Comparative Religious Studies: Origins of Religion
When Noah stepped off of the ark he brought with him three sons, three daughters and a lot of animals. What Noah also brought with him was the knowledge of God. This knowledge he passed on to his sons, and in turn, they passed on to their own children. But things were different after the flood than they were before the flood.
If you examine the genealogies given by the Old Testament you will find that people before the flood lived much longer life spans than before the flood. Although there are both scientific and theological answers as to why they lived longer, for the sakes of this article we will simply state that people did, indeed, live much longer life spans.
This is important when it comes to the authenticity of the record handed down to us from the Bible. If you examine things in the light of evolutionary thought, or humanist thought, then you have to account for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years of tales being told from one generation to the next. This much time certainly would create a problem for authenticity.
However, if you take the Bible at it’s word, you will find that the time from creation (or at least the time after man was expelled from the garden of Eden) was no more than 1656 years. But, what’s more important is that during this whole time there were no more than ten generations of people. Furthermore, as the Bible records, Adam’s life span encompassed eight of those generations. As you look at time through a Biblical lens, time really does seem to compress. If the stories of the pre-flood era were passed down from father to son they did so for no more than 11 generations. If there was a discrepancy about the tales, it was very possible for Noah to have asked Enos (Adam and Eve’s grandson) as to their authenticity. It is very possible that Lamech, Noah’s father, knew Adam personally.
After the flood, however, people’s life spans began to shorten tremendously. By the time Peleg came along, life spans had declined into the hundreds. Four generations later and the life-spans became no more than 120 years. It was during Peleg’s life ( approximately 350 – 400 years and 8-9 generations ) that the city of Babel was confounded by God and mankind began scattering across the face of the earth.
From the cradle of civilization, the Tigris and Euphrates valley, came all mankind, all knowledge of the one true God, and all religion. It is clear to us now through discovery of some key documents from this early civilization, that the people who occupied this land knew about the flood, and new about the survivors of the flood, but had begun to twist the stories of the flood and of God, around into what would become the primary essence of every cult and every religion that has followed.
According to the Akkad and Babylonian myths, the creation story is one of two gods, one male and one female. These two gods then give birth to a son. Later interpretations have this birthing experience the cause of the existence of the universe. What’s key here is the understanding of what really happened in Babel.
For some time Babel ran as just any other city. Soon, however, a group of people began building the very first ziggurat, or early pyramid. This building was created in the shape of a mountain, and at first was a memorial to Noah’s landing in the Ararat mountains. Soon it became a substitute fortress against any further wrath of God. Later still, it became a symbol of power. This symbology was given by Gilgamesh, the great hunter; known in the Bible as Nimrod.
Gilgamesh married a common woman who he found on one of his travels somewhere near the sea. This woman was both beautiful, and conniving. The woman bore a son to Gilgamesh. Now that there was a legitimate heir, the wife decided to rid herself of her husband and take over as regent for her young son, which put her in charge of Babel.
Gilgamesh had already begun the practice of having his populace worship him as though he were a god. His wife picked up this thought process and began proclaiming her son as the son of a god, and herself a goddess. In fact, what she had done was try to proclaim that her son was the child of promise, the son of the god Gilgamesh, who would one day rule the world in peace in the name of that god. It was for this reason that the real God came down and confounded the languages.
But, because the languages were confounded, does not mean that the memories and folk tales of these people died with that confusion. As we will see, there are common threads of the religion of these Babylonians which carry themselves throughout all religions, in all areas of the globe. First there were those who went from Babel to the Hindus Valley, from whom we get the religions of Hindu, Buddhism, Shintoism, and many new-age philosophies. Next are those who went from Babel, through Egypt and took the stories of two gods and turned them into many gods. From there we find the people spreading to Europe, and also from China to North America. Finally, we have those who braved the oceans of the Pacific, who carried with them the final stages of the degeneration of religion.
The next section we will follow these people East, to the Hindus Valley.
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