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Abraham- the Son of a

Sumerian Oracle Priest

Part 1

Robert D. Mock MD

robertmock@biblesearchers.com

 

Ten generations had past since the great deluge and the memory of the horrendous catastrophic event was fading from the collective memory of the various tribes from the House of Noah.  Nahor, the eighth generation from Noah in the House of Shem, had an infant son, raised in the shadows of the mighty Sumerian prince, Nimrod.

 

Topics

Early Sumerian Culture

Nimrod, the Mighty Warrior

Birth of Abram

Ur of the Chaldeas

Terah, the Oracle Priest

 Tower of Babel

The Return of Abram to Sumeria

Abram flees Ur Casidim (Khaldini)

Abram, the Scion of the Sumerian Head of State

The Royal Lineage of Abram

 

Introduction

 

The story of Abram is retold millions of times as a favorite to children all around the world. The drama in the Torah and the Old Testament is simple. With the addition of the Inter-testament Book of Jasher, the Ebla Tablets, and the ancient Sumerian tablets, it reveals a “Man of all Seasons” born to Terah, the High Priest of the Temple of Ur, and he becomes a contemporary and threatened rival to Nimrod the Mighty Hunter, the builder of the Tower of Babel in the Land of Sumer, who received his power and authority by the stolen garments of skins given by the Lord of hosts to Adam.

 

Here is the origin of ancient Sumer, where Enmeduranki, the first High Priest was devoted to the service of an extra-terrestrial dynasty of rulers, known as the Watchers in the Inter-testament Books of Enoch, Jasher and Jubilees. Here the Sumerian god, Marduk, the son of Enki, became the god of Sumer and Chaldea.  Here was the family of Enki, a brother called Enlil, who caused the Flood of Noah, and the father Anu, the Ancient and Hidden One.  In this realm of the ancients, the Priesthood of Sumer was given access to the Divine Celestial Tablets of Anu. Here, in the land of the Annukians, as described in the books by Sitchen is the origin of the Chaldean Magi and the life of the High Priest of Ur (Uratu), Terah, who introduces Abram, the son of the Oracle Sumerian Priest.

 

A birth party for Abram was opening high drama of the tension and conflict between this newborn and Nimrod, the ruler of Shinar (Sumer). During the party an exploding star erupted in the heavens interpreted as an omen of the demise of Nimrod by the hands of Abram.  The babe was sent into exile, and eventually to the tutelage of Noah and Shem in Ur Casidim, the land of the Khaldini, or the Ur of the Chaldeas. All the families of Shem were inhabiting the Mesopotamian valley after the flood.  After the fall of the Tower of Babel, become the Chaldeans, Assyrians, Persians, Lydians and the Hebrews/Arab Semites. 

 

At the age of fifty, Abram returned to the land of Nimrod.  This was the land that Gilgamesh sought when he obtained the Lapis lazuli tablets hidden in a Copper tablet box.  Here was the land where early writing came from the records found by Kainan of the Nephilim, children of the Watchers. Once again, Abram is caught trying the overthrow the priestly hierarchy, which was his legacy to assume the role of the High Priest.  He burned down the temple of his father, which his brother Nahor died in the flames.  Abram was captured and thrown into a fiery furnace by Nimrod only to emerge unhurt, but his brother Haran died in the flames. He was then given a large possession, armed guards and Eliezar his servant by Nimrod, but his days were numbered in the court of the Nimrodian empire.

 

Here we see the land of the ancient zodiac calendar and ancient cosmology, the corruption of the knowledge which led to the attempted assault on the Elohim, the confounding of the communication skills of the people of Shinar, the fall of the Tower of Babel by a massive earthquake and the dispersion of the inhabitants of Shinar across the globe before the tectonic plates of Pangea separated into the continents of the world as we know them today.  After the Tower of Babel collapse, Nimrod is later known in scripture as Amraphel, one of the confederations of kings who invaded and captured Lot, nephew of Abram with the five kings of the Vail of Siddim.  The fate of Nimrod was truly at the hands of Abram.

 

Abram fled with his family, after told of an assassination plot by Nimrod, to Harran, and later become king of Damascus.  Terah his father, retired and built a Temple in Harran as a replica of his former Temple to Marduk.  If this all sounds like fantasy, join the Bible Searchers as they investigate the writings of the ancients as they enhance and collaborate the story of Abram in the Book of Genesis. 

