There's a really interesting find made in 2024 in Jerusalem: it was a seal that belonged to a senior Jewish official called Yoa. He used the seal to seal his letters, certify documents, and solemnize statements. And what was the image on this Jewish official's seal?
It was a tinger; it was what serologists call a genie. It was a Mesopotamian skyers. For hundreds and thousands of years, stories told in the Bible have been the bedrock for believers all around the world.
But is the Bible a version of someone else's book? Is the Bible a repeat of the stories of the Mesopotamian cuneiforms? If you talk to any serious academic scholar of the Bible or any pastor who has a theological degree, they will know about the Bible's dependence on the narratives of the Mesopotamian cuneiforms.
It's not that the Bible is a repeat of all those stories, word for word, idea for idea, character for character, but when it's studied at an academic level, it becomes impossible to deny that the biblical writers were aware of the stories told by the Mesopotamian cuneiforms, or at least they knew some version of those stories. These stories, curated by the world's oldest known culture, are not religious texts, nor do they speak at any length of an almighty God. They are the stories of plural advanced beings, Anunnaki sky people who colonized planet Earth, genetically modifying our hominid ancestors and governing over planet Earth for tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
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With Surfshark, you can swim under the radar in the sea of online content. I've been a preacher for more than 30 years. I've studied and taught through the Book of Genesis many times in churches all around the world, and I've trained pastors in the skills of interpreting texts.
The Bible has its own stories; it tells the stories of the Elohim, the Powerful One. It tells the stories of Elohim, El, El-Shaddai, Yahweh, Adonai. It talks about the conflicts among the Elohim, their arrival as the Sar Hashim, the airborne armies, and the B’rit, the power council governing over human society in the deep past.
It has stories of its own, but many of those stories are clearly based on the stories that came from ancient Sumeria, Babylonia, Akkadia, and Assyria. Now, we didn't know this until the 1800s—not until the translation key had been discovered at Behistun by Henry Rawlinson of the East India Company. But once that discovery had been made, it became clear pretty quickly that the Bible had this dependency.
It was Henry Rawlinson who first pointed it out, and it was British Assyriologist George Smith who first started publishing on this subject in the 1870s. He observed in his introduction to the Chaldean account of Genesis, his first book on this topic, that it was surprising to them as they began to translate this trove of ancient texts that the stories of origins across all the cultures were pretty similar. They seemed to have the same worldview, the same recollections of the same kind of entities.
He noted these were rival cultures, and yet they were all telling a similar story. Of course, the case that he makes in his book, published in 1876, is that these stories are the sources of our familiar God stories in the Bible. Now, of course, George Smith was able to say this because he was an Assyriologist employed at the British Museum.
Leonard William King could publish similar papers; again, he could say it as an Assyriologist. But even 20 years after George Smith had published the Chaldean account of Genesis, Nathaniel Schmidt, working at Colgate University, could publish papers in 1896 pointing out exactly the same things and exploring exactly the same implications. However, he got the boot from his position as an Assyriologist there because he was apparently undermining people's faith.
Thankfully, he got a 36-year tenure following that at Cornell University and pursued his academic excellence there. Now, he had phenomenal kudos as an academic, but it was the implications for faith that got Nathaniel Schmidt into trouble. So there was controversy back then, but we've had more than 100 years since to come to terms with what these academics were revealing.
So what is the controversy around the Bible's dependence on the Mesopotamian narratives? Well, it's certainly not controversial to state that dependency. If you pick up a scholarly Bible, I would recommend the New Jerusalem Bible, the Expanded Study Edition.
You'll find in the footnotes where the editors pause and they note the dependence of a biblical text or a similarity between a biblical text and the Mesopotamian original. I really applaud the New Jerusalem Bible for taking that stance. I enjoyed a correspondence with its senior editor, Dom Henry.
