The Great Inception Part 1: The Mountain of Eden
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT set to air on network television mid February (2017) through mid-March. This series and the forthcoming programs will center on two groundbreaking books (to be released Match 7) — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert. These reports and entries will unveil what most in the modern Church have never heard regarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods, the Titans, and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.
The long war between God and the lesser gods who rebelled began on a mountain, and it will end on a mountain.
First things first: The rebel gods are real. That’s not something you’re likely to hear in church. Not only have we been taught that the pagan deities of the ancient world were imaginary, most American Christians today don’t even believe in Satan or the Holy Spirit.
That’s not an exaggeration. The Barna Group found in a 2009 survey of American Christians that only about one in three believes Satan is real and not just a concept. Likewise, nearly 60% of American Christians said they didn’t believe the Holy Spirit is living entity. So it’s not surprising that when we think of Baal, Asherah, Moloch, Dagon, Chemosh, Marduk, and the rest of the pagan pantheon mentioned in the Bible, if we think of them at all, we tend to assume they were nothing more than lifeless blocks of wood and stone.
We couldn’t be more wrong.
The true story begins on a mountain: Eden.
The Great Inception Part 2: Was Eden on Mount Hermon?
While the early Sumerians were figuring out how to grow crops without rain, interesting things—historic things—were happening far to the northwest. The second peak in the chronological list of spiritually strategic holy mountains is Mount Hermon.
Hermon is the highest, most majestic peak in the Levant. At 9,200 feet above sea level, it dominates the Golan Heights on the border between Israel and Syria, anchoring the southern end of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. It has been considered sacred for most of human history.
Mount Hermon was a holy site as far back as the old Babylonian period, nearly two millennia before Christ, and probably even earlier. In the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic, which dates to the 18th century B.C. (roughly the time of Jacob), “Hermon and Lebanon” were called “the secret dwelling of the Anunnaki.” The Ninevite version of the poem, written about 600 years later, describes the monster slain by Gilgamesh, Humbaba (or Huwawa), as the guardian of “the abode of the gods.”[i]
The Anunnaki were the seven chief gods of the Sumerian pantheon: Anu, the sky god; Enlil, god of the air; Enki, god of the earth; Ninhursag, mother goddess of the mountains; Inanna (Babylonian Ishtar), goddess of sex and war; Sîn, the moon god; and Utu, the sun god. They are mentioned in texts found in what is today southeastern Iraq that date back to the 27th century B.C. So the more recent versions of the Gilgamesh story from Babylon and Nineveh may remember more ancient traditions.
The name Hermon appears to be based on a root word that means “taboo,” similar to the Hebrew word kherem, or “devoted to destruction.” The word is often translated into English as “under the ban.”
The Great Inception Part 3: Cain, Coneheads, and the Old Gods of Sumer
Life after Eden must have been a crushing disappointment for early humans, especially the First Couple. Forget about the burden of living under the curse—toiling to coax enough food from the ground to survive, the pain of bringing new life into the world, and all the rest. The realization that they had disappointed their Creator and condemned their children and their children’s children until the end of time to lives apart from Yahweh must have been nearly unbearable.
The Bible gives us very little on the rest of their lives. We only know the names of three of their children: Cain, Abel, and Seth. There must have been others and at least two of them were girls, because Cain and Seth both married and had children of their own. (See? The old question, “Where did Cain find his wife?” isn’t that hard to answer.)
It’s understood that secular archaeologists and historians won’t agree with much of what we believe about human history. That’s okay. We Bible-believing Christians don’t reject science when we interpret data through a biblical lens. Science is the process by which we collect and record information to test theories about the way things are. Analysis is what we do with that information after it’s collected. It’s not the science we often question, it’s the analysis.
Scholars do agree, however, that civilization emerged in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 B.C. (Note: We’re using dates that are generally accepted by a consensus of scholars so we don’t get bogged down arguing about the timeline. That’s outside the scope of what we’re trying to do here.) Agriculture, cities, writing, trade, science, and organized religion all developed in a broad arc that stretched from Egypt through the Levant and down into Mesopotamia.
