Thank you Gill. After googling around a few sites it seems to me that the "mountain" tradition rests mostly on the interpretation of the relief on the top of the Hammurabi stele -- mountain, ziggurat, or "mountainous ziggurat" as one puts it? Anyway the symbolical meaning (place where heaven and earth meet) is the same.
Hammurabi and Moses! Did Moses plagurise Hammurabi?
by Gill 14 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Leolaia
Gill...Okay, I did some checking and figured out what the story is. There is no narrative like that of Moses that has Hammurabi going into a mountain and receiving the law code there. No such statement exists in the text (both the prologue and epilogue), nor as far as I can see in other inscriptions. As I said, it would have been odd since there are no mountains in Mesopotamia. However the bas relief illustration on the stele depicts the god Shamash giving the king the law, and significantly the god is seated on top a representation of a mountain underneath his feet. Here's a picture I took of the stele:
If that is what the two rows of blocks represents (and I have seen the claim made in the literature), then it is significant that only the god is on the mountain, not the king who stands on the ground at lower elevation. This mountain is no ordinary terrestial mountain but represents the cosmic mountain at the edge of the world (axis mundi, connecting heaven to the underworld) where Shamash has his throne. In Babylonian mythology, the twin mountains of Mashu are in the west through which the sun sets (cf. the two mountains of bronze in Zechariah 1:8, 6:1), and in the east where the sun rises, and this is where Shamash returns after conferring with the Annunaki in the underworld (for the sun has to pass under the earth each night in order to rise in the east). Here is one hymn about Shamash that is in the literature:
"Shamash when you come forth out of the great mountain, out of the great mountain, the mountain of the hollow when you come, when out of Dul-Azag where the fates are decided do you come forth, there where heaven and earth meet, out of the base of heaven do you come forth, the great gods for judgment come forth to you, the Annunaki to decide decisions come forth to you".
Depicting Shamash on a mountain in the Hammurabi Stele is possibly meant to convey this notion of divine judgment implicit in the law code ... i.e. that the laws are decided by the gods (in Dul-Azag?) and Shamash brings them to his holy mountain. I don't think the stele necessarily implies that Hammurabi was taken off to the extremity of the earth to receive the laws, but that Shamash is enthroned at his great mountain when he reveals the law to the king.
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Satanus
Leolaia
That stone is in remarkably good shape, for being thousands of yrs old. Are those the laws carved into the bottom part of it? Remarkable! Even more remarkable is the absence of the ten laws that the socalled true god gave to moses,,, twice. Yet, there is visible evidence of laws given to humans by a socalled false god. Hmmm. If bible claims that god had it written and protected his divinely inspired words, i would expect to have the entire bible in the original bible language on stone, for all to see.
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JWdaughter
Very interesting thread, thanks!
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Gill
Thanks Nakisos and Leolaia!
It's interesting to see that the two parallels that do exist, the giving of the laws by a God, and the laws enscribed in stone are there.
I wondered if 'Moses' was the Jews wanting to be a successful as the Babylonias and emulating their ways in their own fashion.
They certainly behaved in battle as the Babylonians did, in showing no mercy.
They had the aspirations of a system of law as the Babylonians did.
They had aspirations for land, riches and power.
The storys of the 'flood' of Noahs day, and the flood in the epic of Gilgamesh are possibly copied are handed down from Babylon/Sumeria possibly, also.
It seems, the more these people wanted to be different from eachother, the more they were the same.
