Because of Panbabylonism, a quasi-romantic universal explanation for myths (they all come from Mesopotamia) popular a century ago, now offering up Babylon as an explanation of anything is suspect and any speculation on such things goes way beyond the evidence, but some of us cant help ourselves and connect dots anyway, and sometimes they do lead back to Babylon. The first Holy Trinity we know of was the Mesopotamian one, Anu, Enlil, and Enki. These corresponded to zones in the sky. Enlil was the northern sky, where the North Pole is and the stars never set. Enki was the southern sky, where stars can rise and set in the same night and where part of the sky is never visible. Anu, the Highest God, occupied the middle where the planes of the solar system (ecliptic) and the earths equator (celestial equator) dominate. The ecliptic moves north and south of the celestial equator reflecting the tilt in the earths axis. In Ugarit, we find El (sounds like Enlil) living atop a mountain (North Pole) in the North surrounded by thousands and tens of thousands (they didnt have light pollution then) of stars, the Hosts, who never set and surround the Pole/Mountain in successive circles. In Midian, we find Yah (sounds like Ea, the Babylonian name for Enki), who also appears on a mountain. Like Enki, Yah is a more human-friendly and earthy god than El, appearing as Marduk, the storm god, in Babylonia proper, and, among the Canaanite adherents to him, appearing as Baal, another storm god. All of these gods are, like Baal, in the process of defeating Death and its primary symbol, sea water, symbolized by a sea serpent, Hydra, or Yamm, or Leviathan. Anu, the Highest God, appears as a title of El in Abrahamic times. Subsequently, as the Midian Yah-worship extended into Canaan, El and Yah were fused into the LORD God, a common title in the Torah. Whereas the more ancient versions of myths, such as the flood, could cast Enlil as bad, wishing human destruction, Enki was good, warning of the impending disaster. These myths suffer from the monotheistic impulse, creating the problems of theodicy, which is just another way of saying that the character God is not internally self-consistent. He both destroys humans and saves some. He does good things and bad things. Enlil and Anu have been completely absorbed into a human-like Enki, setting the stage for the Davidic Kingdom and all that followed.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 18:39:40 +0000
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