The Ancient Tradition

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Music

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Listening to the Ancient Tradition. A Wonk Media Production. Music provided by Joseph McDade. Here’s your host, Dr. Jack Logan.

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Welcome to the Ancient Tradition. I’m your host, Jack Logan.

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Welcome to the program. I hope you’re all having a wonderful week. The sun is shining outside my window. It’s a beautiful, gorgeous day. God’s creations are beautiful. I hope you’re out there enjoying them. I’m going to just get right to it today. In our last episode, we learned from the ancients that everything God created and everything God continues to create every star, every nebula, every galaxy, every planet, our planet.

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Every waterfall and lily and dove is sanctified or holy because they were brought about by God’s ordering power, which was given to him because he perfectly upheld the cosmic law of righteousness. All of God’s creations are sacred because he was the one who transformed them, the elements

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into beautiful, ordered, fertile, life-full creations. We learned that the power to order is the power to sanctify. To order something is to transform it from its awful profane state into a sanctified, holy state.

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To this point, we’ve been talking about this transformative process in terms of the creation of the cosmos. But don’t miss the deeper esoteric symbolism of the creation here. If God has the power to transform the profane elements into a beautiful, sacred creation, doesn’t He also have the power to do the same for us? To transform the profane sides of our nature?

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into fully ordered, sanctified, holy people like him. I don’t wanna get too far ahead of myself, but that’s precisely what the ancients are gonna tell us takes place inside the sacred temples they built. The precise process by which this transformative sanctification or personal creation process takes place.

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It’s gonna be a little bit before we cover that process on the podcast, but one of the things that you’re gonna see is that the ancients taught that this sanctification process involved seven steps, just like the creation of the world seen in the Hebrew Bible, or just like we’re going to see on the Sumerian Gudea cylinders today, where the creation is directly associated

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with the number seven. It was the culmination of those seven steps that brought about the full ordering or sanctification of what was originally profane. I bring this up here to illustrate to you the symbolic depth of the ancient mind. See, when the ancients give us an account of the creation of the world, they aren’t just giving us an account of the creation.

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of the world. They’re using the creation of the world to symbolize God’s ordering power, to symbolize the process by which he brought about the sanctification of all of his creations, including me and you. The sanctification of his entire cosmic kingdom, which precisely because of that sanctification process made

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and makes God’s entire cosmic kingdom an unimaginably grand, holy cosmic temple. The ancients then built miniature replicas of God’s sacred temple on earth as a tent or a brick and mortar earthly temple, a microcosmos if you will, of God’s macro cosmic temple

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And then the ancients taught that it was within this earthly temple that human beings could, like we see in the ordering process of the world, become fully sanctified. There are so many layers here that you really do have to take time to ponder the symbolism, to capture the depth of how the ancients associate the sanctifying, ordering process of the creation with the cosmos.

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with the cosmic temple, with the earthly temple, with the earth, and with the sanctification process of human beings. And don’t forget that the ancients taught that all of this was directly tied to kingship. You really do have to see how all of these concepts are symbolically tied together to truly grasp the magnitude of the theology the ancients taught in their texts and in their

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In episode number 11, we talked about how God, by necessity, has to use symbols to teach us about the reality of the spiritual realm. Because there aren’t one-for-one word equivalents here on earth that can convey the reality of what that spiritual realm is really like. So God uses symbols to point us in the right direction. But we have to ponder them and let God teach us.

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their spiritual meaning. The nifty thing about symbols, like a parable, is that it allows God to teach on at least two levels, the exoteric level and the esoteric level. So whereas some people see the creation account, like in the Hebrew Bible, as an exoteric account of the geological creation of the earth, others who ponder it are gonna note that the creation account there

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holds important esoteric wisdom about the process that God uses to bring about the transformation and sanctification of everything in his kingdom, including me and you. You know, the same thing can be said of ancient myths. On the exoteric level, the myth of Jason and the Argonauts is this really fun story about

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who slays a dragon guarding a sacred tree on which hangs a beautiful golden fleece. But if you’re a long-time listener to the program, you know that this fun myth conceals all kinds of really important esoteric truths. I like how Thomas Roussell, he’s a scholar of Old English and Icelandic medieval studies, says it. Listen to what he says about the esoteric nature of Norris’ myth.