 

Early Sumerian Culture

 

Nimrod, son of Cush, son of Ham, the second son of Noah, has been recognized in Hebrew scripture as a ‘mighty man’.  The various tribal families were spreading across the Mesopotamian delta and were ripe for a strong leader or ruler to synthesize their tribalistic spirit into a nationalistic unity.  Kish, the city of Cush, is recognized as the first city-state with Kish as its ruler.  It was then, according to ancient Sumerian tablets that kingship was lowered down from heaven and that civilization was taught to mankind by the “gods”.

 

The waters of the Noachian flood were receding, yet great patches of marshes and lakes spread across the fertile-crescent in which the habitation of large herds of wildlife and birds dwelt.  It was a productive, fertile and verdant landscape in which the remnants of the mighty pre-diluvia Edenic Rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris now traversed the countryside carrying the waters collected in the steppes and mountains of Armenia to the Persian gulf.  This was no hint of the arid and desert conditions that would grip these areas four and one-half millenniums later. 

 

The mighty headwaters of the River of Eden were gone, disappearing in the continental shifting, the undulation of great continental plates and the grinding, splitting, and separating of the tectonic plates of Pangea.  In a era of a prior age, the land for thousands of miles around were fed by the mega rivers fed by the erupting head waters of a giant geyser controlled by the earth-moon tidal gravitational pulls in a central highland, Eden.  The massive uplifting which occurred during the Great Flood, and the subsequent tectonic shifting of continental plates in the days of Jared, created a mountain chain in the Armenian highlands, which now become the source of the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. These fed the former riverbeds, now carrying water in the opposite direction from their pre-diluvium course.

 

Samuel Kramer, in his book, History Begins at Sumer, lists the firsts in the Sumerian society.  Justice demanded that the king was required to be ‘righteous’.  The Law, as promulgated and instituted by the king, stated that citizen and king alike were to obey and uphold the tenets of the law.  The Law Code was in essence codes of upright behavior, similar to the Hebraic law, the Ten Commandments which stated what is right, what is wrong and thereby should not be done.  Though credited to Hammurabi, a Babylonian ruler 1000 years later, the codified law according to Hammurabi was in essence not a law of behavior but rather a listing of crimes and the punishment needed to seek justice, a Law of Codes of Retribution.  These laws were arbitrary and punitive.  Rather than reflect a moral society, it was a legal attempt to arrest the behavior of an amoral and degenerate society.

 

Judicial administration in early Sumerian culture came by Judges, Juries, witnesses and contracts.  The family, as a unit of society, instituted laws of contractual marriages, rules and customs for succession, adoption, and the rights of widows.  The Law of Economic activity initiated an exchange based on contract, rules based on employment, wages and taxation.  Trade laws as depicted in a custom station in Drehem, developed a hierarchy, which kept meticulous records on trade transactions and international trade relations. 

 

Wisdom as depicted in the science and arts was the domain of Enki, the chief scientist, of the Annunnaki and his children.  This was an era depicted by the ancient in whom the “gods” may not be walking with man as depicted in the pre-diluvium society, but there is direct evidence in all writings including both Sumerian and Hebrew that the ancient rulers communicated directly with their “gods”.  The Annunnaki according to Sitchen in his series of books called the Earth Chronicles, possessed a unique object called ME which was a kind of a computer or data disc which contained instructions for the sciences, arts, and handicrafts. This object numbered more than one hundred tablets which included: writing, music, metalworking, construction, transportation, anatomy, medical treatments, flood control, and urban decay plus astronomy, mathematics and the calendar.  This object was ‘lowered down from heaven’ or granted to mankind by the ‘gods’ usually through a chosen person or group such as the priesthood. 

 

Enmeduranki was groomed to be the first priest.  He was given the secrets of Anu, Enlil and Enki in the Divine Tablets upon which the engraved secrets of Heaven and Earth were imprinted.  They also taught him how to make calculations with numbers and showed him now to observe oil and water (knowledge of medicine given either as an enema (oil) or oral medicine (water).  The Divine or Celestial Tablets contained information concerning the planets, solar system, and visible constellation of stars (Zodiac), and earth sciences which included geography, geology, and mathematics.  

 

The historical picture of the post-diluvium era was enhanced with the rediscovery of one the earliest historical documents written, the Book of Jasher, translated in 1840 from Hebrew into English and printed by the J.H.Parry & Company, Salt Lake City in 1887, later reprinted in 1988 by Artisan Sales in Thousand Oaks, California.  This ancient document is mentioned twice in the writings of the Judges, Joshua 10:13 and 2 Samuel 1:18.  It has given historical students greater insight into the era which  the children of the House of Noah repopulated the post-diluvium world.  

