The End of Days - Zecharia Sitchin-pages

Page 239 of 319

Page 239 of 319
The End of Days - Zecharia Sitchin-pages

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231 a starving siege, a humiliating defeat, wanton looting, a Bab- ylonian occupation, and the exile of the king and all the no- bility. Arriving there, Ezekiel saw a scene of complete breakdown of the rule of law and of religious observances. Wondering what was going on, he heard the remnant sitting in mourning, bewailing (8: 12; 9: 9): Yahweh sees us no more, Yahweh has left the Earth! This was, we suggest, the reason why Nebuchadnezzar dared attack Jerusalem again and destroy Yahweh’s temple. It was an outcry virtually identical to what Adda-Guppi had reported from Harran: “Sin, the lord of the gods, became angry with his city and his people, and went up to heaven; and the city and the people in it went to ruin.” One cannot be certain how or why events occurring in northern Mesopotamia gave rise to a notion in distant Judea that Yahweh, too, had left the Earth, but it is evident that word that God and gods departed had spread far and wide. Indeed, tablet VAT 7847, which we mentioned earlier in con- nection with the solar eclipse, states the following in a pro- phetic section regarding calamities that last 200 years: Roaring the gods, flying, from the lands will go away, from the people they will be separated. The people will the gods’ abodes leave in ruins. Compassion and well-being will cease. Enlil, in anger, will lift himself off: Like several other documents of the “Akkadian Prophe- cies” genre, scholars deem this text, too, a “post-event proph- ecy”—a text that uses events that had already happened as the basis for predicting other future events. Be that as it may, we have here a document that considerably expands the divine exodus: the angered gods, led by Enlil, flew away from their lands; it was not just Sin who was angered and left. When the Gods Left Earth