Digging Tswana Roots

The true history of the Weapon of Brilliance

In line with the gods’ stratagem that “mortals” must never be their equal (see Genesis 3:22-23), only the gods owned and operated this weapon. Ancient descriptions of the Weapon, detailed below, are sourced from Zecharia Sitchin’s The War of Gods and Men (Harper). 

What was this “Brilliant Weapon”, also called the “Killing Brightness” or the “Divine Fire”? It was evidently a device of sorts that emitted blindingly bright light of the sort many of us encountered in the chemistry lab when we applied a flame to a strip of phosphorus.

Last week, we encountered it when the gods (called “angels” in the Old Testament) were given time to deploy this weapon as the people of Sodom tried to break down Lot’s door when they saw that he was artfully delaying them as to who he was hiding in his house. Lot’s sinister guests, the angels, then used it to blind and scare away the people only to deploy an even more devastating one later: a nuclear weapon.

This week, I felt that the Weapon needed more explanation as it aided whosoever the gods’ favoured in war, and features in many Old Testament  (OT) encounters that have shaped our religious history.  The Weapon of Brilliance was commonly either hand-held or fitted to a helmet. As such, the ancient Sumerian poem Lugal-e Ud Melam-bi which chronicles the feats of the Ninurta, the foremost warrior of the ruling clan of gods, reveals that:  “…[the god] Ninurta, foremost possessor of the Divine Powers…who in his hand the Divine Brilliant Weapon carries, Mighty Lord: the land-of-mountains you subdued as your creature”. Other members of that clan, the clan of Enlil, also wielded it – most notably the god Ishkur/Hadad (“Teshub” to the Hittites, “Ashur” to the Assyrians) who was often depicted with a fiery hand that wielded “the awe-inspiring Brilliance, the weapon of Ashur”. The weapon could also be fitted to a helmet, just like a miner’s helmet holds a torch. Thus, says another poem, “Ishtar, who dwells in Arbela, clad in Divine Fire and sporting the Radiant Headwear, rained flames on Arabia…”

The gods, who in this column I have time and again revealed to be not mythical creatures but ancient yet advanced beings of flesh and blood, used their advanced weapons sparingly when aiding a favoured mortal side in war. The mere sight of these weapons was often enough to demoralise an opposing side.

As Zecharia Sitchin reveals in his book, at first the gods directly fought each other for dominance, but later they preferred ordinary men to fight their wars of ego for them – like pawns in a chess game. One early encounter of god against god is recorded in The Myth of Zu, when Ninurta faced the rebellious god Zu: “Zu and Ninurta met at the mountainside. When Zu perceived him, he broke out in rage; with his Brilliance he made the mountains bright as daylight.

He let rays loose in a rage.”If there was one bitter lesson the gods learnt from the Sodom and Gomorrah incident, it was that nuclear weapons were not to be used willy-nilly. An “Evil Wind” (radiation-charged sand) from Canaan blew into Sumer and “caused the gods to flee” the region. “Gods”, of course, were quite simply the elite of White people. Indeed, not all Whites were privileged into the ancient secrets and technology of their elite; most regarded them with the same awe as did other races.

These weapons, I explained last week, were detonated to eliminate Marduk (Baal/Bel) and his eloquent son Nabu (Nebo), together with the two renegade (“sinning”) cities that were harbouring them, after Nabu won them over to their cause. The Evil Wind made the ruling Pantheon of Twelve realise that when gods fought each other, it might devastate our planet. And so, “monotheism” became the preferred outlook for the dawning Age of the Ram (Aries: 2160 BC to 0 AD). The worship of individual gods was promptly outlawed.

The only problem with this “monotheism”, however – which they enforced brutally on the Israelites before it took hold elsewhere – was that the gods united, defused their rivalry, only to play this “One God”, even using their technology to awe everyone into submission. But “God’s” puzzling cruelty, as recorded in the OT, can be blamed on the rise of the utterly ruthless Ishkur/Ashur, who became the de facto leader of the gods after successfully blackmailing the de jure leader, Adonai, the Merciful One, over the “Minotaur” incident (explained in my books).

He did not tolerate any disloyalty, which is why in Leviticus 26:27ff (see also Isaiah 10:5-7), when his anger burned against Israel, he used Assyria as a “whip” to chastise the Jews. As such, the Assyrian king Sennacherib was given technical assistance such as rockets (depicted in his Siege of Lagash), or the ‘Brilliant Weapon’ that blinded opposition. In fact, Sennacherib’s only downfall was that he besieged Judah without permission and ahead of schedule: that “honour” was strictly reserved for Babylon.

Nevertheless, even his successors Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal employed the Brilliant Weapon and the former describes how in his conquest of Egypt “the terror-inspiring Brilliance of Ashur blinded the Pharaoh so that he became a madman”.   Indeed, just as Deuteronomy 20:10-18 quotes “the  Lord” as directly calling for, and guiding, the Israelites’ genocide of the nations they encountered as they came out of Egypt (see also Joshua 6: 21, Numbers 31:7-18), Assyrian kings were always careful to fight only on “the trustworthy orders of Ashur my Lord”: the same Lord. “Monotheism” indeed came with countless lives lost and this we must remember as we continue to call upon the “God of Israel” in our prayers.

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