This civilization is called the Ubaid culture by scholars. That’s not what the people who lived in it called it, of course; we don’t know what they called themselves because they never invented writing. The Ubaid civilization got its name from Tell al-`Ubaid, a small settlement mound in southeast Iraq where famous archaeologists Henry Hall and Sir Leonard Woolley dug up the first bits of pottery from those people between 1919 and 1924.
The Great Inception Part 4: Babel, the Abyss, and the Gate of the Gods
Not all the holy mountains in the history of the world are natural, formed by the shifting of tectonic plates or the sudden, catastrophic opening of “the fountains of the great deep.” The Tower of Babel was one such artificial mountain. Babel was humanity’s attempt to force its way back into the divine council.
At Babel, mankind tried to storm the castle of God.
For generations, well-meaning Bible teachers have presented the story of Babel as an object lesson on the dangers of pride. Those foolish people were so arrogant they thought they could build a tower high enough to reach heaven!
With all due respect to those teachers, that’s an insult to the intelligence of our ancestors, if you think about it. And it’s a disservice to people in church who want to know why Yahweh was so offended by this project. Really? God is that insecure?
Look, if big egos were enough to bring God to Earth, He’d never leave.
Babel was not a matter of God taking down some people who’d gotten too big for their britches. The clue to the sin of Babel is in the name.
Remember, the Hebrew prophets loved to play with language. We often find words in the Bible that sound like the original but make a statement—for example, Beelzebub (“lord of the flies”) instead of Beelzebul (“Ba`al the prince”), or Ish-bosheth (“man of a shameful thing”) instead of Ishbaal (“man of Ba`al”). Likewise, the original Akkadian words bāb ilu, which means “gate of god” or “gate of the gods,” is replaced in the Bible with Babel, which is based on the Hebrew word meaning confusion.
Now, there’s a bit of misinformation that must be corrected about the Tower of Babel. Contrary to what you’ve heard, Babel was not in Babylon.
The Great Inception Part 5: More Than Abraham Was Not From Ur
Let’s fast forward about 1,000 years from Babel. After the tower was abandoned, it appears that a group of Sumerians traveled by sea around the Arabian peninsula, and then overland across the wadis extending west from the Red Sea to found the 1st dynasty of Egypt.
This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Early Egyptologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie noted a sharp difference between two groups of people buried at a large site near the village of Nakada in Upper (southern) Egypt. One group had been interred with very basic grave goods in simple pits covered with palm branches. The second group had been ritually dismembered, buried in pits lined with brick along with objects of value, such as lapis lazuli jewelry, and then covered with palm logs.
Petrie eventually theorized that the second group, which he dubbed the Falcon Tribe, had invaded and conquered the native inhabitants with superior technology, such as the pear-shaped mace found buried with some in the second group. Make no mistake, in the 4th millennium B.C., the pear-shaped mace was a weapon of mass destruction.
Other evidence, from artwork to architecture—for example, Egypt’s first pyramid, for the pharaoh Djoser, is clearly modeled on the Sumerian ziggurat—linked the so-called Dynastic Race with Mesopotamia. This theory was widely accepted until World War II. After Hitler, however, the Dynastic Race concept was a little too much like the Nazis’ ideas about genetics and bloodlines for comfort.
But then in 1995, Egyptologist David Rohl published his first book, A Test of Time. Rohl makes a strong case for the Dynastic Race theory, even documenting ancient graffiti in Egypt that appeared to show the Falcon Tribe carrying their boats overland from the Red Sea toward the Nile.
Now, is it a coincidence that the name of the first king of the first Egyptian dynasty, Narmer, is awfully close to that of Nimrod, the would-be emperor of Uruk? Scholars have to guess at vocalization in many cases. It’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that the names Narmer and Enmerkar (or “Enmer the Hunter”) were the same.