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In particular, Chapter 42 of the Prose Edda, the Gilfonganing, which we talked about in our last episode.

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unless you understand that the myths are symbolic of truths, of actual truths. So the function of the myth is to impart wisdom from the Divine to the mortal realm. And that’s how you should regard it. What is the wisdom within this myth? There is an esoteric dimension and there’s an exoteric one. The exoteric one is not hard to understand, as despite people deliberately trying to misrepresent

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what’s in there. But I think the esoteric ones in this one are not particularly difficult to approach either. It’s about order versus chaos.

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I like how Rausl says that the function of myth, and I would add the function of symbol, is to quote, impart wisdom from the divine to the mortal realm, which is something that we’ve clearly seen and we’re going to continue to see on the program. And I especially like how he says that we should ask ourselves, you know, what esoteric truths are these myths teaching me? And I would add symbols too.

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What are these symbols trying to teach me? Because that’s where the full theology is being taught.

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With that in mind, I want to continue where we left off in our last episode. In that episode, we learned that in the heavens, in the cosmos, that not all space is the same. The ancients tell us that in order to preserve the sanctified, holy, sacred nature of his creations, God created a cosmic boundary around his creations, around his cosmic kingdom, which separates it and protects it from the profane waters.

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where dwell chaos and the awful sea dragon and his followers. The ancients tell us that in the heavens, there is a clear demarcation, a cosmic demarcation between holy and profane space. And it’s this demarcation that establishes the borders around God’s cosmic temple. Everything within the border

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is holy a temple and everything outside the border is unholy or profane. I’ve mentioned this on the program before but it’s worth noting here again. The English word profane actually comes from the Latin word profanus where pro means beyond or outside of and fanus means temple. So the English word profane literally means to be

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quote, outside the temple. To be outside of, to be outside of clearly implies there is some sort of demarcation or boundary between the two. So today in today’s episode, I want to take a closer look at this cosmic boundary, especially what the ancients have to say about it in their ancient records.

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So with that, I want to start by going straight to the world’s oldest known religious text, the Keshe Temple Hymn. This text was found on a cuneiform tablet in the ruins of the Mesopotamian city of Nippur, which is located today in Iraq. Archaeologists date the tablet to around 2600 BC. So to reiterate,

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this planet there is no known earlier religious text than this one. So it’s incredibly significant that this text gives us a description of the cosmic boundary that separates God’s cosmic temple precinct from the profane waters that surround it. And the description actually shows up very early in the text. So all of this indicates that

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knowledge of a cosmic boundary between sacred and profane space was known very, very early in world history. And not only that, but that this knowledge was foundational to the entire theology that we see taught, not only in this text, but throughout the ancient Near East, and then ultimately across the whole world. So let’s jump into the text. While I read

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Remember, the text is talking in symbols. So see if you can figure out what the ancients are using in the text to symbolize the boundary between the two. Between lines 22 and 30 of the Keshe Temple Hymn, the text reads. And this comes from the English translation provided by Oxford University in their electronic text corpus of Sumerian literature. Quote.

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Good house built in a good location. House cash built in a good location, floating in the heavens like a princely barge, like a holy barge furnished with a gate like the boat of heaven.

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Did you figure it out? Did you figure out what symbolizes the cosmic boundary between the sacred and profane? Now, it’s not easy if we don’t understand the symbols that the ancients used. It’s just a mystery to us if we don’t know. But on this program, we’re learning, so let’s break it down. The text begins, quote, good house. So what do you think good house refers to?

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The text is called the Keshe Temple Hymn because this text is about the building of a sacred temple in Keshe, an ancient city in Sumer. And the next line refers to this house as House Keshe. So we know that the good house or house Keshe here refers to the Keshe temple. The text then goes on to compare this sacred earthly temple to something else. Do you remember what it was?

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Well, it was a quote, princely barge. The text reads quote, good house built in a good location. House Keshe built in a good location, floating in the heavens like a princely barge. Take note that the text compares the earthly brick and mortar temple in Keshe to a princely barge, to a boat.

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that is floating in the heavens. Note that this boat is quote, a princely barge, a princely boat. So think of all of the royal kingship theology that princely connotates. You can think of Ra in ancient Egypt on his celestial bark, seated on his royal throne. Take note that the object in the heaven is a boat. Boats float on water.

