Sacred Mountains and Pillars

Alice C. Linsley

“And the mountains shall be melted under him: and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before the fire, and as waters that run down a steep place.” (Micah 1:4)

“The mountains melted like wax at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the Lord of the whole earth.” (Psalm 97:5)

Mount Tabor

The Connection Between Mountains, Pillars and Shrines

Mountains among the ancient Afro-Asiatic peoples were regarded as meeting places between God and Man. Volcanos spoke of God's power to create new earth and were associated with male ejaculation. Thus the connection between stone pillars, mountains and shrines. We find this in the story of Jacob setting up a pillar and calling that place "Beth-el", house of God (Gen. 28:10-22). Then we are told that Jacob anointed the pillar, as Hindus today anoint the lingam.

Each region had a sacred mountain and the people living near it claimed that it belonged to them. Covenants were formed on these mountains. In an earlier essay on “Finding Noah’s Ark”, it was noted that Noah offered sacrifice to the Lord on “the mountain of life after” and that God established a covenant with Noah and his descendents.

Pillars also represented deified heroes in the temples and shrines. Temples were constructed of many pillars, both inside and out. The ancient temple at Heliopolis (Biblical On) was a place of pillars. To the church at Philadelphia Christ says: “Because you have kept my word of patient endurance, I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth. I am coming soon; hold fast to what you have, so that no one may seize your crown. If you conquer, I will make you a pillar in the temple of my God; you will never go out of it. I will write on you the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem that comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name” (Rev.3:10-13).

This church is to the Kingdom of God what Heliopolis was to the ancient Horites. It is the place of true worship, characterized by many pillars (iunu) in the temple. Iunu refers to the pillared temple of Heliopolis. The pillars represented the righteous ones in the temple of God. Exodus 24:4 explains that the twelve pillars in God's house represent the twelve tribes upon which God has inscribed the holy Name.


Follow the Mountains: A Different View of the Exodus

After leaving Egypt, the clan of Jacob (Israel) journeyed by stages, making contact with Hebrew kinsmen at each stage. The first people to help them were their cousins the Midianites (descendants of Abraham by Keturah) in the region of Horeb, the Midianite sacred mountain (Deut. 29:1). Another people to help them were the Edomites related to Seir the Horite Hebrew chief named in Genesis 36. The Edomite sacred mountain was Paran (Deut. 33:2). Crossing through Edomite territory (where Aaron was buried), the Hebrews moved northeast into Moab. They visited with Lot’s descendants and worshipped on Mount Nebo (Deut. 32:49), where Moses died. At each of these sacred sites, the reunion of kin was celebrated by a covenant that included animal sacrifice and a night of feasting. These covenants likely resembled the covenant made between Jacob and Laban at Mizpah (Gen. 31:44-54).

Temples as Man-Made Mountains

Where there were no mountains, the Afro-Asiatics built ziggurats or pyramids. The Babylonian ziggurats were quadrangular and aligned with the cardinal points: the East representing the rising light or the arousal of God, and the West representing the future or the dusk of time. The alignment of the man-made mountains to the cardinal points is significant. We find this in the (Ethiopian) Book of Enoch. Enoch was regarded as a great prophet who saw the coming day of judgment. In chapter 17:1-7, we read:

“And they took and brought me to a place in which those who were there were like flaming fire, and, when they wished, they appeared as men. And they brought me to the place of darkness, and to a mountain the point of whose summit reached to heaven. And I saw the places of the luminaries [sun and moon] and the treasuries of the stars and of the thunder and in the uttermost depths, where were a fiery bow and arrows and their quiver, and a fiery sword and all the lightning. And they took me to the living waters, and to the fire of the West, which receives every setting of the sun. And I came to a river of fire in which the fire flows like water [volcano] and discharges itself into the great sea towards the west. I saw every large river, until I arrived at the great darkness. I went to where all flesh migrates; and I beheld the mountains of the gloom which constitutes winter, and the place from which issues the water in every abyss.”

(While Christians often dismiss the Book of Enoch, we should remember that Jude quotes Enoch, chapter 2: “Behold, he comes with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon them, and destroy the wicked, and reprove all the carnal for everything which the sinful and ungodly have done, and committed against him.”)

The Babylonian temple mounts were referred to as houses ("beth" in Hebrew) or high places. The temple of Bel at Nippur bears the name “E-Kur” which means “mountain house”. One of the oldest temples found in Assyria bears the name “E-Kharsag-Kurkura” which means “house of the mountain of all lands”. This may be analogous to the Israelite conception of the temple on Mount Zion as “a house of prayer for all nations.”

