SPENTA MAINYU
	YOU ARE IN DARKNESS.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: "Ignorance is an outlook on life. Even educated can be ignorant."
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In the 9 th. and 8 th. centuries BC. writing was not developed sufficiently to write down the texts in the Old Testament. The first written document in the Old Testament on Abram and his family is Genesis, which was written 1500 years later then the time Abram and his family are assumed to have lived. Well, if he ever lived, when could that be? Abram and the persons around him are claimed to have lived about 1900-1800 BC. But there are those who say that he must have lived at a later date. We do not know for sure if Abram, Isaac and Jacob (Father and sons - The Patriarchs) have really lived. If Abram ever lived, especially in the assumed period - 1900-1800 BC. - 'Neither the Arabs nor the Hebrews were existent then' (Max Dimont, Jews, God and History, New York, 1962). No documents, belonging to the era of Abram and his family were found, tah would prove that they actually existed. The only testimony is the Old Testament. This 'code book' of the Hebrews, with all the discrepancies in it, was written over a period of 800 years as I pointed earlier. The Old Testament has taken its final written form in the 4 th. century BC., following the Babylonian exile. This is for sure, because the myths of Creation, Adam, Paradise, and Flood do not exist in Canaan which is a further proof that the final form was given to the Old Testament following the Babylonian exile. It was translated into ancient Greek in Alexandria in the 3 rd. century BC. The texts in the New Testament are of a much later era, and the story there is very very short. So the only real and valuable source we have is the Old Testament. To cut a long story short, Abram, after becoming Abraham as a result of the 'divine suggestion'(!) has come to be known as the 'Father Messenger' - Patriarch - of the Mosaic belief system, Christianity (naturally), and the Islamic belief system. So, again, who is this man Abram? Where did he come from?

Spenta Mainyu told you that according to the Old Testament, Abram had initiated the history of the Hebrews. How did he initiate that? Well, the Old Testament says that he had spoken with the 'God' (That is his personal God of course! This 'supreme overseer' will go through a transformation process and the 'personal God' of Abram will eventually turn into a 'universal creator' and an 'arbiter mundi' with the advent of Islam. We shall see that later). According to the story of Abram speaking with his personal 'supreme overseer', as reported in the Old Testament (Genesis 12:1), God has commanded Abram 'to get out of where he was living and go to a country which he (God) would show.' Abram's 'supreme overseer' shows himself to Abram for a second time (when he is 99 years old), reiterates his covenant, and tells him that he is not called Abram anymore, his name will be Abraham. So this is the 'messenger' called Abraham, who also is the father 'messenger' of Islam, because Mohamed calls 'his ancestor.'

Where did the fathers of the Jews come from? Joshua 24:2: "...Thus said the Lord God of Israel, your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time. Even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor: and they served other Gods."  What did you understand? They dwelt on the other side of the flood. What flood? Is this the famous Flood, or should we understand a river which has the habit of flooding the area around it frequently? Who knows? Only the writers of the Old Testament. Genesis 12:4 tells us "...and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran." According to Genesis 10-11, Abram, Nachor and Haran were born when Terah was 70 years old. Terah gathers his family and goes to Haran. Terah dies in Haran when he was 205 years old. Abram should have been 135 years old when his father died. But Genesis 12:4 tells us that when Abram departed from Haran, as ordered by the God, he was 75 years old. So who is telling the truth? What is right what is wrong? Only the writers of the Old Testament know the answer. Acts 7:4 goes on: "Then he came out of the land of the Chaldeans, and dwelt in Charran (was it not Haran?), and from there, when his father was dead, he removed him into this land, wherein you now dwell."  So, let us follow his journey: Abram sets off from the land of the Chaldeans, but the city of Ur is not mentioned here. It may have been added to the text later on in one of the 'updating' operations. He dwells in Charran. There are two different words here, for apparently the same place, which may be taken as an indication for two separate writers. Then he comes to Palestine. If the dates given in the Old Testament are to be taken as 'probable pointers' ('Probable' because we are dealing with 'reported' stories which have been rewritten and amended so many times and so extensively that nothing is clear) we are led to believe that Abram left his native place, Haran, 645 years before the Exodus. Since Exodus is thought to have taken place in the 13th century BC., Abram must have lived about 1900 BC. Some researchers say that Abram has set off from the city of Mari. Scholars were familiar with the royal city of Mari for a long time, which was featured in many old inscriptions from Babylonia and Assyria. One text claimed that Mari was the tenth city to be founded after the Flood. The inhabitants were Amorites. Finds at Mari seem to confirm the accuracy of the Old Testament's account. According to the evidence of the palace archieves Haran and Nachor were both flourishing cities About 1900 BC. - this is a fact. The beginnings of Mari around 1800 BC. seem to agree extremely well with the traditional dating of the Biblical Patriarchs around or shortly after 2000 BC. Furthermore archieves of Nuzi in Yorgan Tepe near Kirkuk (Presently a province in northern Iraq) is thought to be a possible place which may provide us with the information to solve this matter; the written documents from this Horite city of the kingdom of Mitanni (kingdom of the Hurrians) (1500 BC.) and the legal practices of the Patriarchs agree to an amazing degree with the Biblical texts. Yet there is something amiss! If the Patriarchs followed the legal customs of the Horites of the 15th century BC. how could they have lived in the 18th, 19th, 20th centuries BC.? In other words 300 to 500 years earlier. Simple! Horites were following the legal practices of the patriarchs. Can you say that? Were there any kind of legal practices at Abram's time, which were handed down to Horites? Who could give a clear-cut answer to these questions: Did Abram really live in the Kingdom of Mari? Or should we look for him centuries later in the kingdom of Mitanni? Certain concepts of the period of Patriarchs in the religious sphere are matched by ideas contained in the texts from Ugarit whose classical period came still later in the 15th or 14th cent. BC. Therefore should we place Israel's Biblical ancestors even later? The question of Abraham's sojourn in Egypt also cannot be confirmed from non-biblical sources and even in the Bible it is merely indicated incidentally. Questions, questions..

