Alien Talk Podcast
Alien Talk Podcast
The Enuma Elish: An Alien Creation Story
Gods, ETs, or both? Does our creation narrative tell of a cosmic battle high up in the Heavens? The stories we've cherished for millennia as divine revelations may have very ancient—and potentially extraterrestrial—origins than most realize. Our dive into the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth that predates Genesis by over a thousand years, reveals shocking parallels that challenge conventional religious understanding.
When 19th-century archaeologists unearthed the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, they discovered clay tablets containing creation narratives startlingly similar to Biblical accounts. The Enuma Elish, an epic poem written in Akkadian cuneiform script, tells of primordial waters dividing, skies forming, and humans being created to serve gods. These are all elements found in the Book of Genesis, but with dramatically more detail about cosmic battles and involving multiple deities.
We explore the provocative question proposed by ancient astronaut theorists: what if these weren't mythologies at all, but attempts by ancient humans to document encounters with advanced beings using the limited vocabulary available to them? As Zecharia Sitchin pointed out, while later cultures might create myths, how does the very first civilization—Sumer—get a myth? Perhaps their accounts weren't metaphorical but historical and then filtered down through generations of oral tradition before being condensed into the Biblical form that we know today.
The evidence suggests the Old Testament's formation occurred much later than many believe—compiled after the Babylonian exile around 520 BCE, allowing ample time for Mesopotamian cosmologies to influence Hebrew thought. Archaeological discoveries even reveal that early Israelite religion included a female consort for Yahweh named Asherah, paralleling the divine couples in surrounding cultures, before later theological developments emphasized monotheism and abstraction.
Whether you approach these texts through faith, historical interest, or the ancient alien perspective, they demand the same rigorous standards of evidence and critical thinking. The striking similarities between these accounts offer profound insights into humanity's earliest attempts to understand our origins and purpose. We must ask how they continue to shape our worldviews today?
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Hello everybody, thank you for joining us on Alien Talk Podcast. This is the show where we discuss all things about aliens and UFOs and, as always, we push the limits of our understanding about subjects that pertain to the existence of extraterrestrial life, the presence of UFOs and perhaps even the very meaning of human life here on Earth. We explore the mysteries of the cosmos and the enshrouded secrets of our ancient history, constantly pondering what is out there in the far reaches of space and asking questions about what our ancestors really encountered in the revered stories from the distant past. So, the last time Laurie and I were with you, we had the pleasure of hosting our good friend and colleague, Reverend James Allerton.
Joe:He is a police detective just like us, and he is also a chaplain for many public service agencies out here in the Tucson area, helping to serve the counseling needs of first responders in our area. And, of course, as his title implies, he is a Christian pastor. And when he was here with us we had the opportunity to examine the intersectionality of religious dogmas with those of extraterrestrial intelligence ideas and the idea of extraterrestrial life existing elsewhere in the universe, and we were able to compare and contrast the major points of the two subjects and debate the philosophy tied to the long-held biblical beliefs that are prevalent within Judeo-Christianity, and Laurie, I thought it was a very healthy dialogue, very honest and straightforward, a bit lengthy but yet all-encompassing, and actually there was more that I wanted to bring up, more about scriptural eisegesis, of which I would have liked to have had further opportunity to challenge him on that.
Laurie:Yeah, I agree, there was more I wanted to get into about the narratives in the book of Genesis and debate the young earth theory to which so many creationists hold and I believe James even said that he holds to that belief as well and that and the idea of dinosaurs referenced in the Bible to have existed alongside humans, all of that with the young earth creation, and I think we could have talked a little more, which would have turned that into something like a four-hour long episode. But you know, I mean we could have, I mean we could have talked about this for, you know, six to eight hours, but you know I wouldn't mind having James come back on sometime to discuss more topics in further detail.
Joe:I would like that too. Further detail I would like that too. I think we really need to dig into the meaning of faith in the Bible and the adherence that people have to the belief that it is inerrant and infallible, despite the preponderance of evidence that fails to support that idea. I think it is important to hold people everyone accountable for their theology, whatever it may be Christian or otherwise. In other words, we should expect them and us to provide reasoning for why they and we believe what we do, and that should be not threatening. That should be something where we desire to seek sensible and provide sensible explanations to our ideas, our precepts and our teachings, and we should all hold ourselves to that standard, I believe.
Laurie:Right? Well, we need to scrutinize and analyze the ancient alien theory with the same methods that we would with religion. Overall, I think the debate is good. It is a good thing that helps expand our understanding of complex topics.
Joe:Yeah, and we spent a good amount of time with James going over the Westhoff and Billy Carson debate from early January. One of the points brought up from that is the significance of a very ancient Babylonian text known as the Enuma Elish and its influence as a literary source to the biblical creation story and it's nothing new. We brought it up here on this show plenty of times before, but the last time we were on we concluded with the need to expand a little more on the enumeralish and its importance to much of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition as it comes from the book of Genesis, the intriguing points that a Bible scholar who asserts its historical accuracy, wes Uff, and Billy Carson raised during their debates and today.