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So we know that when the ancients talk about a boat in or on the waters in heaven, they’re talking about this boat floating in or on the profane primordial waters. And note that this boat is floating in the heavens, not on earth. So the author here is comparing the earthly Keshe temple to a celestial princely boat that floats atop the profane primordial waters of chaos.

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So you see where we’re going here. The author is telling us that the Keshe Temple is a replica of God’s cosmic temple, which he’s symbolizing by a princely barge, which floats atop the profane primordial waters. And not only that, the author goes on to stress that this barge is sacred. It’s not profane like the waters that surround it. The text reads, quote,

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floating in the heavens like a princely barge, like a holy barge furnished with a gate, like the boat of heaven. Note how this holy barge has a gate, like a temple would have, which suggests guarded, protected space. Like we discussed in our last episode, the gate allows the sacred in and shuts the profane out. Okay.

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So back to my original question. What is the author of this text using to symbolize the boundary between God’s sacred precinct or temple and the profane waters? Did you guess the whole of the boat? Because the whole of the boat, the shell of the vessel is what keeps the water out. The whole is what gives the vessel structural integrity.

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It’s what keeps the boat buoyant on the water. It’s what protects the vessel from being submerged in the water. The hull is what separates and protects what’s in the boat from what’s outside the boat. The hull of the boat is the boundary that separates the sacred from the profane. I don’t know if any of you’ve ever been on a cruise ship, but a couple of months back, I was on a cruise ship.

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and I was headed to Panama. And I was seated on the promenade deck where I love to hang out the most because I can sit there and read. And I was thinking about this very thing, how the ancients used a boat to symbolize God’s cosmic kingdom or temple. And I was seated on one of those deck chairs, so I stood up and I moseyed over to the railing and I just looked out. And all I saw for as far as my eyes could see in every direction

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endless ocean of water. And I thought to myself, the only thing saving me from these waters, from sure death, is this boat. Literally. Below me is shark-infested waters. So the only thing saving me from the sharks is this boat. Literally. And I thought to myself, man, the ancients picked a great symbol.

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for God’s cosmic temple. The boat is what is protecting me. There’s nothing but death and destruction and disorder outside of this boat. God’s cosmic kingdom or temple is the boat.

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The Keshe Temple Hymn is pretty clear. The text attests that in the spiritual realm, in the real real, there’s a clear separation between profane and sacred cosmic space. God’s cosmic temple is protected from the profane like a boat protects one from the waters. Like an air bubble or cavity or a floating gourd is protected from the waters. Or a peach pit is protected

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from the flesh of the peach, or the nucleus of an atom is protected from the cloud of negative electrons that surround it.

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If you’d like to hear a full audio recording of the Keshe Temple Hymn, you can find it on our sister podcast, the Ancient Tradition Audio Rit.

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The symbolic representation of God’s cosmic temple as a boat is quite intriguing, especially when we read the account of Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian Noah in Tablet 11 of the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Tablet 11, Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that the gods have warned him that a great flood is coming.

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In the section that I’m going to read, Utnapishtim recounts to Gilgamesh what the gods commanded him to do. The text reads, and this is the Stephanie Dalley translation, quote, Man of Shuru Pak, son of Ubaratutu. Those are epitaphs that the gods have given Utnapishtim. Dismantle your house. Build a boat. Leave possessions.

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Put aboard the seed of all living things into the boat. The boat that you are to build shall have her dimensions in proportion. Her width and length shall be in harmony. Roof her like the Apsu. Here we see that Utnapishtim is given very specific instructions about how to build the boat or arc that’s to save his life. Now, considering that we just saw in the Keshe temple hymn that in the ancient world,

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God’s cosmic temple was symbolized by a heavenly boat, then we would surmise that when the gods give Utnap Pishtim specific instructions about how to build a boat, that what the gods are really asking him to do is build a temple, a temple boat, one that’s a miniature replica of God’s heavenly temple boat. And this interpretation is actually

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by the text itself. When we read the following a couple of lines later, the text reads, quote, the carpenter brought his axe, the reed worker brought his stone, children carried the bitumen. If you’re not familiar with what bitumen is, bitumen is kind of like tar. It’s a naturally forming petroleum based substance that naturally bubbles up out of the earth.