Wbor, who spoke about his intention in that Bible to be very transparent with regard to the translations of words conventionally understood to be names for God, wanted that Bible to make clear which name was being used. If we're looking at Elohim, El, Elion, Elai, Yahweh, and Adoni, he wanted clarity because some Bibles simply say "the Lord, the Lord, the Lord; God, God, God," without acknowledging the different names. This leaves open the question of whether they are the same or different entities.
He sought transparency in the texts and explained that, without it, we would not understand the journey of faith and belief that those scriptures represented. Now, if a Bible can acknowledge that dependence, how controversial can it be? There really is no controversy around it in academic circles among trained pastors.
The problem is that this information hasn't filtered down into the rank and file of the churches. When I speak about the dependency of the Bible on the stories from ancient Sumer, out of ancient Babylonia, Arcadia, and Assyria, many people in the churches act with shock and horror, as if they've never heard the like before. But it's actually been part of public conversation since the 1830s and has been written about and published since the 1870s.
Unless you are in a very open-minded church community or have had the good fortune and privilege of studying at a seminary, there's every chance you won't have heard anything about this in church life. It does shock a lot of people, and I get a lot of pushback from those who don't know about this and who haven't asked their pastors or spoken to their theological faculties about it. This really rattles people because it raises questions.
As soon as you look at the history of the formation of the Bible, whether it's the Old Testament or the New Testament, it immediately creates problems if you're wanting to approach things in a fundamentalist kind of way, where you regard the scriptures as inherent, infallible, inspired, and virtually dictated by God. How can there be a process? How can it have evolved from something else?
Those are some of the problems that people have. What are some of the differences between the Mesopotamian and biblical accounts? I think one of the things that's so interesting about the Mesopotamian accounts is that they are not religious texts; they're not texts about God, and they're not hortatory texts wanting you to do something or believe something, looking for some kind of response of faith or obedience from you.
These are texts telling ancient stories, and it makes it very interesting for me, having come from the world of faith, to be studying ancient texts that are not faith texts and to find that my faith texts are based on those. Now, some scholars would say, "Well, Paul, actually there may be a hortatory element to these texts because some of these stories might really be about which city should be in charge. " So, when there are battles among the sky people, and one comes out on top while another becomes junior, that could be a way of telling the story of why Uruk is better than Eridu, or vice versa.
There may be a political layer that you're not picking up as a modern person, and that's a fair comment. But I think, as a 21st-century person coming to these texts, the great treat for me is that they are simply a reservoir of information. They tell me what was the worldview of these previously forgotten civilizations—the first civilizations that we know about.
In fact, ancient Sumer and the cultures that it spawned all shared this worldview, this understanding of who we are, where we've come from, what our places are in the cosmos, and how it is that we became a civilization in the first place. I go to those stories as a trove of information, and I find them absolutely fascinating. But, of course, they have implications for how we frame our God stories and how we understand faith today.
Is the Bible's dependence on the Mesopotamian corpus widely accepted? As I've said before, if you have studied theology at even a bachelor's degree level, any trained pastor, for instance, will know about this. There's no controversy around it; the controversy is really about what the implications are.
What are the implications of our familiar God stories being based on someone else's stories of sky people? It is widely accepted, but not in the community of faith at large, simply because it has not been made known. This is really one of my drivers in publishing the Eden series—getting this information out there and then asking people to think through the implications.
These are stories of sky people; do they sound familiar? What is the purpose of these texts if they're not religious texts, if they're not hortatory texts? What are these stories telling us about our deep past?
Another aspect that interests me is why stories in this cultural family bear such significant overlaps and carry so many correlations with the stories of origins of cultures all around the world—whether we go to ancient Greece, India, the Norse stories, African stories, Mesoamerican stories, Native American stories, or Aboriginal Australian stories. It was really the correlations that first caught my attention and made me read these texts with a different eye and listen with a different ear. Now, I ask the question: what memories were these stories crafted to carry?
How do pastors handle this kind of information? Quietly is probably the short answer to that. I'm certainly in correspondence with pastors who are in service and are asking me the question: what do I do with this information?