Laurie:You know we want to focus specifically on Wes Huff's assertion, for a little bit anyway, that there aren't many similarities between the details in Genesis and the Enuma Elish. Now, remember, Wes Huff is an apologist and scholar of the Bible who asserts the historical accuracy of it. Billy Carson, on the other hand, is the ancient alien theorist who supports the idea that there is a complex interchange and adaptivity between the Biblical narrative and proposition that much of it could be explained as coming from extraterrestrial encounters in the ancient past, by which some people were able to describe what they saw through lavish and vivid supernatural imagery, like we find in these texts and it's not just the Bible but all of the ancient mythologies everywhere worldwide. But there is one story that stands out as being very similar to the one found in the book of Genesis and that is the Enuma Elish, and in their debate, wes and Billy fully agreed with each other that verses mentioning the separation of the waters are nearly identical. However, we know from reading its translations that it is full of passages that parallel Genesis.
Laurie:But you know with even more detail. So, consider what we have in Genesis 1: 6 to 10, with God saying you know, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the water From. I think that's where they separate the fresh and the sea water, the salt water, and God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above, and God called the expanse sky. What we have is God separating water from water to make the sky the atmosphere, I guess. So, the big question is you know, what does that even mean? And there's no mention of him making water in the first place, because you know, the Spirit of the Lord hovered over the face of the deep is what it says in the Bible.
Joe:Yeah, it's like the water was there.
Laurie:Already there.
Joe:Yeah, there was no creation of water. It was just there along with God. Right Now. This has always been a perplexing use of semantics and has baffled people for centuries, whether theologians or scientists. It's always made me wonder. So, if we are to accept creationism, then we need to grasp what is going on in the making of the sky and ocean, and really all we have is God speaking it into existence out of nothingness. You know, are we just to assume that everything was made by magic?
Joe:Ancient people did not understand many of the natural processes going on in the world in terms of knowing about geology, meteorology, astronomy and so on. So this idea of the firmament, which was thought to be a mass of water, sort of encapsulating the sky and the earth below it, it was never supported by any kind of evidence, nothing that suggests the Earth was once inside what seems to be something like a shaker snow globe, one of those ornaments we've all seen, in which the water surrounds what is inside. There's no evidence that such a thing ever existed. So what was it? What was being talked about? When you're mentioning the firmament, it could be, as we see as typical and common in mythological literature is that it is referring to something as metaphor or allegory and not so much as a literal description. So is it talking about something else? That could very well be completely different from the way we are reading it today.
Laurie:Very well be completely different from the way we are reading it today. Yeah, again, the Bible has it all. In a nutshell, I believe, and definitely based on faith, because there is no evidence to prove. You know how it was formed in the biblical text, but something like the firmament might be symbolic of something else, like perhaps something celestial or interstellar. Well, you know, compare what I read from Genesis to the script on the first tablet of the new militia.
Laurie:That starts with the line they I guess they, being the gods, had mingled their waters together before Meadowland and Reedbed was to be found when not one of the gods had been formed or had come into being. When not one of the gods had been formed or had come into being, when no destinies had been decreed, the gods were created within them. La-mu and La Anu Amu were formed and came into being. While they grew and increased in stature, ansar and Kesar, who excelled them, were created and they prolonged their days. They multiplied their years. Anu, their son, could rival his father. Anu, the son son equaled Ansar. And it goes on for about 300 or so verses describing how everything on land, sea and sky was formed through a cosmic battle of the gods way up in heaven.
Laurie:And I believe I said I got rid of that from Genesis. That was a mistake. That's actually from the Enuma Elish, but just from this passage alone, you know, we see that what is taking place is extraterrestrials, as it is happening beyond Earth. So, the question would be, you know, are these extraterrestrials really spirits and gods or are they life forms with flesh and blood, physical bodies much like our own blood, physical bodies, much like our own?
Laurie:And you know, basically we have the very brief first and second days of biblical creation that is elaborated in an almost treatise or essay form. You know, now it's really no less obscure than you know what we read in Genesis, but it is definitely way more comprehensive and that's why I was saying the Bible has it condensed in like a nutshell version. It tells about God making the earth and creating everything, but doesn't say how it all happened. So, and if you listen to all of our previous episodes, you can tell that we're pretty much on board with these gods and everything being extraterrestrials. But many scholars who have compared the two have concluded for quite some time now that Genesis, and indeed the entire Pentateuch for that matter, is more like a condensed transcription of the Enuma Elish and the other Mesopotamian sources.
Joe:Yeah, and is much more ancient, and that is evident from studying the original Hebrew form of the scriptural text in which they are compiled, integrated and refined in sections that are retelling of something else, something much more antiquated that was around before it. So, the Enuma Elish is also known as the Seven Tablets of Creation and is believed to date back to an even earlier version, predating King Hammurabi, his reign in Babylon, which was around 1792 to 1750 B. C., and he is one who, in Babylonian mythology and history, is elevated to the god Marduk, and that is the patron deity of Babylon, the city and the empire. So that's more than a thousand years before the formation of what we know as the Old Testament, and many history and literary experts believe that the Pentateuch, which is Greek for five scrolls, also known as the Torah in Hebrew, was made by using material from these older sources, particularly from Babylonian ones, just like the Enuma Elish. So, you know, the Enuma Elish is Akkadian and it means it translates when the heights, or when on high, or when the heavens above, which is none other than the very opening verse of the text, and it is similar in meaning to in the beginning from Genesis.
