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Jupiter, Marduk, and Fringe History Claims

3/21/2014

19 Comments

 
Before I get into today’s topic, I thought I’d share this letter to the editor a Minnesota zooarchaeologist wrote to the Star Tribune complaining about the uncritical and fawning profile of Scott Wolter that ran in the paper was the subject of my blog post yesterday.

I also want to let you know that I received a review copy of a major new academic anthology on The Watchers in Jewish and Christian Traditions, which promises to be a fascinating look into mainstream ideas about the semi-divine beings so beloved by ancient astronaut theorists, lost civilization scholars, and Nephilim researchers. I can’t wait to read it.
Last weekend when I reviewed The Universe’s episode on “Heavenly Destruction,” I mentioned that Immanuel Velikovsky had a rather unique take on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. In an article on the topic published in KRONOS in 1981, the catastrophist claimed that the planet Jupiter had once been close enough to the earth that it expelled massive electric discharges that blasted Sodom and Gomorrah off the face of the earth. A similar catastrophe resulted in the destruction of the Tower of Babel when the planet Mercury flew too close to the earth and discharged some electricity there, too.

This seemed like your run-of-the-mill kooky claim, but it’s interesting to look at the logic Velikovsky used to generate his idea. He argued more or less:

  • Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by fire from the sky.
  • The ancients considered lightning to be fire from the sky.
  • Lightning was the weapon of the god Jupiter (= Zeus).
  • The god Jupiter is the same as the planet Jupiter.
  • Therefore: The planet Jupiter sent lightning (electricity) to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.

In Worlds in Collision (1950), Velikovsky made a similar claim about the Pillar of Fire from Exodus, attributing it to showers of flame from Venus mistaken for Marduk-Jupiter. Obviously, the claim violates the laws of physics as we know them today.

Jupiter’s name comes from the Latin, of course. Jupiter was the chief of the Roman gods, and his name comes from an elided form of Deus Pater > ’Iu Pater > Iuppiter, God the Father. In turn, this derives from the proto-Indo-European name Dyeus peter, referring to the god of the shining daytime sky. He survives also as Dyaus, the Vedic sky god; as Tyr, the Norse god; and of course as Zeus, the chief Greek god. But this deity was not a storm god at first and only became so after 1200 BCE, during the period when the Greeks merged Zeus with the Near Eastern storm god, probably due to influence from Tarhun (Teshub), the chief of the Hittite pantheon. His parallel gods in Norse and Vedic myth were not the storm gods of their pantheons (Thor and Indra respectively).

So that line takes us nowhere. Instead, we have to turn to where the Romans got the idea to name the planet after their chief god. That, in turn, comes from Babylon, where the planet had already been named for Marduk, the chief Babylonian god. Eusebius, citing Alexander Polyhistor citing Berosus, explained that Marduk was Jupiter, or rather, more specifically, Belus—the Greco-Roman name for Marduk, taken from his title as Baal, or Lord—was identical with Zeus-Jupiter.

Marduk was associated with lightning and storms. He uses lightning as a weapon in the Enuma Elish, for example, and he rides in a storm chariot. So why did he become assigned to the planet Jupiter? One of the obvious reasons is that Jupiter is the third brightest object in the night sky, behind the moon and Venus. Jupiter’s apparent twelve-year trek around the ecliptic became an important way Babylonian astrologers marked the zodiac, making the planet the “ruler” of the zodiac and thus the cosmos. The Enuma Elish reports that the Babylonians believed that Marduk established the celestial station of Nibir (or Nibiru), where Jupiter was opposite the sun, and thus the cosmic throne ruling over the zodiac.

But here we hit a wall. There is no indication that the Babylonians or their predecessors ever considered Jupiter to have once been closer to the earth, to have shot out lightning, or to have literally been the god flying across the sky, at least no more than Marduk was also thought to literally be present in his cult statue in his temple at Babylon.

It is perhaps interesting to note that Zecharia Sitchin took this same information and twisted it into his wandering planet theory. Sitchin explicitly cites George Smith, the Victorian translator of the Enuma Elish, as a key source, and we find Smith writing in his Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876):  “I have translated one of these names nibir, ‘wandering stars’ or ‘planets,’ but this is not the usual word for planet, and there is a star called Nibir near the place where the sun crossed the boundary between the old and new years, and this star was one of twelve supposed to be favourable to Babylonia.”

In Twelfth Planet we can see exactly how Sitchin misunderstood the concept of a planet as a wandering star and twisted it into the idea of a wandering planet: “The Sumerians called the planet NIBIRU, the ‘planet of crossing,’ and the Babylonian version of the epic retained ... astronomical information…” Thus the idea that there was a wandering star that reached the summit of the heavens every twelfth year curdles into a giant planet hurdling about the universe.

Both Sitchin and Velikovsky wanted to literalize mythology and remove it from the realm of symbolism and astrology, despite the explicit claims in the source texts to astrological symbolism.

19 Comments
KIF
3/21/2014 06:38:47 am

Sitchin and Velikovsky were boring writers

Reply
Erik G
3/21/2014 06:42:35 am

Jason -- "Worlds in Collision" dates from 1950 (not 1965) and Velikovsky attributed the Exodus events to Venus and not to Jupiter.

I think you should bear in mind that when Velikovsky wrote "Worlds in Collision" there was no space flight and very little hard knowledge about the planets. Some astronomers considered Venus pretty much Earth-like under its cloud cover. Many of Velikovsky's assertions turned out to be true in time -- others not. But give the man some slack. He backed up his hypotheses. He attempted to provide evidence, even if it was largely extrapolated from myth and legend. But most of all, he did not involve aliens, or long-lost uber-civilizations in his scenarios.

In his way he was an old-fashioned scholar, quite unlike the many fringe yahoos you castigate here.


Reply
Jason Colavito link
3/21/2014 06:48:36 am

My fault on the date; as for the "Worlds in Collision" section, I misread it. Velikovsky says Venus did it, but that the Israelites mistook it for Jupiter-Marduk. I've amended the above to clarify.

I'm not sure, though, that I follow the idea that I should cut him slack. Wrong is wrong, and at any rate I don't think I said anything specific about Velikovsky as a person. A few weeks ago I did a post on a Victorian scholar who thought the North Pole was the Garden of Eden. He was a mainstream scholar and did the best he could with the evidence at hand. It's still wrong, though, and it does no one any good to pretend otherwise.

Reply
J.A.D
3/23/2014 07:04:42 am

The ancients had noticed SUPER*NOVA events so if a section
of the night sky lights up near a transiting planet, the Gods could
be active, the war in the heavens is then tied into any local storm
that has thunder or lightning. Velikovsky and Sitchen read into the
translations what they want to see, yes... but all is not just a big
hallucination. GOTO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1054

KIF
3/21/2014 06:54:25 am

Velikovsky's claims were not original - he was using and adapting other people's earlier ideas

Reply
Jason Colavito link
3/21/2014 06:55:38 am

Not least of which were those of Edmund Halley, who started the whole idea that Bible events were caused by cosmic collisions.

KIF
3/21/2014 07:34:45 am

Bob Forrest on Velikovsky's sources
http://www.velikovsky.info/Bob_Forrest

charlie
3/21/2014 09:34:18 am

Jason,
This sort of post is the main reason I visit your site every day. I enjoy learning the facts on myth, ancient beliefs, and ancient sciences. While I do enjoy your commentary on the AAT's and AU among other fringe shows, when you seriously look into real ancient beliefs and history and myths, then I feel I have gained some real knowledge.
I know you feel compelled to challenge the AAT's, AU, and other fringe "theories" which are not really theories at all, but pure speculation, posts like this one today are, to me, the best of your best. Thank you for ALL that you do on your site and I will be purchasing some of your books later this summer for sure. You have rekindled my interest in these subjects and I applaud you for that as I still enjoy learning about these subjects even at the (not quite so very) old age of 66.
Many thanks again and my very best to you and yours. Yeah, I AM a fan of yours. Note, if I feel it necessary, I may ask a critical question or three of you. I do not follow anybody or any idea totally uncritically.