 

The book was initially called the ‘upright or correct record’ but since the name of the manuscript was not known, it was called the Book of Jasher.  Written in ancient Hebrew, the translators admit that only seven or eight root words could be traced to Chaldean origin, negating textual critics who felt most of Hebrew documents were formulated in the era of the Babylonian captivity of the Judean people or were renditions of earlier Sumerian texts. 

 

Nimrod, the Mighty Warrior

 

The life of Nimrod has been amplified significantly by the writings of Jasher which inform us that the strength and valor of the mighty warrior was attributed to the possession of one of the sacred relics of the House of Noah, the “garments of skins which God had made for Adam and his wife, when they went out of the garden.”  (Book of Jasher, translated, Artisan Sales, PO Box 1497,Thousand Oaks, CA., 91360, 1988, p. 15)  This sacred relic had been entrusted to the care by Enoch, then to Methuselah, and then Noah.  In the possession of the Noah, the garments now over 1650 years old, were stolen by Ham, and given in secret to his eldest son, Cush.  When Nimrod was twenty years old, he was given these garments by Cush at the age of twenty, it states, “God gave him (Nimrod) might and strength, and he was a mighty hunter in the earth, yea, he was a mighty hunter in the field, and he hunted the animals and he built altars, and he offered upon them the animals before the Lord” (Book of Jasher, ibid. p. 15) With this apparent divine power, this tribal family with Nimrod as their leader sought to increase their power and influence over his brethren and cousins, first subduing the House of Japheth,  With four hundred and sixty men of war including hired mercenaries, he conquered and consolidated the first historical civilization in the post-diluvium era.  Shinar was the first of the royal cities who were extensively built and became the visible symbol of the unchallenged reign of Nimrod.  His fame spread throughout the land, the symbol kingship was placed upon his head and the era of the god-kings was begun.  Rather than give credit to the Source of his power, he consolidated the power and glory unto himself,

 

“and all nations and tongues heard of his fame, and they fathered themselves to him, and they bowed down to the earth, and they brought him offerings, and he became their lord and king, and they all dwelt with him in the city of Shinar, and Nimrod reigned in the earth over all the sons of Noah, and they were all under his power and counsel.  And all the earth was of one tongue and words of union, but Nimrod did not go in the ways of the Lord, and he was more wicked than all the men that were before him, form the days of the flood until those days.” (Book of Jasher, ibid, p. 16.)

 

The first world government was formed and the seeds of world religious and political dominance were instilled in the power of the priestly hierarchy, and the roots of the Chaldi, the secret wise ones were installed.

 

The empire of Nimrod was centralized in the Mesopotamian valley.  “His kingdom in the beginning consisted of Kish, Babel, Erech, and Accad, all of them in the land of Shinar. From that land he migrated to Asshur and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calab, and Resen, a great city between Nineveh and Caleh.”  (Genesis 10:10-11) 

 

The walls of Erech (Uruk)  were built on the foundation of a pre-Flood cityGilgamesh claimed, from his reading of tablets engraved on Lapis lazuli and secreted in a “copper tablet box”  loosened with “the ring-bolt made of bronze” that  this city was built by the seven sages or patriarchs of the Cainite prediluviun society and was not the city of his possessions. (Gardner, John and John Maier, Gilgamesh, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. New York, 1984 Tablet I, Lines 4-6, 22-25)

 

Birth of Abram

 

In the height of the military prowess of the Nimrodian dynasty, the prince of the military hosts was led by the capable leadership of the Terah, the high priest of Ur, the royal heir to the House of Shem, and later high priest of Harran. and a leader which the “king and the princes loved him, and they elevated him very high… and dignified him above all his princes that were with him. (Book of Jasher 7:49,51. ibid, p. 16)

 

At the pinnacle of greatness, second in command of the empire of Sumer, Terah was wed to Amthelo, the daughter of Cornebo.  To this union was born a son, Abram.  In celebration of his birth, a great party was thrown and the guest lists included heads of state(wise men) and conjurors.  The evening of the party,  they witnessed an exploding star which came from the east which caused a vast luminescence and rapidly spread and covered the whole night time sky on the Mesopotamian delta.  This spectacular celestial scene prompted the wise men, the Magi,  to give their oracular interpretation to Nimrod that Terah's  son, Abram would become powerful and kill all the kings of the earth, an international dynastic coup. 

 

Nimrod, the king of Kish,  offered Terah a bribe to purchase Abram, which included a  gold and silver enough to fill Terah’s house, with the knowledge that Abram would be killed.  A three day waiting period was given for consultation, and during that time, a son of Terah’s servant was substituted for Abram.  The king immediately threw the child down and dashed the head against a stone, secure in his mind that a future political coup had been prevented. 

