Kingdom Come

Ebla was an important center in what is now Syria throughout the 3rd millennium BC, i.e. before and after the Flood. Archeological excavations from Ebla since 1964 show its territory – the Levant – was a centralized civilization equal to Egypt and Mesopotamia.

In Bible-speak, the Levant is the territory bordered by the Nile to the Euphrates Rivers and granted to YHVH’s earthly ruler. Its importance can be deduced from the continuous battles for control of this region by every empire in the area from Ebla to Rome, continuing to this day between Eastern and Western powers, most notably America.

This is what makes “ancient” history so fascinating – it is also contemporary news.

Ebla has been described as the capitol of the first recorded world power, starting in the Early Bronze Age (c. 3500 bc). This corresponds in time with the arrival of the fallen Watchers on earth in the days of Jared. The kingdom had its own Semitic variant language, Eblaite.

Ebla’s influence was built on a vast trading network, as demonstrated by archeological artifacts from Sumer, Cyprus, Egypt and as far as Afghanistan recovered from the city’s palaces. The political organization of Ebla had features different from the Sumerian model. Women enjoyed a special status, and the queen had major influence in the state and religious affairs. Its deities were exclusive to Ebla. These features all correspond to Babylon’s lifestyle as condemned by YHVH, indicating that Ebla was not home base of a righteous people, but rather a mission field for righteous prophets like Jonah at Ninevah.

Ebla was destroyed by fire during the 23rd century BC, which corresponds in time with the natural disasters precipitating the flood. 

Sumerian legend reports that after the flood, the kingship was given to ‘Etana’. This title means ‘the shepherd who ascended to Heaven and made firm all the lands’. This implies that Etana, like David and the Son of David, and Cyrus, brought stability, peace and order to a population in desperate need of recovery from disaster.

The only reasonable deduction is that Noah is Etana, ruling over the initial population of the new world.

Etana is also sometimes credited with the founding of Kish, a settlement located midway between the Tigris and Euphrates. This strategic location corresponds to the early post-flood terrain during which these two rivers were surely far wider than currently due to raging floodwaters from the glacial melt cascading off the Caucasus Mountains.

The Sumerian king list states that Kish was the first city to have kings following the deluge, beginning with Ĝushur.

This king’s “name” is certainly not a personal name like we consider names, but a title reflecting his accomplishments, one of which is that he reigned for 1200 years.

The Sumerian numerical system was based on sequences of 12 – like modern time-keeping – rather than 10, so what has been translated as “1200 years” is quite possibly in our decimal system “1000 years”. Think of it like converting currencies. We can deduce that this was, at the least, an exceptionally long life, experienced only by, thereby being proof of, this individual’s unique transplant to the post-flood from the pre-flood world when men who did not meet a violent death lived about 1000 years.

As the leader of the small band of survivors through the flood, Noah is only real match for the individual the Sumerians called Ĝushur.

•  And all the days that Adam lived were 930 years
• And all the days of Seth were 912 years
• And all the days of Enos were 905 years…
• And all the days of Jared were 962 years…
• And all the days of Methuselah were 969 years
• And all the days of Lamech were 777 years

“And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth…And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years. And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years.” (Genesis 5:32, 7:11-13, 9:28-29)

Ignace Gelb identified Kish as the center of the earliest East Semitic culture which he calls the Kish civilization, derived from Ebla and Mari in the Levant. Based on what we’ve learned about Ebla, this is the continuation of the Adversary’s civilization, not YHVH’s righteous way of life! What happened?

In 9 consecutive generations – about 300 years after the flood – the average lifespan had dropped and stabilized from almost 1000 years to about 150 years.

At this same time Noah died. If not before, by then he had certainly lost control of Kish to the Adversary.

Noah’s / Ĝushur’s successor King of Kish is translatable as a sentence in Akkadian meaning “All of them were lord”. This is the definition of anarchy, and some scholars have indeed suggested that this may signify the absence of a central authority in Kish.

