Sumerian for Seventh-day Adventists

Koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Visiting Professor

Department of Liberal Arts Education

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

Noah’s Flood ended 352 years before the birth of Abraham and according to the reckoning of biblical chronology, the birth of Abraham is set at 2231 BCE, taking the Exodus date as 1450 BCE, as William Shea and myself independently of each other calculated; but not the way Siegfried Horn-Leon Wood-Edwin Thiele calculated it as 1445 BCE. The language of mankind until that time, in fact, until the time of the Tower of Babel, was the same. At the Tower of Babel God confused the languages of the world and divided it into different streams and proto-types for our modern languages. Many cuneiform tablets were found between the Tigris and the Euphrates and those languages after the Flood and after the division into differences, used pictures to communicate in writing to each other. The Flood changed the whole ecology of the earth and even man’s age started to decrease and his memory span shrunk so that writing was essential to remind him of that which he/she forgot. The first cuneiform texts used pictograms to express sounds and combinations of sounds that linked to ideas. It was a form of pictography. Akkadian also had an early origin and the bilingual word lists or tu-ta-ti syllabaries of Akkadian intended to explain how Sumerian must be understood for the same expression. Since Hebrew is a walk-over into Akkadian, Akkadian was the bridge to understand the more complicated language of Sumerian. Scribal errors, variants, lexical glosses and loanwords were precious sources to analyze the language.

It is probably not far off to allocate to Sargon of Akkad the date 2305 BCE. The pre-Sargonic texts were pictographic that means written with pictures of day to day objects. When the Ur III texts kicked in, syllabograms were used in cuneiform or nail combinations, sometimes resembling those ancient pictographic concepts of earlier times, after the Flood, of course.

We better bring in the Bible Chronology into secular history since the iconography of seals from the pre-Sargonic period displays dinosaurs of the Tyrannosaurus type with long necks intertwined that are remarkably close to the modern fossil finds since the 18^th century and those displayed all over the world in museums. The dinosaurs could not survive a worldwide Flood and must have died in 2583 BCE with that catastrophe giving rise to the origin of the fossil record. Iconography of these seals found by archaeologists since the 18^th century, dating close to 2583 BCE by 200-300 years, indicates that they had a vivid memory of those animals’ physiology so vivid that it means that they knew about them. Shem for example lived deep into the life of Abraham before he died and he was on the ark.

Do not let people fool you about pyramid dating or chronology in Egyptian history. At a certain period shortly after 2400 BCE, all certainty dries up just like it does in Mesopotamian history. Writing is allocated only to about 2300 BCE by scholars like Erica Reiner of Chicago University Oriental Institute. Pyramid building requires mathematics of the highest kind and pure sensibility by mind only cannot construct these buildings with such high accuracy without writing. The dates of the pyramid has to be lowered than what conventionalism is doing.

What about the Flintstone people who used flint for tools. We do not work with Evolutionary schemes nor with Classical Darwinianism. It is not the Adventist way. Uniformatism is an artificial denial of catastrophes in the past that made major shifts in ecological systems of the past. Certain religions like Buddhism do not operate with any other scheme than cyclic uniformatism.

The femur of a dinosaur recently found is so big that it is taller than a man and looks like a huge tree stump. The animal ate one and a half tons a day as vegetarian and no country, even the Amazon, can accommodate this species. The pre-Flood world must have been of a higher energy capacity to feed the dinosaurs. His length was just a meter or two shorter than an Olympic size swimming pool. Want to feed the pet in a zoo of today’s world?

Our intention here is to focus on certain Adventist concepts important in the Bible of which Sumerian gives us some detail.

Tigris = Hiddekel Daniel 10:4

The Hebrew word in Daniel 10:4 is ḥiddeqel. As was indicated by Dietz Otto Edzard, Sumerian Grammar (Boston: Brill, 2003), 19, the word is known in Akkadian as Idiglat. The name of the Tigris in Sumerian was ^ídIdigina (Edzard 2003: 9). The supralinear ^íd is the determinative for river or canal added to the names of rivers to show that they are talking about a river. The word is a loanword in Daniel from a Mesopotamian background and since Daniel was in the court of Nebuchadnezzar as a young man, he must have learned Babylonian of which Sumerian and Sumerograms were borrowed to express many terms in Babylonian. Babylonian is not modern Sumerian in Daniel’s time but rather modern Akkadian, however, they still used Sumerian determinatives and loanwords from Sumerian. The word for “wide”in Sumerian is daĝal (nasalized ng) and add the determinative for “river” in Sumerian before it and one is close to the Akkadian form of Tigris which also corresponds close to the form that Daniel had it.Sumerian ^íddaĝal = Akkadian Idiglat = Daniel ḥiddeqel.