Joe:We see a very Biblical perspective, in that there is a supreme deity in charge of all, that is, who is above all, that is on the earth. Everything happens and is there because of him, and humans are made to obey him. But unlike in the Bible, that deity in the Enuma, Elish, is more corporal, very powerful, but not at all abstract or transcendent, and not invisible like the Hebrew God and subsequently the Christian God. And that God is Marduk. His role is more like that of a champion who has been victorious over forces of chaos and disarray, and by doing so he creates the universe. Now Marduk is the Babylonian God, and his depiction was contrived from an even earlier narrative of the Sumerians, and that mythology put Enki at this central position in which he was in contention with his brother Enlil, both of whom sons of the chief figure of a bigger god named An, and that name, of course, is the root word for the mythical figures known as Anunnaki, children of An, i. e., children of God. And so, it all ties in nicely with other traditions, as we see.
Laurie:Yeah, and on is just, you know, en and ki, on is sky and ki is earth. So, on, ki and ki and not ki, those are, from the heavens to earth came, as Zechariah Sitchin had translated. But interestingly, like you said, that opening phrase, when on I, it does sound very similar to the first line of Genesis in the beginning, but both seem to mark an unspecified beginning of time to a place above it, in the heights, you know, encompassing the world, namely the heavens. And they both describe the earth at that particular moment to be formless and void with darkness covering the face of the deep, like I said earlier. So, you know, many people are surprised to learn that the Pentateuch, the Torah, which is traditionally claimed to have been written by Moses, was merely written by scribes who gave literary attribution to Moses. I mean, if you think about it, the final chapter of the book of Deuteronomy portrays the death of Moses. So how could someone provide a narrative about their own death? Clearly, the material for this manuscript has come from other, earlier sources.
Joe:Yeah, and so up until the middle of the 19th century, the consensus was that the Bible was the world's oldest book and it was thought to be completely original, with nothing being around before it. After all, it contains stories that go all the way back to the beginning of everything. Then discoveries were made during European expeditions to the Middle East, where artifacts were dug up which revealed much more about the history of the ancient world than was thought, and people started to become more motivated to visit and examine the lands of the Holy Bible, to go and check out the places that were mentioned in it, like Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Damascus, the Sea of Galilee, Babylon, the Red Sea and many others. So as it was, in 1846, British explorer Austin Henry Lanyard came upon the ruins of Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria, which is well known in scriptural lore from the Book of Jonah. Growing up as a kid, everyone has learned about it in Sunday school with the story of Jonah and the whale.
Joe:And upon excavating the site, he and his team found the buried and forgotten Lbrary of Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king who was also found in the pages of the Bible and who ruled from 668 to 627 BC. So within the old structure they came across some clay tablets that had cuneiform script, and there were over 30,000 of them, so quite a lot, and I would have loved to have been part of something like that. It must have been like a real Indiana Jones movement there, entering a dark, dusty and forlorn chamber back in the 1840s. This chamber is covered in centuries of dusty, dirty, desert sand and then finding these clay tablets belonging to a king from the Old Testament. I can only imagine what that must have been like.
Laurie:Yeah, me too. And even more intriguing is that the language was Akkadian and it was a Semitic dialect formed in Akkad around the 25th century B. C. and spoken in Babylon and Assyria, and, along with ancient Egyptian, it could very well be the oldest written language that we know of, and it is through this language that we know of, and it is through this language that the tales of Sumer have survived. And the Sumerian language was not like the other languages that came after it. So the knowledge from the oldest civilization on Earth is preserved in the Akkadian script, in cuneiform, which was discovered in I think it was the 1800s, and from there it became evident that everything about the Sumerians was later passed on to another Semitic language, Hebrew, from which you know, we get the Bible, even yeah, and you know, during that Victorian era, like I was saying, you know, there were actually museums and universities and churches that sponsored these kind of excavations.
Joe:So it was kind of a big hype back then, and these excavations were of particular interest to Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Holy Land. At the time it was all under the Ottoman Empire, so I don't know what traveling was like back then. It was probably pretty dangerous. But they wanted to search for physical evidence for the historical collaboration of biblical accounts and what was found was really more the opposite. And what they found was the discovery of these cuneiform tablets showed that the book of Genesis telling about the creation and the fall of man, the Nephilim, the great flood, the Tower of Babel, the patriarchs they were actually Assyrian in origin, which in turn were Babylonian in origin, which in turn were Sumerian in origin. So, it goes from Sumer to Babylon, to Assyria and then on to other groups, one of those other groups being the Israelites all over the course, I would say at least 2,000 years. So, it's 2,000 years later that the Israelites get the story that we have in the Bible, coming from something much earlier.
