCE Exodus, Ohr Somayach dating, not meant to be exact. 1319-1279 BCE would be the administrative match) – Ramses II (1279 BCE ascension), Egyptian Empire
• Abraham (~1760 BCE ‘Abraham and Sarah start teaching Torah’, Ohr Somayach dating. ~1750 BCE Abraham in Ur, Dr. Philippe Bohström’s dating) – Hammurabi (r. 1792-1750 BCE), Amorite Empire
Ohr Somayach places the Code of Hammurabi alongside Abraham and Sarah as the key world event around 1760 BCE. Though the stele is dated by academic consensus to c. 1755–1750 BCE, Ohr Somayach’s chronology uses approximate rather than precise datings:
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Genesis 14:1
In the days of King Amraphel of Shinar…
Shinar is Hebrew for Sumer, the Mesopotamian kingdom absorbed into the Babylonian Amorite empire.
Wiki for ease:
Hammurabi [also known as Hammurapi] was honored above all other kings of the second millennium BC[40] and he received the unique honor of being declared to be a god within his own lifetime.[41] The personal name “Hammurabi-ili” meaning “Hammurabi is my god” became common during and after his reign.
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Being “declared to be a god within his own lifetime” is to be a god, while living, in the eyes of that person that is declaring it (and added conditions may further involve that person’s lineage, subordinates, and/or territory).
Compare Exodus 6:7 and John 20:28
Exodus 6:7
I will take you as my people, and I will be your God
John 20:28
Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’”
My original hypothesis is that it is an Hammurabi-ili that is the best candidate for the biblical Amraphel. In transliteration, the glottal -h- would mark off El/Ili as its own semantic unit, and the dropping or absence of the final -i (“my”) would indicate that the vassal relationship was formally severed or not present. The Abraham-led coalition win against the Amraphel-led coalition results in Abraham taking posession of the territory that he was given a blessing to do so, a standard in the ancient world.
Abraham being physically in Mesopotamia in 1750 BCE would allow him to receive the Genesis 12:1-3 blessing in the year that Hammurabi passes – which is also 1750 BCE. This is another standard in the ancient world — Jacob receives his blessing in the year that Isaac passes in the Biblical narrative. Herod The Great’s children receive their blessings in the year that he passes, per Josephus.
As I’ve linked earlier in thread, Dr. Bohström’s dating for Abraham rests on the 1750 BCE Ur stelae lamenting the first-ever ‘shepherd’ incursion in (Elamite-ruled) Ur, which led to Amorite rule:
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Hammurabi claimed dominion over Ur in his Code of Hammurabi. If Abraham originated from Ur at that time, Hammurabi was his deified emperor. My working hypothesis ‘How Government Made God,’ which applies to all empires, would be that to whom the emperor would be deified to would not be to a settled population internally, but most likely a tribal vassal under the adê contract, which can require the vassal’s lineage to be pledged.
Since the epithet El Shaddai is invoked only with Abraham and Moses, an epithet that Dr. McLaughlin suggests corresponds to El Shadday, the “God of the Mountains” attested in a Ugarit inscription (and who I believe is a role name for Ba’al Saphon-El and possibly more Storm Gods),
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I am going to read The Covenant at Mount Sinai in the Light of Texts from Mari by Professor Frank H. Polak of Tel Aviv University, which may talk about Abraham, too.
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Mari, a city in Hammurabi’s empire and adjacent the Aram countryside, was within the region that Genesis updates to Aramaea, where it is identified as Abraham’s tribal homeland.
Just like Moses, David, Solomon, or Herod the Great having to conquer the territory that they were promised/blessed, this would result in the Abraham-led and Amraphel-led factions vying for Canaan in succession wars.
Abraham’s war-time leadership of a coalition of tribal kings seems to best match the Bronze Age Amorite model, where figures with titles like abi, ‘Father’ can potentially aspire to šarru rabû — meaning ‘Great King,’ a tribal chieftan permanently presiding over other tribal chieftains, even in peace-time.
In the wider Akkadian tradition, the title šar šarrān, meaning ‘King-of-Kings’ was similarish — just more integrated into imperial hierarchies and with land ownership and not a pastoral tenant model, which seems to be potentially relevant to Leviticus:
Leviticus 25:23
The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants.
In Daniel 2:37, Daniel declares Nebuchadnezzer to be the king of kings.
Daniel 2:37
You, O king, the king of kings…
Mini-majors David, Solomon, Jacob, Isaac and Ishmael – the rise towards Great King
In the Bronze Age collapse, there is no empire, and Psusennes I is the Tanis GOAT:
• David (r. circa 1010 BCE-970 BCE) – Psusennes I (r. 1047–1001 BCE), Tanis Kingdom in Egypt
2 Samuel 5:10
David became greater and greater…
“Became greater and greater” may mean more than becoming awesome and mighty — the Bible already has those terms. As a chieftan king leading a coalition of chieftan kings in wartime, David came the closest to Great King of anyone in the Hebrew Bible/OT. Herod the Great is the Great King of the New Testament. It’s in the name.