Praise as harp music

In an Akkadian-Sumerian bilingual wordlist, the word zá-mi in Sumerian is sammû in Akkdadian (Edzard 2003: 16), but it means “harp” and “praise”. How loud can praise be with a harp? It makes us consider about the modern insistence that one should worship and praise the Lord with electronic equipment that makes it impossible for the Holy Spirit to whisper to a person. Self-control is surrendered to outside manipulation of calls for raising the hands, waving, moving, swaying, turning, dancing, jumping, laughing, shouting, and all kinds of side-effects to achieve this mass control. Let us use this rule as yardstick: if your worship music cannot accommodate mothers with small babies or your grandmother or grandfather or younger children, there is something wrong with your worship style. Jesus, as much as he loves you, also loves the babies whom He took on His lap.

Hekal as “palace” in the Bible

The original word after the Flood in Sumerian was é-gal of which é means house and gal means “great”. A “great house” was thus a palace. Akkadian was using the same word as ēkallu and biblical Hebrew has the form hēkal and in Ugaritic of the post-Exodus period Canaanites who fled to the Syria area and who got mixed with secular Habiru who settled there during the times of the Judges, also used hkl for “palace”.

How long? ad matay in Daniel 8:13

In Sumerian the expression “how long?” is li-šu but in Akkadian and in Babylonian of Daniel’s time, it was a-di ma-ti which corresponds closely to that expression in Hebrew used by Daniel ad matay. For the expression in Sumerian, see A. Poebel, Sumerian Grammar page 38.  

 Evenings and mornings in Daniel 8:14

The expression used by Daniel in 8:14 is without a copulative “and” and is ereb boqer. The evening precede the morning which is a typical Hebrew concept that the day has a night part first for 12 hours closely before it has a day part for the remainder of the day. The sun does not rule the day and the importance of the sun is placed at the end of the concept. In God’s view, we rest before the event takes place. It means that we rest first and then worship God when we wake up bright and clear. In modern times we work first and then sleep to rest from the work. In Sumerian and Akkadian wordlists we do find the expression “morning and evening” as gĕ-û-bi (Sumerian) which is translated in Akkadian as ṣi-i-it ^dšamši-i[m] e-ri-ib ^dšamši-i[m]. The concept of a whole day also occurs in the expression “night and day” gĕ-Ù-na or also in the form of gĕ-û-na  translated in Akkadian as mu-ši ù ur-ri (Poebel 1914: 39 presenting Text 152 Col. 11 lines 27-28 and also line 38). Notice that the same expression is used for “morning” that is also used for “night” in Sumerian. The Egyptians and Babylonians reckoned the day as starting when the sun comes up since the sungod ruled their life. Morning is the end of the previous day and start of the new day which in Akkadian may be called evening or day since it stretch until the sungod disappear behind the horizon or dies, like in Egyptian theology. He goes into the underworld during the night through 12 gates fighting. When an Akkadian or Sumerian uses the Daniel expression of ereb boqer, evening morning, then they mean one day of 24 hours where the daytime (evening) precedes the nighttime (morning). For the Hebrew mind, based on Genesis report of Creation, the night part of the day precedes the daylight part of the day so that the expression evening morning is also 24 hours but night first, “from evening” and day second “from the morning”. By using this reverse order of the expression, Daniel would have both a Hebrew and Babylonian believe he is talking of one day of 24 hours and the same hours in the same day. Let us summarize this very important difference between Babylonian theology and Hebrew theology. On the basis of Genesis 1, Hebrew theology and God operates with the night-part 12 hours first before he operates with the light-part 12 hours of a day. 12 night + 12 daylight = one day. The expression is ereb boqer in Hebrew. Babylonians and Egyptians worship the sungod and therefore their day starts, contrary to the Hebrews at the morning sunrise. The day ends with the next sunrise the following day. Daylight 12 hours + night-time 12 hours = one day. Funny enough, they also use the same expression as Daniel to express their 24 hour continues day, although arriving at the same sumtotal or correct end of the understanding, the method of arriving there is through two different and opposing systems, one biblically correct and one biblically incorrect. Both Babylonians and Hebrews could only understand a continuous 24 hour period called a day.

Seventh-day; on the seventh-day

In Sumerian the word for seventh is umun₇-kam-ma. The word for “on the seventh” is the addition of (a)kama(k) of which the first and last are two genitives “of”. In the Gudea Cylinder A xiii line 4 a locative use is seen “on the seventh-day” as u₄-umun₇-kam-ma-ka. u₄- is the word for “day”. Umun is the word for seventh. Kam is added to indicate the ordinal seventh. Gudea was patesi of Lagash during 2154 or the year that Ishmael was born, the son of Abraham. He was a devoted heathen and all the statues shown him very pious. The point is that during this time, Shem was still alive and thus the concept of seven and seventh and seventh-day as one finds it with Adam in Genesis 1 and 2 are still vivid as cultural given in the Ancient Near East. Seven was very important for these heathens in those days. It was important for God in the Paradise with Adam in Genesis 1-2. God rested on the seventh-day from all His creation work.

