Genesis 15:7 (NIV)
“I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans
to give you this land to take possession of it.
Wasn’t the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the God of the Israelites, the God of the Old Testament? Thus, in addition to names like Jehovah, Yahweh, and El Sheddai, Abraham’s God had another name in Sumer, one which he was called in one of his Temples in the city of Ur.
According to Cuneiform tablets found in Ur and many other pre and post-dilluvial cities along the Tigris and Euphrates to include Sippar and Nineveh, this Sumerian deity also had brothers and sisters who were also worshipped as gods in Mesopotamia and the surrounding regions. Abraham’s deity’s name is mentioned in other noteworthy documents from the region and era to include the Atrahasis, the Enuma Elish, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Abraham and Noah also have close contact with these deities. Who were they and how do we know they existed? What are we to think about the fact that Abraham’s God had a previous history as a Sumerian deity with a temple dedicated to him in Ur of the Chaldeans?
The funding for early archeological inquiries was closely controlled and channeled by early church authorities, in particular the Roman Catholic Church. A mandate was issued to only fund the archeological explorations that perpetuated the story told in the canonical Bible, established by the same institution at the Council of Nicaea, 325 AD. Eventually, hidden books and suppressed artifacts, codices, cylinder seals, and Sumerian cuneiform inscribed monuments and tablets gave up their secrets to the inquisitive minds of disenfranchised seekers of truth.
A heroic gentleman comes to mind, discovered during the research into this book, a Sir Henry Rawlinson , responsible for recording and decoding three languages he discovered in 1835 located 1700 feet above the desert floor chiseled into the cliffs of Behistun, in modern day Iran. The historical marker was commissioned by Darius the 1st who lived and reigned from 522-486 BCE, recounting the Persian ruler’s suppression of various rival uprisings. In 1835, Sir Henry Rawlinson, a British army officer training the army of the Shah of Iran, began studying the inscription in earnest. As the town of Bisistun's name was anglicized as "Behistun" at this time, the monument became known as the "Behistun Inscription". Despite its inaccessibility, Rawlinson was able to scale the cliff and copy the Old Persian inscription. The Elamite was across a chasm, and the Babylonian four metres above; both were beyond easy reach and were left for later.
Armed with the Persian text, and with about a third of the syllabary made available to him by the work of Grotefend, Rawlinson set to work on deciphering the text. Fortunately, the first section of this text contained a list of Persian kings identical to that found in Herodotus, and by matching the names and the characters, Rawlinson was able to crack the form of cuneiform used for Old Persian by 1838 and present his results to the Royal Asiatic Society in London and the Societe Asiatique in Paris [120].
Major Rawlinson copied the strange wedge-shaped writings etched into the sheer rock face and made them available to the British Museum after spending time decoding the tablets. His efforts lead to the ability to translate Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian scripts from one to the other leading to the re-discovery of the Mesopotamian sites in modern day Iraq, buried beneath the desert sands. A new investigation of the first-hand writings and evidence left by the Egyptians, Sumerians, and early church authors sheds new light on the historical truth, which at times seems stranger than the wildest contrived fictional tales. Discoveries at the ancient Mesopotamian cities of Nineveh all the way to the very Southern city of Eridu have many secrets to reveal, many of which are discussed in this book.
Various clues have surfaced and been laid bare for all to see, wrought forth by the dedication, sweat, and blood of the investigative pioneers from the past. It is now the responsibility for modern man to take a fresh look at the original evidence from which historians and scribes of the past aggregated the genesis accounts upon which our society’s civilization foundations rest. Knowing that history’s texts are inked by those in power at the time events are recorded, often relegates truth to the sidelines in favor of a story that perpetuates the controlling influences of the ruling party. Flagrant acts such as chipping away hieroglyphic evidence captured in stone to subsuming names and ranks of rival deities and creating also known as lists adds confusion to further cloud the truth.
Thus, given the unreliable nature of historical accuracy, people relegated the responsibility of knowing the truth to authorities appointed over them. This happened readily for those unfortunate enough to not be able to read-which throughout history included the majority. Scribes and priests were often those trained in the lingual arts and thus had their fingers on the pulse of truth throughout history. Books written by first-hand authors that told the truth, such as the Book of Enoch, were hidden from mankind for thousands of years and are now widely in circulation. Tens of thousands of Cuneiform inscribed tablets that lay forgotten; buried for thousands of years guarding recorded secrets hidden beneath the silt and sand of the Mesopotamian plains, recently unearthed all along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, have been recovered and decoded by archeologists. So many tablets, tens of thousands, written in baked clay were recovered that the discovery spawned a cuneiform digitization project to expedite the process of garnering the tablet’s secrets [63]. Many of the Sumerian artifacts and cuneiform tablets are on display in prominent museums in London, Paris, and Berlin to name just a few.
The oldest Sumerian records pre-date the books of the canonical Bible by thousands of years in some cases. The Sumerian records, discovered in cities like Uruk, the Biblical Erech, record mundane activities involving marriage and trade, and more important accounts of decrees and records of birth and death, etc. Referencing the first-hand historical accounts versus those composed by the societal victors, allows one to at least compare the current basis for cultural events and social mores with their antecedent counterparts from multiple recorded cultural perspectives toward a synthesized whole.
Stranger than fiction was the account of Noah’s mystifying near-alien birth as described in vivid detail in the Book of Enoch [36]. According to some sources, Noah’s father was definitely not Lamech as told in Genesis 5: 28, but rather one of the Mesopotamian deities that ends up saving him from the deluge [37]. The old Babylonian version of the flood account depicts the deity speaking to a reed hut where Ziusudra, AKA Noah, resides thereby divulging the urgent warning to get prepared for a flood that was to arrive on the Mesopotamian plains. This same story is told in the Bible sans illuminating Sumerian detail.
By analyzing the various birth accounts, genealogy tables, and deities venerated in the temples of Mesopotamia, an interesting realization, actually a profound epiphany is revealed! A cultural lie is uncovered that has such profound impact as to relegate all previous beliefs to obscurity, as if one had not come to that conclusion already given our present-day knowledge base. When asking a Westerner the simple question, who was Yahweh? one gets the typical AKA list to include Jehovah and finally the AKA list ends with the answer of God, as taught intentionally with the help of the canonical Bible, in particular the Old Testament. When one realizes that one of the Gods of the Old Testament, Yahweh, was none other than the local deity of the Sumerian city of Ur, e.g. Enlil, the truth is revealed. For you see, Enlil was written about in a plethora of accounts in Sumeria and elsewhere in the region. Enlil and his relatives were venerated as gods in various temples from Nineveh to Assur to the Sumerian city of Ur to name just a few. Similarly his brother Enki and his children Nannar and Inanna also had temples in prominent cultural and trade portals within the region. More importantly, Enlil was not acting alone, but rather in consort with others referred to as the Anunnaki in the Atrahasis or the Nephilim or Elohim in the Genesis 1:26 account wherein the confusing statement is made: