Nimrod’s Babylon

NIMROD’S BABYLON

Post-diluvial civilization began, as one might expect, not far from where the ark landed in the mountains of Ararat – that is, in Mesopotamia, at the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates. Perhaps the earliest state discovered by archaeologists was that centred on Arslantepe in south-east Turkey, where a king’s throne and signs of a bureaucracy have been found.¹ “The basic political unit in this region,” writes Dominic Lieven, “was the city-state, each with its own city god. Even by the beginning of the third millennium BCE monarchy was the universal system of rule. The heavens and earth were seen as parallel realms, with the king as the intermediary between the two. The rituals and sacrifices he performed placated the gods and secured the well-being of his subjects. As deputy and steward of the city god, the king provided order, justice and security. Kingship everywhere had both religious and secular attributes. In a manner to be repeated in only slightly different terms across most of the world ,in the following millenia an Assyrian proverb stated that ‘a people without a king is like a flock without a shepherd, a crowd without a supervisor, water without a pipe… a house without a master, a wife without a husband…’”²

However, though natural and universal, kingship began deeply immersed in evil.

Moses writes: “Cush [the son of Ham] fathered Nimrod, who was the first potentate on earth. He was a mighty hunter in opposition to Yahweh, hence the saying, ‘Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter in opposition to Yahweh’. The mainstays of his empire were Babel, Erech and Accad, all of them in the land of Shinar. From that country he went forth to Assyria and built Nineveh, that vast city, and Caleb.” (Genesis 10.8-12). ³ According to St. Jerome, “Nimrod was the first to seize despotic rule over the people, which men were not yet accustomed to.”⁴

The Jerusalem Targum explains: “He was powerful in hunting and in wickedness before the Lord, for he was a hunter of the sons of men, and he said to them, ‘Depart from the judgement of the Lord, and adhere to the judgement of Nimrod!’ Therefore it is said: ‘As Nimrod is the strong one, strong in hunting, and in wickedness before the Lord.’” Or, as the Targum of Jonathan says: “From the foundation of the world none was ever found like Nimrod, powerful in hunting, and in rebellions against the Lord.” For, as Josephus writes, “it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God; he was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it were through his means that they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage that procured their happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other method of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his own power.”⁵

The British Egyptologist David Rohl identifies Nimrod with the Sumerian king Enmerkar. ⁶ In another work, he writes: “Look at what we have here. Nimrod was closely associated with Erech – the biblical name for Uruk – where Enmerkar ruled. Enmerkar built a great sacred precinct at Uruk and constructed a temple at Eridu – that much we know from the epic poem ‘Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta’. The Sumerian King List adds that Enmerkar was ‘the one who built Uruk’. Nimrod was also a great builder, constructing the cities of Uruk, Akkad and Babel. Both Nimrod and Enmerkar were renowned for their huntsmanship. Nimrod, as the grandson of Ham, belongs to the second ‘generation’ after the flood (Noah-Ham-Flood-Cush-Nimrod) and this is also true of Enmerkar who is recorded in the Sumerian King List as the second ruler of Uruk after the flood (Ubartutu-(Utnapishtim)-Flood-Meskiagkasher-Enmerkar). Both ruled over their empires in the land of Shinar/Sumer.”⁷

One-man rule in antiquity was of two kinds: God-hating Despotism or Tyranny, which was almost universal, and God-loving Autocracy, which appeared only in Israel under David. In the post-diluvial world, despotism appeared first – in Nimrod’s Babylon, the mystical fount and root of all antichristian despotic power down the ages. With the scattering of the peoples, God-hating despotism spread from Babylon to all the developed pagan States throughout the world – to Egypt, the Indus valley, Greece and Rome, China, Central and South America – before the rise of Athenian democracy introduced a new kind of government. Despotic rulers recognize their power as absolute, unlimited by any other power in heaven or on earth. Democratic rulers recognized their power as limited by no power in heaven, but only by their people on earth, who thereby became the gods of democracy. Autocracy, on the other hand, recognizes its power to be neither unlimited, as in Despotism, nor limited by the people, as in Democracy, but as limited by the Law of God alone as interpreted by God’s faithful priesthood in the Church. Autocracy first appeared in embryonic form in the pilgrim Israelite State led by Moses and the Judges, and then more clearly in the Israelite State founded by Samuel and Saul and David.⁸

Sometimes pagan despotic rulers allowed themselves to be led by the True God. Such was the Pharaoh who venerated Jacob and Joseph, and Cyrus the Persian when he ordered the Temple in Jerusalem to be rebuilt, and Darius the Mede when he rejoiced in the salvation of Daniel and ordered his slanderers to be cast into the lions’ den instead. In those moments, we can say that despots behaved, albeit fleetingly, as God-fearing autocrats, which is why the Lord called Cyrus His (invisibly) anointed one (Isaiah 45.1).