Psusennes I, unlike many other Egyptian rulers, does not call himself a god. Elohim, meaning God, is not used for the bestower of the Davidic Covenant, while it is used for the Abrahamic Covenant. For the Davidic Covenant, the bestower is YHWH of hosts (also read as Lord of armies):
Samuel 7:4-5
And the word of YHWH came to Nathan the prophet, saying:
5 “Go and tell my servant David: Thus says YHWH of hosts: I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep, to be prince over my people Israel…
It’s noticeable that the blessing/promise redeemed by David’s son Solomon is given during the Period of GOAT, the PoG.
• Solomon (r. circa 965-931 BCE) –
Son of a shepherd, Solomon makes a rare marital alliance with a Pharaoh’s daughter. In my original hypothesis, the boundaries of his territory described in 1 Kings 4:21 are basically a match to Egypt’s Lord of Rjeṭenu’s territorial boundaries. Within their own ethnos, these Lords were regarded as kings in full standing.
1 Kings 4:21
Solomon was sovereign over all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines, even to the border of Egypt; they brought tribute and served Solomon all the days of his life.
Because Solomon’s bride belonged to the Great House, the ‘Great’ would likely formally rest there. And Solomon is not attributed the word great/gadol in the Biblical narrative.
• Jacob [if Hyksos Yaqub-Har] (reign c. 1650 BCE) 15th Dynasty, with many scarabs in Syrio-Palestine, including what is now Israel.
Hyksos translates to “Ruler of Foreign Lands,” a title that originally denoted tribal chieftains in Egypt’s claimed frontier lands. Jacob’s lineage gets promised the great/gadol by Elohim in Genesis 46:3
Genesis 46:3
Then He said [to Abraham], “I am God, the God of your father; do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there.
The Amorite 14th Dynasty of Egypt (per Dr. Burke under Dr. Bietak) that preceded the Canaanite-origin 15th Dynasty used divine titles like Yakbim the Good God, and Nehesy the Perfect God. This predates Seti I and Ramses II portraying themselves as “the Good God” on stelae at Beth-Shean by like half a millennia.
So far, I have not found any other deified rulers in the ANE for a guesstimate window of 18th-16th C BCE preceding Yaqub-Har’s ascension that could have given a Patriarchal Family blessings besides these. Even Thebes did not have divine titles for this period. Keeping in mind that narratives may be incentivized to claim rightful ascension instead of usurpation, but archaeologically, the transition from 14th to 15th Dynasty is a peaceful blur.
• Isaac doesn’t get the great/gadol directly in blessing, but the local people say he has “become too great/gadal for us,” in Genesis 26:16, which is a recognition of his power or ascendancy.
• Ishmael was the son of a handmaid to a Lord — Abraham is addressed as “my Lord” in Genesis 23:6. It is patrilineage which most mattered for tribal peoples, and Ishmael’s lineage is also assigned a great/gadol:
Genesis 17:20
“And as for Ishmael…I will make him a great nation.”
Where does Muḥammad ﷺ (c. 570-632 CE) situate himself along the continuum of leadership? He neither claims kingship nor is it ever ascribed to him. Instead, he assumes the role of rasūl, a messenger and conduit of revelation. The Qur‘an refrains from applying the adjective ‘great’ to him in a titular or dynastic sense. (A minor correction to my earlier comment, Allah does not walk with him — the Qur‘an denies any embodied theophany.)
Returning to the three biblical majors we can call Bible GOATS — Abraham, Moses, and Jesus — the first two are repeatedly framed with great/gadol, as leaders though not kings. (As for foreigners, some Pharaohs and the ‘great nation of Babylon’ are associated with great/gadol, but not peer kings who are at most ‘mighty’ or ‘strong’. And that completes the list of all people in the Bible associated with the adjective great/gadol.)
Abraham in:
• Genesis 12:2
• Genesis 17:1
• Genesis 18:18
Genesis 12:2
I will make your name great…
Moses in:
• Deuteronomy 34:10
• Exodus 11:3
• Numbers 12:3
Exodus 11:3
Moreover, Moses himself was a man of great (gadol me’od) importance in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh’s officials and in the sight of the people
Again, I’ve written a Platinum Post for my original hypothesis that the original Moses may be Thutmose, Overseer of Foreign Lands and Frontier Lands for His Majesty and Viceroy of Kush. In this hypothesis, the Exodus would occur during Akhenaten’s succession wars. It could be why the anachronistic title of Pharaoh (possibly Ay) follows the King of Egypt (possibly Akhenaten) in that narrative. Thutmose’s roles may add up to the responsibilities of a Great, but here the Ruler of Foreign Lands/Hyksos role has been subsumed into empire as the Overseer of Foreign Lands. (I go into about 10x more detail in my Medium post).
• Jesus Christ never has the word ‘great’ assigned to him in any biblical text, canonical or gnostic, in any language. Instead he is:
Revelation 19:16
….King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
Interestingly, a rare king of kings ascends east of the Jordan in 41 CE, King Malichus II. I may have mentioned him. He suddenly appears in his father’s lineage inscriptions where he was not listed before.