 

Abram was secreted out of the city to a rural cave hideout with his mother and nurse and there lived 10 years in exile and isolation.  At the onset of puberty, Abram  left his family and traveled north near the site of the Great Ship south of the Ararat Mountains, where Noah and Shem apparently were living in the same area.  There he " learned the instruction of the Lord and his ways, …and Abram served Noah and Shem his son for a long time,” (Book of Jasher 9:5, ibid, p. 19.) isolated from the cosmopolitan center of higher learning of Shinar.  Within the foothills of the Armenian mountains, visible in the distance the peaks of Ararat, and within the political influence of the tribal mountain people, the Khaldini of Urartu, Abram received the instruction and wisdom of Yahweh Elohim.  This Wisdom passed from Adam to Methuselah, directly to Noah and then to Abram.  The oral traditions and the tablets of the Book of Adam were studied and learned by the young man, Abram. 

 

Ur of the Chaldeans (Khaldinis)

           

David Fasold, his book, The Ark of Noah, while detailing the archeological finds of a ship remains in Armenia  and describing the path of the drogue stones, or stone anchors depicting the path of this ancient ship, gives his thoughts on the Armenian connection of Abram.  The area of Armenia lies north of the Mesopotamian valley in the area of Lake Van.  An ancient historian of the Armenian, Moses Khorenatsi, called by some the “Herodotus of the Armenians” noted that the local tribesmen called themselves Hai, pronounced by the people in the Lake Van region as Kh(o)ai, meaning Ram.  They recognized themselves as the People of the Ram and their supreme deity was (K)Hal-di.  Thus was derived the land of the original Khaldini, later corrupted by Greeks in the times of Achaemenian to Chaldea(Fasold, David, The Ark of Noah, Wynwood Press, New York, NY, 1988. p 184) 

 

According to Josephus, Shem, the third son of Noah, had five sons who colonized the land from the Euphrates delta valley to the Indian Ocean.   The Persians were in descent from Elam, and the Elamites.  The Assyrians came from Asshur who dwelled in Nineveh.  Arphaxad  descendants were called the Arphaxadites, now known as the Chaldeans.  The Syrians came from the Aramites, or the son Aram and the Lydians were in descent from the son, Laud, and his descendants, the Laudites. (Josephus,  Flavius, The Complete Works of Josephus, translated William Whiston A.M., Kregel Publication, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 49501,  1981, p. 33)

 

David Fasold, believes that the thirteen B.C.E. Urartu was in reality the area of the Khaldini and consistent with the claims of descent from Arphaxad, born twelve years after the flood from an offshoot of Kesed, reputed son of Nahor (Fasold, Ibid. p. 185)  In the Book of Jubilees, it confirms this idea with a long genealogy 

 

Terah as noted earlier resided in Harran, and was the oracle high priest of the temple of Harran, copied after the divine city of Nippur.  Tell Harran, recognized as a typical tell in the Mesopotamian valley, located eighteen kilometers from the modern Syrian border therefore became the focal center of the  Abram story, the area of his roots, in the land of the People of the Ram from the House of Terah.  In Daniels time, the Chaldeans spoke Syriack (Daniel 2:4 KJV), now known as Armenian, or the language of ancient Syrian.  In the Jewish Kabballah, when the divine visitors announced to Abram that Sarai, his wife was in child, he laughed and said, “No! Not Sarah! As a child, my Lord, I spent much time jesting with the young men of the mountains of Urartu.  Yes, I played satire with the men of Ur…” (Fasold, Ibid, p. 186) In Ezekiel’s day, (Ezekiel 1:3 KJV, Greek spelling) the land of the Chaldeans was by the river Kebar, or in Ur Kasdim by the modern Khabor River in upper mesopotamian valley.  Therefore Ur of the Chaldeas was the area above the bifurcation of the Euphrates River in the area of Padan Aram, near the Khabor River and the Syrian border in the town of Harran, now known as Tell Harran.  The people are known today as Armenians, who spoke the ancient language of Syriack in the land near the mountains of Urartu. The linkage of Abram to Ur of Sumeria and Ur in Chaldea which has puzzled historians and archeologists for years, may reside in the fact that Abram probably lived and received social notoriety in both the rural and cosmopolitan region.

