The Sons of God (and other texts)

(originally found at: http://echoes.devin.com/watchers/sons-of-god.html)

The Sons of God

(1) The Sumerian Watchers

"...Man and his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own, that in fact men and women were not conscious as are we, were not responsible for their actions, and therefore cannot be given the credit or blame for anything that was done over these vast millennia of time; that instead each person had a part of his nervous system that was divine, by which he was ordered about like any slave, a voice or voices which indeed were what we call volition and empowered what they commanded and were related to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully established hierarchy."

"...The astonishing consistency from Egypt to Peru, from Ur to Yucatan, wherever civilizations arose, of death practices and idolatry, of divine government and hallucinated voices, all are witness to the idea of a different mentality than our own."

"The gods were in no sense 'figments of the imagination' of anyone. They were man's volition. They occupied his nervous system, probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and receptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated speech which then 'told' the man what to do."

"Throughout Mesopotamia, from the earliest times of Sumer and Akkad, all lands were owned by gods and men were their slaves. Of this, the cuneiform texts leave no doubt whatever. Each city-state had its own principal god, and the king was described in the very earliest written documents that we have as 'the tenant farmer of the god'."

- Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

"... The Akkadians called their predecessors Shumerians, and spoke of the Land of Shumer.

"It was, in fact, the biblical Land of Shin'ar. It was the land whose name - Shumer - literally meant the Land of the Watchers. It was indeed the Egyptian Ta Neter - Land of the Watchers, the land from which the gods had come to Egypt."

- Zecharia Sitchin, The Stairway to Heaven

"It was from that planet [Nibiru], the Sumerian texts repeatedly and persistently stated, that the Anunnaki came to Earth. The term literally means 'Those Who from Heaven to Earth Came.' They are spoken of in the Bible as the Anakim, and in Chapter 6 of Genesis are also call Nefilim, which in Hebrew means the same thing: Those Who Have Come Down, from the Heavens to Earth."

- Zecharia Sitchin, Genesis Revisited

"The Anakim may have been Mycenaean Greek colonists, belonging to the 'Sea Peoples' confederation which caused Egypt such trouble in the fourteenth century B.C. Greek mythographers told of a Giant Anax ('king'), son of Heaven and Mother Earth, who ruled Anactoria (Miletus) in Asia Minor. According to Appollodorus, the disinterred skeleton of Asterius ('starry'), Anax's successor, measured ten cubits. Akakes, the plural of Nanx, was an epithet of the Greek gods in general. Talmudic commentators characteristically make the Anakim three thousand cubits tall."

- Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis

(2) The Egyptian Ntr

There is archaeological evidence of a strong cultural connection between Sumer and ancient Egypt.

"Ptah and the other gods were called, in Egyptian, Ntr - 'Guardian, Watcher'."

- Zecharia Sitchin, The Wars of Gods and Men

During the fabled "First Time, Zep Tepi, when the gods ruled in their country: they said it was a golden age during which the waters of the abyss receded, the primordial darkness was banished, and humanity, emerging into the light, was offered the gifts of civilization. They spoke also of intermediaries between gods and men - the Urshu, a category of lesser divinities whose title meant 'the Watchers'. And they preserved particularly vivid recollections of the gods themselves, puissant and beautiful beings called the Neteru who lived on earth with humankind and exercised their sovereignty from Heliopolis and other sanctuaries up and down the Nile. Some of these Neteru were male and some female but all possessed a range of supernatural powers which included the ability to appear, at will, as men or women, or as animals, birds, reptiles, trees or plants. Paradoxically, their words and deeds seem to have reflected human passions and preoccupations. Likewise, although they were portrayed as stronger and more intelligent than humans, it was believed that they could grow sick - or even die, or be killed - under certain circumstance."

- Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods

"'Deliver thou the scribe Nebseni, whose word is truth, from the Watchers, who carry murderous knives, who possess cruel fingers, and who would slay those who are in the following of Osiris.' May these Watchers never gain the mastery over me, and may I never fall under their knives!'

"Who are these Watchers?

"'They are Anubis and Horus, [the latter being] in the form of Horus the sightless. Others, however, say that they are the Tchatcha (sovereign princes of Osiris), who bring to nought the operations of their knives; and others say that they are the chiefs of the Sheniu chamber.

