The Day of the Lord – Part Two
While St. John was in exile on the Greek island of Patmos, he had a series of visions which he described in his book of Revelation. These visions portrayed events which were predicted to occur during the end times leading up to the return of Jesus. As John wrote:
“And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;
“And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” (Revelation 8: 10-11)
Over the centuries these verses have been the source of numerous conflicting interpretations. And part of the reason for this is due to the controversy surrounding the true identity of the writer of this last book of the Bible.
Although the founders of the early Christian Church considered John of Patmos to be the same person as St. John the Divine, the beloved disciple of Jesus and author of St. John’s Gospel, a number of modern theologians have questioned this.
They point out that this was the last book to be accepted into the Christian Biblical Canon (those books accepted by orthodox Christians as being divinely inspired), and that John’s book of Revelation has never been accepted by the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Even during the period of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, it was regarded with suspicion. It was the only book in the New Testament for which the French reformer John Calvin did not write a commentary, while Martin Luther rejected it outright, as being “neither apostolic nor prophetic”.
So the dramatic predictions contained in the book of Revelation have been ignored by those who question its authenticity. Yet, whoever the actual author really was, his prophetic words should concern all those who seek answers to events that are now unfolding in the world.
For them, the key question remains. What exactly was this “great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp” that John called “Wormwood”? And this is where “the plot thickens”, so to speak, for there have been no shortage of suggested answers.
One could say that much of the confusion that has arisen over just what John was referring to when he wrote about “Wormwood”, began in 1968 when the manager of a local hotel in Davos, Switzerland, published a book with a provocative title, and an even more provocative thesis.
Erich von Daniken
The title of the book was Chariots of the Gods, and the Swiss hotelier was Erich von Däniken. In this book von Däniken posed the idea that extraterrestrial beings had visited the earth in the ancient past, and had been worshipped as “Gods” by the cultures of those times.
He went on to attribute all sorts of ancient monuments and artifacts to the work of these alien beings, whom he referred to as “ancients astronauts”. For example, he suggested that structures such as Stonehenge, the Moai of Easter Island and the pyramids of Egypt were built by these ET visitors.
He also offered an entirely new interpretation of ancient artwork taken from various parts of the world, by referring to them as attempts by local artists to record extraterrestrial spacecraft and their technology, using examples like Mayan glyphs found in places like Mexico, Guatemala and Belize.
He challenged the traditional view of religious texts, by explaining them as stories describing human contact with alien beings, and offered new interpretations of parts of the Old Testament of the Bible, such as the Ark of the Covenant and the “wheel” witnessed by Ezekiel.
These evocative tales of human/alien contact in ancient times found a ready market among people stirred by the burgeoning developments in the space race between the Americans and Russians, and his book quickly became a bestseller, leading to many more on the same theme in subsequent years.
Now just where these particular extraterrestrial beings came from, and where they went, von Däniken did not know. But then along came a man who claimed that he did know. He was the Russian-born author Zecharia Sitchin, who wrote a series of books that also became bestsellers.
Zecharia Sitchin
But if Erich von Däniken’s books contained theories that were provocative, Zecharia Sitchin proceeded to take his readers on a journey of the mind that beggared description. He concocted a scenario of human/alien interaction that far exceeded the imaginary works of the French novelist Jules Verne.
Like von Däniken, Sitchin was not a trained scholar. He was born in what was then the Soviet Union, and was raised in Palestine. He received a degree in economics from the University of London, and was an editor and journalist in Israel, before moving to New York in 1952.
It was while he was working as an executive for a shipping company that he had the chance to visit various archaeological sites in southern Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq. It was there that he became fascinated by the ancient Sumerian culture and their inscribed clay tablets.
Once he had satisfied himself that he understood the cuneiform inscriptions on these tablets, Sitchin began to write a series of books about the Sumerians and their times. His first book was published in 1976. It was called The 12th Planet, and it proved to be an immediate success.
According to his analysis of the iconography and symbolism of these clay tablets, Sitchin claimed that there is an undiscovered planet beyond the planet Neptune that follows a long, elliptical orbit that completes its closest approach to the sun roughly every 3,600 years.
Sitchin said that the Sumerians called this planet Nibiru. He referred to it as the 12th planet because, according to Sumerian cosmology, our solar system is comprised of the sun and moon, as well as the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Nibiru.
If what Sitchin has written is correct, one would have to question why the Sumerians should consider Earth’s moon to be a “planet”. After all, there are four moons in our solar system that are significantly bigger than our moon. Three of them orbit around Jupiter, and one around Saturn.