Laurie:Yeah, and now here we are today, thousands of years later, with our own religion, christianity, which derived from the Jewish religion. You know the Old Testament and we've canonized that into our Bible and now we have to coincide with our New Testament and you know, but all that stuff you're saying, you know this is all stuff that Zechariah Sitchin wrote about. Anyone familiar with the Twelfth Planet, the first book in The Earth Chronicles series, you know they probably recognize what we're saying here as it was thoroughly covered and analyzed in those works, and also from Eric von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods. And we all know how the theory of ancient aliens plays into you know this mythology and, like you said, you know you went all the way back to Sumerian and everything you know. After the Sumerians, other cultures can claim these stories to be myths. But, like Zachariah Sitchin once the first civilization gets said, you know how does the first civilization get a myth? They don't. Their stories are historical documents. So, and you know so it plays into the mythology, as you know, as many of the historians believe and assume are to have been the first civilization on Earth, at least based on the accepted archaeological record we now have. Granted there is evidence like Gobekli Tempe that challenges that. But at this time, but then again, Gobekli Tempe could. Now I'm hearing that that may not have been the Homo Sapien race, that could have been whoever the Atlanteans were that built that.
Laurie:But at this time, mankind coming forth from that, we must ask you know where did the idea come from? You know how did such imagery spawn within the storytelling ability of our ancient minds? And you know what was the source of that kind of inspiration? Was the source of that kind of inspiration? Well, and it's like we've been saying, the idea of the imagery came from the ancient peoples, their misunderstanding of extraterrestrials and of their technology, such that the stories that were passed down became construed in the way they knew how to express themselves.
Laurie:And if we today were to try and explain some scientific fact or some natural phenomena to a small child who has barely learned how to speak and listen, they would visualize as being more magical and more dramatic, visualized as being more magical and more dramatic. Being told that a comet's tail forms as it gets close to the sun may very well conjure a mental picture of it being a living thing, with a literal tail that starts to grow as it flies across the sky toward our sun, and so the ancient people probably would have envisioned such notions in the same way that they were told about them. And it's like you know we don't. We saw that tic-tac and we referred to. We don't know what that was, but what did it look like? To us in our civilization's time? It looked like a tic-tac, and so we refer to it as that.
Joe:Right, and in a previous time, when they didn't have tic-tacs, they would have called it an egg exactly that eggs, didn't have tic-tacs, um.
Joe:But I mean, when we speak in ordinary language about things like um, like splitting the atom, many people tend to think of a tiny atom as being broken into two pieces, like putting a piece of fruit, when that is not really what is happening, and any you know theoretical physicist will tell you that's not exactly what goes on when you split the atom, but that's the imagery, that's sort of the word description we get. So, yeah, this is what most of us have in our minds when we think about that and it's how we illustrate it when we're talking about it to others right.
Laurie:And so when we look at the, the um, the battles of the ancient time, the ancients, how they wrote those battles, um, like the, the story of a cosmic battle with these colossal gods, they're like striking each other in the heavens with, you know force, almost like a pool table of planets, may just be a prehistoric rendition of the movement of the celestial bodies in which the planet Tiamat was split into by Marduk, also associated with the planet called Nibiru, where the Anunnaki are from, and the Earth's formlessness and void. That signifies that it had yet to coalesce into the planet that we are living on today. While the darkness of space enveloped the remnants of Tiamat, which were in the process of forming a new world, the other half of Tiamat scattered throughout the solar system, eventually becoming the asteroid belt aptly referred to in the Bible as the hammered bracelet. So mythology may just be a personification of planetary astronomy that dates back to the distant past. The celestial bodies are the given names as gods, but I think it was Henry K Rawlinson when he first discovered the cuneiform tablets. He translated them as you know. These, the planets as gods, but what else could have been given divine names? So could some be the names of ancient people, designated highly sophisticated and technological beings from another world, as Marduk, the champion of the young gods in their war against Tiamat, who is female, is of Babylonian origin.
Laurie:The Sumerian Inki, babylonian Ia or Enlil, is thought to have, which would be his brother, half-brother, thought to have played a major role in this original version.
Laurie:The fragments of the copies of the Illuminae Lish found at Asher have the god Asher in the main role, so the patron god of different city-states would be prominent in the story. So Marduk only figures as prolifically as he does, because, you know, most of the copies come down from Babylon or Babylonian scribes, even in the Assyrian ones. Even so, the Sumerian god Enki still plays an important part in these versions as the one who created human beings. But this tendency for various tribes and groups of people to elevate their own deities to the status of being the most powerful is quite evident throughout the Middle Eastern cultures. A parallel can be found with the Hebrew theme, as can be seen in Psalm 89.7, which says in the counsel of the holy ones, god is greatly feared and awesome above all who surround him. Now, this sounds a lot like any pantheon from the ancient world, much like we would find in Greek mythology, with the gods dwelling on Mount Levis right.
Joe:Yeah. So with that, it could be that the Jewish priests and scribes were intending to develop and illustrate a stark contrast between Yahweh, who is their god, and the Lord from all the other pagan deities. And yet it seems that the psalmist was speaking of him as being included within this council of other deities. Granted, he is said to be higher than them, but at the same time he acknowledges their existence. And I think at this point in this Old Testament scriptures, we're trying to see Yahweh as looking more of an abstract and less like the pagan gods who are always depicted in bodily form with faces. It got to the point where, in Jewish belief, you weren't supposed to even have the name Yahweh spelled out. There was no way you were ever supposed to try to paint a picture of God. God has no image. He's completely abstract. Also, when you look at the Ten Commandments, they emphasize this directive from God to the Hebrew people, instructing them to have no other gods but him, and this is contrary to the idea that other gods are not at all real. He's acknowledging that they are and he's telling the Israelites that they certainly do exist, but they shouldn't dare try to put any of them within their hearts or within their worldview, as being above him.