Reply
Dave Lewis
3/21/2014 03:11:48 pm

Jason said... "There is no indication that the Babylonians or their predecessors ever considered Jupiter to have once been closer to the earth, to have shot out lightning, or to have literally been the god flying across the sky, at least no more than Marduk was also thought to literally be present in his cult statue in his temple at Babylon."

Please forgive me if I am reading this wrong. The Mesopotamians did in fact believe that the god inhabited his idol.

The following is from Dr Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, page 19...

"Two closely related ceremonies allowed a god to enter an image: the pıt pı (“mouth-opening”) and the mıs pı (“mouth-washing”) rituals. These ceremonies and their accompanying incantations are described in a number of Akkadian and Sumerian texts. Most of these come from neo-Babylonian and neo-Assyrian libraries and date from the mid-first millennium, though references to the ceremony go back as far as Sumerian times – that is, to the end ofthe third millennium. The ceremonies asserted the heavenly origin of cult statues and effected the arrival of the god’s live presence into them."

Reply
Jason Colavito link
3/21/2014 11:29:55 pm

Yes, they believed that the spirit of the god inhabited the statue, just as the god also inhabited the planet. I believe that his means that while both are aspects of the god, they are not the totality of the god and do not actually perform actions on their own. As I understand it, this is something like the way Jesus is thought to be present in the communion wafer during the Eucharist.

Reply
Dave Lewis
3/22/2014 01:33:53 pm

ok, you got it right!

J.A.D
3/23/2014 07:13:59 am

we are after Newton and Galileo, and the way the Church
assumed the stars were like a painted ceiling with pinhole
leaks, Episode One of Neil deGrasse Tyson's COSMOS
went into WHY poor Bruno is burnt at the stake. do not
assume that the ancients thought the heavens incapable
of movement. God*Myths had to explain shooting stars,
comets and meteors. Gods could swoop down from the
heavens to the equal degree that Icarus could climb up...

Reply
!!!!!!!!!!
3/23/2014 07:28:41 am

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/23/how-cosmos-bungles-the-history-of-religion-and-science.html

Titus pullo
3/22/2014 02:44:27 am

The more things change....

30 years ago as a physics major we actually had an informal club that got together to go over worlds in collision and point out the physical problems with his theory of Venus getting ejected and impacting the earth. I think old Carl Sagan wrote a book on dispelling velikovshys work as well. I honestly have not even heard of worlds in ollision in over 20 years.

Reply
Scott David Hamilton
3/22/2014 09:37:43 am

I've always been interested in the "pillar of cloud by day, pillar of flame by night" from Exodus, ever since I saw it identified as a UFO in some AA book when I was a kid. It strikes me as a poetic description of a volcano, though I don't know if that's really a thing people would be familiar with in that area of that world. A large forest fire might work too, though having lived through Florida's summer of fire I don't remember seeing the clouds lit up at night.

Reply
Varika
3/22/2014 01:20:03 pm

It would also describe certain types of torches--smoke visible by day, flame at night. I personally wouldn't describe a torch as a pillar of anything, but the description fits as well to torches as it does to UFOs, volcanos, and forest fires. tl/dr: speculation is meaningless about such a vague description.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
3/23/2014 02:08:07 pm

As I mentioned in a now-deleted post, I have removed the discussion thread by Steve St. Clair that violated the comments policy.

Reply
DAN D
3/26/2014 09:36:03 am

I see Rebecca Dean has updated her Blog showing her letter to the editor was accepted and printed.

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/letters/251575861.html

Reply
Kyle
7/8/2017 05:17:45 pm

The lightning mentioned is not lightning. Same as the pillar of fire. These weapons used by the gods were asteroids and comets. How do you think preIron age weapons were made and attributed to? Gifts from the gods? Legendary weapons? If you follow the translation of lightning and seperoth you find bright and shining. What do asteriods do when they are not hitting a planet? Arabs and the chinese noted the tails of comets like swords, daggers......and they could bring destruction just like a weapon should. The war between the heavens and earth is coming again....

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