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Josephus continues: Nimrod “also said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to down the world again. For that he would build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach. And so (by that method) he would avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers.” As St. John the Romanian writes, “After the flood, people again turned away from God’s ways; and having turned away, they again began to expect a flood. Therefore they decided to build the Tower of Babel, that is, the Babylonian fortress. They wanted to build it up higher than the clouds, so that water would no longer be a threat to them. For this madness God confused their tongues, and they weren’t able to do any of this.”⁹

The deeper motivation for the building of the Tower was vainglory. For Nimrod, like all despots, wanted “to make a name for himself” (Genesis 11.4). When such a man is already sated with money and power and pleasure, he can still desire to “make a name for himself”, making him remembered by later generations, if not for good deeds, then for evil…

Rohl believes that the Tower of Babel was dedicated to the god Ea, transcribed into Hebrew as Jahweh; that is, to the true God. But perhaps he transferred his allegiance from God to Satan. For according to other sources, Nimrod built the Tower to Marduk (or Merodach, “brightness of the day”), with whom Nimrod and the later kings of Babylon may have identified themselves.¹⁰ Thus N. Smart writes: “If you drop the first consonant of Nimrod’s name and take the others M, R, D you will have the basic root of the god of Babylon, whose name was Marduk, and whom most scholars identify with Nimrod. In the Babylonian religion, Nimrod (or Marduk) held a unique place. His wife was Semiramis. (In Cairo, Egypt, the Semiramis Hotel is named after this woman.) Marduk and Semiramis were the ancient god and goddess of Babylon. They had a son whom Semiramis claimed was virgin-born, and they founded the mother and child cult. This was the central cult of ancient Babylon, the worship of a mother and child, supposedly virgin-born. You can see in this a clever attempt on the part of Satan to anticipate the genuine Virgin Birth and thus to cast disrepute upon the story when the Lord Jesus would later be born in history. This ancient Babylonian cult of the mother and child spread to other parts of the earth. You will find it in the Egyptian religion as Isis and Osiris. In Greece it is Venus and Adonis, and in the Hindu religion it is Ushas and Vishnu. The same cult prevails in various other localities. It appears in the Old Testament in Jeremiah where the Israelites are warned against offering sacrifices to ‘the Queen of Heaven.’ This Queen of Heaven is Semiramis, the wife of Nimrod.”¹¹

We may presume that it was in this transfer of allegiance from the True God to a false god – perhaps himself – that constituted Nimrod’s real rebellion against the true God… Human self-deification is the root motive of despotism…

The Babylonian state religion was a mixture of nature-worship and ancestor-worship introduced by Nimrod. Thus the Babylonians worshipped the stars and planets, and practised astrology as a means of discovering the will of the gods. “They believed,” writes Smart, “that they could predict not merely by earthly methods of divination, but also by a study of the stars and of planets and the moon”.¹² One of the purposes of the temples or towers or ziggurats, whose remains can still be seen in the Iraqi desert, may have been as platforms from which to observe the signs of the zodiac.

On the other hand, Nimrod/Markuk became the ancestor of the Babylonian dynasty down to the fall of Babylon to Cyrus in the time of Belashazzar,

The great spring festival of the chief god, Marduk/Nimrod, took place at Babylon, at the splendid temple with ascending steps called in the Bible the Tower of Babel.

Nimrod’s Babylon, like all the early urban civilisations, was characterised by, on the one hand, a despotic, totalitarian state structure, and, on the other hand, a pagan system of religion. Both the governmental and the priestly hierarchies culminated in one man, the king-priest-god. Thus N.N. Alexeyev writes: “The cult of the god-king was confessed by nations of completely different cultures. Nevertheless, at its base there lies a specific religious-philosophical world-view that is the same despite the differences of epochs, nations and cultural conditions of existence. The presupposition of this world-view is an axiom that received perhaps its most distinct formulation in the religion of the Assyro-Babylonians. The Assyro-Babylonians believed that the whole of earthly existence corresponds to heavenly existence and that every phenomenon of this world, beginning from the smallest and ending with the greatest, must be considered to be a reflection of heavenly processes. The whole Babylonian world-view, all their philosophy, astrology and magic rested on the recognition of this axiom. The earthly king was as it were a copy of the heavenly king, an incarnation of divinity, an earthly god.”¹³

The word “Babylon” comes from the Hebrew word meaning “confusion”, or “mixing up”. “Ironically,” writes Juan Luis Montero Fenollos, “this interpretation was itself a confusing of languages. In Akkadian, the root of the words Babylon and Babel does not mean to mix: it means ‘gateway of the gods’.”¹⁴ In either case, the name is appropriate; for the Tower of Babel was begun as a gateway of the gods, an ascent to heaven, in order to “quarrel” with heaven, but ended up as the cause of the confusion of languages and the dispersal of the nations around the world…

“If, before the flood,” write two Catacomb Church nuns, “the impious apostates were the Cainites, the descendants of the brother-murderer, then after the flood they became the sons of the lawless Ham. The Hamites founded Babylon, one of the five cities of the powerful hunter Nimrod (Genesis 10.8). ‘Nimrod, imitating his forefather, chose another form of slavery…’ (St. John Chrysostom, Word 29 on Genesis). Nimrod invented a form of slavery at which ‘those who boast of freedom in fact cringe’ (ibid.). He rebelled against God, against the Divine patriarchal order of governing families and governing peoples. The times of Nimrod were characterized by the appearance of the beginnings of godless monarchism and future imperialism…”¹⁵