'May their knives never gain the mastery over me. May I never fall under the knives wherewith they inflict cruel tortures. For I know their names, and I know the being, Matchet, who is among them in the House of Osiris. He shooteth forth rays of light from his eye, being himself invisible, and he goeth round about heaven robed in the flames which come from his mouth, commanding Hapi, but remaining invisible himself. May I be strong on earth before Ra, may I arrive safely in the presence of Osiris. O ye who preside over your altars, let not your offerings to me be wanting, for I am one of those who follow after Nebertcher, according to the writings of Khepera. Let me fly like a hawk, let me cackle like a goose, let me lay always like the serpent-goddess Neheb-ka.'"

- The Egyptian Book of the Dead

"They had come to Egypt, the Egyptians wrote, from Ta-Ur, the 'Far/Foreign Land,' whose name Ur meant 'oldest' but could have also been the actual place name - a place will known from Mesopotamian and biblical records: the ancient city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia. And the straits of the Red Sea, which connected Mesopotamia and Egypt, were called Ta-Neter, the 'Place of the Gods,' the passage by which they had come to Egypt. That the earliest gods did come from the biblical lands of Shem is additionally borne out by the puzzling fact that the names of these olden gods were of 'Semitic' (Akkadian) derivation. Thus Ptah, which had no meaning in Egyptian, meant 'he who fashioned things by carving and opening up' in the Semitic tongues."

- Zecharia Sitchin, The Wars of Gods and Men

"The Legend of Votan, who had built the first city that was the cradle of Mesoamerican civilization, was written down by Spanish chroniclers from oral Mayan traditions. The emblem of Votan, they recorded, was the serpent; 'he was a descendant of the Guardians, of the race of Can'. 'Guardians' was the meaning of the Egyptian term Neteru (i.e., 'gods'). Can, studies such as that by Zelia Nuttal (Papers of the Peabody Museum) have suggested was a variant of Canaan who was (according to the Bible) a member of the Hamitic peoples of Africa and a brother-nation of the Egyptians."

- Zecharia Sitchin, When Time Began

(3) Bene Elohim

Note that plural gods elohim' appears in the earliest Hebrew texts, even though it is translated as God (El) in modern texts.

"...The sons of gods (bene ha-elohim') saw the daughters of men that they were fair..."

- Genesis 6:2a

"The sons of God (or children of God; 'bene elohim' and variants) are divine members of God's heavenly host...The title 'sons/children of God' is familiar from Ugaritic mythology, in which the gods collectively are the 'children of El'...The sons/children of God are also found in Phoenician and Ammonite inscriptions, referring to the pantheon of sub-ordinate deities, indicating that the term was widespread in the West Semitic religions."

- Oxford Companion to the Bible

"The Watchers were "a specific race of divine beings known in Hebrew as nun resh 'ayin, 'irin' (resh 'ayin, 'ir' in singular), meaning 'those who watch' or 'those who are awake', which is translated into Greek as Egrhgoroi egregoris or grigori, meaning 'watchers'. These Watchers feature in the main within the pages of pseudepigraphal and apocryphal works of Jewish origin, such as the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. Their progeny, according to Hebrew tradition, are named as nephilim, a Hebrew word meaning 'those who have fallen' or 'the fallen ones', translated into Greek as gigantez, gigantes, or 'giants' - a monstrous race featured in the Theogony of the hellenic writer Hesiod (c. 907 BC)."

- Andrew Collins, From the Ashes of Angels - The Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race (1996) p. 3

"The statement (Gen. 6:1) that the 'sons of God' married the daughters of men is explained of the fall of the angels, in Enoch, vi-xi, and codices, D, E F, and A of the Septuagint read frequently, for 'sons of God', oi aggeloi tou qeou ['angels of God']. Unfortunately, codices B and C are defective in Ge., vi, but it is probably that they, too, read oi aggeloi in this passage, for they constantly so render the expression 'sons of God'; cf. Job i, 6; ii, 1; xxxviii, 7; but on the other hand, see Ps. ii, 1; lxxxviii, & (Septuagint). Philo, in commenting on the passage in his treatise 'Quod Deus sit immutabilis', i, follows the Septuagint."