And it is no answer to suggest that these distant moons would not have been visible to the ancient Sumerians, as only five planets are visible in the night sky at the best of times, and Neptune and Pluto can barely be seen even with the aid of a powerful telescope.
Anyway, undaunted by this, Sitchin went on to explain in his book that the planet Nibiru was the home of a technologically advanced human-like extraterrestrial race whom the Sumerians called the Annunaki, and the Bible referred to as the Nephilim.
He further explained that, based on his interpretation of the ancient cuneiform tablets, the Annunaki had arrived on earth from Nibiru around 450,000 years ago. He said that they were looking for minerals, especially gold, which they were able to find and mine in Africa.
So according to Sitchin, the Gods of antiquity were actually the rank-and-file workers of a colonial expedition that had been sent to earth from the planet Nibiru. But because they were dissatisfied with their working conditions here on earth, they rebelled.
According to Sitchin, the Annunaki therefore decided to create a race of primitive workers to do their mining for them. They did this by means of genetic engineering, and by cross-breeding extra-terrestrial genes with those of primitive man.
It was this cross-breed, Sitchin claimed, that was the origin of the human species that scientists today call Homo Sapiens. So according to Sitchin, modern humans are the descendants of slaves who were created for the express purpose of serving their colonial masters from the planet Nibiru.
It is hardly surprising that this bizarre scenario was greeted by scholars and the scientific community alike with a mixture of disbelief and scorn. So great was their contempt for Sitchin’s work that very few could be found who were prepared to even challenge his ideas in print.
Unfortunately, this has led the great majority of his readers to believe that scholars and scientists have no answer for his claims, and that there exists a great conspiracy of silence by Governments everywhere to hide the truth about the existence of Niburu, and the threat it poses to earth.
One person who has been prepared to go on the record, however, is the established authority on ancient Sumerian cuneiform writing, Michael Heiser. Heiser has been highly critical of Sitchin because of his flagrant errors in translating cuneiform script.
He has even gone so far as to create his own website, which he calls www.SitchinIsWrong.com. On this website Heiser analyses each of Sitchin’s interpretations of the script on Sumerian tablets, and then demolishes them one by one.
Not content with his own research, Heiser invites visitors to his website to find out the facts for themselves, by showing them exactly how and where to do this. He also challenges Sitchin, or any of his followers, to produce a single line of cuneiform text that supports his ideas about the Anunnaki. As he says:
“I just want to see one line of one text that says things like the Anunnaki inhabit a planet called Nibiru, or that the term Anunnaki means ‘people of the fiery rockets’, that sort of thing.” So far nobody has.
Another vocal critic of Sitchin’s work is the American cultural critic William Thompson, who complains that what Sitchin claims to see in the clay tablets is exactly what he needs to support his theory. He writes:
“Sitchin has constructed what appears to be a convincing argument, but when he gets close to single images on ancient tablets, he falls back into the literalism of ‘Here is an image of the gods in rockets’. Ancient Sumer is made to look like a movie set.
“The gods can cross galactic distances, but by the time they get to earth they need launching pads for their rocket ships. This literalization of the imagination doesn’t make any sense, but every time it doesn’t, you hear Sitchin say ‘There can be no doubt, but…”
But if scholars were critical of his faulty translations, astronomers were absolutely scathing in their rejection of Sitchin’s theory about the existence of a 12th planet on an elliptical orbit around the sun, and for his unorthodox ideas about the early days of our solar system and the origin of the Earth.
According to Sitchin, the planet Nibiru collided catastrophically with another planet which the Sumerians called Tiamat. He explained that Tiamat was located between Mars and Jupiter, and that Tiamat was struck by one of Nibiru’s moons, causing the planet to split into two parts.
Sitchin wrote that in its next orbit around the sun, one of the moons of Nibiru struck one of the two halves that remained of Tiamat, and that this collision created the asteroid belt that exists between Mars and Jupiter today. But then he went on to propose something even more preposterous.
This collision also supposedly created the Oort cloud that is believed the source of so many comets throughout our recorded history. And finally, for good measure, Sitchin stated that the other part of the original planet Tiamat was pushed into a new orbit, where it became today’s planet Earth.
This picture painted by Sitchin of rogue planets rampaging through the solar system, creating and destroying other planets as they did so, may have been swallowed by gullible readers at the time his books were written, but from the standpoint of modern science, such theories are laughable.