It was believed that God resided at the summit of the universe, which was at the seventh firmament. This is why the ziggurats were seven stories. This notion stands behind Saint Paul’s mystical experience of being taken to the third heaven.

Mountains in Traditional African Societies

Many tribes in Africa claim mountains as their sacred ladder to heaven. For the Gikuyu, Mount Kenya is the sacred mountain. They call it “Kere-Nyaga” which means Mountain of Brightness. For the Masai, the sacred mountain is the active volcano "Oldoinyo LeNgai" in Tanzania. "Ngai" is the name for the supreme God among the Gikuyu and the Masai.

The typical village is arranged with the “fathers’ house” (where the elders meet) in the center. Its roof is usually domed to represent a mountain. Among the Baganda (Uganda) the royal tombs have peaked roofs, symbolizing mountains or pillars.

Mircea Eliade wrote extensively about the connection between mountains and the sacred center. (See The Sacred and the Profane, especially pages 36-47). In placing the Fathers' House in the center of the village, traditional Africans conceive of their village as being situated at the navel of the world. This notion of the center as a place of meeting between God and Man is found among tribal peoples around the world.

The Great Zimbabwe water collection system involved pillars such as these. 

Egyptian and Canaanite Religion

The religion of the Canaanites was influenced by the sensuality of Egyptian religion. The festival dedicated to Amun-Min, who inseminated the earth and brought about plentiful harvests, was celebrated in the spring. A statue of Min, with erect phallus, was placed on an inclined pedestal that represented the primordial mountain. After the pharaoh's enthronement at the harvest festival, four arrows were shot toward the north, east, south, and west, and birds were released in the directions of the cardinal points.

Sacred prostitution was a fact of life among some Canaanite populations, but generally shunned by the Egyptians who valued purity of life among their priests. In ancient Egypt and Canaan fertility was a sign of blessing. Motherhood was venerated, giving a woman with children higher social status.

The obsession with fertility led to decadence among some populations. This focus on the creature rather than on the Creator is what some of the later Old Testament Prophets criticized. They spoke against the "high places" with their sacred poles which they equated with sexual activities (perhaps such as that described between Tamar and Judah).

The Egyptians regarded their kings as channels of blessing. This why the Pharaoh who took Sarah was so angry with Abraham (Gen. 12:10-20). Had the king committed adultery with Sarah, he and his entire kingdom would have been under divine judgment.

The Mountain of Judgment

The Prophets Enoch and Micah, and the author of Psalm 97, speak of the mountains melting before the Lord. This is an image of the Day of Judgment and is imagined as "Armageddon" in the Book of Revelation. Armageddon is a corruption of the Hebrew "Har Megiddo" which means "Mountain of Megiddo". Megiddo is a site of multiple judgments, one piled on top of another.

Eric Cline, Chairman of the Department of Classical and Semitic Languages and Literature at George Washington University will be digging in Armageddon next summer. He reports, "Armageddon is a real place: Har Megiddo, the Mountain of Megiddo in Israel. We go out every other year... and we've got 20 cities one on top of another from about 3000 BC, until about 300 BC, from the Canaanite period to the Persian period."

Cline writes, "During the past 4000 years, at least 34 bloody conflicts have already been fought at the ancient site of Megiddo and adjacent areas of the Jezreel Valley. Egyptians, Canaanites, Israelites, Midianites, Amalekites, Philistines, Hasmonaeans, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Crusaders, Mamlukes, Mongols, French, Ottomans, British, Australians, Germans, Arabs and Israelis have all fought and died here. The names of the warring generals and leaders reverberate throughout history: Thutmose III, Deborah and Barak, Sisera, Gideon, Saul and Jonathan, Shishak, Jehu, Joram, Jezebel, Josiah, Antiochus, Ptolemy, Vespasian, Saladin, Napoleon, and Allenby, to name but a few of the most famous. Throughout history Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley have been Ground Zero for battles that determined the very course of civilization. It is no wonder that the author of Revelation believed Armageddon, the penultimate battle between good and evil, would also take place in this region!"


Related reading: Peaks and Valleys; The Christ in Nilotic Mythology; Mount Mary and the Origins of Life; Mount Moriah; Mount Where Noah's Ark Landed

Finding Noah's Ark

Alice C. Linsley


Despite claims that Noah’s ark has been found in Turkey, Noah’s boat has never been found. In fact, every claim of publicity seekers concerning the boat shaped forms on Greater Mount Ararat have been shown to be false. Noah's ark just isn't there.

The ark has never been found because people have been looking in the wrong place. Instead of searching the mountains of Turkey, they should be looking to the mountains of East Central Africa. This is the homeland of Noah, a Nilo-Saharan ruler who lived in the region of Lake Chad at a time when the Sahara was wet and the Nile was much wider.