 

Terah, the Oracle Priest

 

Terah was a worshipper of Marduk, the celestial warrior god, Mars.  The Tower of Babel was dedicated to this orbiting celestial proto planet, which returned to an avenging destructive path to earth about every 52-54 years.  Imagine the fear, respect and terror created by this protoplanet as every two years it made a commentary pass by over the earth. Each pass by was closer and closer until its nearest and most destructive orbital visit came on a fifty plus year anniversary.  An entire governmental department of that early Shinar was devoted to scientific evaluation of this cometary visitor. This department included the conjurors, which developed a whole system of predictive celestial sciences and the Magi, wise men, who studied the philosophical, religious, and sociological implication of these semi-centennial visits.  Rituals and religious symbolism was developed to appease Marduk (Mars) and what better than to fashion images in stone or wood and use them in effigies to be placed in their homes for worship.  This is the earliest historical depiction of idol worship (Jasher 9:7) 

 

In his urban estate, Terah built twelve large statues, which resided in his private temple, constructed of stone and wood and no doubt reflected the highest quality of artistry and craftsmanship in the Shinar peninsula.  Each effigy represented a deity for the month, representing the calenderic system utilized in Nippur,  developed since the Noachian flood and the catastrophe which forced the earth to a new and further orbit from the sun increasing the yearly calendar from 290 to 300 days per year to 360 days per year.  The Zodiac system was begun, and Terah came from a long line of Oracle priests and the first disciples of the Zodiacian secret mysteries.

 

In the Book of Jasher, it recounts the story of  Arphaxad, who had a son by Rasuja, named Kainan, not to be confused with Kainan, the son of Ham and father of the Canaanites.  This Kainan came under the special tutelage of his father and learned the art of writing.  One day on the foothills, he uncovered a stone stele with writings which he soon identified as the writings of the Watchers, the fallen angels, who wrecked such genetic havoc in the antediluvian world.  These writings included the “astrology of the sun and the moon and the stars and in all the signs of heaven” (Jubilee 8:3, compare with Book of Enoch 8:1) Kainan hid the writings from the knowledge of Noah but passed the secret mysteries to his son, Kesed and then to his son, Ur, the builder of the city of Era of the Chaldeas.  It was Ur, who transported this information to the new mystery religion of the Chaldeas and was the first to sculpt molten images for worship.  The formation of idol worship was started by Ur, the father of the Chaldeas.

 

  The author of the Book of Jubilee, viewed behind the super-dimensional aspects of the story, stating, “And the prince Mastema gave his power to make all this, and through the angels who had been given under his hand, he sent out his hand to do all wickedness and sin and all transgression, and to destroy and to murder and to shed blood over the earth.”  (Jubilee 11:5)

 

The priestly dynasty passed down through the daughter of Ur, called On, who was the mother of Nahor, the grandfather of Abram.  The traditions were then passed on to Terah and Abram.  While Abram was secreted away from the deadly grasp of Nimrod, he learned the art of writing and the mysteries and secrets of the heavens from his father.   The oracular mysteries were confined within the dynasty of his family.  The power and social acclaim were his birthright.

 

Even so, Abram went to live with Noah and Shem who resided in the foothills of the Armenian mountains and resided there for thirty nine years.  It was stated that “Abram knew the Lord from three years old” (Jasher 9:6) In his youth he also pondered the meaning of worship the sun and the moon but came to the thoughtful conclusion that the Creator God was greater than these. In the solitude of the Armenian hillside, the true worship of the Creator God  and the family traditions in the family of Adam, preserved and transcribed  by Noah were given to Abram. 

 

At the age of fourteen, a plague of ravens settled in the hillside and began to eat the grain as it was being sown and cast across the fields in the springtime.  As soon as they cast the grain, the bird would eat it up and the villagers knew that a disaster harvest was ahead.  Wherever Abram went, he had the magic to dispel the ravens, which flew in great clouds.  By diligently working with his countrymen, he saved the harvest and his fame went throughout the land. That winter, Abram, designed a novel invention to be placed on the crook-timber of the plows whereby they would drop seed into furrows and the ravens could not find the seed to eat.  Thus at the age of fifteen, Abram became the inventor of the seed furrow planter

 

During this era the massive building project of the empire was the Tower of Babel.  In the plains of Shinar, the inhabitants of early Sumer now numbering about six hundred thousands citizens (Jasher 9:23) began the first national work building program using mortar and brick.  The megalithic (giant stones) era of the antediluvian era was over.  The land of Sumer did not have limestone as quarried in Egypt and so brick, bitumen used, as mortar became the commercial building material.  Their ruler, Nimrod, who gained power and prominence using the hand wrought garments made by Yahweh Elohim, now began to believe the power and glory of his reign and thought to assume the role of a national god, an imperial  monarch.   It was the national custom to create your god, the first ‘me’ generation.  “And the inhabitants of the earth made unto themselves, at that time, every man his god; gods of wood and stone. (Jasher 9:6)  

 

The arrogance turned to vengeance as the Sumerian war lords, comforted in the security of their borders turned their attention thinking they could fight the Elohim who has brought the flood ten generations prior.  Their ruler, now ruling over seven generations of inhabitants by subjugating his cousins and imposing a military rule, now sought to fight the ‘gods’ in the heaven in direct assault by building a tower up to their abode in the clouds and using it as a military staging ground. 