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One acre was her circumference, 10 poles each the height of her walls. I laid down her structure, and this is Utnapishtim speaking, drew it out. So this sounds like the gods gave him very specific plans for this boat, plans which he drew out, kind of like a blueprint, gave her six decks, divided her into seven. All right, everything in here is so interesting.

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In this section of the text, we can see some interesting connections between the building of this boat and the creation account given in Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. The text tells us very intriguingly that this boat was to have a circumference. A circumference. A circumference the size of an acre. Which implies that this boat was to be formed in the shape

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a circle. Now that’s interesting. The text also tells us that the width and the length of the boat were to be quote in harmony, which seems to suggest that the boat was to have either a cylindrical shape or a spherical shape. It sounds to me like the boat was to take on the same form as the earth itself.

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And the text gets even more intriguing when Utnapishtim tells us that this boat was to have six decks. Six decks which would divide the boat into seven sections. That should stick out to you. Because almost all of us know that in the Genesis account in the Hebrew Bible that the creation of the earth was divided into seven periods of creation and rest. But here’s the thing.

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We don’t just find the connection between the number seven, the creation of the earth and temple building in the Hebrew Bible. It’s found all over the ancient world. For example, in this Sumerian Gudea cylinders, which I mentioned earlier, dated to 2125 BC, we read of seven stones that surrounded the temple, a seven day temple dedication,

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And then between lines 562 to 577 of cylinder A, we read about the laying of the foundation of the temple by the stretching of the line or the stretching of the cord, which we’ve talked about on the program. And the marking out of seven squares. The text reads, and this translation comes from Oxford’s electronic text corpus of Sumerian literature. Cylinder A reads,

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And note the kingship reference in here too. Quote, Gudea. Now Gudea is the king, so this is King Udea. In charge of building the house, the temple. Well, of course he is, we already learned this in the program, it’s the king who builds the temple. Placed on his head the carrying basket for the house as if it were a holy crown. He laid the foundation.

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set the walls on the ground. He marked out a square, aligned the bricks with a string. He marked out a second square on the side of the temple. And then the text goes through the third and the fourth and the fifth and the sixth squares, and then it ends with quote, he marked out a seventh square on the site of the temple. The fact that the number seven is associated here in this Mesopotamian Gudea cylinder

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with the building of an earthly temple, and in the Genesis account with the days of creation, the building of a cosmic temple, and in the architecture of Utnapishtim’s boat or ark in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I argue is also a temple, is striking because it tells us that there is something very, very important about the connection between the number seven and God’s temple, which we are definitely gonna unravel down the line.

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I also want to point out that after Utnap Pishtham and his workers finished building the boat, the cylinder tells us, quote, they made a feast like the New Year’s Day Festival. This is significant because the New Year’s Day Festival was the day in the ancient world when the ancients celebrated the creation of the world. All of this points to Utnap Pishtham’s boat or arc.

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as yet another symbolic representation of God’s sacred creations, his cosmic temple, which the ancients also symbolized as we just saw in the Keshe temple hymn as a holy barge floating on the primordial waters. I bring this up in reference to our discussion of the cosmic boundary between sacred and

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The ancient Mesopotamians smeared bitumen, that natural tar-like substance found in natural deposits, all over the exterior and interior of their reed boats as a sealant to prevent water from seeping through the hull. They coated every inch of their boats, filled every seam with bitumen so that not a single drop of water could penetrate the hull.

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If they missed a spot or they didn’t apply the bitumen thick enough, then water would seep in and sink the boat, drowning everyone on board. So the ancients did everything they could to keep the water out. See, it’s the bitumen that creates the barrier between the boat and the water in which it’s submerged. It was the bitumen that made Utnap Pishdem’s great circular arc watertight.