How do I. . .
In any way, approach it with my congregation in a way that's not going to be too upsetting, that won't rattle their faith too much, that won't split the congregation, and that won't break the relationship of trust with their pastor. Pastors do wrestle with this, and I hear from pastors in training, ordinands, and theological students who write to me. They say, "I'm seeing all the things you're describing in the text, Paul, but this is a bit of a taboo at college.
What do I do with this? " It may simply be that they realize the Bible is a version of someone else's book, or they might go the next step, as I do, and say these stories are based on stories of paleo contact—that's the theory that our ancestors had contact with other civilizations, ET civilizations, in the deep past—and that some of that memory has become confused with God's story. What do I do?
Is this information I can marshal in my teaching ministry moving forward, or does it really pull the rug out from under me? So we have those questions, and I've been amazed by how many pastors in retirement have written to me. They may have spent 40 years in a Baptist church preaching Orthodox Christianity, and within six months of retiring, they write to me and say, "I've gone back to the Bible, and I've gone back to some questions I've always had, and Paul, I think you're on the money!
These are the Mesopotamian stories; these are stories of sky people. I think these are ET encounters that have been described," and they're very excited to be making these discoveries. But they did not have the liberty to do that study or draw those conclusions while they were in congregational ministry and were under that continual pressure to repeat the familiar orthodoxy, reaffirm the familiar stories from Sunday to Sunday, week to week.
As soon as they had that liberty, when their only loyalty was to the text and to a clear conscience and to understanding the truth, all of a sudden, they’re on a different territory. For me, when I was going through seminary, how I handled this, I think, was first of all, I didn't give it an awful lot of attention because I think my agenda was apologetics. I wanted to learn how to argue better for Christianity so that I could persuade more people to become Christians, and my heart was very much for that kind of ministry.
I wanted to be fruitful in it and to be good at it, so I was really looking for tools and things that helped me in that, and things that didn't help me perhaps didn’t get quite so much attention. But we were certainly made aware of the Mesopotamian corpus when we did our form analysis and our source analysis. We were encouraged to look for the authorial intent, and so if you read the Enuma Elish, the Atrahasis account, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and think "Whoa, these stories sound familiar," the question you should ask is, "Well, how does the biblical account differ?
" Because it's in that difference that you'll find the authorial intent. As a preacher, going off what the author intended is very important; you have to go to the text and get from it what the author wanted you to before you do anything else. I think that was probably my approach, but it sort of airbrushes over a fundamental question: What are the implications of our God stories being based on somebody else's stories of sky people—beings whom today we would describe as extraterrestrials, beings who were more advanced than us and able to colonize us and rule over us in the deep past?
What are the implications of that? I think many scholars just stick with that earlier argument of "Yes, but how is it different? " and let's focus on that.
This would be the approach of Michael Heiser, for instance, who is very good at acknowledging the plural Elohim in the Bible and understanding that the plural Elohim are really the Bible's version of the Anuna in the Sumerian accounts, the Anunnaki in the Babylonian accounts. But then the way he avoided allowing that information to rattle his orthodox hearers was to say, "Yes, but the writer has inverted those stories; he's put a little spin on them to teach something new and to teach something true about God. " But there are two problems with that: a problem of fact and a problem of logic.
If you read Genesis 3 and the story of humanity's upgrade, it is not an inversion of themes to be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, and in the Enuma Elish. It is a summary form; all that's changed is the name of the characters involved. If you go to Genesis 6 and to the flood narrative, there's no inversion there; all that's changed is that the conversations among the Anunnaki and the conflict between Enki, Enlil, and Anu have all been rolled into the internal thoughts of Yahweh or God.
It's not an inversion; it's a summary form. There’s no spin; it’s just a brief version of what we read in the Mesopotamian corpus. So, there is a fact problem with what Michael Heiser was saying, and there’s a logical problem as well.
