Divine Encounters - Zecharia Sitchin-pages

Page 21 of 384

Page 21 of 384
Divine Encounters - Zecharia Sitchin-pages

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18 An interesting light is shed on the "Geography of Cre- ation" (to coin a term) and, consequently on the initial Divine Encounters, by the Book of Jubilees. Composed in Jerusalem during the time of the Second Temple, it was known in those centuries as The Testament of Moses, because it began by answering the question, How could Humankind know about those early events that even preceded the creation of Hu- mankind? The answer was that it was all revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, when an Angel of the Divine Presence dic- tated it to Moses by the Lord's command. The name Book of Jubilees, applied to the work by its Greek translators, stems from the chronological structure of the book, which is based on a count of the years by "jubilees" whose years are called "days" and "weeks." Obviously drawing on sources that were available at the time (in addition to the canonical Genesis), such as the books that the Bible mentions and other texts that Mesopotamian libraries cataloged but which are yet to be found, the Book of Jubilees, using the enigmatic count of "days," states that Adam was brought by the angels into the Garden of Eden only "after Adam had completed forty days in the land where he had been created"; and "his wife they brought in on the eightieth day." Adam and Eve, in other words, were brought into being elsewhere. The Book of Jubilees, dealing with the expulsion from Eden later on, provides another morsel of valuable informa- tion. It informs us that "Adam and his wife went forth from the Garden of Eden, and they dwelt in the Land of Nativity, the land of their creation." In other words, from the Edin they went back to the Abzu, in southeastern Africa. Only there, in the second Jubilee, did Adam "know" his wife Eve and "in the third week in the second jubilee she gave birth to Cain, and in the fourth she gave birth to Abel, and in the fifth she gave birth to a daughter, Awan." (The Bible states that Adam and Eve had thereafter other sons and daughters; noncanonical books say that they numbered sixty-three in all.) Such a sequence of events, that places the start of Hu- mankind's proliferation from a single primordial mother not in the Mesopotamian Eden but back in the Abzu, in south- DIVINE ENCOUNTERS