“Now the multitude,” writes Josephus, “were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than anyone could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners [in the Flood]; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion…” ¹⁶

The date of the Flood according to the Septuagint text of the Bible is 3289 BC. This is a little earlier than the earliest kingdoms of Babylonia and Egypt, and also, not coincidentally, the approximate date of the origins and dispersal of the Indo-European languages according to the latest linguistic research by Will Chang, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall and Andrew Garrett …¹⁷

For, having destroyed the Tower of Babel and divided the languages, God scattered them in different directions across the face of the earth, which explains both the existence of different nations speaking different languages and the fact that all the primitive nations were pagan, worshipping a multiplicity of gods that often displayed a marked kinship with each other and the original pagan religion of Babylonia.

St. Paul explains the scattering of the nations in his sermon to the Areopagus in Athens: “He made of one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, although He is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17.26-27).

Thus on the one hand all nations have a single nature and origin, being “of one blood”. On the other hand, God has determined that they should live in different groups or nations in different places all over the world, so that the one God should be glorified in different ways and in different tongues throughout the world – but also so that the evil that arises in one people should not quickly or easily be communicated to the rest of the human race.

It was God’s plan that all the nations, though sunk in paganism and separated geographically and linguistically through Nimrod’s folly, should seek for the One True God and worship Him together “with one heart and lips”. Moreover, this aim was in fact achieved with the founding of the Church of all nations at Pentecost in 33 AD. For then the division and scattering of the nations in the time of Nimrod was reversed: “Once, when He descended and confounded the tongues, the Most High divided the nations. But when He divided the tongues of fire, He called all men into unity. And with one accord we glorify the All-Holy Spirit.”¹⁸

Nevertheless, for a time – more precisely, until the coming of Christ and the preaching of the Apostles – God tolerated paganism; for “in bygone generations He allowed all nations to walk in their own ways” (Acts 14.16). But even in those pre-Christian times “He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14.17). Moreover, as St. Augustine says, there is “a God-shaped hole” in the soul of every man, exactly fashioned to accommodate the One True God. And so now the apostles “preach to you that you should turn from these useless things to the living God, Who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and all things that are in them” (Acts 14.15)…

September 13/26. 2024.

1^ See Bettany Hughes’ programme on Channel 4, “Treasures of the World”, May 11, 2024.

2^ Lieven, In the Shadow of the Gods, London: Allen Lane, 2022, p. 36.

3^ The Chaldean paraphrase of I Chronicles 1.10 reads: “Cush begat Nimrod, who began to prevail in wickedness, for he shed innocent blood, and rebelled against Jehovah.”

4^ St. Jerome, Hebrew Questions on Genesis, 10.9.

5^ Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, book 1, chapter 4, paragraph 2.

6^ Rohl, From Eden to Exile, London: Arrow Books, 2002, p. 59.

7^ Rohl, Legend: The Genesis of Civilization, London: Random House, 1998, p. 216.

8^ Orthodox monarchist authors – for example, Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), – identify the term “autocracy” (samoderzhavie) with the better, God-fearing and Orthodox forms of one-man, monarchical government (yedinoderzhavie). However, I have found it useful to make a distinction between monarchy and autocracy for reasons explained in the introduction. The Economist describes Putin’s Russia as “an autocracy, not a dictatorship” (August 29 – September 11, 2010, p. 17) – that is, a not very severe despotism. But since 2010 his rule has become a severe despotism with no claim to being an Orthodox autocracy. “Autocracy” in the sense used in this book is different in kind from despotism insofar as it implies a knowledge of, and obedience to, God that despotism does not possess.

9^ St. John of Neamts, the new Chozebite, “Today’s Tower of Babel”, Orthodox Christianity, October 3, 2017, http://orthochristian.com/106787.html.

10^ I.R. Shafarevich, Sotzializm kak Iavlenie Mirovoj Istorii (Socialism as a Phenomenon of World History), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977.

11^ Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind, London: Fontana, 1971, p. 299:

12^ Smart, op. cit., p. 299.

13^ Alexeyev, “Khristianstvo i Idea Monarkhii” (“Christianity and the Idea of Monarchy), Put’ (The Way), N 6, January, 1927, p. 660.

14^ Fenollos, “Envy of the World: Babylon”, National Geographic History, January/February, 2017, p. 43.

15^ “Taina Apokalipticheskogo Vavilona” (The Mystery of the Apocalyptic Babylon), Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’ (Orthodox Life), 47, N 5 (545), May, 1995, pp. 14-16.

16^ Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, I, 4.

17^ Chang, Cathcart, Hall and Garrett, “Ancestry-constrained Phylogenetical Analysis Supports the Indo-European Steppe Hypothesis”, Language, vol. 91, no. 1, 2015.

18^ Pentecostarion, Pentecost, kontakion.