How can you have a real, true, inspired, infallible story that’s been deliberately and consciously based on a false story? It's like Mono Kote; he was a character in a Graham Greene novel—an elderly priest who was having some confusion in his latter years. This priest used to claim that he was descended from Don Quixote.
Of course, the problem with that is Don Quixote is a fictitious character, and when friends pointed out, "Mono Kote, you can't be descended from. . .
” Don Kote, because he's pure fiction, could never quite process that thought. We have the same problem here: how can a true, inspired, infallible story have been deliberately crafted on a false story? How can a true God be descended from a sky person?
So again, I think that's the problem it throws up. It really challenges a fundamentalist reading of the Bible, and it begins to put the biblical stories of Yahweh and the Elohim in a wider context. As soon as you do that, you have to understand them differently.
So, are the Elohim of the Bible the same as the Anuna of Sumeria and the Anunnaki of Babylonia? The Bible has many stories about Elohim, and it's the Bible's earliest word that gets translated as God. But the component parts of that word mean "the powerful ones.
" It is a masculine plural form word, and there are places where it takes plural form verbs. For instance, when Abraham is explaining to a foreign king about moving from Ur of Chaldea, or of the Hal, he says, "the powerful ones" (plural) told me (plural). In another place, we see "Elohim Mal," I think is the phrase, which is "the powerful ones, the messengers, the powerful ones, the agents" in the plural ascending and descending, whatever Jacob's Ladder really was.
So, it gets used in the plural that way; it gets used in the singular as well. There's a moment when Yahweh's king Ahaziah has broken his back. He wants to know if he's going to get better, and he's heard that the Elohim in Ekron is good at medical prognostics, so he sends messengers there to get a prognosis.
According to the prophet Elijah, when Yahweh hears this, he's furious and he says, "Is there no Elohim here that Ahaziah has to go running off to the Elohim of Ekron? " He deliberately mispronounces the other Elohim's name; he calls him the Lord of the Flies, which, when correctly pronounced, means the Lord and Prince. But there it's being used in the singular.
Yahweh is an Elohim, and so is the Lord of Ekron. Yahweh is one of the Elohim, and so we have narratives of Elohim in the plural going to war with one another, conflicting with one another. They gather together in the council, the Elba, which is presided over by El Elion, and their arrival as colonizers is really emphasized in texts like Psalm 82 and Deuteronomy 32 when El Elion carves up the lands and apportions them to different Elohim.
Yahweh appears to be a junior Elohim because the other Elohim get land and therefore own the resources in the land and on the land, and the people who live on the land. Whereas Yahweh gets a people group with no land. So, when he appears in the story, it's to rescue his people group from another Elohim's land.
He goes into Egypt, which is A's land, and he pulls his people out. Then he has to go to war with other Elohim to get land for his people group. All the wars are framed by that scenario, so Yahweh is one of the Elohim.
Now, there are Yahweh and Elohim stories that are summary forms of Mesopotamian stories of people like Enlil, Enki, Marduk, and in particular in the early stories of the Bible. But the Bible has its own stories of Elohim as well, so it's more that there is a substantial overlap. What are some of the shared themes across the Bible and the Mesopotamian corpus?
Well, "shared themes" is probably the way to put it. There are some very precise correlations at various points, correlations of extraordinary details. But it's not that you've got a text that's been directly quoted one from the next.
For instance, if you look at the correlations of the flood narratives of Utnapishtim, Atrahasis, Ziusudra, and Noah across the Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Assyrian, and biblical tellings, there is only a 4% variance in the volume of that rescue craft with precise mathematical measurements from one telling to the next. That is an extraordinary correlation of detail, and alongside other themes that have been woven in and flipped around, it's very clear that one telling is dependent on the next, and the Noah form is the most summarized form. There are other examples besides.
If you look at the creation narrative, for instance, in the Bible, what we call the creation myth begins on a planet that is flooded and shrouded in darkness. So, before the first word of creation, before "Let there be light," planet Earth is already there, but it's been devastated. "Tohu vavohu" is the phrase in Hebrew; it's been laid waste.
