The Big Book of Mysteries. Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe

older than that.

      The principal god of Babylon was known as Merodach and the city was regarded as his sacred dwelling in a very special and particular way. It was often referred to as “Babilu mahaz Marduk” which translates as “Babylon the stronghold of Merodach.”

      This Merodach had a consort called Zir-panitum, the principal goddess of Babylon. Innana, Nana, or Ishtar was also regarded as one of the most important patron deities of ancient Babylon.

      The great Hammurabi, known in Babylonian as Kimta-rapastum, was king of Babylon round about 2120 B.C., and was a clearly established member of the Babylonian Dynasty.

      Throughout the ensuing centuries, there was continual war between Babylon and Assyria. The great city and its magnificent temples were destroyed and rebuilt on numerous occasions, any of which could have been the inspiration of the Tower of Babel story.

      Nebuchadnezzar was a particularly vigorous rebuilder and restorer, as Daniel, chapter 4, verse 30, clearly indicates. Antiochus Soter was probably the last Babylonian king to carry out any restorations. The bold and decisive Xerxes plundered Babylon and intrepidly carried away the golden statue from the Temple of Belus, which Darius had hesitated to remove for religious reasons. By the time Alexander the Great got there, the city was in ruins once again. He originally decided to restore Babylon’s former glories, but even Alexander’s brilliant imagination drew back from the awesome logistics of a task that would have needed ten thousand labourers simply to clear away the rubble before the rebuilding began. After the death of Alexander, the decay and desolation of Babylon continued for many centuries.

      TOO MANY RUINED TOWERS?

      The biblical mystery of the Tower of Babel and its alleged consequences for global languages remains unsolved. It is not that there are no ruined Babylonian towers to which archaeologists can refer: there are, if anything, rather too many.

      While the Israelites were undertaking their long journey through the wilderness after Moses had led them out of Egypt, their central place of worship was the Tabernacle, and the holiest object within the Tabernacle was the Ark of the Covenant, the Hebrew title of which can also be interpreted as the Ark of the Testimony. Together with the Mercy Seat situated on its lid, this ark was the centre of the Israelites’ sacred mystery.

      As far as can be ascertained from Exodus, chapter 25, it was cuboid in shape, 1 ½ cubits wide, 1 ½ deep, and 2 ½ long. The biblical cubit was approximately forty-five centimetres or eighteen inches — the length of a human forearm from elbow to fingertips. It was made of fine acacia wood overlaid with gold on both sides.

      The Mercy Seat was placed above the ark, and supported a cherub at each end. It was regarded as the symbolic throne of God. When the ark was in place within the Tabernacle, or later within the Holy of Holies in the Temple, a luminous cloud known as the Shechinah was seen to hover above it, and was clearly distinguished from the familiar smoke created by incense.

      Tower of Babel.

      ACACIA WOOD

      Acacia wood, a genus of the mimosa family, or Mimosaceae, is found mainly in Africa and Australia, as well as in the Middle East. Acacia flowers tend to be small and fragrant, and are almost always yellow or white. One variety found in the Sudan is the source of gum arabic, used as glue or as an emulsifier in sweets, inks, adhesives, and chemical products. The bark of most acacias is also a rich source of tannin. The acacias yield interesting and unusual wood, particularly appropriate for the sacred Ark of the Covenant.

      The Shechinah was reported during the days of the Tabernacle and while Solomon’s Temple stood, but apparently it was no longer seen in Zerubbabel’s Temple, as it was one of the five things that some Jewish writers maintained was missing from this later temple.

      Dr. Bernard in his notes on Josephus disagrees. He argues from Josephus’s records that as the mysterious Urim and Thummim were said to be in Zerubbabel’s Temple, the other four significant “missing” things must have been there as well.

      The first reference to the Shechinah is found in the Targums. A Targum in Aramaic literally means a translation or an interpretation, so the Targums were translations of portions of the Hebrew Bible — or, indeed, the whole of it — into Aramaic. At one time the word meant a translation of the Old Testament into any language at all, but was honed down over the years to refer specifically to a translation from the old Hebrew into the later Aramaic.

      The word Shechinah comes from an old root meaning “to rest,” “to settle,” or “to dwell.” It is not found in the Bible itself, but was widely used by later Jews, and borrowed from them by Christians. It signified the visible majesty of the Divine Presence, particularly when God was thought to be especially there in the area between the Cherubim on the lid of the sacred ark.

      The Targums were produced to meet the spiritual and religious needs of the great majority of Jewish worshippers who found it difficult if not impossible to cope with ancient classical Hebrew.

      When the Herodian Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70, the Targums came into their own. Synagogues had to replace the lost temple, and the central readings in the synagogue services needed to be translated into Aramaic for the benefit of most of the worshippers. As time went on, the Targums assumed the role of commentaries, and a special meturgeman attempted to explain away any confusions or doubtful meanings.

      Wise sayings, proverbs, aphorisms, allegories, and legends crept into the Targums as time went on, so that the later ones were very different from the straightforward translations that had been the main purpose of the originals.

      From its special use in the Targums, the concept of Shechinah came to signify the actual presence of God on Earth as far as the early Jewish theologians and scholars were concerned. One reason for this was a fear on the part of the writers of the Talmud, Midrash, and Targums that some of the clearly anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the earlier writings might cause serious misunderstandings. The idea of a God who looked like an amorphous cloud of glowing mist — rather than a human being — undoubtedly seemed theologically safer to them than the earlier concepts of an undeniably humanoid God who walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening looking for Adam and Eve.

      Some theologians have considered the existence of a parallel between the concept of the Shechinah and the idea of the Holy Spirit. Other, mainly medieval, theologians have tried to work out theories of the Shechinah as a separate Divine Being, Someone or Something created by God, perhaps a personified representation of Divine Glory or Divine Light.

      ARAMAIC

      It was after the Exile in Babylon that Aramaic became the preferred spoken language of the Palestinian Jews, and so replaced their original Hebrew. Just as Latin lingered among European academics and ecclesiastical scholars long after it had ceased to be spoken by Roman Legionaries, so Hebrew lingered among Jewish academics and scholars until well after the first century of the Christian era, although by then Aramaic was firmly established in the eastern Mediterranean area.

      In one of the sadder short stories of H.G. Wells, a character goes in search of Light but falls to his death in the process — the Wellsian concept of Light in the mind of the tragic hero in this particular story comes surprisingly close to the medieval theological concept of the Shechinah.

      Yet another Jewish idea connected with the Shechinah was that it would return when the long-promised Messiah came. In the Gospel account of the Transfiguration of Jesus, when the disciples Peter, James, and John witnessed him shining with his rightful Divine Glory on the mountaintop with Moses and Elijah, the Shechinah could well have been put forward as an explanation.

      To what extent can this extremely mysterious and powerful Shechinah light be associated with the records of the Exodus? Many of the biblical accounts surround it with a cloud, so that the brilliant radiance