After its early supremacy, Kish declined economically and militarily, but retained a symbolic significance strong enough for later rulers to claim “King of Kish” as a traditional if subjectively meaningly title, like the titles of the monarch of Great Britain  even if they ruled from Akkad, Ur, Assyria, Isin, Larsa or Babylon. One of the earliest to adopt this title upon subjecting Kish to his empire was King Mesannepada of Ur.

The twenty-first king of Kish on the Sumerian king list, Enmebaragesi is the first name found in archaeological finds and literary references as contemporary rivals of Dumuzid, the Fisherman, and Gilgamesh, early pagan rulers of Uruk.

Some early kings of Kish are not named on the King list but have archaeological records. We can deduce that these individuals were warlords who claimed the title of king without being officially recognized by the record keepers.

“Behold the land of the Chaldeans / Kasdim

The Chaldeans (hard K sound as in “school”), AKA Kesed are also derived from the name of Shem’s son Arph-axad.

The book of Jubilees reports that Arpachshad fathered Ura and Kesed who founded the city of Ur Kasdim (Ur of the Chaldees) on the west bank of the Euphrates (Jubilees 9:4; 11:1–7). This was validated when the city was unearthed by notable archeologist Leonard Woolley in 1927.

The Chaldeans are the original Babylonians in southern Mesopotamia.

this people / nation was not, till the Assyrian founded it for them that dwell in the wilderness: they set up the towers thereof, they raised up the palaces thereof...” (Isaiah 23:13)

The Assyrian is Asshur, Arphaxad’s younger brother, famed as an architect-engineer.

The Assyrians were a Semitic people who originally spoke and wrote Akkadian.The city of Ashur was founded c. 1900 BCE on the site of a pre-existing community that had been built for the Akkians.

After building forts for his warmongering brother in the south he built forts of his own in the north, doubtless after the region had thawed enough to dig foundations.

“Out of that land went forth Asshur and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, And Resen between Nineveh and Calah: the same is a great city.

The biblical account of the close ties between brothers, maintained by their nations the Chaldeans and Assyrians, is validated by secular records.

The relationship between the kings of Assyria and Babylon had traditionally been close. From the 14th century BC when Assyria became an independent state, the royal families had been linked by marriage. Shalmaneser III of Assyria (858-824 BC) and Marduk-zakir-šumi I of Babylon, for example, are depicted as equal partners on the front of Shalmaneser’s throne base from his palace at Kalhu…

According to one interpretation of passages in the biblical Book of Genesis, Ashur was founded by a man named Ashur son of Shem, son of Noah, after the Great Flood, who then went on to found the other important Assyrian cities. A more likely account is that the city was named Ashur after the deity of that name sometime in the 3rd millennium BCE; the same god’s name is the origin for ‘Assyria’…The king Erishum I built the temple of Ashur on the site in c. 1900/1905 BCE.

This is consistent with the estimated date of Ashur’s death, estimated to be within the same time as his brother Arphaxad.

Do you see the bias with the constant discrediting of the biblical history? No historian would ever brush aside the Egyptian account of their dynastic founder being equal to their national god.

In fact, the “more likely account” is that Ashur, who as the grandson of Noah lived for hundreds of years during the 2000’s BC is one and the same with the deity Ashur from the 2000’s BC. After the post-diluvian ecosystem triggered rapid genetic mutations resulting in rapidly constricting lifespans the new generations attributed immortality to the first few generations of centuries-long-living superhuman they never saw age or die.

In addition, as is well-known in Egypt, the ruler was inhabited by the spirit of the god and therefore considered to be the god.

“the sons of Ham; Cush…And Cush begat Nimrod…the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad / Akkad , and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.

These are all Chaldean cities belonging to the Akkadian civilization, so it was Nimrod who began the process of ending Arphaxad’s hegemony.

