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Endpaper 367 Nabu Sin Shamash Adad Marduk of numbers and counting Marduk the illuminator of the night Marduk of justice Marduk of rains This was not the monotheism of the Prophets and the Psalms; it was what scholars term henotheism—a_ religion wherein the supreme power passes from one of several deities to another in succession. Even so, Marduk did not reign su- preme for long; soon after the institution of Marduk as na- tional god by the Babylonians, it was matched by their Assyrian rivals by the institution of Ashur as “lord of all the gods." Apart from the arguments that we have mentioned in the cases of Thoth that negate an identification with any major Egyptian deity (and Marduk was the great Egyptian god Ra after all), the Bible itself specifically rules out any equating of Yahweh with Marduk. Not only is Yahweh, in sections dealing with Babylon, portrayed as greater, mightier, and su- preme over the gods of the Babylonians—it explicitly fore- tells their demise by naming them. Both Isaiah (46:1) and Jeremiah (50:2) foresaw Marduk (also known as Bel by his Babylonian epitheht) and his son Nabu fallen and collapsed before Yahweh on the Day of Judgment. Those prophetic words depict the two Babylonian gods as antagonists and enemies of Yahweh; Marduk (and for that matter, Nabu) could not have been Yahweh. (As far as Ashur is concerned, the God Lists and other evidence suggest that he was a resurgent Enlil renamed by the Assyrians "The All Seeing;" and as such, he could not have been Yahweh). As we find so many similarities, and on the other hand crucial differences and contradicting aspects, in our search for a matching "Yahweh" in the ancient Near Eastern pan- theons, we can continue only by doing what Yahweh had told Abraham: Lift thine eyes toward the heavens . . . The Babylonian king Hammurabi recorded thus the legiti- mization of Marduk's supremacy on Earth: