by Brian Godawa
[vi]
In the Book of Jasher, we read about the story of Nimrod building the Tower of Babel and hearing an astrological prophecy about the birth of Abram whose seed would rule over kings. Nimrod confronts Abram by throwing him in a furnace of fire, and Abram survives it by a miracle. It is also in this text that Amraphel, the king of Shinar who joined the four-nation confederation of Chedorlaomer that invaded Canaan, is explained as Nimrod under a new name.
What’s in a Name
The idea of individuals changing their names is nothing new in the ancient world. We know that Abram’s name which meant “exalted father” was changed to Abraham to mean “father of many nations” (Gen 17:5) based on the historical events of God’s covenant with him. Later in the Bible, Jacob (“usurper”) was changed to Israel (“struggles with God”) as the ancestor of the people of God. Even ancient gods changed names based on locales. Inanna of Sumer became Ishtar of Babylonia, and then Ashtart of Canaan. Ninurta of Sumer was probably the basis for Marduk of Babylon, and then Ba’al of Canaan.
While it is a cardinal rule not to change a character’s names in a modern story in order to avoid confusion, I have utilized this technique of changing names and identities as a foundational element in the Chronicles of the Nephilim storyline in order to incarnate the living cultural zeitgeist of the ancient world. Names were more than mere shallow title references to a person; they were believed to incarnate the person’s very essence or identity, as well as mark significant moments in their lives.
Yahweh
Even God himself is referred to by many different names in Scripture. Critical scholars use this fact to concoct a conspiracy theory that these different names were different gods that Israel worshipped in their own pantheon. As years went by elitist Jewish religious leaders became more intolerant. They finally recorded their zealous monotheist demands to worship one God instead of the others, but somehow foolishly left the residue of polytheism in the text of the Bible by neglecting to edit out the names from their source texts.
Apart from the fact that there is not a single scrap of actual historical or archeological evidence for this theorizing, it also reeks of modern imperialism by projecting stupidity onto the writers of some of the most intelligent and poetic literature in history. Such arrogance is easily dismissed when one studies the ancient cultural context of divine names as expressing character traits related to specific situations.
The text that illustrates this most suitably is Exodus 6:3-4 where God speaking to Moses says, “I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as El Shaddai, but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them.”
Unfortunately, English translations obscure the meaning of the text by painting over the Hebrew names with bastardized generic terms. Thus, Yahweh is translated as “the LORD,” and El Shaddai, as “God Almighty,” which drains them of their rich cultural context and meaning. And English translations further this offensive activity by translating El Elyon as “God Most High,” and Elohim as “God,” and on and on. We have reduced the names of the living God to nameless generic references to a “supreme being.” This de-naming of Yahweh Elohim is more a reflection of the Greek impersonal “Prime Mover” than the Hebrew personal “Named One.”
But when one researches the meaning behind the original Hebrew words, their truer fuller meaning comes to light. Elohim is revealed as a more generic plural reference to the Creator as all humankind can know through general revelation.[vii] El Elyon has a linguistic affinity to the Ugaritic “Elyon Ba’al” a name for the Most High God of Canaan, and therefore a polemical stance against him. Ba’al is not the Most High, the God of Israel is.[viii] El Shaddai, carries with it a possible derivation of “God of the mountain,” a common understanding of deities in the ancient Near East as revealed in power on mountains (Mount Sinai and Mount Zion are God’s locations of self-disclosure).[ix] Finally, Yahweh is the “eternally self-existent one” who is the unique covenantal name of Israel’s deity in opposition to the nations.
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When Yahweh told Moses he revealed himself to the forefathers as El Shaddai, but not as Yahweh, he was saying that they only knew him in a limited sense that was not as full as he was about to reveal. The Mosaic revelation on Sinai would be a dramatic world changing self-disclosure of God’s unique character through his Law, a new revelation of God. This is what would separate them from the nations as a holy people of God’s own choosing.
In the section below on Babel Inheritance, Deuteronomy 32:9 is shown to describe Yahweh as dividing the nations up at Babel and allotting the peoples under the authority of other gods, while keeping Israel as his own people. Yahweh would be the name he would use to mark the strong demarcation between his people and the people in slavery to other gods.
Gilgamesh
This ancient Near Eastern obsession with changing names was also why I made Gilgamesh change his name and identity into Nimrod. This was not mere fancy or fabrication. There are some scholars who believe that Gilgamesh was the person behind the Nimrod of the Bible. But again, because of its antiquity, there are as many theories of who Nimrod really was as there are scholars.
W.H. Gispen listed just a few options of theories for the true historical identity of Nimrod by other scholars:
1. Gilgamesh, king of Uruk (2750 – 2600 B.C.)
2. Ninurta, the Sumerian deity
3. Marduk, the Babylonian deity
4. Tikulti-Ninurta, king of Assyria (1242-1206 B.C.)
5. Naram-Sin, king of Akkad (approx. 2300 B.C.)
6. Sargon, king of Akkad (2350 – 2294 B.C.)[xi]
7. Enmerkar, king of Eridu in Sumer (approx. 2850 B.C.)[xii]
As the reader can see, the theories are as widespread and diverse in their possibilities as a deity or a king, with a space of about one thousand years difference of possible fulfillment. The conclusion is pretty clear: Nobody really knows who Nimrod really was, but the name of Nimrod was most likely a Hebrew play on words that demonized the leader, because Nimrod in Hebrew means “to revolt.” One hardly thinks a person would make his name with such negative connotations, since such kings often considered themselves like the gods.
Unless a king did so as a defiant gesture “in the face of” a deity he hated. Thus the motivation behind the Nimrod of the Chronicles.
Scholars van der Toorn and van der Horst suggest that Nimrod was most likely a deliberately distorted Hebrew version of Ninurta as the hunter god of Mesopotamia. They argue that the reign of Nimrod was most likely a symbolic synopsis of the history of Mesopotamia embodied in one character, a deity deliberately dethroned by the Jewish writer to a hunter king.
The cities [of Nimrod] mentioned in Gen 10:9-12 are given in a more or less chronological sequence. The list reads as a condensed resume of Mesopotamian history. Akkad, though still in use as a cult-center in the first millennium, had its floruit under the Sargonic dynasty. Kalhu had its heyday in the first half of the first millennium BCE, some fifteen hundred years later. If Nimrod is not a god, he must at least have enjoyed a divine longevity, his reign embracing both cities.[xiii]
Babel
The Tower of Babel incident is also an event that has a long history of as many interpretive possibilities as there are scholars. The standard ancient interpretation was that Babel and its tower were simply the city of Babylon in mid-Mesopotamia that had been started, then stopped by the confusion of tongues, only to be reborn a thousand years later under Hammurabi’s predecessors.
Contrarily, Anne Habermehl has argued that it was in the far northeastern part of Syria;[xiv] David Rohl argued that Babel was actually the oldest known city of Eridu in the southernmost region of Sumeria on the gulf, and its tower was the famous ziggurat called Nunki.
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Again, with so many different interpretations possible, spanning thousands of miles of geography, no one really knows. But I went with the traditional interpretation on this one because it was still a sensible option. Unfortunately, be
cause the water table is so high in the modern region of the ruins of Babylon, we will never be able to excavate any layers of sediment below to discover its more ancient past.
Abraham
The picture of Abraham as a warrior fits very well with the warrior motif of Chronicles of the Nephilim. But even this is not as much fiction as it is Biblical fact because in Genesis 14 we read about Abram leading 318 warriors trained in his household on a rescue mission of his nephew Lot. Not only did he and his men, along with an unspecified group of allies from three friendly Amorite tribes, bring back the Sodomite captives and their booty, they overwhelmed a four-city coalition army that had just swept through Canaan wiping out giant clans. Abraham and his men were no mere pastoral shepherds. They were warriors.
Semiramis
Another tradition that shows up in ancient legends surrounding Nimrod and Babylon is that of Queen Semiramis. The most well known ancient reference to this queen of Babylon comes from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus who wrote of the mythical romance of Semiramis with King Ninus, around 2189 B.C.[xvi] Since Ninus was the reputed founder of Nineveh, it was a simple connection to be made with Nimrod who was the founder of Nineveh in the Bible.
Later in 1853, Protestant minister Alexander Hislop expanded on the relationship of Nimrod and Semiramis in The Two Babylons. Hislop’s mythmaking became very influential though it was entirely fabricated by the writer to serve his anti-Catholic polemic.
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The closest historical personage that can be said to be the source of the Semiramis legends was Queen Shammuramat of Assyria, who reigned with King Shamshi-Adad V around 824-811 B.C., and whose Neo-Assyrian empire included Babylonia. There was a legend that she had once been a brothel keeper in Uruk, thus her connection with Shamhat the harlot from Gilgamesh Immortal.
Arba
The giant king Arba makes his appearance in Abraham Allegiant. But this is not a character of the author’s imagination. There was a giant named Arba after whose name the city of Kiriath-Arba (later called Hebron) was named. He was of such significance to the author of Joshua, that he wrote of him, “Arba was the greatest man among the Anakim” (Joshua 14:15), and that “he was the father of Anak” (15:13). The Anakim were the giant descendants of the Nephilim who seemed to dominate southern Canaan when Israel arrived for conquest. Joshua’s campaign in the hill country was focused on eliminating these Anakim as mortal enemies (Joshua 11:21-22).