Joe:And we also need to keep in mind that when the Tanakh and that is the entire Hebrew Bible when it was actually compiled, it was after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian exile, and that was around 520 BC. Return of the Jews from the Babylonian exile, and that was around 520 B. C. And it was then that the scribes began to memorialize Jewish doctrine and theology by completing the written canon, and that is a later date than many Christians realize. After talking to a lot of people, they don't realize that the Old Testament as we know it was actually compiled that late in time. Many of them believe that it was written like 2000 B. C. and so there was a ton of time for oral tradition to filter down from earlier Mesopotamian sources to 520 B. C. to be written as the Hebrew Bible, and indeed that is what we find. Upon close examination of the Cuneiform scripts, we see that it morphed its way down into the form we have in the Old Testament scriptures.
Laurie:Yeah, now there are other tablets that were subsequently found at sites like Ashur, kish, saper and Ur, all of which were also part of the Assyrian Empire and Babylonian Empire, that also contained these scripts that made up the Enuma. Elish Scholars consider the story to be one of the oldest, if not the absolute oldest, in the world, and it tells of the birth of the gods and the creation of the universe and human beings. And it references that in the beginning there was only undiffriated, undifferentiated water swirling around in chaos, like everything was out of control. And out of this swirl, the waters divided into sweet, fresh water, known as the god Apsu, and salty, bitter water, the goddess Tiamat. So, once Differiturated, the union of these two entities gave birth to the younger gods.
Laurie:So here are some more verses that cover this Babylonian creation story. This is quoted from this ancient story. So these young gods, however, were extremely loud, troubling the sleep of Apsu at night and distracting him from his work by day. And, upon the advice of his advisor, mumu, apsu decides to kill the younger gods. Tiamat, hearing of their plan, warns their eldest son, enki again Babylon, sometimes Ea and he puts Apsu to sleep and kills him. From Apsu's remains, Enki creates his home.
Joe:With this. What we're seeing is a much more descriptive account of what's happening during creation Volumes, more than what we find with the Bible. In the Bible, God just simply speaks things into existence. It's actually very brief. When you look at the pages of any Bible, you see that creation takes about three pages, and that's it Now. Does this sound like fantasy? Yes, of course a lot of mythology does, but I think the real question is does it speak in symbols? Is the message being delivered, encrypted in some way, about greater things that are perhaps difficult for the ancient mind to comprehend?
Laurie:Right, and I think that the answer to that is yes. I mean, it just goes on and on with. You know, then, tiamat, once the supporter of the younger gods, tiamat, rewards Kingu with the Tablets of Destiny, which legitimize the rule of a god and control the fates, and he wears them proudly as a bristly. With Kingu as her champion, tiamat summons the forces of chaos and creates 11 horrible monsters to destroy her children. Now, ea, enki and the younger gods fight against Tiamat, futilely, until from among them emerges the champion, marduk, who swears he will defeat Tiamat. And Marduk defeats Kingu and kills Tiamat by shooting her with an arrow which splits her in two. From her eyes flow the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Laurie:Out of Tiamat's corpse, marduk creates the heavens and the earth. He appoints gods to various duties and binds Tiamat's eleven creatures to his feet as trophies too much, you know adulation from the other gods. Before sitting their images in his new home, he also takes the tablets of destiny from Kingu, thus legitimizing his reign. So after the gods have finished passing, praising him for his great victory and the art of his creation, marduk consults with the god Ea, which the god of wisdom, which is also his father, and decides to create human beings from the remains of whichever of the gods encouraged Tiamat to make war and Kingu is charged as guilty and killed, and from his blood Ea creates Lulu, the first man to help the gods in their eternal task of maintaining order and keeping chaos at bay.
Joe:And as this epic poem ends, it says that Ea created mankind, on whom he imposed the service of the gods and set the gods free. So, following this, Marduk is said to have arranged the organization of the netherworld and distributed the gods to their appointed stations. So, then there's a long praise of Marduk for his accomplishments, much like how Genesis 2, 1-4 gives a doxology of God sanctifying all that he had created. It's much briefer and, you might say, less embellished. It gets right to the point. God made it, he thought it was good and he rested, just as the people of Israel are supposed to do under the Mosaic law, right?
Laurie:Right, and so from this narrative we end up getting an elaborate pantheon of deities that exist in all of the Mesopotamian cultures. Unlike with the Hebrews, there is a prominent matriarchy with Iana, Ishtar, asherah, ashtarat. These are encountered by the Israelites in their sojourn in the books of Exodus, leviticus and Deuteronomy, with the tribes of the Canaanites, the Moabites, the Am morites, the Midianites, the Edomites and the Gideonites. A whole lot of "ts where the deity Baal was a major figure. Now, he was likely a derivation of Marduk, Ea or Enlil, as theological was typical of all these different groups of people, meaning that the names and persons and niche of these gods were borrowed back and forth from among them back and forth from among them.