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and preserved it and humanity from the flood. Bitumen is the wall. The exoteric message here is pretty easy to follow, but consider the deeper esoteric wisdom. The story of Utnapishtim in the Ark invites us to ponder. Now, there are likely many, many layers of wisdom in the Ark account, but one message that’s clear to me,

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especially when we recognize that Utnapishtim’s boat represents God’s cosmic temple, is the message that we need to be inside God’s holy barge, inside God’s temple if we don’t want to spiritually perish. The flood waters represent all that is evil and profane. So we must symbolically coat our homes and ourselves

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bitumen so that not a single drop of profane water can seep into our homes or into our souls. Now Pishnam is teaching us that in our own lives we must clearly demarcate the sacred from the profane. I don’t have time to develop this here but there are even greater esoteric messages being conveyed here. One of which is the symbolic

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parallel between the smearing of bitumen over the boat as a protective wall against the profane and the smearing of holy anointing oil over the whole body as a protective covering against the profane. The holy anointing oil is the wall.

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So there’s so much to ponder there.

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Before I leave this section, I want to talk a little bit more about Uthnapishtim’s boat. From what’s written in the Epic of Gilgamesh, it seems pretty clear that the ark Uthnapishtim constructed looked nothing like how modern artists portray it. You know, today the ark, we imagine it as a large kind of oval or rectangular boat with the bow and stern rising high above the midsection.

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This interpretation does not align with what we find in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The text clearly indicates that the gods asked Utnapishtim to construct a large circle shaped boat. And I argue that that’s because this boat was supposed to symbolically represent a miniature replica of the earth, God’s creations.

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Assyriologist Stephanie Dally, who translated this text into English, says the following of Utnap Pichtim’s boat on page 133 of her book, Myths from Mesopotamia, published by Oxford University Press. Quote, the ancient Mesopotamians were builders of rafts and reed boats for use on rivers, not builders of timber frame vessels. The ark is described here seems to be a tub of Kufa type.

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which consists mainly of a framework of reed matting, liberally coated with bitumen and oil to make it waterproof, fitted inside with benches and supporting poles.

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Dali tells us here that Utnapishtim’s boat was indeed a round boat known as a kufa, which is the Arabic word for a basket woven from reeds. The Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Babylon in 450 BC, actually saw these circle boats navigating up and down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He was in awe of them.

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In section 194 of book one of the histories, Herodotus wrote, and this is the G.C. Macaulay translation, quote, the greatest marvel of all the things in the land, and he’s talking about Babylon, after the city itself to my mind is this which I’m about to tell, their boats. Those I mean which go down the river to Babylon are round.

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These vessels are made both a very large size and also smaller. Such are their boats. When Herodotus writes, such are their boats, we gather that the circle boats were the norm, the traditional way the Mesopotamians traveled down the river. Now, as you can imagine, a circle boat would not be easy to navigate.

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These boats didn’t have a sail, so they didn’t have the ability to sail against the current. They pretty much just drifted wherever the current took them. And as you can imagine, these circle boats had the tendency to spin, so they had to carry these really long poles to try and steer them. And I tell you that because it makes you wonder why they chose a circle shape if it was so impractical in so many ways. Of course, I can’t prove this.

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but I offer up the possibility from what we’ve read in the Epic of Gilgamesh that they chose the circle shape because of its cosmic significance. If you’d like to see a couple of pictures of these circle boats, you can find them on the webpage for this episode.

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Interestingly, the Epic of Gilgamesh is not the only place we learn that Utnap Pishdem’s Ark was constructed in the shape of a circle or a sphere. Just 15 years ago, just 15 in 2009, a man by the name of Douglas Simmons, he was the son of an RAF officer, loaned the British Museum a cuneiform tablet that his father had obtained years earlier in the Middle East.

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The tablet was then translated into English by the famed and I think adorably quirky, British museum curator Irving Finkel. Now I can’t remember if I’ve talked about Dr. Finkel on the program, but if I haven’t, you have got to see video of this gentleman. He is quite a character. And sometimes I think someone needs to write a film series that’s based off of him, kind of like they did with Indiana Jones, because I think it would be amazing.

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In 2015, Dr. Finkel published the first translation of this tablet. It’s now known as the Ark tablet, and he published it in his book, The Ark Before Noah. What Dr. Finkel found was that this tablet, which he dates between 1900 and 1700 BC, contains detailed specifications for building Noah’s Ark, who was known as Atrahasis.