As can be seen from the image above, Noah's homeland, called Borno, is almost exactly in the center of Africa, and Har-Meni is the likely mountain upon which the ark came to rest. Har-Meni means Mount Meni and Harmeni is close to the word Armenia. Ar-menia could mean ""mountain of Meni." In 1874, Godfrey Higgins, in his monograph Anacalypsis: An Inquiry into the Origins of Languages, Nations and Religions, noted that "Armenia" could mean "mount of Meru… that is, Ar or Er-Meni-ia, the country of mount Meru or Meni."

According to David M. Westley, Director of the African Studies Library at Boston University, "From the center of the Chad Basin to Mount Meni is about 230 miles."  Mount Meru, Africa’s fifth highest mountain, is located in northern Tanzania. It stands at 15,000 feet and is 42 miles west-southwest of Mount Kilimanjaro, near the Kenyan border. It is an extinct volcanic crater. The land at the base is rich volcanic soil. As one ascends the mountain, there are forests with fig and Acacia trees. Mahogany, olive, and date palm trees grow on the drier crater walls. There are so many species of animals living in the Arusa region that the Kenyan tourist agencies refer to Mount Meru as "Noah’s ark."

Noah likely lived during the Holocene Wet Period which is also called the "Gurian Wet Period" and the "Aqualithic." The latter term was coined by British archaeologist John Sutton (Journal of Africa History 1974; Antiquity 1977). There was an abundance of water in central Africa due to monsoons off the Indian Ocean, and to the African rifts that created great watersheds or troughs. Rifting, combined with prolonged rains. caused this entire region to flood.

Lake Chad is located at the boundary of Niger, Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon, an area of heavy rifting as shown in the map below.

Prehistoric boats and cows 
shown on Saharan rocks 

In the time of Africa's Wet Period Lake Chad extended many hundreds of miles beyond its present basin, and it is possible that there may have been water up to Mt. Meni in East Africa. I believe that is where Noah's ark landed, but no one knows for sure.

In the Bhagvad Gita, Lord Krishna says, "Among the mountains, I am Meru", that is the spinal cord of the world. The Vishnu Purana (from about 200 B.C.) details how there are seven continents ringed by seven oceans: "The central continent has Meru at its core, bounded by three mountain ranges to the north and three to the south. One of these ranges is the Himalayan barrier, interposed between Meru and ‘Bharatha’, the Indian subcontinent. Meru itself stands eighty-four thousand leagues high, with four faces of crystal, ruby, gold and lapis lazuli. Ganga falls from the heavens on Meru’s summit, circles the mountain and then divides into four mighty rivers which flow to the four quarters of the earth." According to Buddhist tradition, the island of Sri Lanka broke off from Meru. Many Hindu temples, including Angkor Wat in Cambodia, have been built as symbolic representations of Mount Meru.

The word meni appears only once in the Bible, in Isaiah 65:11, where it is paralleled with the word gad, meaning good fortune. I suspect that there is a connection between meni and the ancient practice of worship on mountain tops because where the word "gad" appears there is often a contextual reference to sacrifice or praise offered on mountains. We recall that Noah offered burnt sacrifice on the mountain in thanksgiving for his deliverance (Gen. 8:20) and that God established a covenant with Noah and his descendants.


Related reading: Noah's Flood: Where and When?; How Big Was Noah's Flood; Africa in the Days of Noah; Cemetery Predates Noah; Newly Discovered Pyramid Predates Noah; Was the Earth Repopulated After Noah's Flood?

Serpent Symbolism

Alice C. Linsley


Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"

The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "

"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Gen. 3:1-5)


Serpents are known for their swiftness, their ability to hide, and for their ability to raise themselves to eye level with humans. Some are slender with narrow heads and lateral eyes. Others are thick, with hooded heads and eyes facing forward. Serpent symbolism is found in all religious traditions. Among archaic peoples the serpent was regarded as having powers to communicate, to deceive, to heal, to hide, to reveal and to protect. The oldest serpent veneration is associated with the 70,000 year old python stone carved in a mountainside in Botswana.

Serpent images are found across the world. The wide dispersion of serpent images on artifacts and in mythologies tells us that this is a very ancient symbol. Serpents on artifacts range from coiled snakes to fire-breathing winged dragons. On some works, the serpent is somewhat hidden and on others it is the focal point of the piece. Many illuminated Medieval Bibles show Adam and Eve with a winged serpent coiled around a tree. The serpent is often shown with the head of a woman (Lillith) and sometimes that head is topped with a fiery plume. The morphing of the snake suggests that peoples around the world have pondered the serpent and found it a dynamic metaphor for the great mysteries of life. To understand the deeper meaning of the serpent in Genesis, we must explore serpent symbolism in the larger context.

