Entries by Derek Gilbert

Jesus and the Gods of Mount Hermon

Jesus, of course, was fully aware of the ongoing war for his holy mountain. For him, the war was personal. Many of the key events in the life of Jesus […]

Titans, the Angels Who Sinned, and the Origin of Demons

Who were these meropes anthropoi, and what’s the connection to the Rephaim of the Bible? Homer named a few of them in The Iliad: Theseus, who killed the Minotaur on […]

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Summoning the Rephaim

Let’s bring our timeline of history into focus: The Bible tells us that Abraham arrived in Canaan 430 years before the Exodus. With the Exodus at 1446 B.C., that puts Abraham […]

Dead Kings and Rephaim

The ancient Amorite tribe called the Tidanum was not only honored by their descendants, it was venerated. Based on texts found across the ancient Near East, the Tidanum were the […]

The Iniquity of the Amorites

In a previous article in this series, we mentioned an odd comment that God made when He gave Abraham a glimpse of the future: As for yourself, you shall go […]

God vs The gods of Egypt

By the time Moses arrived on the scene, around 1500 B.C., the Hebrews had been in Egypt for more than a hundred years. The days of Joseph serving as vizier […]

Abraham’s Real Roots

Prior to Sir Leonard Woolley, scholars assumed that Abraham’s Ur was somewhere near Harran (which is the spelling outside the Bible). That’s about ten miles inside Turkey along the Balikh […]

Abraham Was Not from Sumer

Let’s fast forward about 1,000 years from Babel. After the tower was abandoned, it appears that a group of Sumerians traveled by sea around the Arabian peninsula, and then overland […]

Nimrod and the Return to Babel

The end of the Sumerian poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta is mostly missing, but it appears that Enmerkar ultimately triumphed over his rival. Other stories suggest that Enmerkar, who I […]

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The Tower of Babel: Abode of the Gods

The Tower of Babel: Abode of the Gods   Not all the holy mountains in the history of the world are natural, formed by the shifting of tectonic plates or […]

After Eden, Before the Flood: Life in Ancient Mesopotamia

The big question we didn’t address in last month’s article is why cranial deformation—headshaping—was even a thing. Please understand that I’m not suggesting that these 6,000 year-old coneheads were genetic […]

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Cain, the First City, and the Mystery of Head Shaping

Life after Eden must have been a crushing disappointment for early humans, especially the First Couple. Forget about the burden of living under the curse—toiling to coax enough food from […]