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among the Akkadians and as we’ve pointed out as Utnap Pishtim among the Babylonians. Let’s read some of what the tablet says. You’ll note that this tablet sounds a whole lot like what was written in the Epic of Gilgamesh but with a lot more detail. This tablet predates the Epic of Gilgamesh by about 500 years. The tablet reads, and this is the god Enki speaking to Atrahasis,

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giving him detailed instructions of how to build the boat. And I’m gonna skip over some of the parts because there’s a lot of details. Quote, destroy your house, build a boat, spurn property and save life. Draw out the boat that you will make on a circular plan. Let her length and breadth be equal, let her floor area be one field. Dr. Finkel says that

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This field is about the size of a soccer pitch. So this is a very big boat. Let her sides be one ninden high. I set up 3,600 stanchions within her. I constructed her cabins above and below. I apportioned one finger of bitumen for her outsides. I apportioned one finger of bitumen for her interior. Dr. Finkel notes that one finger here refers

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the length of the last section of your finger, so about almost two centimeters. So the bitumen would be decently thick. Listen to what Dr. Finkel, in his very characteristic way, thought the very first time he read what was written on this tablet. Quote, reading lines six and seven, and that’s where it says that the boat’s gonna be circular.

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for the first time was certainly an adrenaline stirring moment. And my first reaction, as anybody’s would have been, can this be right? A circular plan? But then thinking it over, staring into space with the tablet precariously poised over the desk, the idea began to make sense. A truly round boat would be a coracle, which is a kaffa. And they certainly had coracles

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in ancient Mesopotamia. Now I find the fact that this boat is circular, of course intriguing because of its cosmological significance, but it’s the last two lines of the tablet, lines 59 and 60 that really fascinate me in terms of this episode. Listen to how the tablet ends. This is what it says after the Mesopotamian Noah has completely finished the boat and filled it with animals.

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The tablet ends with these lines, quote, when I shall have gone into the boat, caulk the frame of her door.

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Now that’s interesting. The Mesopotamian Noah goes inside the circular boat and then commands that the seams of that door be caulked or sealed off with bitumen. He literally seals himself, all of the animals, everything else inside the boat so that there is absolutely no way for the water to seep in. I hope you see where I’m going with this.

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The Mesopotamian Noah has sealed himself inside what is now effectively a protective bubble or gourd.

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to seal oneself inside the boat doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of practical sense. I mean, sealed in, what’s he gonna do for air and light? But it does make a whole heck of a lot of sense cosmologically. Symbolically, from what we’ve learned, the esoteric message here is that the Mesopotamian Noah, by sealing himself inside the ark,

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is effectively sealing himself inside God’s sacred temple precinct, where he’s protected from the evil, profane floodwaters. I find the symbolic parody here amazing. As above, so below. I was so intrigued by this, I wanted to know what Dr. Finkel had to say about it, about the Mesopotamian Noah sealing himself inside the boat, because it’s definitely odd. So,

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I scoured all 445 pages of the Ark before Noah and I couldn’t find anywhere where he commented or made a statement about this, which is kind of surprising because the book’s quite thorough. It covers nearly every imaginable aspect of the Ark tablet. I’d really love to hear Dr. Finkel’s thoughts on this because after all, he is one of, if not the, world’s leading astereologists.

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He does mention in a lecture he gave in Vienna, Austria at the Origins Conference that the Babylonian version of the coracle had a roof on top, which would make it very much like a giant gourd floating on the ocean. After Dr. Finkel finished translating the ARC tablet, you are never gonna believe what he did next. He actually went out and tried to build the boat.

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Yes, he did. He got the financial backing of several wealthy Americans and he traveled to India and he constructed a one-third scale replica of the boat based off of that blueprint that’s in the tablet. And it cost him, you’re never going to believe how much it cost him, it cost him 10 million dollars to build this boat. Listen to Dr. Finkel describe the boat and how it was built and listen very closely to how he describes the boat.

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towards the very end of the clip.

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What you do when you build one of these things is you lay the rope, you have to twist the rope firstly, and this is all covered in the cuneiform inscription. You get the pith of a palm tree and you twist it into rope and it’s laid out in the great circle of the right size which is 3600 square meters.