Jesus is the only descendant of Abraham called King of Kings in the Bible.
So, there is the promise to all the nations of the earth in:
Genesis 22:18
…in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.
Roman historian Tacitus (56-120 CE)
Few interpreted these omens as fearful; the majority firmly believed that their ancient priestly writings contained the prophecy that this was the very time when the East should grow strong and that men starting from Judea should possess the world. 45 This mysterious prophecy had in reality pointed to Vespasian and Titus, but the common people, as is the way of human ambition, interpreted these great destinies in their own favour, and could not be turned to the truth even by adversity. – Histories 5.13
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Roman historian Suetonius (69-122 CE):
There had spread over all the Orient an old and established belief, that it was fated at that time for men coming from Judaea to rule the world. This prediction, referring to the emperor of Rome, as afterwards appeared from the event, the people of Judaea took to themselves; accordingly they revolted… –Life of Vespasian 4
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And of course, Jewish historian Josephus (37-c.100 CE), just that he as a Roman citizen in Rome places Vespasian as the fulfiller of that role like somehow.
But now, what did most elevate them in undertaking this war, was an ambiguous oracle that was also found in their sacred writings, how, “about that time, one from their country should become governor of the habitable earth.” 313The Jews took this prediction to belong to themselves in particular, and many of the wise men were thereby deceived in their determination. Now, this oracle certainly denoted the government of Vespasian, who was appointed emperor in Judea – The Jewish War
Could that be part of why Jesus was coming for Nero in Book of Revelation and referencing the Bright Morning Star? (Venus was the symbol of the common deity of war east of the Jordan and in Syria via ancient Mesopotamia).
John 20:28
“Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’”
Looks like this is where tribal recognition of divine kingship may begin again.
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Next discovery:
John 14:6
Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life…”
This seems to coincide with:
• The Way (the Way of Life in Mandaeanism and earlier, The Way of the Akkadian Living God)
• The Truth (Kus‘ta, core tenet that becomes a synonym for the Living God)
• The Life (hypostasis of the Living God)
The Way
Thou hast shown us the Way of Life
– The Ginza Rabba 45.2.3
To behold the Great One in the House of Perfection.
As They called them and they answered not,
When they call, who will answer them?
Because it was given to them but they took not,
Who will give to them when they ask ?
They hated the Way of Life and its Abode. But loved the abode of the wicked.
–The Ginza Rabba, chapter 90
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In an earlier millennium:
In the tripartite division of the Babylonian Sky, the northern sky was the Way of Enlil, the equator and half the zodiac occupied the Way of Anu, and the southern sky was the Way of Ea.
– Origins of the ancient constellations, the Mesopotamian traditions, John H. Rogers, 1998
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On water ablution deity Ea’s name:
The translation of Living-one seems to be the only option for reasonable interpretation.
– Peeter Eespak, Ancient Near Eastern Gods Enki and Ea: Diachronical Analysis of Texts and Images From The Earliest Sources To The Neo-Sumerian Period
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Revelation 1:18
I am The Living One…
For John the Baptist’s followers, the Mandaeans, “The Way” is the soul’s route back to the World of Light that traverses an astral corridor:
…the ascent of the soul through the heavenly purgatories of the planets and the signs of the zodiac…
– Dr. Kurt Rudolph, Mandaean Religion
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And that every earthly person has a counterpart in this non-material World of Light:
The symbol of the Great Life is ‘living water’, that is flowing water, or yardna [Jordan]…The second great vivifying power is light, which is represented by personifications of light…This dual application was characteristic of the cults of Anu and Ea in Sumerian times…
– The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, Their Cults, Customs, Magic, Legends, and Folklore
– E. S. Drower, 1932
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Anu, the unmanifested supreme deity of Mesopotamian religion, became vertically syncretized with Ea (and Enlil) by bestowing his power and titles.
Indeed, when other gods are elevated to a position of leadership, they are said to receive the anûtu, the “Anu-power.”
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Ea’s original Sumerian name, Enki, means ‘Lord of Earth.’ In my original hypothesis, Anu, the Lord of Heaven, awarding his power to Enki, the Lord of Earth, results in Enki becoming Lord of Heaven and Earth.
Edit: Found again:
Grandiloquent lord of heaven and earth, self-reliant, father Enki
– Enki and The World Order
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Same title as in Acts:
Acts 17:24
The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands…
Worship of the Great Living God in Mandaeanism involves no shrines or temples.
It is not lord but maker of heaven and earth in the much-earlier Melchizedek’s blessing. The comparison still holds, Enki (Ea) made heaven and earth in Genesis Eridu.
Genesis 14:19
He blessed him and said, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth…
This could align with Hebrews’ Chapter 7 exposition on how Jesus is a priest in the order of Melchizedek, and not Aaron.
Similarly, it’s my original hypothesis that Enki’s rare role as a Great Lord adds the Great to the epithet, Great Living [One/God]. It’s just like how a king over other kings merits the Great. This would also explain why the honorific of Great/Rabba is not used sometimes in Mandaean texts where their deity is simply called The Life, and even simply Life — in my original hypothesis, this may be evidence for incorporating traditions earlier than the acquisition of those titles.