Other cases listed by Gudea of seven are: Gudea stated that seven days, slaves and king, walked together (Statue B 5, 51-7, 8 lines 26-33), he built the temple of the seven (heavenly) zones (line 11).(Thureau-Dangin [1907]: 76-77 Statue D of Gudea lines 7-11 also E line 16 [1907]: 78-79, also G line 13 also [1907]: 84-85. He said that seven blessings were spoken over the temple (Cylinder A 21 lines 1-12. Page 113). He mentioned that seven days was the period to put stelae in the temple (Cylinder A 23:1-3 page 115, also Cylinder A 27 line 29 [1907]: 121. Gudea said that he allowed seven heroes to stay in the pillar hall Ku-lal in the "Portal of the Battle" (A 24, 25-26 [1907]: 119). Gudea said that he speaks of a battle weapon with seven points (Cylinder B 11 line 12 also Cylinder B 12 lines 21-22 [1907]: 135). One finds Gudea saying that he placed seven twin daughters with Nin-gir-su to pray (Cylinder B 11 lines 10-11 [1907]: 133). He also said that near a garden and fishpond he placed seven musicians (Cylinder B 12 lines 1-4 [1907]: 133). Interestingly he said that he rested for seven days (Cylinder B 17, 18-21, 18 [1907]: 139). We are focusing on Sumerian influence in the Bible but in this case with seven we have Hebraic thinking (through Noah and his sons since 2583 BCE when the Flood was) influencing Sumerian with the importance of the number seven. We need to work with these realities otherwise we are sitting with too many unwilling explanations. Agnostics cannot make these statements and even Jewish agnostic scholars will not. They deny the reality of their own tradition faithlessly. We cannot work with these set of minds. Correspondences with the early biblical history and outside real data making sense of all in a wholesome manner, forces us to shelve any form of atheism or agnosticism and believe the revelation of God in the Bible. Dinosaurs disappear due to a catastrophe, the world before the Flood must have been better than after, longitivity that are evidenced in the Sumerian Kingslist as well, an early Hammurabi revealed through Kassite history existing in the same time of Amraphel or Hammurabi of Shinar or Babylon in Abraham’s day in Genesis 14, the existence of Eber around the earliest references of Habiru in history, the importance of Ur and Abraham coinciding. All these and the careful chronology of the Bible make us to take the Bible and its message more serious.

2300

The way 2300 was pronounced in Sumerian is ĝeš(d)u-eš ĝeš-i which is 600 x 3 + 60 x 5. ĝeš(d)u- = 600 and eš = 3; ĝeš = 60 and –i = 5 (Edzard 2003: 65).

1260

It is in the Old Testament as the form “time, times and half a time” in Daniel 7:25. It is the same way understood by John in Revelation 12 where the 1260 days appear. It is not three and a half years but 1260 years. The way time works, is the period in contractual relations in Babylon that an economic contract is made with a person that stretch over months in equal calculations of 30 days per month and for an economic year of 360 days. The Kassite Calendar published by R. Labat in Sumer is an example of this economic year or hemerology indicating the good and bad forecasts that may happen to the king during one time forecast or one year. It is the “time” of the contract. Two “times” is thus 360 days x 2 – 720 days. “Half a time” will be half an economic year of 360 days, thus 180 days. Adding them up will correspond to the 1260 days of Revelation 12. The year-day principle is biblical but was also known among the Babylonians as divine reckoning. In Sumerian the expression was ĝeš(d)u-min ĝeš. The min indicates 2 x’s. It is thus 600 x 2 + 60. The amount of 600 is the word ĝeš(d)u which is 60 and u = 10 thus it is 60 x 10 = 600 (Edzard 2003: 65)..

666

The word in the Bible is used in the New Testament in Revelation 13 and it was written in Greek but during the empire of Rome and thus a Latin explanation should be sought for this mysterious number. It is not mysterious but clearly explained by counting in Latin of a name that adds up 666. It has to be a Latin name and not Nero which means in Greek 600 = nhroj. The Sumerian word for 600 is ĝeš(d)u but in Akkadian it is nēru which corresponds to the Greek form for 600. ĝeš(d)u is 10 sixties. The full form is thus ĝeš(d)u ĝeš-áš. Áš means 6 and is made up of ia = 5 + aš = 1 which is 6 (Edzard 2003: 63).