Since Akkad was destroyed and lost with the destruction of its Empire in the period 2200–2154 BCE (long chronology), the stories mentioning Nimrod seem to recall the late Early Bronze Age. The association with Erech (Babylonian Uruk), a city that lost its prime importance around 2,000 BCE…also attests the early provenance of the stories of Nimrod.

Another attestation to early provenance of all the founders of the earliest civilizations is their close relationship to each other, validating the biblical account and genetic record of just four sets of parents surviving the flood.

The Assyrians common root and cause with the Chaldeans is revealed throughout the first 1,200 years of the Empire’s rule beginning about 1,900 BC. Akkadian continued to be the language of Assyria until about 700 BCE when it was dropped in favor of Aramaic. Then, over one thousand years later the most famous Assyrian ruler identifies himself with the first Assyrian Emperor.

Sargon II (722-705 BCE)…was able to bring the empire to its greatest height…

his son Sennacherib (705-681 BCE)…campaigned widely and ruthlessly, conquering Israel, Judah, and the Greek provinces in Anatolia [eastern Turkey]. His sack of Jerusalem is detailed on the ‘Taylor Prism’, a cuneiform block describing Sennacherib’s military exploits which was discovered in 1830 CE by Britain‘s Colonel Taylor, in which the king claims to have captured 46 cities. His account is contested, however, by the version of events described in the biblical book of II Kings, chapters 18-19, where it is claimed that Jerusalem was saved by divine intervention and Sennacherib’s army was driven from the field.

The internal reliability of the Judean kings’ scribes documenting the standard practice and many times they were abandoned by their God to the destruction of their enemies, and the well-known spin put on embarrassing failures by politicians of any era certainly gives the biblical account the credibility in this contested report.

Sennacherib drove his army against Babylon, sacked it, and looted the temples…[two of his] sons… assassinated him in his palace at Nineveh.

Hmm. This too is recorded in II Kings, chapter 19, but the historian failed to mention that.

His son Esarhaddon (681-669 BCE) took the throne, and one of his first projects was to rebuild Babylon. He issued an official proclamation which claimed that Babylon had been destroyed by the will of the gods owing to the city’s wickedness and lack of respect for the divine…

Hmm. This too is recorded in the biblical record. Hundreds of times.

the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (668-627 BCE)…was the most literate of the Assyrian rulers and is probably best known in the modern day for the vast library he collected at his palace at Nineveh…

In 612 BCE Nineveh was sacked and burned by a coalition of Babylonians, Persians, Medes, and Scythians, among others. The destruction of the palace brought the flaming walls down on the library of Ashurbanipal and, although it was far from the intention, preserved the great library, and the history of the Assyrians, by baking hard and burying the clay tablet books…the destruction of the great Assyrian cities was so complete that, within two generations of the empire’s fall, no one knew where the cities had been. The ruins of Nineveh were covered by the sands and lay buried for the next 2,000 years.

Legacy of Assyria

Thanks to the Greek historian Herodotus, who considered the whole of Mesopotamia ‘Assyria’, scholars have long known the culture existed (as compared to the Sumerians who were unknown to scholarship until the 19th century CE). Mesopotamian scholarship was traditionally known as Assyriology until relatively recently (though that term is certainly still in use), because the Assyrians were so well known through the primary sources of the Greek and Roman writers…

Tiglath Pileser III had introduced Aramaic to replace Akkadian as the lingua franca of the empire…the expansion of the empire throughout the Middle East brought Aramaic to regions as near as Israel and as far as Greece and, in this way, Mesopotamian thought became infused with those cultures and a part of their literary and cultural heritage…

Among the greatest of their achievements, however, was the Aramaic alphabet, imported into the Assyrian government by Tiglath Pileser III…Aramaean was easier to write than Akkadian and so older documents collected by kings such as Ashurbanipal were translated from Akkadian into Aramaic, while newer ones were written in Aramaic and ignored the Akkadian. [this allowed later scholars to decipher Akkadian writings and then Sumerian.]

The result was that thousands of years of history and culture were preserved for future generations.