Then for Anu, the adding of the formative suffix -sh could be nominalizing, essentially naming Anu into manifestation as Anush, a name that Dr. McGrath translates as Enoch.
Again, the Mandaean texts seem to assert that their Judaea-origin diaspora left the worship of Adonai (Yahweh) for the Great Living God at the time of the miraculous conception of a messiah:
And they loved the Lord, that is, Adonai , until in the House of Israel there was created something which was not placed in the womb of Mary , a daughter of Moses. It was hidden in her womb for nine months and bewitched her until the nine months were fulfilled and she was in labour and brought forth a messiah.
…and he called the people to himself and spoke of his death and took away some of mysteries of the (Sacred?) Meal and abstained from the Food[…]and joineth to himself a people, and they are called Christians.
… and from Nisrat (Nazareth) a city of the Jews…
– The Haran Gawaitha
(Note: I redacted the polemical portion with […] as it is useful, but not central to the point.)
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And I’m sure all that went over well.
Acts 9:2
…and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.
Acts 19:9
When some were becoming hardened and disobedient, speaking evil of the Way before the congregation, he left them, taking the disciples with him, and argued daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus.”
The Truth
The truth (kusta) that was aforetime, in the Beginning…
– The Ginza Rabba 77.7.7
(But) I shall not be put to the question, because of the Word of Truth (Kushta)…
– The Ginza Rabba 18.5.3
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Kušṭa (Classical Mandaic: ࡊࡅࡔࡈࡀ, lit. ’truth’, Modern Mandaic pronunciation: [ˈkuʃtˤa]) can have several meanings. Its original literal meaning is “truth” in the Mandaic language, and is thus typically used to refer to the Mandaean religious concept of truth…Alternatively, kušṭa can be used as a synonym for Hayyi Rabbi [The Great Life] or God in Mandaeism.
Wiki for ease (mine):
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For a possible earlier Ea antecedent, I read an academic claim yesterday that Ea was first a god of truth, and it is only in a later period that this truth-wielding transforms into the god of ‘clever’. It is probably a Peeter Eespak paper, and I will dig for it.
The Life
In the name of the Life!
– The Ginza Rabba 3.1 (and repeatedly onwards)
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The Mandaeans believe in one god, who we call Haii Rabi, which translates to mean THE GREAT LIFE or The GREAT LIVING GOD.
– Nashmi Yuhana, Contemporary Issues For The Mandaean Faith, 2013
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Jesus doesn’t seem to be claiming to be ‘The Great Life’ but ‘The Life’, and not ‘The Great Living [One/God]’ but ‘The Living One’.
all copyright the adorable one
The quick answer as to why lore about a 5th Millennium BCE Sumerian rivers and springs deity could reappear on the banks of the First Century Jordan (and, traditionally, at Seven Springs) might be that there was a Sumerian Antiquarian Revival in 4th-1rst C BCE Uruk.
By a strange irony of history Sumerian even outlived Akkadian as a literary language since
the latest body of literary texts yet uncovered on Mesopotamian soil, the library of
the kalû Ea-balässu-igbi from 1rst century B.C.
– Antiquarian Theology in Seleucid Uruk,
Dr. Paul-Alain Beaulieu,1992
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Ea‑balāssu‑iqbi means “Ea has promised.” Now the original Anu, Enlil, and Ea stock is up and the deity portfolio of the fallen Neo‑Babylonians is down. Seleucid Uruk digs farther into the revealed past than even 6th C CE Nabonidus did with 23rdish C BCE Sargon of Akkad, continuing…
…Babylonian notions that revealed knowledge was given by antediluvian sages (Lambert 1957:9) and so, whatever comes from the past is much closer to original “truth.”
– Dr. Irene J. Winter, Babylonian Archaeologists of The(ir) Mesopotamian Past, 2000
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“Whatever comes from the past is much closer to original truth” reminding of:
The truth (kusta) that was aforetime, in the Beginning…
– The Ginza Rabba 77.7.7
A concept expanded as the Word of Truth here:
(But) I shall not be put to the question, because of the Word of Truth (Kushta)…
– The Ginza Rabba 18.5.3
A Mandaean issue with Christianity is that these concepts were simplified. Compare:
John 1:1
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
So, the tells of Abraham’s Ur of the Chaldees and Enki/Ea’s Eridu occupy the same lagoon system as modern Nasoriyah. It’s all just maybe six miles apart. Uruk is just a few miles farther. Over millennia, ports silt, irrigation lowers the water table, someone else’s kingdom diverts the river, and along with natural climactic change this means there must be the rise of a new idyllic entrepot city.
The remains of the ancient cities of Ur, Uruk and Eridu, today in the desert but originally situated near freshwater marshes which receded or became saline before drying up, best exemplify the impact of the unstable deltaic landscape of the Tigris and Euphrates upon the rise and fall of large urban centers.
