If we’d been interested in stopping at a nice biblical number to justify a catchy title, something like The Seven Mountains of the Supernatural War, we’d have ended the book at Mount Zion. But this book would be incomplete without bringing up an eighth holy mountain, one that’s had a tremendous and incredibly destructive impact on the world.
This mountain is responsible for what statisticians say will be the world’s largest religion by about 2070 unless something drastic happens. In that regard, we must give credit where it’s due—this mountain was, without question, the site of the most successful supernatural PSYOP in history.
The Arabic name of this peak means Mountain of Enlightenment. Jabal al-Nour is near Mecca in western Saudi Arabia. It’s the site of the cave where Muhammad was visited by an angel calling itself Jibril, or Gabriel.
The message was not from God. Yahweh does not contradict Himself, but the Quran clearly does. Muhammad saw something, of that we have no doubt. But it was not a messenger from Yahweh.
We’ll deal with the specific beliefs of Islam and its major sects in the book. Islam has a role to play in the future conflict for God’s holy mountain, but sadly for Muslims, the part the Fallen wants them to play is very simple—to die.
Allah is the name used for the god of Islam, but it’s also the name used for the God of the Bible by Arab Christians. This is somewhat confusing, which is, of course, not coincidental. Just as El was the name of the chief god of the Canaanites and a generic name for God in Hebrew, “Allah” is another PSYOP by the Fallen to muddy the water.
Many Christians assume that Muslims worship the same god they do, and so they aren’t surprised to learn that Arab Christians apply the same proper name to the God of the Bible. This is the same mistake as assuming a pagan Amorite in the 15th century B.C. who prayed to El was calling on the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Muslims, who believe that Allah has no son, have put their faith in something they think is the God of the Book (the Bible). How can that be, when there are fundamental differences between Allah and Yahweh?
Some Christian scholars draw a link between Allah and older deities worshiped in Arabia prior to Muhammad. This isn’t universally accepted, but it doesn’t have to be to make a case for the god of Islam being something other than Yahweh.
Etymologically, the explanation that seems to make the most sense, and the one accepted by most scholars, suggests that Allah is a contract of al-lāh, “the god.” That’s like the old Semitic use of El, a proper name that grew out of the generic Proto-Semitic word ʾil-, meaning “deity” or “god.” Variant forms show up in Akkadian (ilu), Ugaritic (il), and Hebrew (eloah, the singular form of elohim).
Still, differences in the fundamental characteristics of Allah and Yahweh force us to conclude that one of two things must be true: Either, 1) Allah and Yahweh are one and the same, and the Bible doesn’t accurately record the way Yahweh revealed Himself to the prophets and apostles; or, 2) some thing lied to Muhammad in that cave on Jabal al-Nour, and Allah is not the God of the Bible.
Given that we have Old Testament texts that can be reliably dated to at least two centuries before Jesus (the Septuagint translation from Hebrew into Greek), and most scholars would accept earlier dates for the authorship of those books, and that the books of the New Testament are the best attested documents from the classical period, there is compelling evidence that the Bible has not been corrupted or substantially changed since it was written by the apostles and prophets. While there are minor differences between some texts, the sheer number of manuscripts and documents that quote scripture, like letters from the early church fathers, provide plenty of material to cross-check the books of the Bible and confirm its reliability.
In contrast, the Quran was compiled into its final form about twenty years after the death of Muhammad from several competing versions. By the time of the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, Islam had spread from Arabia into Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Iran, cultures that were different from one another and from the origin point of the faith. Uthman was reportedly motivated to take on the project by disputes between some of the new followers over the correct way to pray. So, to prevent Muslims from fighting over the book, texts were collected from around the caliphate and compiled into an “official” version, and variant copies were destroyed.
Even Muslim scholars—mainly Shia, who believe that Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law was the rightful heir to the prophet’s growing empire—admit that Uthman corrupted the Islamic holy book by his action.
There is more to the story, of course. Scholars spend entire careers studying the Quran just as others do the Bible. But the fundamental difference between the Quran and the Bible is that there is no comparison between the two when it comes to the quantity and quality of the source material.
We take no joy in saying so. Literally billions of humans will pay the ultimate price for the supernatural deception worked on a charismatic Arab trader fourteen centuries ago. And billions more will be destroyed in the cataclysmic final battle for the holy mountain of Yahweh. The bloodthirsty gods are preparing for war.
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Here is where another brief review of history may be helpful. We’ll get a little speculative, and because we’re dealing with the spirit realm there is only so much we can say with one hundred percent confidence.
What happened to the Amorites? Scholars have been exploring that question ever since their existence was confirmed by sources outside the Bible in the 19th century. They were pushed out of Mesopotamia by the Kassites, who took Babylon in the 16th century B.C., and native rulers near the Persian Gulf called the Sealand Dynasty. We’ve already discussed how the Amorite Hyksos rulers of Lower Egypt were evicted by native Eygptians around the same time.