Joe:And not only that, but many Bible historians speculate that the name and personage of Yahweh may have also been derived from this source, from Marduk. And there's an interesting article by J Glenn Taylor from the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review. It's dated May 1994, over 30 years ago, and they found artifacts from ancient Samaria that is located in northern Israel, and they make reference to Yahweh as having a female consort, and these artifacts date to 1000 to 800 B. C. Now this is the time frame in which David and Solomon's kingdom was taking shape. It was also a time of the construction of the first temple in Jerusalem and it was a time of the dominant theme being formed, of the covenant with God's nation and that being more solidified within the Judaism faith. So, we have they're like pottery objects and they have inscriptions that talk about Yahweh and Asherah, his consort, his wife, and this gives us a very strong connection. This is almost, you know, kind of a bombshell in a way, because it shows a strong connection between Yahweh and the god, Baal, who also had a consort, Asherah, and also sometimes called Ashtaroth. So, the same, same female, same consort shared by Baal and Yahweh, meaning that it's almost seems like the idea of Yahweh was sort of transposed from the image of Baal. Now, later on, that became apparent that they were not the same. In fact, they were in the books.
Joe:One of the books I think it was the First Book of Samuel, Elijah has Baal and God duking it out on a burnt offering altar. But there is a parallel between the Israelite religion, with the Lord, that being Yahweh, and that of the Canaanites as well as the surrounding tribes, which in turn is a parallel between them and the Babylonians. So, we can see how this Sumerian mythology is like passed down, like filtered down all the way into the Jewish religion. Remember, this is over a course of 2,000 or more years and eventually we see it in the Tanakh, the Old Testament, and like in the Books of Kings and the Books of Samuel, we see that they break away from conceiving the Lord as being completely different from Baal. By the time you get into the books of the Kings, the authors want to make it pretty clear that Yahweh is not Baal, and he has no female consort, no feminine goddess.
Laurie:And that is one of the distinctions of Judaism and Christianity is that there really is no mother goddess of theology and integration of gods happening everywhere throughout the ancient world, as people adopt beliefs from others, as migrations would be taking place all the time and in Babylon, marduk gained prominence during the reign of Hammurabi and quickly surpassed the former patron deity Inanna or Ishtar in popularity, and during Hammurabi's reign, in fact, a number of previously popular female deities were replaced by the male gods. The Enuma Elish praising Marduk as the most powerful of all the gods therefore became increasingly popular as the god himself rose in prominence and his city of Babylon grew in power. Scholar Jeremy Black writes the rise of the cult of Marduk is closely connected with the rise of Babylon from city-state to the capital of an empire. This was in much the way, as you were saying. You know that the rise of Yahweh was closely connected to Israel becoming a unified kingdom.
Laurie:After the Israelite exodus from Egypt, the Marduk became more and more important, until the authors of the Babylonian epic maintain that not only was he the king of all the gods, but that many of the other ones that were mentioned before or later were nothing other than aspects of his persona. And this sounds exactly like how the Hebrew God was written into the Genesis story as the all-powerful creator who transcends all human affairs, which, of course, resulted in the writing of our Bible.
Joe:And something important that we need to remember is that the Bible is not the Old Testament, the New Testament as well. It's not complete. We find all kinds of passages within the scriptures that allude to books that are pretty much wiped out of existence. There's the Book of the Wars of the Lord, talked about in Numbers 21: 14. Wars of the Lord, talked about in Numbers 21:14. The book of Jasher from Joshua, 10:13, and 2 Samuel 1:18. The Book of the Rights and Duties of the King, that's 1 Samuel 10:25. The Book of the Acts of Solomon, that's 1 Kings 4. 32. The Book of the Covenant was found in Exodus 24:7, and even one called the Book of the Prophet Nathan in 2 Chronicles 9:29. And there are about 30 or so manuscripts referenced which to this date have not survived. We really don't know what was written in them.
Joe:And although the basic paradigm of the biblical narrative and the Enuma Elish stories they do align closely, there are still significant differences, and that's noted by historian and scholar Stephen Burtman, that both Genesis and the Enuma Elish, they detail and celebrate religion. While Genesis describes the origin and founding of the Jewish people under the guidance of the Lord, the Enuma Elish recounts the origin and founding of Babylon under the god Marduk. Each contains a story of how the cosmos and man were created. Each work begins by describing this watery chaos and primeval darkness that once filled the entire universe, and then light is created to replace that darkness. Afterward the heavens are made and in them the heavenly bodies are placed, and finally man is created as the apex. So, these similarities notwithstanding, the two accounts are more different than they are alike, and you kind of point it out by his reading the passage of how different it is.
Laurie:Nothing like that is found anywhere throughout the Old Testament different it is Nothing like that is found anywhere throughout the Old Testament. Well, just as Genesis would have, you know, resonated with followers of Judaism, so too the Enuma Elish would have resonated with Babylonians, who saw, you know, their people breaking with the traditions of the past to create an era of a new god-king, who was none other than Nebuchadnezzar II, the one who reigned from 605 to 562 B. C. during the Jewish exile. Antiquity scholar E Thorkin Jacobson, for example, notes that Babylon warred with the territory of ancient Sumer and all its renowned and venerable ancient cities and their gods. And the story, then, can be read not only as a grand tale of the triumph of order over chaos and light over darkness, but as a parallel of the rise of Babylon and the Babylonian culture over the old Sumerian model of civilization. Further, the tale can be understood as an illustration of the concept of life as perpetual change.
