THE TOWER of Babel was not at Babylon. It was at a place that was at least as important in the spiritual sense: Eridu.
The Sumerians remember Eridu as the first city, where “kingship” was lowered from heaven, and, most important, it’s where the oldest and largest ziggurat in Mesopotamia was located. That was the temple of the god Enki, the E-abzu—the “House of the Abyss.”
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TODAY WE discuss the fall of Babylon. It wasn’t just divine punishment for the hubris of King Belshazzar; this was a smackdown in the spirit realm.
Interestingly, the target of God’s wrath wasn’t Marduk, city-god of Babylon and head of the Mesopotamian pantheon, it was the moon-god, Sîn. Belshazzar’s father, Nabonidus, was the king of Babylon in 539 B.C., but he’d been living at Teima, an oasis in Arabia that was a center of the moon-god cult. Nabonidus was from Harran, another major center of moon-god worship, and his mother was a priestess in the temple of Sîn there.
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End times prophecy is the focus of this week’s study as we conclude the Book of Joel and begin our study of Daniel.
We explain why the third chapter of Joel confirms that the battle of Armageddon will be fought at Jerusalem, and we analyze the first dream of Nebuchadnezzar recorded in the Book of Daniel.
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THE ROLE and responsibility of a watchman opens this week’s study. But beyond the burden watchmen carry for sounding the alert when enemies approach is a deeper sense of the word, a meaning rooted in the similarity of the Aramaic and Hebrew words for “Watcher” (Strong’s H5894) and “city” (Strong’s H5982), which is a place guarded by a watch.
Filed under Bible Study, Old Testament