– United Nations World Heritage Committee, 2019
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Eridu, Ur, Uruk and other settlements on the Euphrates-Tigris alluvial plain contain artifacts of John the Baptist’s followers, you know them as the Mandaeans:
Mandaic texts inscribed upon curled-up lead rolls and especially Mandaean incantation bowls and lead amulets have been found in large numbers at many important sites such as Abu Shahrain (formerly Eridu), Warka (Uruk), Tell Uheimir and Ingharra (Kish), Afak (Nippur/Nuffar), Tell al-Hiba (Lagash), Telloh (Girsu), Tell Jokha (Umma), Tell al-Muqayyar (Hamazi and Ur), etc. These settlements are all on the Euphrates–Tigris alluvial plain…
– Probing the Relationships Between Mandaeans (the Followers of John the Baptist), Early Christians, and Manichaeans, Brikha H. S. Nasoraia,
Religions 2025,
More in this weekend’s discoveries:
Sumerian Enki is also attributed as “The Living One”, and this is not just the likely meaning of his Akkadian name, Ea. Also, “Lord of Life.”
In An = a-nu-um god lists, the section giving the names of Enki contains (II 165) en-ti (R. Litke, God-Lists, pp. 87–88). The name is translatable as ‘the lord of life.’
Hammurapi B hymn to Enki titles him the “Lord of Life.”
A bilingual list from Ebla translates the Sumerian name Enki as ‘a-u9 meaning, “The Living One.” Enki is most probably translated as “the living one”.
– all Dr. Peeter Eespak’s, The God Enki in Royal Sumerian Ideology and Mythology, 2015
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And in Sumerian King Shulgi’s hymn to Enki, he is “lord of heaven and earth.” (Enlil has this title in Mesopotamian inscriptions, too.)
This completes the search for the role name of Ancient Near East running water ablution deities — imo it seems to be iterations on The Living [One/God.]
Dr. Eespak makes a very interesting claim, that Ugarit El resembles Father Ea? I think this would help to explain why Jacob (a name which I think may contain the Ya theonym for Hayya) receives his new name, Isra-el at the Jordan river (the Jabbok is a tributary.) And the ladder dream (ziggurats being Mesopotamian temples). And possibly why both Elohim and the antiquarian El name is used:
Genesis 35:1
Then God [Elohim] said to Jacob, “Go up to Bethel and settle there, and build an altar there to God [El]…
El’s home
Ugaritic sources depict El’s home as:
at the source of the rivers, in the midst of the double deep of the rivers in the heart of the seas…(Day 2002, p 25; Lurker, 2004 p. 56).
– Asli Kahraman Cinar, The God El And His Attributes in Ugarit, Oannes 2025
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Enki’s home
Enki, the king of the Abzu [the watery deep], placed in charge of all this him who holds a sceptre in his right hand, him who with glorious mouth submits to verification the devouring force of Tigris and Euphrates…
–Enki and The World Order, Oxford translation
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The Akkadian expression, pi narati, the mouth (confluence) of two rivers in l. 198 is related to a similar expression found in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle where the abode of El is found at the source/vase of two rivers, in the midst of the flow of two oceans…”
– Professor Daniel Bodi, The Double Current and the Tree of Healing in Ezekiel 47:1-12 in Light of Babylonian Iconography and Texts, 2015
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El is the “father of mankind” who is “wise unto eternity”, and the only god of mercy in the Ugarit pantheon, and Enki is basically these things in the Mesopotamian pantheon. The language of El’s interaction producing deities Dawn and Dusk is also similar to that of Enki’s.
El is the “kind/caring El”. El saying, “Does he desire a kingdom like that of the father of man?” may offer light on the “son of man” question. Both deities are uniquely considered father to both humans and gods.
En-ki is a Lord of the Earth. El is a Lord of the Earth.
Eliade observes the paradoxical character of El, noting: “Despite being introduced with epithets such as
‘Lord of the Earth’, El appears as physically weak…”
Again, quotes from Asli Kahraman Cinar, The God El And His Attributes in Ugarit, Oannes 2025
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But I’m not aware of any Living or Life epithets for Ugaritic El; perhaps there isn’t a connection after all, which is a genuine possibility, or perhaps Abraham brings that understanding from Ur, or perhaps even there was an Ancient Near East interpretio.
It makes it more interesting that with Adonai being the usual spoken term for Yahweh by First Century Jews, the antiquarian choice of speaking El’s name as Eli, “my God” in quoting Psalm 22 is attributed to Jesus.
all copyright someone nice
I’ve found a scholar who sees Mut in the Book of Isaiah, and he came at it from a totally different angle than I did.
Recap – I think the God of Isaiah restates Egyptian Mut/Mother myths like The Destruction of Humanity, and then restates Mesopotamian Father Ea myths – like saving humanity and installing the mes, the blueprint of civilization, in the wilderness:
Many difficulties and perplexities in Isa 28:1-22 can be resolved by reading the text as a condemnation of the Judeans’ seeking protection from Assyria by means of a covenant with one of
Egypt’s major deities, the mother goddess Mut. Her close association with the Egyptian throne would have given her the “right” to make a covenant; her protective aspect explains why those in distress would seek her; her motherhood explains why the Judeans who seek her are characterized as children; the prominence of drunkenness and flowers in her cult explains the appearance of those elements in Isaiah 28. She also was associated with the underworld as a protectress
of the dead, and it is likely that her name sounded very much like the Hebrew word HID,
“death”, making Isaiah’s double entendre a natural play on words. Other features of the text such as the overwhelming flood refer to the Neo-Assyrians; Isaiah warns that Egypt and Mut cannot
protect Judah from their assault.