The Serpent in Hinduism and Buddhism

Nāga is the Sanskrit word for a deity that has the form of a large snake. The term may also refer to human tribes known as "Nāgas" and can apply to ordinary snakes. The largest of the cobra in India is the King Cobra (shown above). It is intelligent, alert and deadly. It can inject enough venon at one strike to kill an elephant. The Indian Cobra holds a special place in the religious symbolism of Hinduism and Buddhism. The Buddha is said to have been sheltered from rain by a giant cobra. In Buddhist texts, the cloud gods, Nanda and Upananda, who showered Gautama at his birth are identified as nāgas, serpents.

The Serpent Among the Afro-Asiatic Peoples

The serpent is both admired and feared among Afro-Asiatic peoples. Abarea, a headman of the Galla, in the north-east of Kenya Colony reports in Swahili, "Nyoka ni adui- the snake is the enemy."

The plumed or crested serpent is venerated in Swaziland and Natal, where native peoples provide daily offerings of meal, tobacco and water at shrines. This variety has a flame colored body. The crested flame colored serpent is among the most dreaded snake in southern Africa. The feathered serpent of the Olmecs (Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador) is portrayed in the same way as the crested serpent of southern Africa, suggesting that the Olmec rulers may have come to the Americas from Africa.

There are about forty varieties of snakes in southern Africa. The most dreaded are the deadly Black Mamba and the flame colored crested serpents that elevate and lunge at their victims. Naja haemachates, a snake in the cobra family, has a large hood and spits or ejects its poison. The largest of the serpents in southern Africa is the Natal python. It lives in jungles, among rocks along streams and in the coastal districts. It can reach a length of 20 feet and has been known to strangle humans and large animals.

The fat of the python is used in rituals throughout Africa. The Mofu holy man (Cameroon) mixes python fat with the blood of a sacrificed animal when offering prayers for rain. Rounded rain stones are placed in a stone basin. Then dry grasses are added, followed by a handfull of brilliant green python fat and then the red blood. The holy man mixes all together with his hands while he prays for rain. When the holy man has finished praying, he instructs his assistant to wash the stones carefully before they are returned to their hiding place. (For more on python rituals in Africa go here.)

The Serpent in Judaism

The proto-root for vein, river, tongue, sinew, lightening and serpent was NS. The S originally would have been a pictograph representing a serpent or anything serpentine. It also indicates "great" and can mean "Man" (Egyptian - sa), and throne (Proto-Saharan es or is). NS suggests connection between heaven and earth, and between deity and man. The serpent was a sacred symbol to the Kushites, especially to the metalworking clans such as the Hittites of Anatolia who called themselves NS (Nes).

In the Old Testament, the serpent (nahash) symbolizes deception, the promise of forbidden knowledge and self-elevation. This is seen in the serpent’s deception and manipulation of the first woman (Gen. 3:4-5 and 3:22). The serpent in this story isn’t a deity, but it does have powers not usually associated with snakes. It is said to be "more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made" (Genesis 3:1). Nevertheless, it is very much a creature. The prophets and rabbis identify the serpent of Genesis 3 as HaSatan, the one who decieves and accuses 364 days of the year. On one day only is HaSatan not able to accuse: on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

Though God curses the serpent for leading the woman astray, the snake continued to be venerated among the people of Abraham. Moses transformed a rod into a snake and back again, as a sign of Yahweh’s power before Pharaoh. "And the Lord said unto him, ‘What is that in thine hand?’ And he said, ‘A rod.’ And He said, ‘Cast it on the ground.’ And he cast it on the ground and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail.’ And he put forth his hand and caught it and it became a rod in his hand" (Exodus 4:2-4).

Later, while leading the people through the wilderness, Moses lifted up the bronze snake to cure the snake-bitten Israelites. "And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, ‘We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us.’ And Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.’ And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived" (Numbers 21:6-9).

The ancient veneration of the serpent encountered opposition from the King Hezekiah who sought to purify Israelite religion of occult elements. According to Second Kings 18:4, King Hezekiah "removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and he called it Nehushtan."

The Serpent in Christianity

Christianity, building on Judaism, also connects the Serpent and Satan. Genesis 3:14 is seen in this light: "And the Lord God said unto the serpent, 'Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.'" Some believe that this indicates that the serpent originally had legs. But if the serpent is Satan himself (who is sometimes called THE serpent or dragon), rather than an ordinary snake possessed by Satan, the reference to crawling in the dust symbolizes the Devil’s ultimate humiliation and defeat.