 

Tower of Babel

 

In Genesis, the second time recorded that the Lord God is translated as a plurality, said, Let us do down there and confuse their speech…” (Genesis 11:7)  This was amplified by the author of Jasher by stating “to the seventy angels who stood foremost before him, to those who were near to him, saying, Come let us descend and confuse their tongues, that one man shall not understand the language of his neighbor, and they did so unto them.” (Jasher 9:32)  It is of interest that scholars suggest that seventy tribes or nations came out of the Tower of Babel experience.

 

Elohim to the ancient writers, though monotheistic in their understanding of a Supreme God and Creator, also viewed the pantheon of supernatural beings created by and in the presence and at the service of the Almighty One, as gods consistent with the Sumerian world view of religious thought.  Yahweh Elohim, the manifestation of the Elohim to mankind, was viewed by the Hebrew thought as reflective of the One God, yet the message and visual imagery came many times by emissaries sent by the direct charge of the  Elohim.  That they, the angelic beings created in the higher dimensions who served next to the Creator God, would at times be viewed as God, was not inconsistent with the postdiluvian Hebrew thought. 

 

The debacle of the ultimate catastrophic collapse of the Tower of Babel including earthquakes, massive earth fissuring which swallowed up a third part of the tower, also included a strange phenomenon in which the population became aphasic to their mother tongue, they could hear, but could not comprehend, and when they spoke, their language was different.  Was it the role of the angels to carry a new root language to each different family tribe with impressions of oracular vibrations still unknown to this day?  Some scholars have suggested that language was by mental telepathy and that the telepathic powers of the brain were diminished so man had to communicate by oral speech.  From Babel, they migrated and settled in new homelands: the Indus Valley, China, Egypt, the proto-Mediterranean  basin and Meso-America.

 

The empire of Nimrod was dispersed, vast migrations moved out to all corners of the globe. The early Sumerian empire was subdued,  but the power of Nimrod was not broken.  His heart was hardened and his people consolidated around him. Yet the glory days were over and fading fast.  The world, as envisioned by Hancock, in Footprints of the Gods,  had already been mapped, explored and the cardinal points had been determined.  Pangea was still intact, her subterranean crust fractured by the Noachian flood, and the continental drift had not yet begun. 

 

The post-Babel empire of Nimrod was significantly reorganized and whereas before the Babel debacle, Nimrod controlled his empire by the might of his own sword, he now sought military alliances to maintain primacy in the military-diplomatic arena. Nimrod’s subjects also renamed their leader, Nimrod, to Amraphel. According to the author of Jasher, the title of Amraphel was given because, “at the tower his princes and men fell through his (Nimrod’s) means”  (Jasher 11:6)  One of Nimrod/Amraphel’s earliest allies was the king of Elam, Chedorlaomer, who had subdued the children of Ham who lived in the vail of Shiddon in the cities of the plains

 

The Return of Abram to Sumeria

 

Still in his youth, at the age of forty nine, as sexual maturity took longer to achieve in those days, Abram knew it was time to return to the land of his family.   It was the first jubilee (forty-nine years) of Abram’s life when Nahor, Abram’s grandfather died.  A large family reunion was called in Sumeria.  Peleg, the great grandfather of Nahor had died a year earlier.  The name of Peleg meant ‘division’. Upon his birth, the continents of the earth were split and were divided and upon his death, the Babel experience caused the massive migration and division of the children of Noah.  The political unrest was settling down and Nimrod, now called Amraphel with his allies were finishing the consolidation of the remnant of his post-Babel empire. 

 

Abram, now absent from his fathers house for thirty-nine years and commencing the celebration of his fiftieth birthday, he returned to the funerary celebration of his noted grandfather, also revered sage and priest of the Sumerian cults.  It was at this funeral celebration that the religious  reformationist, Abram sought to start a revolt in the Sumerian religious hierarchy.  At his father home, Abram watched and observed the twelve statues of Terah, noting that by placing food before the altars, the idols were unable to reciprocate and eat.  He confronted his father, who acknowledged that the religious and political power was so interwoven in the early Sumerian culture, that to initiate such a reform would be political and personal suicide for him and his family. 