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And then when you’ve done that, as it comes around to the beginning point, you lay it on top all over again and then on top each time. And as it’s done, the various strands of the wall are lashed together north to south. So you end up with a giant floppy basket made of this material. And the next step in the tablet is that ribs are cut, which go from the top on the inside, follow the profile down, and these great ribs interlock the base to make a kind of gap

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done that, the thing is bitumen from floor to ceiling, or rather, as it were, from floor, or inside and out, thickly with bitumen, which dries hard and waterproofs it, and there you have your boat. And the tablet tells you moreover that there was a deck, there had to be a deck. Obviously the animals were underneath, there was a little house on the top, and there was a roof, the profile of which matched the base of the thing. So that when the ark in the

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walnut floating in the sea with this kernel of life inside.

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Did you know how he said that the roof of the boat matched the profile of the base of the boat? That indicates that the boat was shaped like a sphere. And how did he describe it? It looked a bit like a walnut floating on the sea with its kernel of life inside. Dr. Finkel’s description here of the Mesopotamian Noah’s Ark as a

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walnut floating on the sea is perfectly, perfectly in keeping with the cosmological and theological notion that God’s cosmic temple floats in the cosmos like a holy barge or gourd or air bubble and contains the kernel of life like the stone pit of a peach. And don’t forget that this so-called

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was completely slathered in bitumen so that not a single drop of profane water could permeate the hole. If you’re interested in seeing a video of the coracle arc that Dr. Finkel built, I’ve posted a link on the webpage for this episode to a documentary that PBS produced on the subject. And if you’re in London,

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and you’d like to lay your eyes on the actual ARC tablet, you can find it at the British Museum.

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If you’re familiar with the Hebrew Bible and you’re an acute listener, you may have caught some similarities between the Mesopotamian Noah’s basket-shaped reed boat and the story of the infant Moses in Exodus chapter 2. In this account, Moses’ mother bears a son, Moses, and notes that he’s a goodly child.

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And when she can no longer hide him from Pharaoh, who wants to kill all of the sons born to Hebrew women, she places him in a basket and sets him afloat in the waters of the Nile. The New Living Translation of Exodus chapter two, verse three reads, but when she, and this is Moses’ mother, could no longer hide him, she got a basket made of papyrus reeds and water

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and proofed it with tar and pitch. She put the baby in the basket and laid it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile River.

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Did you know how we’re told in this verse that Moses’s mother coated the basket with tar, which is bitumen? The King James version of this same verse actually refers to the basket in which Moses was laid as an arc. The King James version reads, quote,

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and daubed it with slime. And the slime here is the bitumen and pitch and put the child there in and she laid it in the flags by the rivers brink. This is quite interesting because the Hebrew word that the King James translators translated as arc is tabat, T-E-B-A-T, a word that actually comes from Egypt and which literally means a chest. And we all know that a chest has a lid

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So this means that Moses’s mother placed him in a basket that completely surrounded him like a little capsule or walnut or air bubble. And she waterproofed that capsule with bitumen and she placed it with her precious child inside in the Nile waters. And what’s more, the King James translators called that little capsule an ark.

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Moses’ mother, by placing him in a bitumen-slathered capsule, was symbolically placing her son inside sacred space, symbolically placing him inside a temple where he was completely sealed off from the waters. I hope you can see that the ark the infant Moses was placed in was a microcosm of the macrocosm. It was a miniature replica of God’s cosmic temple. We’re getting the same

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symbolic image of God’s kingdom as an air bubble of protected sacred space here in the infant Moses account. In these accounts, again, the bitumen is the wall. Stuff like this absolutely blows me away. And don’t miss that it was this little ark or reed capsule that saved the infant Moses from assured death.

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just like the wall around God’s cosmic temple saves us from assured death. There is so much more being conveyed in these ancient texts than most of us could ever imagine. We can see this same idea illustrated on the oldest known map of the world, the Mapa Mundi. It’s also known as the Babylonian map of the world.