John the Baptist calls the Pharisees and Sadducees a "brood of vipers" (Matthew 3:7). Jesus also uses this imagery in his condemnation of their hypocrisy: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Gehenna?" (Matthew 23:33).

Jesus recognized that the serpent symbolizes both deception and wisdom, because He sent forth his twelve Apostles with this exhortation: "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves" (Matthew 10:16). He also applied the serpent image to Himself as the "wisdom of God" (to which Paul refers often) when He compared being lifted up on the Cross to Moses’ rod with the bronze serpent being lifted in the desert. All the Israelites who looked upon it were saved. So all who look to the Cross of Jesus for salvation will be saved. Jesus said, "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:14-15).

All Christians recognize and honor the Blood of Christ as the means of our salvation. Not all recognize, as did the Church Fathers, that the blood of Jesus is the blood of his mother, Mary. She is "the woman" spoken of in Genesis 3, where God addresses the serpent. Then Yahweh God said to the snake, ‘Because you have done this, accursed be you of all animals wild and tame! On your belly you will go and on dust you will feed as long as you live. I shall put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he [following the Greek] will bruise your head and you will strike his heel." (Gen. 3:14-15)

This proclaims that Satan’s "children" will be at enmity with the offspring of "the woman". The "woman" to whom this refers can’t be Eve as Eve is not named until Genesis 3:20. The "offspring" can’t refer to the human race since, according to Christian understanding humanity is Satan's captive. Therefore the woman's "offspring" refers to those, who redeemed by the Blood of Jesus, share in His ultimate victory. (So it is that Mary is regarded as the Mother of the Church.)

Satan bruised His heel at Calvary, but the sacrifice, resurrection and ascension of the Incarnate Son of God crushes the serpent's head, makes void the curse, sets Eve free, and renews Adam. May God be praised!

Related reading: The Dragon and Beast of Revelation; The Serpent of Eden; Nilotic-Kushitic Celestial Archetypes; Tamar of Timnah; Afro-Asiatic Metalworkers; The Cosmic Serpent Exposed; Answers to High Schoolers Questions About the Serpent in Genesis

Cain's Princess Bride

Alice C. Linsley

Nok figurine

If Cain were born of Eve, the first mother, we would have to speculate that he produced offspring by a sister or perhaps a daughter of his brother Seth. If Eve is the original mother of all humanity, she and her children would have lived at least 3.2 million years ago since that is the age of the oldest human fossils. In this case, Cain's historicity is impossible to prove.

But what if Eve is the archetypical first mother, analogous to Mumbi among the Gikuyu? She then would represent the origins of a tribe of people (specifically Abraham's Nilotic ancestors), not the mother of all humanity.

This second approach enables us to consider Cain in historical time as the first ruler who established a territory for his son Enoch, born to him by a daughter of Enoch (Nok). In other words, Cain married a princess, probably a young woman to whom he was related.

The line of descent of Cain's princess bride is given in Genesis 4. She is not named, nor is her sister, the bride of Cain's brother, Seth. The line of descent from Seth's wife is given in Genesis chapter 5. Both Cain's wife and Seth's wife names theri first-born sons after their father Enoch/Nok, so we know their father's identity.

Most readers imagine that they are reading about the children of Adam and Eve when they read these begats in Genesis 4 and 5. However, analysis of this kinship pattern reveals that the blood line was traced through the wives. Cain and Seth's brides were the daughters of an African chief name Nok (Enoch in the Hebrew). Were we to diagram this, it would look like this:

Enoch/Nok

/  \

Wife of Cain    Wife of Seth

/   \

Enoch/Nok    Enosh/Nok

So Genesis 4 and 5 traces descent from Enoch/Nok and not from Adam and Eve. As we see from the diagram, the wives of Cain and Seth named their first-born sons after their father. This naming prerogative of cousin brides continues throughout the Bible. We may assume from this that Cain and Seth married patrilineal parallel cousins, as did Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is also likely that Cain and Seth had second wives who would have been half-sisters, as did Nahor, Terah and Abraham.

Bloodline among Abraham's people was figured through the mother, but social status (caste) and livelihood (occupation) were inherited from the father. Tubal-Cain is said to have worked metal. He would have inherited this from his father.

The brides of Cain and Seth were of noble status. Their father was a ruler of great wealth who controlled the water systems of his region. During this time Africa was much wetter than it is today. The Chadic Sea was about 600 feet deep and sustained boating and fishing industries. The average fishermen used canoe dugouts, but nobles used boats constructed of marsh reeds lashed together and sealed with pitch.