It's now in a state of chaos; it's been ruined and it has to be rehabilitated. That's the story that we see, and it begins with beings hovering in the sky—the Elohim hovering in the Ruah—and then separating the waters. The separation of waters is there in the Enuma Elish as well; that's how creation begins in the Enuma Elish.
The separation of waters begins the creation story of the Iroy people, and it's there in a little-known indigenous story from out of the Philippines in which the Tagalog separates the waters from the land, and that's their creation mythology. So, we have themes like that. I think one of the closest correlations is in the Noah, Atrahasis, Ziusudra, Utnapishtim stories; they are all versions of the same story, Noah being a summary form.
They all include this flood; they all include similar reasons for the flood: too many human beings. Enlil wants a cull, wants to get rid of the human beings, just the same as the Yahweh character in the Bible. So, there’s a long.
. . Lead into the flood in the Mesopotamian tellings.
Various plagues are tried first, but ultimately it's going to be a flood that does it. Then a human being is warned and told to construct a rescue capsule for himself, his farm, and his family. In the Bible, it's an odd thing because Yahweh decided to destroy everyone, but then thinks, "Maybe I'll save this family over here.
" It's almost as if he's changing his mind, thinking two contrary things. In the source narratives, it's different characters who think those things. Enlil wants the cull, and Enki and H say, "We've got to have a rescue plan; we can't let humanity be extinguished in this way.
" It's Enki who finds the human family, the animals, and the seeds who are going to reboot the ecosystem after the flood. As the flood recedes, Noah sends out two birds; one goes out and looks like, "We're still flooded. " Then he sends out the dove and has the evidence he needs that the floodwaters are receding.
So, the two birds is a contracted form of a whole number of birds in the Mesopotamian telling of the story. There are interesting correlations; there are even names that repeat from the Mesopotamian to the biblical telling. When we read the Enuma Elish, we have Ashari, who is remembered as the one who brought agronomy, brought agricultural science, the bedrock of civilization and city-building.
In the Bible, of course, we have Asherah remembered by the ancient Hebrews for exactly the same things. Why isn't this dependency common knowledge? Well, the covering up of this relationship began a very long time ago.
If you read the books of Ezekiel, One and Two Kings, Jeremiah, and Ezra, we are told about the process of monotheism that Judaism underwent between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. There was a ritual cleanup of Judaism, and what this included was the army going into the Jerusalem Temple and demolishing the installations that showed images of the Elohim. There was a carving showing the "sashamayim," the Airborne armies, the sky armies; they destroyed that.
There was the "nushan," which showed what Yahweh looked like. That's an argument I make in my book, *The Eden Conspiracy. * They can't know what Yahweh looks like because we're rebranding Yahweh now to be God Almighty, God the creator of the universe, and all the other Jewish priesthoods—don't think there was only one.
The kings had established priesthoods to Yahweh and Milcom, Asherah, and Chamos, and all these other priesthoods had to be gotten rid of. The priesthoods were rounded up; sometimes they were slaughtered, their temples had to be demolished, their altars broken, the altar horns broken off, figurines confiscated, their heads broken off. Because moving forward from King Hezekiah onwards, there was this push from him, his grandson King Josiah, and the high priest Hilkiah to extinguish the memory of these other powerful beings so that Jews in future generations would only know about Yahweh.
They wouldn't know about Asherah, they wouldn't know about Chamos and Milcom, the others, and Yahweh would take on the role of Almighty God, the God of the heavens, the creator of the universe. So, we're actually told the story of Judaism changing from a canon of memory of paleo-contact, when they commemorated all these advanced beings that they had contact with in the past, that had to be airbrushed over, gotten rid of. Now we've got only one God, Yahweh, and one high priesthood—that's the Yahwist high priesthood in Jerusalem—only one temple, the Jerusalem Temple.
