11.
THE
GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE NEPHILIM
“In v.irtually all of the mythologies of the world there is the theme of an ancient conflict among the gods. In Egyptian myth it is the conflict of Osiris and Horus against Set; in Babylonian myth it is the battle of Marduk against the primeval goddess Tiamut; in the Canaanite myths of Ugarit it is Baal against Yum and Mot; and in Greek myth it is Zeus against the Titans. All of these conflicts relate in one may or another to the original conflict, the first divine conflict ever set down in writing, which was the ongoing conflict between Enlil and Enki as told by the ancient Sumerians. ”
Peter Goodgame545
Certain “characters”
from ancient myths have repeatedly appeared throughout this work:
Ra, Marduk, Ninurta, Nergal, Thoth, Zu, and to a lesser extent,
Horus, Osiris, and by implication, the consorts of all of these.
This cluster of names from Mesopotamia and Egypt highlights the
cultural milieu from which our own culture’s biblical basis
derives, and the poles between which it thus moves. Like all such
traditions, it has its own unique way of recounting the same
events, and its own unique perspectives on why the events happened.
This broad Mesopotamian-Egyptian context, however, is one largely
hidden from most of the public and accessible only to a few
specialists, or more recently, to those interested in pursuing
alternative or revisionist paradigms of ancient human
history.
Accordingly, in order
to gain an appropriate perspective from which to view the
peculiarly biblical understanding of some of these events, it is
necessary to place them against the backdrop of the relationships
of the above personages. And the term “relationships” here is to be
understood in the fullest sense of the term, for it is a little
known fact that the genealogies of these individuals may be
reconstructed from the ancient Mesopotamian myths. One scholar who
has taken the time to do this is Laurence Gardner, in his book
Genesis of the Grail Kings. When one
views his genealogical charts one gains that additional and
much-needed perspective on why the cosmic war was considered by so
many cultures to be a war of rebellion, a “civil war in the
pantheon.” One also gains an immediate understanding of the central
role of mankind in this struggle, and a unique and ancient
perspective on answering some age old biblical riddles. We shall
present the first three of Gardner’s genealogical tables, and then
comment on each of them as a way of beginning to answer the
important questions of ”Who were the ‘good’ guys and the ‘bad’ guys
in this war? And why were they good, or
bad?”
Before doing so,
however, a generalized comparison and cautionary note on Biblical
and Sumerian parallels is in order.