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or tablet BM 92687, which scholars date to sometime between the 9th and 7th centuries BC. This map was discovered in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Sippar in what is now modern-day Iraq. On this map, the known world is depicted as a circular island or sphere of land. The cuneiform captions that accompany the map

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give names to individual locations on the map like Assyria or the city of Babylon. But for our purposes what’s remarkable about this map is that the ancient Mesopotamians depicted the world as being entirely encircled by a ring of water. A ring which is identified four times on the map itself as the Maratu which translated into English means bitter sea

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salt sea. The obverse side of the tablet tells us that in this vast sea are found quote the ruined gods which he Marduk settled inside the sea. Here we learn that the quote ruined gods live

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in the bitter waters that surround God’s creations. The quote ruined gods here refer to the god or god’s Marduk battled and victoriously defeated before the earth was created. We find a similar thing written on an inscription of King Sennacherib, second ruler of the Sargonid dynasty, known as OIP2142b2. In this inscription,

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The creatures of Tiamat are said to be the quote, ruined gods that Marduk cast into the bitter waters. On the backside of the Babylonian map of the world, the text gives us a description of who these ruined gods are. The text reads, quote, the ruined gods which he, Marduk, settled inside the sea are present the viper, sea serpent.

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great dragon, Ansoobird and scorpion man. Clearly, this water is bitter due to more than just salt. Remember that Marduk cast these creatures, or as the text says, settled these ruined gods inside the sea because they rebelled against the high god and the cosmic law. Had they been allowed to remain in God’s presence, they would have polluted and profaned the sanctity of his kingdom.

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precisely because they rejected the law, the cosmic law that brought about the sanctity of all things, including the sanctity of God and his kingdom. The only way for God to preserve the sanctity of his kingdom is to establish a clear barrier between those who are willing to keep the cosmic law and those who are not. Those who are not are quote, settled

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inside the sea. For our purposes today, the Babylonian map is important because it visually demarcates the division between the ruined gods in the profane sea and God’s sacred creations by a circle. Everything within the circle is sacred, a temple. Everything outside of it is profane, bitter waters.

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On this map, the circle is the wall. If you’d like to see a picture of the Babylonian map of the world, you can find it on the webpage for this episode. If you’d like to lay your eyes on the real thing, it’s on display at the British Museum. Yet one more reason to visit the British Museum.

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The cosmic boundary between sacred and profane is especially pronounced in tablet four of the Enuma Elish. In our last episode, I mentioned that I was gonna save two important lines from the tablet for this episode. And that’s because they have to do with this boundary. In this tablet, we’re told that Marduk used Tiamat’s dead carcass to create the earth. In the very next line, the text reads,

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This is the Stephanie Dalley translation. Quote, he, speaking of Marduk, drew a bolt across and made a guard hold it. Now this is interesting. The text tells us that after Marduk created the heavens and earth, his cosmic temple, he quote, drew a bolt across it. Well, what does that mean? What’s this bolt?

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Well, in parts of the ancient world, the ancients would slide a bolt across the door to lock it in place. In this passage, keep in mind that the bolt is symbolic. It’s not talking about Marduk using an actual physical lock to protect his creations. The bolt symbolizes something that God did to seal off or lock the cosmic waters out. This is clear in the next line, which reads, quote,

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He, speaking again of Marduk, drew a bolt across and made a guard hold it. Her, and this is speaking of Tiamat, her waters he arranged so that they could not escape.

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By drawing the bolt across his creations, the text is symbolizing that Marduk did something to set a firm boundary between his newly formed kingdom and the profane waters where dwelt the ruined gods. The bolt acted as a barrier, which prevented the waters from polluting his sacred creations or cosmic temple. Listen to what a serologist Wayne Horowitz says in his quite important book, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography.

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about this bolt. On pages 326 and 327, he writes, quote, “‘A cigarro is a bolt on a door. “‘In the context of the sea, “‘the cigarro may be a bolt on a water lock “‘that holds the waters of the sea in place. “‘In this passage, the function of the bar “‘and doors of the sea is to keep the waters “‘of the sea within their bounds.'” I think it’s quite interesting.

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This text also tells us that Marduk placed a guard or a sentinel of some type in charge of making sure that the bolt stayed securely locked. The text reads, quote, he, speaking of Marduk, drew a bolt across and made a guard hold it. This is very intriguing and as you’re going to see as the podcast continues, the notion that God assigns guards

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to protect the precincts of his cosmic temple is yet another very important stubborn bit. I’ve got to leave it there. There’s a lot to ponder in this episode, which I hope you’ll do. In our next episode, we’ll pick up right here. So with that, I’ll leave you with the words of William Shakespeare, knowledge is the wing we’re with, we fly to heaven. I’m Jack Logan.

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You’ve been listening to the Ancient Tradition. A Wonk Media Production.