So, now all the community's tithes will go to Jerusalem and, of course, one king, the king who worships Yahweh. Now you've got a nicely wed theocratic society, and that process is spelled out in the Bible. If you're not familiar with that story, I go through that very carefully in my book, *The Eden Conspiracy.
* Now, once you've seen that and realize that's not what Judaism was in the beginning, that's not what the Jerusalem Temple was in the beginning, you realize that there has been a cover-up that goes back all the way to the 8th century BCE. Now, there's a really interesting find made in 2024 in Jerusalem, and it was of a seal that belonged to a senior Jewish official called Yehua. He used the seal to seal his letters, to certify documents, to solemnize statements.
What was the image on this Jewish official's seal? It was a tinger; it was what serologists call a genie. It was a Mesopotamian skyers.
This was from the period just before the great reforms, and it shows you that this senior Jewish official saw no conflict between his stories of Yahweh and the Elohim and the Sumerian stories of Anuna, the Babylonian stories of Anunnaki, the Babylonian stories of Abalo, the Iranian stories of Tinger. It was all the same great pantheon, and Yahweh and the Elohim were just part of that wider canon of stories—that's how it was seen at that time. That's why he had that particular design on his seal.
But all that got suppressed and deliberately forgotten, so that now when we read today's version of Yahweh's Ten Commandments, we're told you're not to work for the other Elohim. Of course, we're not supposed to ask who and what they are; you're not to work for them, you're not to bow down to them and worship them, and you mustn't even depict them. There had to be a great forgetting, and I think this great forgetting has continued from that time through Judaism, through Christianity, to the present day.
It's only now that we have studies of religion that are not faith-based, that we have universities with anthropology departments, that we have archaeological. . .
Departments finding things like the seal of Yoa, digging up the artifacts that tell other stories, and of course, unearthing all these Kun form tablets showing us where our God stories have come from. The other reason it's not common knowledge is because of the dynamics—the social dynamics of communities of faith. Now, as I said before, pastors know this; people who have done theology degrees understand the footing of my work in the Eden Series.
So, in "Escaping from Eden," "The Scars of Eden," "Echoes of Eden," "The Eden Conspiracy," "The Invasion of Eden," and "The Eden Enigma," the case I make for paleo contact and paleo contact in the Bible is understood at an academic level. The reason it's not widely known in the churches is that pastors find they go to theological college; they learn all this stuff, they learn the history of the formation of the Bible, they learn that Christianity didn't always believe the things it believes today. But what are they going to do when they turn up in their first appointment?
If they are the junior pastor, they will quickly find that the congregation sees its role as policing the doctrine of the pastor, not vice versa. It won't just apply to the new, young, fresh-faced pastor; the same applies to the senior pastor. If you depart from the script, if you start telling people their familiar stories might not be what they thought they were, there are plenty of churches that will say, "I'm sorry, pastor, but you can't lead us here because you don't believe what we believe," and that is why so many pastors keep mum on this kind of material.
That's why so many pastors contact me and say, "Now I'm retired; I've done this study and reached these conclusions, and I think it's something the churches need to consider carefully. " Why have theological education if you're going to let that be the driving dynamic? But that is the reason that so many people respond to me with hostility, because they haven't heard this from their pastor and I seem to be contradicting what their pastor is saying.
But I always encourage people to go and ask your pastor about this. Talk to them about source analysis and form analysis. Ask them where the biblical stories came from.
If you can make contact with the Old Testament department at your local seminary, send them an email and a question. I often send people with this: Firstly, is the Bible dependent on the Mesopotamian corpus? And are Elohim, El, Elon, El Shadai, and Adonai all the same entity, or is something else going on here?
Because if people put questions like that to their Old Testament faculties, they may be surprised with the answers that return, and they'll begin to realize, "Oh, there may be something to what this crazy Paul Wallace is saying. " Thank you for watching The Fifth Kind TV! Remember to subscribe and click on the bell for notifications so that you never miss when we upload new content.
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