Laurie:And this is the exact same theme we get from the Christian scriptures that the ways of the prior inhabitants of the promised land and all the enemies of the children of Israel are to be vanquished and replaced with a new world order. There is the same concept change and mutability to the universe through their creation as mortal beings who are subject to death. Likewise, they are a people that are tasked with keeping a covenant with the gods and maintain their eternal work on earth and, you know, therefore gain measure of immortality by doing it as well as they can. The message is always the same with religions, and that is, humans have gotten their relationship with God completely wrong, as it was meant to be in the beginning, drastically and irrevocably wrong. So God then chooses a group of people to bring about a renewed order that eliminates the old, incorrect way of worshiping him. That is certainly Judeo-Christianity in a nutshell, right? What Mesopotamian myths like the Enuma Elish teach us is that this way of thinking is an old and borrowed one from a long time ago.
Joe:So where does that leave us with the typology of the Bible? And what I mean is that that being an inspired series of books put together to form what is widely accepted as being the word of god that conveys a message to all of humanity, past, present and future. Clearly, the theory of ancient aliens, much like the theory of evolution, turns such orthodox thinking on its head, since it introduces questions of doubt as to how people of faith, or how people place faith in it as being infallible and inerrant, making its overall narrative much more opaque. I just wanted to correct what I said earlier in reference to Elijah and Baal, and that's not in Samuel, that reference to Elijah and Baal, and that's not in Samuel, that's in Kings. That's not 1 Samuel, that's 1 Kings, 1 Kings 18.
Joe:So I just want to point that out and also, by expanding our hermeneutics so as to encompass these sources that go back to the same time era of the Old Testament, we're forced to reevaluate what these narratives mean in their literal sense.
Joe:So, if the account of Adam and Eve was an apologetic method of somehow abridging and paraphrasing something like the Enuma Elish, then this alters much of the religious dogma that stems from the interpretations of it the notions such as original sin, the fall from grace, atonement and covenant, god's redemption of humanity. These are all presented to Christians through teachings that are based upon the theological authority that is attributed to the Bible and how it is read. So, if these scriptures are actually inauthentic and unoriginal, meaning that they are compiled and syncretized from Babylonian sources original meaning that they are compiled and syncretized from Babylonian sources which are quite different, as we just kind of point out by reading them and then go back much further in a time then does that challenge the whole belief system? Can we still responsibly talk about the bible as a book that is supposed to be an inspired work of God, a message from God, and that tells the whole complete story about humanity's creation, condemnation, struggle against evil and eventual salvation from the Devil?
Laurie:Right, and that's good questions, and it makes us ask if this entire spiritual view is even justified so it can be accepted on faith and indeed that is how it is taught manifest when you find that it certainly is not the oldest piece of literature in existence and that it was written as an abridged way to Judaize and later to Christianize the story about our human condition and our place in the grand scheme of things. If that is so, then it behooves us to really search for the original message and the original meaning of the earliest tradition from which it all came and, it seems, from the comparison to the Enuma Elish have all come from the storytelling of Sumer of a time from a very long time ago very long time ago.
Joe:Well, it's something that you and I have been asked before by people. Is you know? Does the ancient alien theory really posit the notion of what we are reading in the pages of scripture? You know, things like the parting of the Red Sea, Jacob's Ladder, Elijah's fiery chariot, the Ark of the Covenant, Ezekiel's wheel in the sky.
Joe:Are these a record of people in a time of the Bible actually witnessing some form of extraterrestrial technology? Is that what there is to these stories? And to that I would say not exactly. It is yes and no. But what guys like Sitchin and Von Daniken seem to suggest is that the literary material and the literary devices used in the telling of the stories, like what we have in the Bible, comes from much, much older imagery that was passed down from a time perhaps when alien beings came to Earth and humans had encountered them and interacted with them, and this would have been a time before there was even real language and they were incapable of documenting it in the way that we would today. So the stories and tales about all of that became the backbone of oral tradition, and that lasted for millennia after millennia, until it did become part of the storytelling fabric of the people who would have been the ones who had written down the content of what we have as the Hebrew Scriptures.
Laurie:Yeah, and some folks have also said that the idea of ancient aliens, about all that Sitchin wrote in the Earth Chronicles, sounds mostly like fantasy. Well, the stories of the Bible can be taken as God's word to all of humanity for all ages, and that all of the miracles and wonders, the wonderful things that were mentioned in it can be believed because it is from God and therefore it's not fantasy. So this is not at all a sound argument at all. It is the same as saying that something is not too extraordinary to believe as long as you believe it the same way I do. If you believe it differently from that way, then you're crazy. They are saying that Elijah being taken up in a fiery chariot is not fantasy, as long as you have faith in God. So if you suggest it is a imagery derived from some extraterrestrial encounter in the prehistoric past, then you are merely dabbling in the imagination.