The Nile and central Africa were once integrated. It took a long time for these water systems to shrink. The region was still wet in the time of Cain and Seth. The connection of the major water ways, controlled by rulers and chiefs, explains how the House of Nok (northern Nigeria) and the House of Set (Nubia) became the controlling houses of Kush. Ancient Kush would have included Egypt, southern Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania.  Now there is evidence that these Proto-Saharan rulers also governed Chad and Niger where they built pyramids that are 1000 years older than the Giza pyramids in Egypt.



An Ancient River Civilization

On the west side, the Nile connected with the Chadic Sea, which in turn connected to the Benue and Niger Watershed in Nigeria. This is the region of Noah's flood. As a ruler, Noah probably had a fleet of boats constructed of reeds and pitch. The biblical flood likely took place during the late Holocene Wet Period in the only area on earth that claims to be Noah's homeland: Bor-No, the Land of Noah.

The western Nile watershed extended well into the Sudan. This explains why the Sudanese always have thought of the Nile as their river. The Sudanese-born BBC commentator, Zeinab Badawi, expresses the Sudanese view of the Nile:

"Ideologically, I wouldn't say that there are any huge differences between the Sudanese and the Egyptian governments certainly, and there is a huge affinity between the people. I think that the biggest source of friction and potential tension between Egypt and Sudan has been in the Nile, and how the waters of the Nile are used. The feeling that a lot of northern Sudanese might have is that the Nile actually in a sense runs much more through Sudan than it does through Egypt. Sudan is the biggest country in Africa. It's the tenth biggest in the world, the size of western Europe. It is the land of the Nile, and maybe there is a kind of brotherly resentment by the northern Sudanese that the Egyptians have in a sense claimed the Nile as their own, whereas the Sudanese in a sense feel they are the proper custodians of the Nile, because after all, most of its journey is through the territory of Sudan." (From here.)



The Ruling Houses Inter-married

It was the custom for the rulers of this region to have two wives.  One was a half-sister (as was Sarah to Abraham) and the second wife, taken later in life, was a patrilineal cousin or niece.  The second wife named her firstborn son after her father.  This cousin-bride naming prerogative allows biblical anthropologists to trace the lineage of Jesus back to the earliest rulers in Genesis.  It also explains why there are two named Esau, two named Joktan, two named Sheba and two named Lamech named in Genesis.

For example, Lamech's daughter Naamah (mentioned in Gen. 4) married her patrilineal cousin Methuselah and named their firstborn son "Lamech" after her father.

The intermarriage between the lines of Cain and Seth is paralled by the intermarriage between the lines of Ham and Shem and later between the lines of Eber and Sheba, and Abraham and Nahor. In fact, analysis of the Genesis genealogies reveals a consistent and unchanging marriage pattern among the Horite rulers before and after the time of Abraham.

It is very interesting to note that the Virgin Mary was Joseph's patrilineal cousin and that both were in the priestly lines.



Related reading:  Cain as Ruler; When the Sahara was Wet; Water Systems Connected Nile and Central Africa; Abraham's Kushite Ancestors; Are the Names Enoch and Enosh Equivalent?; Cain and Seth: Sons of Nok

A Question for My Readers

Where in Genesis do we find the first evidence of government and law?

The question assumes that where there is government there must be law also.

I look forward to your insightful answers!

Jesus' Blood is Restorative

Alice C. Linsley

Paul’s authority in the Church is undisputed. However, he is hated by some because of his uncompromising defense of the Gospel. The Church has the Apostle Paul (and four Evangelists) to thank for its confessional of redemption by the Blood of Jesus. His confessional approach has rivals in modernist theology.

What is meant by Paul’s “confessional hermeneutic?” It is based on a conviction that spiritual authority rests not with human institutions and hierarchies, nor with works of piety, but with the Incarnate Word whose blood was shed for the life of the world.

Clearly, the Reformation came out of a cultural context very different than that of Paul in the first century. However, Martin Luther’s argument with Rome does touch on a Pauline understanding of the Blood of Jesus. The Pope cannot remit guilt. To claim that is to claim saving power equal with the Blood of Jesus. Luther disputed this in the first eight of his theses. 

Disputation On The Power And Efficacy Of Indulgences Commonly Known As The 95 Theses

“Out of love and concern for the truth, and with the object of eliciting it, the following heads will be the subject of a public discussion at Wittenberg under the presidency of the reverend father, Martin Luther, Augustinian, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology, and duly appointed Lecturer on these subjects in that place. He requests that whoever cannot be present personally to debate the matter orally will do so in absence in writing.