– Dr. Christopher B. Hays, 2022 The Covenant with Mut:
A New Interpretation of Isaiah 28:1-22
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It’s a stitching-in point, imho.
So, the brilliant Dr. Eespak participated on the board of something called The Mellamu Project:
The main purpose of The Mellamu Project is to investigate the continuity, transformation and diffusion of Mesopotamian and Ancient Near Culture from the third millennium through the ancient world until Islamic times and after.
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But I think the Ginza Rabba, meaning the Great Book, of John the Baptist’s followers the Mandaeans does this from the 6th Millennium BCE on. Here’s my original working hypothesis worksheet matching role names:
First Life: Enki in Anu-ship
Sumerian: Enki, “Lord of Life” and “Lord of Earth” in Anu-ship.
Akkadian: Ea, “The Living [One/God]” in Anu-ship.
Notes: Anu is the immaterial “Lord of Heaven” and origin of everything whose name literally means Sky/Heaven. Anu retains his original name into Akkadian without translation, unlike Enki.
Region: Tigris-Euphrates alluvial basin (Eridu, Ur, Uruk, Nasoriyah)
Second Life: Iah “in Anu”
Notes: Iah/Yah may actually mean “Great Ea” in my original hypothesis. I know, I’m surprised too.
-h if suffixed is Egyptian ‘Greatʻ.
H- if prefixed is West Semetic, ‘The’ .
It seems to take the duat perspective – the shining crescent symbolizing rebirth/Life above, and a watery abyss origin with a rebirth/Life river below.
Region: Thebes, Upper Egypt
Third Life: Osiris-Iah “in Anu”
Notes: Iah is syncretized into Osiris in the New Kingdom period, with statuettes (idols?) only beginning to appear in the Late Period around 7th C BCE:
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As for the syncretism between natively Egyptian and foreign deities, like Seth Baal, their names are not formally merged but instead they are interpretio’d, as far as I can tell, at least in their origination stage.
“Osiris in Anu” is a direct quote from the Papyri of Ani, the scribe. Anu is the form used for An, the Egyptian “Lord of Heaven” in the Ani Papyri, 1240 BCE, which sounds a loooot like Mesopotamian Anu. Except in Egypt it’s about twos – Anut has split into having a female companion Anu-t, where in Mesopotamia it’s about sevens (you see where I’m going with this and The Ark).
O thou Divine Substance, from whom all living things came into being. Thou didst send forth the word when the earth was submerged with silence, O thou Only One, who didst dwell in heaven before ever the earth and the mountains came into being…Who is this? This is Osiris.”
Heliopolis has another name, and in the Bible that is ʻOn.’
Variant transcriptions include Awnu and Annu. The name survived as Coptic ⲱⲛŌn.** you do not have permission to see this link **
My bolding. Wiki for ease: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
Region: Thebes-Heliopolis (Upper + Lower Egypt)
Special Mention god: Ptahil
Notes: Ptah-El per Dr. McGrath. Called Fourth Life in some manuscripts. Deity of creation in Lower Egypt + deity of creation in Canaan.
Region: Lower Egypt-Canaan
Special Mention lord god: Yaldebaoth
Notes: Meaning in my original hypothesis, Ya-El of Armies, Ya-‘L-D- (of, and letters are not duplicated in common names, so this D also substitutes for S in the alt spelling of) Sebaoth.
Arrived at via Wikipedia and Robert M. Grant. The Lord of Armies to Judah would be the Lord of Foreign Lands to Egypt, in-house. This Lord role is occupied by Seth, Ba’al (19th C-9th C BCE), Resheph at some point, then Ha, matching the 9th C BCE period of the introduction of Tetragrammaton stelae, if YHW + H.
Region: Syrio-Palestine
Special Mention: God Most High
This imo is likely a role name that can be utilized by maybe the exalted Enki/Ea as Hayya Rabbu and El, which allows for kingship like Osiris also does, but Mandaeans do not accept king-priests, just priests.
• Barley bread is the famous product of the Tigris-Euphrates
Enki said to Ninmah: “For your creatures I have decreed a fate, I have given them their daily bread
–Enki and Ninmah translation
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• Wine is the famous product of Syrio-Palestine’s mountains
WINE TO DELIGHT THE THIRSTY,
THE WINE OF ECSTASY,
(FROM) HIGH UP IN THE LEBANON,
DEW TRANSFORMED INTO FOAMING WINE BY EL.[44]
– Ugaritic text KTU 1.22 I, lines 18b–20
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The Elephantine papyri Yahu/Yahw would then with the exalting Akkadian -u, in my hypothesis, read left-to-right, “Life The Great” ie, “The Great Life.”