Excavation at Tell el-Mardikh south of Aleppo (in Syria) led to the discovery of the town of Ebla, dating from the 3rd. millennium BC. First discovery was that a high degree of culture with an enormously differentiated social structure existed there in almost prehistoric times. Secondly, the rich archieve of clay tablets in Ebla may show that the water-tight opinions have been built on insecure foundations. In connection with the question of names, third and most important of all, is the fact that the Ebla texts dating from 3rd millennium BC. contain names which are familiar to us from the Bible. Abraham is there, as well as Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim on the Dead Sea, which were all destroyed by fire. They agree that the names of the Patriarchs have been found in other sources. But how about Sodom and Gomorrah appearing in the archieves of the 3rd. millenium BC.? Didn't we know that the Sodom and Gomorrah incident occured at a much later date? We became aware of these names because of the story of Abraham's adventures. Didn't we? But Abraham must have been alive around 1900 BC., and these archieves are of the 3rd. millenium BC. In other words, a 1000 years before Abraham. If the names, Sodom and Gomorrah really occur in the archieves of the 3rd millennium BC. in Syria, then we have no choice but to accept that the stories on the Patriarchs and the Sodom and Gomorrah and the other places belong to an earlier period.

We are led to believe that Abram had set off from the city of Ur ('of the Chaldees'), on the site of which the capital city of the Sumerian empire stood. Sumerians were not Semites like the Hebrews. Secondly, Abram could not ever have been a citizen of this Sumerian metropolis, because the impression we have is that he was a tent dweller, moving from pasture to pasture, from well to well. He did not live like a citizen of a great city, he lived the life of a typical nomad. But, Genesis presents Abram as a warlike, merchant prince. According to the story in Genesis 14:14, '....he armed and trained 318 servants, born in his own house and pursued....them (the local Kings) unto Dan.' So, is he a tent dweller or a merchant prince with servants of his own?