In fact the very idea of planets colliding with one another is a myth. Prior to the latest discoveries of space sciences like astrophysics, Sitchin might have been able to get away with such ideas. But not any more. In fact we now know that the solar system operates in such a way as to ensure that planets do not collide with one another.
As recent space probes have now proved, planets are not simply lumps of inert rock careening around the sun. They are electrically charged bodies that are surrounded by magnetic sheaths called magnetospheres. And it these positively charged fields around planets that naturally repel any intruders that happen to venture too close.
So even if the orbit of one planet should somehow be disturbed in such a way as to threaten another, these two planets would not collide. The most likely thing that would happen is that they would exchange plasma discharges (cosmic thunderbolts) as a result of the proximity of their magnetospheres, before being repelled away from one another.
But Sitchin’s theories don’t even stand up to simple logic. One of the most prolific critics of his work has been Leroy Ellenberger. Ellenberger points out that the idea of an ancient civilization developing on a planet that spends over 99% of its time in deep space beyond Pluto is patently absurd.
And the explanation proposed by Sitchin, that the planet Nibiru could be heated from within through a process of radioactive decay is equally ridiculous, and doesn’t even begin to address the obvious problem of trying to survive in total darkness in the icy wastes of space.
But the aspect of Sitchin’s work that attracts the most criticism from astronomers, is his contention that the planet Nibiru still continues to orbit around our sun, and that it follows an elliptical path that takes 3,600 years to complete a single orbit.
For starters, astronomers say that no planet with such an irregular orbit could maintain that orbit for very long. It would either be flung out of the solar system altogether, or become an inner planet.
“The scenario outlined by Sitchin”, says Ellenberger, “with Nibiru returning to the inner solar system regularly every 3,600 years, implies an orbit extending twelve times farther beyond the sun than Pluto.
“Elementary perturbation theory indicates that, under the most favorable circumstances of avoiding close encounters with other planets, no body with such an eccentric orbit would keep the same period for two consecutive passages.
“Within twelve orbits the object would be either ejected or converted to a short period object. Thus, the failed search for a trans-Plutonian planet by Tom Van Flandern of the U.S. Naval Observatory, which Sitchin uses to bolster his thesis, is no support at all.”
Despite the contumely heaped upon Zechariah Sitchin and his work by modern science, he continues to retain a loyal body of followers who remain steadfastly convinced about the existence of Nibiru, and who expectantly await its next return to the skies of Earth.
The Return of Nibiru or Planet X ?
It is followers like these who fill the Internet with extravagant interpretations of Sitchin’s work, and who make bold claims that Nibiru, or Planet X as it is also called in some quarters, is in fact the “great star from heaven” described by John in his book of Revelation.
Yet however confident they may be that Nibiru exists, and that it may one day return and threaten the Earth, Sitchin himself scotched any idea that this would occur within our own lifetimes. As he wrote in his last book titled The End of Days, published shortly before his death in 2010:
“If that is what happened, it would explain the ‘early’ arrival of Niburu in 556 BC – and suggest that its next arrival will be AD 2,900”. And for anyone who might still be in doubt he added: “For those who associate the prophesied cataclysmic events with the return of Niburu- (Planet X to some)- the time is not at hand.”
Because it is clear that scientific evidence confirming the existence of a 12th planet, Nibiru, Planet X or whatever else it may be called, simply does not exist, some of his disenchanted readers have turned to other more exotic explanations for the meaning of “Wormwood” in the book of Revelation.
One of these is that St. John’s “great star from heaven” might not be a planet after all, but a “brown dwarf” instead. Now brown dwarfs are considered by astronomers to be substellar objects that are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion reactions within their cores.
Supporters of this idea suggest that the star from heaven witnessed by St. John in his vision might have been a brown dwarf, because this would better explain other effects described in the book of Revelation, such as the ability to push the Earth into a diferent orbit around the sun.
But this interpretation clearly conflicts with St. John’s words that the star he saw in his vision was “burning as it were a lamp”. And brown dwarfs by their very definition are dark objects. In other words, they don’t glow. This appears to be just another dead end, and so the conundrum continues.
In fact the challenge that faces anyone who tries to understand the book of Revelation is to wed together all the different segments (variously described as seven bowls, seven trumpets and seven seals) into a single coherent theory that can be validated by science and common sense.
But if modern interpreters of Revelation have difficulty explaining St. John’s vision, this did not seem to hamper medieval seers, who wrote in simple language about what they themselves had seen, and the effects this would have upon the Earth, as will be seen in the following instalment.