What do I win? Folk star husband please
all copyright someone in love with a folk star
Steefen:
Stitching-in-point, or SIP,
is an internal network signal that acts as a cue
for a provider to insert a local advertisement or program into a national broadcast
Serene:
I’ve found a scholar who sees Mut in the Book of Isaiah, and he came at it from a totally different angle than I did.
Recap – I think the God of Isaiah restates Egyptian Mut/Mother myths like The Destruction of Humanity, and then restates Mesopotamian Father Ea myths – like saving humanity and installing the mes, the blueprint of civilization, in the wilderness:
Many difficulties and perplexities in ** you do not have permission to see this link ** can be resolved by reading the text as a condemnation of the Judeans’ seeking protection from Assyria by means of a covenant with one of
Egypt’s major deities, the mother goddess Mut.
It’s a stitching-in point, imho.
Steefen:
What is the national network
and
what is the local insertion?
Stitching-in-point, or SIP,
is an internal network signal that acts as a cue
for a provider to insert a local advertisement or program into a national broadcastSteefen:
What is the national network
and
what is the local insertion?
I don’t even have an Associate’s Steefan, you’re asking the wrong person
Hi! Yep, I wasn’t aware that Stitching-In Point was a tech term. Thank you for saying that Bruce, and I’m glad that Steefen pointed it out too because it is apropo.
Jen and Dr. Ehrman just gifted me with a scholarship to return here (I reached out) because the gov shutdown slowed my roll a little.
It’s been four weeks. I’ve now found more amazing scholarship that may help me better articulate my newest claim:
CLAIM
The Jesus movement was influenced by an Antiquarian Revival that begins with Seleucid, then early Arsacid Uruk in Mesopotamia. This would be similar to how the Book of Daniel was influenced by the earlier Neo-Babylonian revival of antique religiosity in Mesopotamia, which is academic consensus.
Again, the Antiquarian Revival re-calibrated their religion to the earliest cuneiform, Sumerian:
Beaulieu, P.-A. Antiquarian Theology in Seleucid Uruk
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While the previous Neo-Babylonians claimed to have cracked the 23rd C BCE Akkadian cuneiform layer. The Antiquarian Revival continued to use Akkadianized language for Sumerian cosmology. This would then be similar to John the Baptist’s followers, the Mandaeans:
Indeed, much of the Mandaeans’ thought and practice, especially their rituals of water ablution, have deep origins going back to Sumer, Akkad and Babylonia…
– Dr. Brikha H. S. Nasoraia, Probing the Relationships Between Mandaeans, Early Christians, and Manichaeans, University of Sydney, 2006
Sumero-Akkadian semiotics and restated phrases could be helpful in being understood by an in-group, while concealing information to an out-group:
Matthew 13:11-14
He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says:
‘You will indeed listen but never understand,
and you will indeed look but never perceive.”
This is why Jesus is now teaching in parables—not to reveal the truth of God to all, but to conceal.
– Dr. Jonathan T. Pennington
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How could an antiquarian trend originating in Seleucid Uruk reach Judaea and the Jesus movement?
The offering for well-being in Seleucid-through-early-Arsacid Uruk is the same as the offering for well-being for royalty in Nabataea, “For the life of….” Other Semetic-speaking cultures do not have this blessing. This blessing is discussed in:
Yasuki Mitsuma’s 2015 The Offering For Well-Being in Seleucid and Arsacid Uruk:
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The phrase ‘for the life of’ connects royal dedications to public acts of loyalty in Nabataean culture.
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The Nabataeans may have originated in Mesopotamia, migrated westwards between the sixth and fourth centuries BC, and settled in north-west Arabia and much of what is now Jordan.
– Dr. Jane Taylor, 2002, Petra and the Lost Kingdom of the Nabataeans
Recapping here – Nabataea was a border kingdom with Judaea. The ruler of Galilee, Herod Antipas’ long-time first wife was Phaesalis, who was Nabataean. Herod Antipas himself was 1/4, as Herod the Great’s mother was the Nabataean Cypros. Josephus in AJ 18.5 links the war over the breaking of this marital alliance with John the Baptist who protests the second marriage with Herodias:
Luke 3:19
But when John rebuked Herod the tetrarch because of his marriage to Herodias, his brother’s wife, and all the other evil things he had done
Hmm, I wonder what side of the marital alliance dispute this John the Baptist might be on.
In the Gospels, Chuza, the husband of Joanna who traveled with Jesus in Luke 8:3 has a classically Nabataean name, per Dr. McGrath. So there’s Nabataean presence in Jesus’ movement, and also in Galilee, Peraea, Samaria and Judaea for generations leading up to this. The First Century Nabataeans additionally had aegis in Auranitis, the road to Damascus, Edessa, and communities in merchant nodes spanning Alexandria, Asia Minor, and Puteoli.
Note that in the Antiquarian Revival of Seleucid Uruk, not all Sumerian lore is reprised. While Uruk still had the large pantheon typical of a multicultural metropolis, the Antiquarian Revival focuses strongly on its original and virtually forgotten patron deity Anu, the Lord of Heaven, as a supreme deity. In this context, he is uniquely given a wife with his own name feminized, Antu, representing the masculine and feminine aspects of a single divine entity.