1. When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said "Repent", He called for the entire life of believers to be one of penitence.

2. The word cannot be properly understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, i.e. confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy. 

3. Yet its meaning is not restricted to penitence in one's heart; for such penitence is null unless it produces outward signs in various mortifications of the flesh. 

4. As long as hatred of self abides (i.e. true inward penitence) the penalty of sin abides, viz., until we enter the kingdom of heaven. 

5. The Pope has neither the will nor the power to remit any penalties beyond those imposed either at his own discretion or by canon law. 

6. The Pope himself cannot remit guilt, but only declare and confirm that it has been remitted by God; or, at most, he can remit it in cases reserved to his discretion. Except for these cases, the guilt remains untouched.

7. God never remits guilt to anyone without, at the same time, making humbly submissive to the priest, His representative.

8. The penitential canons apply only to men who are still alive, and, according to the canons themselves, none applies to the dead.” 

It is not a coincidence that Martin Luther came to these conclusions by reading Paul’s Epistles. Paul’s confessional hermeneutic is centered on the Blood of Jesus. He never allows philosophical speculation to lead the Gospel away from the comprehensive reality of the Blood of Jesus. All the things of God are realized in His Blood. All suffering, which many religions attempt to explain apart from Christ, or to avoid through asceticism and enlightenment, are made meaningful by His Blood. All worldly striving is shown to be futile by His Blood. In historic Lutheran theology, this focus on the Lamb's sacrifice is called “the centrality of the Cross.” 

The greatest strength of Lutheran theology has been the insistence on the centrality of the Cross. The deficiency is that the Cross is too often seen as bloodless, which is to miss the point. Jesus’ death could have taken place in many ways. He could have been beheaded or driven through with a spear. He died on a cross in fulfillment of the prophecies that he would be hanged on a tree. Jesus’ Cross is the new Tree of Life, from which we were driven by our sin in the beginning. The shed Blood of Jesus must be regarded as “restorative”. By His Blood we are restored to Paradise and the divine image is renewed. 

In a very real sense, the waters of baptism are Jesus’ Blood making us clean and restoring the divine image. I first perceived this in a vision that I had in 1990 while sitting in St.Paul Episcopal Church, West Whiteland, Pennsylvania. I was alone in the church and suddenly everything around me disappeared except for the stone baptismal font which had replaced the altar, front, center and elevated. An angel appeared above the font, and from a golden pitcher poured blood into the font. I knew that it was the Blood of Jesus and I slipped to my knees, overwhelmed by His holiness. 

Remembering that the Apostle Paul was thoroughly steeped in the Hebrew worldview, we must look there for an explanation as to how blood can be both contaminating and purifying. Linguists are able to trace the linguistic connections between many languages in the Afro-Asiatic family. Here is a significant finding: The Hebrew root "thr" = to be pure, corresponds to the Hausa/Hahm "toro" = clean, and to the Tamil "tiru" = holy. All are related to the proto-Dravidian and ancient Egyptian "tor" = blood. Among the Horite Hebrew (Abraham's ruler-priest caste) all blood that was shed was to be accounted for as it was believed to have power. There were rituals appropriate to all blood that was shed; for women after childbirth and for hunters after the kill. For warriors the ceremony was to relieve blood guilt, something that conributes to post-traumatic stress disorder. In Genesis 14, Melchizedek ministered to Abraham after combat and the ceremony involved bread and wine.

The Apostle Paul refers to the power of Jesus' shed blood no less than twelve times in his writings. Because God makes peace with us through the Blood of the Cross, he urges “Take every care to preserve the unity of the Spirit by the peace that binds you together” (Eph. 4:3). Paul's confession of the saving Blood of Jesus informs his understanding of Baptism and the Body of Christ. He continues: “There is one Body, one Spirit, just as one hope is the goal of your calling by God. There is one Lord, one Faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of all, over all, through all and within all” (Eph. 4:4-5).

The blood of the saints is precious to God because it is the Blood of His eternal Son, by which we are restored to union with God and therefore made one body in Him. Writing to the Ephesians, Paul says: "But now in Christ Jesus, you that used to be so far apart from us have been brought very close, by the blood of Christ. For He is peace between us, and has made the two into one and broken down the barrier which used to keep them apart, actually destroying in His own person the hostility caused by the rules and decrees of the Law. This was to create one single man in Himself out of the two of them and by restoring peace through the Cross, to unite them both in a single body and reconcile them with God. In His own person He killed the hostility... Through Him, both of us have in one Spirit our way to come to the Father" (Eph. 2:13-14).