 

Abram settled down, and married his half-sister, Sara, while Nahor also married, Milcah, the daughter of Harran, and they both started their own families.   One day, Abram took a hatchet and destroyed all the idols except the largest central idol in which he placed the hatchet.  He then told his father that when placing the food before the idols they all reached and grabbed the food before the senior idol was able to reach the food, so he therefore chopped them up.  The fact that Terah did not believe his son, only highlighted the fact even Terah did not believe the idols were capable of any animate activity.

 

This incident was transmitted by Terah to the king, Nimrod, who had Abram imprisoned after Abram directly implicated the king with the religious deception, “O foolish, simple and ignorant king, woe unto thee forever.  I thought thou wouldst teach thy servants the upright way, but thou hast not done this, but hast filled the whole earth with thy sins and the sins of thy people who have followed thy ways.”  (Jasher XI:56-57)  This admonition turned to warning, “if thy wicked heart will not hearken to my words to cause thee to forsake thy evil ways, and to serve the eternal God, then wilt thou die in shame in the latter days, thou, thy people and all who are connected with thee, hearing thy words or walking in thy evil ways.” (Jasher XI: 60)

 

Ten days later, Abram with his brother Haran, now eighty-two years old, were thrown in a fiery furnace.  Haran was implicated by his father, Terah, as the instigator of the initial deception/ploy of switching the boy Abram for a servant’s son, who was then earlier killed by the king.  As reminiscent in the later incident of Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego, Abram was not killed in the fiery inferno, but his brother was reduced to ashes.

 

Three days in the fiery inferno, before the Akkadian multitudes, Abram stayed according to ancient sources.  After this, Nimrod asked “Abram, O servant of the God who is in heaven,”…”come hither before me”. (Ibid XII:32) Abram was sent away in peace with many gift, gold, silver and pearls including many of the king’s servants including Oni, and the most faithful one, Eliezar plus three hundred men.

 

Two years of peace reigned between Abram and Nimrod until one day Eliezar heard rumors within the court of Nimrod that an assassination attempt was to be made on Abram’s life.  The king had a prophetic dream that Abram came after him with a sword and when he turned around, he threw an egg on him, which became a river, which drowned his troops.  The river turned back into an egg from which came forth birds, which came down and plucked out the eyes of Nimrod as he was escaping from the scene of battle.   A wise man in the court of Nimrod, Anuki, interpreted the dream that Nimrod/Amrophel and Abram would one day meet on the battlefield in the vale of Siddim and Abram would destroy not only his troops but the hardened warriors of his three allies after their victory over the Kings of the Cities of the Valley of Siddim.  The memory of the exploding star fifty two years prior came back to the king, vowing now to eliminate Abram not only as a rival to the throne but as an enemy of the empire

 

Abram realizing that he would not dissuade his father to destroy the idols decided to appoint himself the vindicator of God’s justice.  One night he arose in the middle of the night and set the whole temple complex on fire.  The fires leapt high engulfing all the idols and religious icons when his brother ran into the complex trying to save the idols.  The ceilings collapsed and his brother Nahor died in the flames.  His two brothers were now dead and Terah knew that Abram was his only salvation. Some biblical critics have blamed Abram for the death of his brothers, Nahor, in the temple inferno, and Harran, earlier in the fiery furnace and for if he had only tempered his reformationist zeal, and both of his brother’s life might have been spared. 

 

Abram flees Ur Casidim (Khaldini)

 

The exodus from Ur Casidim by Abram and the family of Terah was one in haste.  This fact has puzzled theologians for centuries, not knowing the threat of assassination on Abram by Nimrod as depicted in the book of Jasher.   With the death of Nahor in the fiery temple inferno and Haran in the fiery furnaces of Nimrod of Casidim at the age of eighty two, Abram, along with his family and retinue, fled again to the house of Noah, who along with Shem  had persuaded Terah to leave Ur Casidim and head towards Canaan. There they settled or started a new cityHarran, named for Abram’s deceased brother.  It was near the entrance to Canaan and Lebanon yet out of the political sphere of Nimrod’s saboteurs.

 

Terah  retired away from the cosmopolitan area of Sumer and went back to the foothills of  the Taurus Mountain in northwestern Armenia.  There he built a new estate and temple complex at Harran. Tel Harran, now identified in the Ebla tablets was a noted town of commerce, built at the major northern crossroad center between Sumer and western Asia.  The temple complex built in Harran has been reconstructed by archeologists and noted to be a mirror image of the central Sumerian religious complex to Nannar/Sin in Ur.