The Great Inception Part 6: The Mysterious Origin of the Gods of Egypt
By the time Moses arrived on the scene, around 1500 B.C., the Hebrews had been in Egypt for more than a hundred years. The days of Joseph serving as vizier to the pharaoh were long gone. The Hebrews had grown from an extended family of about six dozen to a couple million, but they were suffering under the rule of a nation that no longer valued their presence except as forced labor.
So Yahweh set the next phase of His plan in motion. After guiding the life of Moses from infancy to adulthood (you don’t think he survived that trip in the reed boat by accident, do you?), Yahweh appeared to Moses in his exile and tasked him with bringing Israel out of Egypt. And the way God had him do it was a clear message to the gods of Egypt.
Moses’ first encounter with Yahweh was in Midian. That was at Horeb in the northern Sinai, later part of Edom (contrary to long tradition that puts the mountain in southern Sinai), the har elohim, or mountain of God. Get this: The burning bush incident was the first time since Eden that a human had come face to face with Yahweh on His holy mountain. There is no question that the bene elohim, the Fallen, the seventy rebel angels God allotted to the nations after Babel knew about this meeting. It was a very clear message from Yahweh to the rebels: I have reestablished my mount of assembly on the earth.
The time had finally come. God called Moses back to Egypt to bring His people, Israel, to the place He’d claimed as His own—Canaan.
Yahweh chose to convince pharaoh and the Egyptians to not only let Israel leave, but to encourage them to go. He did it by hardening pharaoh’s heart through a series of increasingly severe trials until the people of Egypt must have been begging pharaoh to let His people go.
The Great Inception Part 7: Iniquity of the Amorites – Babylon, Og, and the Angels Who Sinned
In a previous article in this series, we mentioned an odd comment that God made when He gave Abraham a glimpse at the future:
As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.“
Genesis 15:7-16 (ESV), emphasis added
The obvious questions that come to mind: Who were the Amorites, and why was the timing of the Exodus linked to their iniquity? What was their iniquity? What could they have done that was so bad that God made it a signpost on the road to Revelation? Whatever it was, the evil of the Amorites was legendary among the Jews:
And the Lord said by his servants the prophets,
“Because Manasseh king of Judah has committed these abominations and has done things more evil than all that the Amorites did, who were before him, and has made Judah also to sin with his idols, therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Behold, I am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such disaster that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.
2 Kings 21:10-12 (ESV), emphasis added
Manasseh was king of Judah about seven hundred years after the Exodus, nearly 1,200 years after Abraham was first called from Ura, near Harran. Whatever the Amorites did, it was bad.
The Amorites were incredibly resilient. They hung around, and dominated for a long time, a part of the world where people have been fighting each other since the time of Nimrod. They were a Semitic speaking people who occupied nearly the entire Near East during the first half of the 2nd millennium B.C. According to the Bible, the Amorites descend from Noah’s son, Ham, by way of Canaan. However, even though Ham is considered the progenitor of various African races, Egyptian artists usually represented Amorites with fair skin, light hair, and blue eyes.
The Amorites were first mentioned in Mesopotamian records around 2400 B.C., just before Sargon the Great turned Akkad from a city-state into an empire. They were known to the city-dwelling Sumerians as the MAR.TU, who considered them savage, uncouth, and generally unpleasant.
The Great Inception Part 8: God vs. the Titans
Let’s bring our timeline of history into focus: The Bible tells us that Abraham arrived in Canaan 430 years before the Exodus. With the Exodus at 1446 B.C., that puts Abraham in Canaan in 1876 B.C., just as the fog over the political situation in Mesopotamia lifted with Amorites in control.
So let’s review:
Amorite kingdom of Babylon founded — 1894 B.C.
Abraham arrives in Canaan — 1876 B.C.
Isaac born to Sarah — 1851 B.C.
Isaac marries Rebekah — 1811 B.C.
Hammurabi crowned king of Babylon at Eridu — 1792 B.C.
Jacob and Esau born — 1791 B.C.
Abraham dies — 1776 B.C.