Theologians in Seleucid Uruk (Beaulieu 1992: 57-58) treat Anu and Antu consistently as one single divine manifestation. See further J.G. Westenholz 2010a: 320. These two divinities, Anu and Antu might be said to reflect the earlier Akkadian Ilum (‘god’) and ‘Astar (‘goddess/Istar’) – the masculine and feminine aspects of a single divine entity.
– Dr. Joan Westenholz, Goddesses in Context
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There are also Seleucid Uruk texts syncretizing this supreme deity Anu’s femininized aspect of Antu with Ishtar, facilitating an even greater consolidation.
Consequently, a syncretism was created between Antu and Istar, with Antu absorbing the attributes of Istar.507 As previously, the consequence of the pronouncement ‘Let Sud be called NinliT was the amalgamation of Sud by Ninlil. Similarly, the declaration of the change of the name of Istar, “may ‘exalted Antu’ be your name”, in the composition Exaltation of Istar leads to this assimilation of aspects of Istar by Antu.508 In this composition, Anu accepts the young maiden Istar as his equal and spouse under the name Antu, endows her with the all the divine ordinances (m e/parsu) in his possession and exalts her in the sky as Venus.
– again, Dr. Joan Westenholz, Goddesses in Context
Ea (“the Living One”), the deity of water ablution, also receives a resurgence. He effectively becomes second in prominence, and Anu absorbs some of previously high-ranking deities Enlil and Marduk’s epithets. Ea appears under his role name, Nudimmud meaning “Shaper/Creator”, along with Anu in the earlier Enuma Elish (c. 12th–11th century BCE):
And the god Anu…
Nudimmud [Ea], whom his fathers, his begetters…..
Abounding in all wisdom…
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As Anu’s son, sometimes first-born in certain texts, and possessor of anûtu, Anu’s divine power, he functions as the immanent bearer and executor of Anu’s authority on earth. In the later Ancient Near East, phrases like “I and ___ are one” commonly denoted this type of authorized agency or shared sovereign authority. Reminding of:
John 10:30
“I and the Father are one.”
With Anut absorbing Ishtar’s dove and morning star symbology, could Anu, Anut and son Ea bear a comparison to the concept of the Trinity?
I’ve previously wondered if Judaea’s neighbor deity Dushara, who likely has the same epithet of The Great Life as the Mandaean deity, might be syncretic too. Nabataean royals themselves worshipped Dushara almost exclusively or exclusively — I haven’t found an inscription of theirs worshipping another deity yet. The Nabataean triad that I’ve mentioned of Dushara, ‘Ashtar/Ares and Theandrios (with Theandrios emerging in the first century CE) could even potentially iterate from earlier syncretism, as there was a First Century religious consolidation movement like that of Seleucid Uruk for their Nabataean subjects. And of course, Nabonidus’ stela of the triad of Sin, Shamash, and Ishtar was discovered in Nabataea’s original capitol of Sela around 2018.
Could some Sumero-Akkadian myths and proverbs possibly bear fruitful comparison to the novel introductions of the New Testament?
Sumerian myth Enki and Ninmah
For your creatures I have decreed a fate, I have given them their daily bread
Compare:
Matthew 6:11
Give us this day our daily bread
Sumerian Proverb
Whoever has walked with truth generates life
Compare:
2 John 4
“I rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as we were commanded by the Father.”
Also compare the Mandaean baptism prayer:
My Sign is in the great jordan of living water…my knees bless and worship the Great Life. My feet tread the ways of truth…
• Ea’s (“The Living One”) healing incantation protocol: first diagnosis, then healing the spiritual cause, then healing the physical cause — all done through his son:
The spell formula called the Marduk-Ea incantation from ancient Mesopotamia is unique in history of medicine due to its documented use of almost 3000 years. The incantation was recited in exorcistic healing rituals.
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• Foxes in Sumerian proverbs are practically obsessed upon as THE adversary. So many fox proverbs, like, “The fox lies even to Enlil.” And one is regent too.
Luke 13:32
“He [Jesus] replied, “Go tell that fox [King Herod], ‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.
Luke 9:38
“Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”
Sumerian Proverb
In the sky there is the raven; on the earth there is the mongoose; in the desert there is the lion ……; my husband! Where shall I go?
Revelation 3:16
“So I will spit you out of my mouth, because you are only warm and not hot or cold.”
Compare:
Sumerian Proverb
Let it be piping hot, so that it does not become cold… (no halfway measures)
Sumerian Proverb
the steward rejoices when the estate increases its income (compare Parable of the Minas, especially Luke 11:16-19)
Sumerian proverbs taken from Oxford’s ** you do not have permission to see this link **
• And, the fish-men of Ea (“the Living one”) whose name, ‘apkallu’ means wise/sage
Wiki for ease:
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reminds me of the Jesus fish (on this early inscription called ‘fish of the living’). Wiki for ease:
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Lastly, about the Parables’ artful choice to ‘reveal and conceal’. The bells are ringing for Sumero-Akkadian catchphrases in the Testimonium Flavium.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
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