Joe:Right. And then the problem is that both ways of interpreting the analytics of the narratives in the Bible, whether acts of God or acts of ancient aliens, require a good bit of speculative thinking as well as a good bit of imagination. And with one approach, it is accepted through faith, through your belief system, while the other is rejected due to a lack of evidence. It's important to take notice that both of the so-called models of belief lack evidence. If you were to accept the truth in stories about talking snakes, talking donkeys, a sea being parted, trumpet sounds bringing down stone walls and a man living in the belly of a whale for three days, all because you do believe in an invisible God that has the power to do anything, has the power to do anything then that is flawed in terms of logic and science as thinking that aliens visited the earth in the past and are now unseen and undetectable. Neither of these views can be demonstrated through reliable evidence. You really can't reject one and accept the other, unless you choose to do so by way of personal faith, and that is how we see that people do accept one version over the other.
Joe:You know, you were even pointing out with Moses. You know that the belief of he being the author of the Torah and that it mentions his own death. So how does one write a narrative about their own death? You also have to consider that the entire book of Genesis deals with events that were before his time. Moses doesn't appear until the book of Exodus, so he's writing about stories that were way before his time. How did he get that information? He had to have obtained that from something older, something that was around before he would have written the first five books of the Bible, as is traditionally believed. So and clearly the evidence doesn't support that that Moses is not the actual author of the first five books of the Bible, that it is attributed to him, but it was written by anonymous scribes in the fourth century BC anonymous scribes in the fourth century BC.
Laurie:Yeah, I believe that Moses lived. Was it 25, 23, 2500 years after the events in Genesis? At least so that would be like somebody 500 years from now writing about times of Jesus and calling that the gospel truth.
Joe:Right, you know specific names, locations, that kind of detail and just from oral tradition. We know that oral tradition would not have preserved that kind of information. You know there had to have been some kind of written form, and there was. We see this with the Enuma Elish. There was indeed a written form. That written form was you know the. And there was. We see this with the Enuma Elish. There was indeed a written form. That written form was, you know the.
Laurie:Cuneiform scripts yeah, and and uh. Well, just look at the words of Jesus. Right, they're all hearsay, and that's just 2000 years ago and Jesus is not attributed to writing anything. So, um, the with the words, was there a being named Jesus Christ or Joshua of Nazareth? Yeshua, I guess, would be the actual original name for Jesus. But you know, did he really say these words? He probably did, but not in the exact verbiage that we have in the red letter text of the New Testament today. So yeah, things aren't real because they sound like they should be real or seem to be real. They're real because they have been proven to be real, and that actually requires a process, as you and I know from doing criminal investigations as cops, detectives. When it comes to going to court to prove a case, nothing is left to imagination or the thought of. Maybe. You either show that something is true or it's not even allowed to be acknowledged, and you must follow strict rules in doing so.
Joe:Yeah, definitely the test of truth and the methods by which something is proven to be real or factual or accurate and sound. It could be quite arduous, but it also leaves hardly any doubt, I mean. So it's a hard standard, but once you've achieved it, you know that it is true and you do not have to really question it, because it has gone through so much testing and been demonstrated so many times, repeated so many ways that it's now considered an axiom. And that's a difficult standard to reach, and I think what I wish for most people is that they would hold the beliefs in the same rigorous standard. You know, question as much as you can, as much as is sensible, and be deliberate in the judgments and decision-making so as to ensure such confidence that you have at least gotten closer to finding the truth. And even that may take. You see that what you maybe believe your entire life does not hold up to scrutiny and the evidence does not support that, and be willing to accept and acknowledge that. So that is all for today.
Joe:There are many more ancient texts that we would like to discuss in the near future. They come from places like Mesopotamia, but besides the Enuma Elish, there's also the Atrahasis, which is a story about the flood. There's the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Code of Hammurabi. There's also from ancient Egypt, the Book of the Dead and the myth of Isis and Osiris many others and we hope to cover those ones as well in the months ahead and Osiris, many others, and we hope to cover those ones as well in the months ahead.
Laurie:Yeah, and before we get to those, we're actually planning for next time on hosting a special guest for our April 28th episode. That's just two weeks away. The author of the novel titled A Line in the Sand. His name is Miles Spencer and he has co-written with Wells Jones this story, which is about two friends who find adventure traveling across the lands of the Middle East, which, as you all know by now, ties into much of what we've been discussing, since the places of the Bible and Mesopotamian slash Sumerian mythology all come from the Middle East. So, you know, we hope that we can get into talking about all the ways that the cultures of that part of the world have helped to shape much of what we have in Western civilization. So you know, we definitely look forward to that one.
Joe:Yes, apparently the novel covers a lot of history from around the time of World War I and bringing up the famous British intelligence officer, te Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, and that has always been a subject of which I'm really fascinated. I just think it is a really interesting period of time in the history of the world, especially with what's happening in the Middle East at the time with the Balfour Declaration and the Sites-Picote Agreement. World War I has always been a fascinating period of time for me. I've always loved watching some of the movies, some of the period pieces that are on Netflix that while during World War I, I think are really interesting, and some of the events that took place over there at that time are still affecting the region to this day. So I'm sure that there will be a lot to learn about. By talking to Miles Spencer, that should be on the 28th of this month of April. We hope you all join us for that. Please check our website, alienetalkpodcastcom, and our Facebook page. Take care, everyone. Until next time, stay curious.