There are those who merge the two stories and say that Abram set off from the city of Ur ('of the Chaldees') came to Haran, dwelt there, and upon 'divine intervention' ordering him to move to the land 'that will be shown to him,' together with the people around him, entered Palestine as a merchant colony. We must stop here for a moment and look into this story in detail. Ur ('of the Chaldees') is thought to be the capital city of Sumer and the city of the moon-God Nanna. If Abram and his family were to have set off from the Sumerian city of Ur, the Old Testament would have mentioned Sumer. Did anybody read anything about Sumer in the Old Testament? No. In the version of the Old Testament which was translated into ancient Greek in the 3 rd. century BC. nothing is said about this city. This leads many researchers to the conclusion that, the name of this city was added to the text at a later date. In the Hebrew text the name of the city is written as Ur-Kasdim. According to the cuneiform tablets unearthed at the ruins of the city of Mari (presently Tell Hariri) which are written in eastern Semitic, the place called Ur-Kasdim should be a city near Haran in the north, and not in southern Mesopotamia. We still have no proof to this end, but there is historical evidence in that direction. In the third Ur era around 2000 BC. Mari and Nuzi and in a later era, some colonies called Ur were established to the north according to the Hittite and Ugarit cuneiform texts. In the Ugarit texts it is written that the merchants from 'Ur-a' could not settle there permanently, and should return to their city in the winter. There are those who claim that, according to these texts 'Ur-a' should have been near Haran. In the Ugarit texts 'Ur-ha' is the name of a person. Furthermore there existed a port called 'Ur-a' in Cilicia in southeast Asia Minor. Pointing out the ancient names of Urfa (A city in the southeast of present day Republic of Turkey), which are Ur, Urha, Ur-hai, Al-Ruha, Edessa, Antiokhea, Kallirhoe, Rohe, Orroes, Khurrai, the Turkish scholars think that this place could be the present day Turkish city of Urfa. There are no archaeological finds yet belonging to those periods. But, excavations at Nevali Cori (Nevaliçeri) and Göbekli Tepe near Urfa has proven that there were people settled there about 10000 BC. They did not know how to make earthenware but established settlements and developed a belief system. The fact that even at those very early times a belief system was developed here, may have led to this region becoming a religious center. City of Urfa is reported to have known also by the local people as the 'city of prophets,' and there are many stories there about Abraham. This may be taken as another 'pointer' to Urfa. There is a story about Urfa having been founded by prophet 'Idris' (Hermes). Furthermore there are claims that Urfa was founded by the Sumerians or Assyrians. Rumours abound: Adam and Eve are claimed to have lived there. Abraham's mother is thought to have given birth to him in Urfa. King Nimrod (there is no such person called 'Nimrod' in history, he must be Ninurta (God of War) supposedly thrown Abraham into fire there, the water coming down from 'up there' by a divine(!) intervention formed a pond, and the firewood became fish in the pond. According to Edward Bocon (Versunkene Kulturen, Geheimnis und Rätsel Früher Welten, Köln, 1963) Blistin Aeteria who went to this city in 6-5 centuries BC., reported that these fish were not consumed because they were thought to belong to planet Atargadis (Venus). People there worshipped the Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn and Mars. One of the city gates was called Beth-Shamash (Sun Gate). The pre-Christian coins used there had crescent moon on them. Although no concrete evidence related to the moon-cult in Urfa is found yet, we know that in Haran near Urfa a moon-cult was practiced until almost our time by the Sabians. Moon-God was worshipped in and around Haran about 3rd. century AD. In the cuneiform texts Haran is written as Harran, Harranu, meaning the 'road.' In fact this place is really a junction of the roads to and from Iran, Mesopotamia, Syria and Asia Minor. Islamic writers claim that Harran was the first city founded following the Flood. Some others claim that Harran was founded by Kayman, one of the grand children of Noah or by Aram, the brother of Abraham (There is no mention of this brother in the Old Testament). The ruins of a Temple underneath the present day Grand Mosque in Harran shows the transition from idol worshipping to Islam. This Temple is said to have belonged to the Sabians. They worshipped the Moon, stars and the Sun. They had two religious books called Safvet İl-Ukala and Makalat-ı Hermes. Qoran recognizes them as people of faith in 2:62, 5:69, and 22:17. They had two prophets, Hermes and Azimûn-Agathodaimon-Agarhademon-Şit. A last point: A village called Selmisin existed in the past near Harran. 'Sin' is the name of Moon-God. Selm-i-Sin means 'Sin-Stone' or 'Stone image of Sin'.

Well, who were these Sabians? The origin of the moon-cult seems to be the Chaldeans According to some researchers, starting from the earliest times, there was a place in this region which was the center of the moon cult: Haran. The Old Testament calls the city of Ur a 'Chaldean city.' Among the Chaldeans, there were eastern Aramaeans. Among these Aramaeans there was Sabian belief system which enveloped the moon-cult, worship of the stars and the planets. If Abram set off from Ur ('of the Chaldees') and came to Haran, Sabian belief system may have been introduced by him to Haran or people of the Sabian belief system may have arrived and settled in Haran before Abram. Abram may have been of this conviction, so he, with his family, may have followed them to Haran. Qoran describes him as 'hanif,' meaning 'the believer of the real and pure religion.' Meanwhile according to Islamic dictionaries it means, 'a person believing in the sole God before the advent of Islam.' But is this the truth? 'Hanif' is Arabic and is thought to be a deterioration of 'Hanefo', 'Hanifu' in Aramaic and Syriac, meaning 'idol worshipper.' Sabian means 'star worshipper.' So here is a another riddle for you: How come a monotheist 'messenger' like Mohamed recognized and mentioned in his 'code book' a belief system which is based on worshipping celestial objects? If Abraham was a Sabian, a star-worshipper, how come a monotheist 'messenger' of Islam accepted him as his 'ancestor' and claimed to have furthered his (Abraham's) religion to accomplishment in Islam? How the Moslems called this star-worshipper a 'Moslem' (not in the sense of Islam as it is understood today but as 'one who surrenders to God')? There is something wrong somewhere.

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