Hyksos take over Lower Egypt — c. 1750 B.C.
Jacob arrives in Egypt — 1661 B.C.
Ahmose drives Hyksos out of Egypt — c. 1550 B.C.
Moses leads the Exodus — 1446 B.C.
Joshua leads the Conquest — 1406 B.C.
Interesting, isn’t it, that the Amorite domination of Mesopotamia began just as God called Abraham and directed him to Canaan? And that Babylon reached the peak of its power with the ascension of Hammurabi the Great just about the time Jacob and Esau were born?
At the same time, a Semitic-speaking, Ba`al-worshiping state emerged to take control of northern Egypt just before the arrival of the house of Jacob. Wouldn’t it be, you know, coincidental if the Hyksos rulers of Lower Egypt were Amorites, too?
Well, yes, it would—if we believed in coincidences. And as it happens, scholars do, in fact, believe the Hyksos were Amorites.
The best-known of the Hyksos kings, Khyan, is attested from inscriptions found as far from Egypt as Cyprus and modern-day Baghdad (probably originally in Babylon). An Amorite king with the same name, spelled Hayanu, is listed in a genealogy as a distant ancestor of Šamši-Adad and the royal house of the old Assyrian kingdom.
Scholars have also noticed strong similarities in the burial practices of the Hyksos and various Amorite kingdoms, especially the practice of sacrificing donkeys for burial with important people and under the doorways of new buildings.
So yes, it’s strangely coincidental, if you’re a believer in coincidence theories. Otherwise, it seems an unseen hand or hands moved the Amorites into position in Egypt and Canaan just before the Israelites arrived—almost as if they’d been placed there to wait for God’s chosen people.
It’s also noteworthy that while the Anakim were confirmed in Canaan by extrabiblical sources from Egypt, the Anakim haven’t been found anywhere else in the ancient Near East.
The Great Inception Part 9: Jesus vs. the Old Gods
Jesus, of course, was fully aware of the ongoing war for his holy mountain. For him, the war was personal.
Many of the key events in the life of Jesus occurred at the Temple Mount. As an infant, Jesus was presented at the Temple in accordance with the Law, where Simeon, a man who had been told he’d live to see the Messiah, and Anna, an 84-year-old prophetess, were led to Jesus by the Holy Spirit. When he was twelve, he stayed behind in the Temple after his parents started back to Nazareth after the Passover celebration in Jerusalem. It was a full day before they realized Jesus was missing, and at least three more before they found him in the Temple talking with the rabbis.
Early in his ministry, Jesus visited Jerusalem during Passover and drove the moneychangers and animal merchants out of the Temple. Later, probably during the second Passover of his ministry, Jesus healed a lame man at the Pool of Bethesda at the north end of the temple complex. Shortly before the Crucifixion, Jesus drove out the moneychangers a second time, and Matthew records that he healed many lame and blind people who came to him at the Temple.
Isn’t it interesting that even in the building erected by the wicked king Herod, and without the Ark of the Covenant in the temple, Jesus was still consumed with zeal for his Father’s house?
And that passion extended beyond the 35 acres that make up the Temple Mount. Israel’s inheritance was Yahweh, and the land inside the borders He established during the time of Moses and Joshua belonged to Him. That’s why Jesus devoted so much of his ministry to healing the sick and casting out demons—which were, remember, the spirits of the Nephilim. He wasn’t just restoring people to physical and spiritual health, he was casting them out of his land, Israel.
When we step back and take a fresh look at the events of Jesus’ life, many things take on new meaning when they’re framed in the context of the war between God and the gods. And, of course, many of the arguments offered by skeptics to explain away the divinity of Jesus are nothing more than PSYOPs by the Fallen to convince modern minds, clouded by the fog of scientism, that Jesus was either a political radical, a social justice warrior, or a misunderstood itinerant preacher—anything but God made flesh.
For example, the Transfiguration. What was the point of all that?
And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” For he did not know what to say, for they were terrified. And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.” And suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only.
Mark 9:2-8 (ESV)
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