Related reading: Jesus' Blood Cleanses; St. Paul's Application of Greek Philosophy; Water and Blood; Blood and Binary Distinctions; On Blood and the Impulse to Immortality

Considering Time and Eternity

Where Did We Get Our Division of Time?

Our present division of time into 60 seconds, 60 minutes and 6 days +0 (which would be 7 for us) is based on the observations of early African astronomers. Their knowledge spread with the dispersion of the early Hebrew ruler-priests into Mesopotamia. 

Early Nilotic astronomers observed and recorded the movement of the stars to understand their seasonal effect on the Nile Valley. These astronomers were mainly temple priests who had been keeping records of astronomical cycles and events for many millennia.

Plato wrote that Nilotic scribes had been keeping astronomical records for 10,000 years. He should know since he studied with a priest in Memphis for 13 years and knew about Earth's Great Year (also called the "Platonic Year"). This is the duration of time between 25,000 and 28,000 years that it takes for Earth to complete the cycle of axial precession. This precession was known to Plato who defined the "perfect year" as the return of the celestial bodies (planets) and the diurnal rotation of the fixed stars to their original positions. The ancients understood much more about the natural world than is generally recongized.

By 4245 BC, the priests of the Upper Nile had established a calendar based on the appearance of the star Sirius. Apparently, they had been tracking this star and connecting it to seasonal changes and agriculture for thousands of years. The priest Manetho reported in his history (c.241 BC) that Nilotic Africans had been “star-gazing” as early as 40,000 years ago.

The ancient Nilotic astronomers observed that 36 groups of stars (small constellations) rise in a consecutive order on the eastern horizon every 24 hours. Each decan rises for 10 days. This gave them the formula of 36 X 10 = 360 days, with the calendar broken into 12 months of 30 days each.

The Sumerian civilization (c.7000 - 2000 B.C.) represents a sexagesimal system based on a calendar with 360 (60x6) days in a year (with a few days added when the priests realized that the calendar needed adjusting according to the discrepancy between the lunar phases and the solar cycle). The duplication of 6 is 12, so the number 12 is a feature of this system, with 12 hours assigned to "day" and 12 hours assigned to "night", and roughly 12 months.

The oldest known time counting device (shown above) ever found dates to about 45,000 years ago and was found in a cave in the Lebombo Mountains of southern Africa. This lunar phase counting device of 29 distinct notches that were deliberately cut into a baboon’s fibula.

The months of a lunar calendar alternate between 29 and 30 days. Since the period of 12 such lunations, a lunar year, is 354 days, 8 hours, 48 minutes, 34 seconds (354.36707 days), purely lunar calendars are 11 to 12 days shorter than the solar year.


What is Time?

Time can be defined in different ways, depending on the discipline from which one is approaching the subject. In Physics, time is often spoken of as a fourth dimension, yet the existence of time depends on electromagnetic radiation, an aspect of the three-dimensional world in which we live. 

Regardless of how time is defined, it is something that humans cannot escape. It is an inescapable feature of the universe that God created. St. Augustine wrote, “God moves the spiritual through time." As we are spiritual as well as fleshly creatures, God moves us through time toward His eternal Being. At some point, as St. Paul reminds us, we must put off this perishable body for the imperishable body.

Solar time or the solar year is the measurement of time according to the earth’s rotation around the sun. Sidereal time is the orbital period of the earth around the sun, taking the stars as a reference frame. It is 20 minutes longer than the solar or tropical year because of precession. The sidereal year is the measurement of time relative to a distant star. It is used in astronomy to predict when a star will be overhead. Due to the somewhat wobbly rotation of the earth around the sun, a sidereal day is slightly less than a solar day. This means that time is relative to where we are in the universe.

What is Eternity?

Many think that eternity is endless time, but eternity is timelessness. This means that eternity cannot be an aspect of the creation in which we live. However, it is an aspect of God’s nature. Theologically, it is possible to speak of the eternal God as timeless.

While eternity pertains to God and not to the creation, eternity is not beyond the grasp of humans. Intellectually, we are able to recognize the difference between time and eternity. The Christian Faith teaches that we were made to enjoy God in eternity, and that Jesus came so that everyone who believes in Him and receives His life-giving Spirit has eternal life.

In the Athanasian Creed we express the belief that "The Father is eternal, the Son is eternal, the Holy Ghost is eternal." Paul tells us that, “as many of you who have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ.” In our baptism, we come naked before God and we are given the undergarments of eternity, but the fine outer garments will be given to us on the Last Day at the general resurrection.

Related reading: The Timeless Mystery of God; Theories of Change and Constancy; Time and Eternity; The Metaphysics of Time Perception; Astronomical Ceiling Diagrams