Since Arba was the father of the giant Anak who birthed the people devoted to destruction much later in history, and since Abraham was said to live only two miles from the city founded by Arba (Gen 13:18; 23:2), it is not too much to speculate that Arba may have met Abraham, foreshadowing the providential rivalry these two people groups would have over that territory.
The Destroyer
“The Destroyer” is a translation of the Hebrew word used of the angel who entered the houses of the Egyptians and killed their first born as God’s last plague on the Hebrews’ oppressors (Ex 12:23). The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible says of this peculiar angel,
“’Destroyer’ is the designation of a supernatural envoy from God assigned the task of annihilating large numbers of people, typically by means of a plague… there was originally a distinction between the angel of death who comes to an individual at the time appointed for him to die and the Destroyer who massacres entire populations with premature and violent deaths. Later traditions, however, fuse the two conceptions.
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In 1 Chronicles 21:14-16 we see a poignant picture of God sending the Destroyer to wipe out Jerusalem with a plague, but changing his mind from the calamity. One wonders if this is not also what happened at Babel.
Babel Inheritance
Another key element of the storyline of Chronicles of the Nephilim is the allotment of nations to the sons of God as punishment for humanity’s rebellion. While I wrote a bit about this in the appendices of Noah Primeval, Abraham Allegiant is where this fascinating biblical theological legal concept takes place at the Tower of Babel incident.
A brief look at the original full text of the Tower of Babel pericope in the Bible will help set the stage for a closer look at the theological ramifications of what it was all about.
Genesis 11:1–9
1 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. 6 And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
So we see that within a short time after the Flood, mankind had proven to be corrupt once again in seeking to unite in a headlong pursuit of self-deification. They decidedly used kiln-burned brick with bitumen for mortar most likely because of their memory of the Flood wiping away their mud brick buildings and temples. This waterproofing technique was the first expression of their devious attempt to circumvent God’s future judgment.
Then they seek to build a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens.” The Hebrew word for tower no doubt referred to the ziggurat temple-tower at the heart of every Mesopotamian city. To discover the idolatrous meaning of this reference, John Walton explains that the function of the ziggurats came from the names given to them:
For instance, the name of the ziggurat at Babylon, Etemenanki, means “temple of the foundation of heaven and earth.” One at Larsa means “temple that links heaven and earth.” Most significant is the name of the ziggurat at Sippar, “temple of the stairway to pure heaven.” The word translated “stairway” in this last example is used in the mythology as the means by which the messenger of the gods moved between heaven, earth, and the netherworld.
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So the temple-tower of Babylon was a religious incarnation of their attempt to create a forbidden link between heaven and earth by building their own stairway to heaven for the gods, a violation of God’s monarchic authority.
Then they seek to “make a name for themselves,” which is a common biblical and ancient Near Eastern idiom for greatness. By uniting together, their pride was so great that there would be no limit to their hubris. This blasphemous self-deification would be a real threat because, remember, mankind was God’s image, his representative ruler over creation. So, if man would unite in this kind of rebellion, imagine the evil that would result, an evil that might rival what happened before the Flood.
So the confusion of tongues and dispersion of mankind breaks apart the tyrannical potential of this global one world government.
We are told twice that God “dispersed them over the face of the earth” in order to stop the megalomaniacal and totalitarian potential of mankind unified in rebellion against God.
The seventy nations described in Genesis 10 are the resultant new boundaries allotted to mankind that came from this Dispersion.
But this Dispersion is not the whole picture. There is something else that happens at this dividing of mankind, something spiritual and legal in the heavenly courtroom of God. God actually divides up the seventy nations and apportions them under the authority of the Bene ha Elohim, the sons of God, those divine beings that surround his heavenly throne.
> Let’s take a look at some of the Biblical passages that reveal this allotment of nations.
Deut. 32:8–9
When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.
In this passage, the Scripture refers to the “dividing of mankind,” which happened in the Dispersion at the Tower of Babel that we already looked at. God separated the nations by giving them different languages so they can no longer unite in blasphemous self-deification. And he divides up the borders of their dwelling. But he does so according to the number of the sons of God.
God put the seventy divided nations under the authority of these sons of God to whom they were “allotted.” But he allotted the people of Jacob to himself as his heritage. The question then arises, what kind of authority do these sons of God have over the nations? Are they good or evil host of heaven? A look at other Biblical passages reveals that these sons of God are fallen beings and they are to become the false deities that own and rule over the pagan nations as Yahweh owns and rules over his people.