 

What is of interest in the saga of the dream of Nimrod, is that the wise man, a Chaldi, who interpreted the dream was called Anuki.  This returns us to the works of Zecharia Sitchin in which the name Annukian referred to those peoples who initially colonized earth as inhabitants when they came from the planet, Marduk, and was translated from Sumerian as “Those who from Heaven to Earth came.”  (Sitchen, Zecharia, When Time Began,  Avon Books, The Hearst Corp., NY p. 10) According to the author of the Book of Jubilees, a tenth of spirits forms of the antediluvian Nephilim with the Angel Mastema were allowed to interact not physically but in the spirit with the inhabitants of the post-flood era. (Jasher 10:8)  

 

Abram, the Scion of the Sumerian Head of State.

 

At the age of seventy five, Abram is living in the vicinity of Harran and possibly at this time he assumed kingship at Damascus, a noted foreigner with an armed retinue.  Here we see a family involved in the political and religious life of Sumeria, a high class family of noble birth who lived and mingled with the high echelons of Sumerian society.   Nicholas of Damascus, reporting in his fourth book states, “Abram reigned at Damascus, being a foreigner who came with an army out of the land above Babylon called the land of the Chaldeans.  But after a long time he got up, and removed from the country also with his people, and went into the land the called the land of Canaan but now the land of Judea” (italics supplied) (Fasold, Ibid. p. 186.)

 

For fourteen years, Abram lives on the corridor of the fertile crescent before descending into the land of Shem’s inheritance, Canaan.  On a crystal clear night, he was observing the heavens to predict the rains and seasonal changes, when the Lord spoke to him.

 

Get the out of thy country, and from thy kindred and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee; and I will make of thee a great nation and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.  (Gen 12:1-3)

 

AB RAM , his Sumerian name meant “Father’s Beloved”.  Terah, his father, not only was the head of the royal hosts of Nimrod, but also high priest of Ur and accepted in the highest ranks

to performs the religious ceremonies at Nimmiru.

 

The Abram as some picture in the Hebrew scriptures was not a marauding nomad.   When arriving in Egypt, he is immediately taken to the presence of the king of Egypt. From there he engages in social, scientific and political discourse and negotiates treaties with dignitaries at high levels.  When cohabitating with the Canaanites, we find Abram careful to avoid local conflicts even with local rights such as water wells.  Here we see a person trained in the fine arts of negotiation and diplomacy.

 

Ancient linguists early compared the Hebrew word Ibri with the word Hapiru which the Egyptian, Assyrian and Babylonians in the seventeenth and eighteenth century called groups of western Semites who pillaged and invaded the borders of the civilized city states. They were the bandits of the era.   Yet when we see Abraham becoming involved in the War of the Kings, he refuses to take any booty for himself, reflecting the high conduct of a person of his stature. 

 

The Royal Lineage of Abram

 

Here was a family of royal lineage, who claimed descent from the first born from the House of Shem: Arphaxad, Selah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor, Terah, and Abram. Yet it is to Eber in which the biblical name Hebrew or Ibri is derived which gives the family of Abraham its greatest identity.  Sitchen claims that the root word means “to cross” and rather than the Semitic origin we must look to Sumerian linguists for the meaning.   He therefore directs us to look to the biblical suffix i when applied to a person means “a native of”.  Therefore Gileadi meant a native of Gilead.  In the same token, Ibri meant a native of the place called “Crossing”, which was the Sumerian name for Nippur: NI.IB.RU.  To Sitchen, this was the Original Navel of the Earth, the pre-diluvium center of civilization.  When transferring linguistics from Sumerian to Akkadian/Hebrew, the n was dropped off. So Abram, the Ibri, was actually Abram of Ni-ib-ri, a man of Nippurian origin. (Sitchen, Zechariah, The Wars of Gods and Men, Avon Books, The Hearst Corp. 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019  p. 294-295)  

 

Nippur was noted in ancient Sumerian society as a consecrated city, the navel or center of  Sumerian religious society.  It was the nerve center where astronomy was utilized and entrusted to the priestly caste and where the Nippurian calendar originated as soon as the orbits of the post-diluvium sun, earth, and moon were calculated.  Scholars know today this calendar was synthesized about 4000 BC in the age of Taurus.  The Hebrew calendar was derived from this Nippurian calendar as it based its origin on the beginning year of 3760 BC (where 1997 is the Jewish year of  5757) The Jewish sages recount that these are the years that have passed “since counting [of years] began(Ibid p.296)   

 

So Abram, turned his sights and the destiny of his family south, to the land of the Canaanites.  A new era in his life was about to begin.  The identity as the son of the Sumerian Oracle Priest would soon evolve in the life of a Western Potentate, and one who had a special destiny to fulfill.

 

To be continued,  Part II

 

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