They Amorites disappear from history around the time of the Sea Peoples invasion of the Levant and Egypt in the late 13th and early 12th centuries B.C. This coincides with what scholars call the Late Bronze Age collapse. Over a period of about fifty years, between about 1200 and 1150 B.C., the major states of the eastern Mediterranean from Mycenaean Greece and Hatti to the Amorite and Canaanite states of the Levant were destroyed.
This was the event that ended the kingdom of Ugarit during the reign of the ill-fated Ammurapi we mentioned in an earlier chapter. A small kingdom southeast of Ugarit called Amurru, named for the Amorites, was also wiped out around this time.
This was the period of the later Judges, a time that set the stage for the emergence of the kingdom of Israel. Barak and Deborah’s destruction of Hazor, which some scholars think may have belonged to the kingdom of Amurru, may be dated to this time.
The bottom line is that only Egypt and a few small kingdoms in northern Syria appear to have survived this wave of destruction. The Philistines settled in what we call today the Gaza Strip, and they may have been part of the Sea Peoples coalition. Emerging from the ashes of this turmoil alongside the kingdom of Israel were several Aramean kingdoms, with Damascus and Hamath being the largest.
Because they came out of the same area formerly associated with the Amorites, it’s easy to assume that the Aramean people were just descendants of the Amorites who carried on as best they could after the disasters of the Late Bronze Age collapse. But we can’t make that assumption any more than we could assume that the Israelites were just Canaanites with a repackaged religion because of where David came to power.
By analyzing texts that have been found from the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and later Egyptian kingdoms, we can piece together a history that seems solid. While the name “Amorite” fell out of use after the conquest of Canaan, there are a couple of tribal names that bridge the period between the disappearance of the Amorites and the emergence of the Arameans. Specifically, the Aḫlamū, sometimes called Aḫlamū-Aramayū (Aḫlamū-Arameans) by the Assyrians, and our old friends the Suteans.
Together, these two tribal names appear to be used, at least sometimes, interchangeably with both Amorite and Aramean nomads, mainly in the steppes of Syria and the Transjordan. After the conquests of the Assyrian empire through the 7th century B.C., even the Arameans fade from history, although the Aramaic language, because it was adopted as the lingua franca by Assyria, became the language of trade and cultural exchange in the Near East from about 600 B.C. to around the time of Jesus before giving way to Greek.
In short, scholars can document a “geographical, historical and linguistic continuity” between the Amorites of the Old Babylonian period and the Arameans of the Middle Babylonian era.1
Recent history in the old Amorite homeland, which includes Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, points to a troubled future for the Holy Land. We mentioned earlier the existence of territorial spirits, the main biblical example being the Prince of Persia that tied up the messenger to Daniel for several weeks. We can’t know for certain, but it’s worth mentioning because, as you’ve noticed by now, this author doesn’t put much stock in coincidence, especially where it concerns the Bible and the ongoing spiritual war.
Here are the relevant questions: Can it be just a weird coincidence that the hot spots in the Middle East, especially since the emergence of the Islamic State since the summer of 2014, are a match for the areas defined as the homeland of the Amorites four thousand years ago? Is it just a cosmic accident that the land of the Amorites, especially central and northern Syria, are far more important in the eschatology of Islam than Arabia, the land of Islam’s birth?
Consider the otherwise inexplicable atrocities in the Islamic State’s capital, Raqqa, which lies on the west bank of the Euphrates close by Jebel Bishri, the ancient mountain of the Amorites; or the destruction in Aleppo, called the City of Hadad when it was ruled by Amorite kings in the days of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The prophecies that guide the leadership of the Islamic State focus on lands where the old gods of the Amorites once reigned supreme.
In Iraq, where ISIS is hard pressed at this writing by Iraqi, Kurdish, Turkish, and American forces in the city of Mosul, analysts at the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Training Academy at West Point suggest that ISIS has already prepared a fallback plan in Diyala province if they can’t hang on in Mosul. The analysts feel the terrain and the demographic makeup of Diyala is especially well suited for an ongoing insurgency.2 That’s the area northeast of Baghdad along the Diyala River toward the Hamrin mountain range, where more than four thousand years ago the doomed Sumerian kings of Ur built their futile Amorite-wall-which-keeps-the-Tidnum-at-bay.
All of this begs the question: What foul spirit is at work in MAR.TUki, the ancient land of the Amorites?
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Let’s dig a little deeper. And, if you’ll indulge us, we’ll get a little speculative. As we’ve noted, there is only so much we can know for sure about the spirits opposed to God. They lie, and our perception into that realm is limited. But let’s look at what’s available to us and see if we can draw some tentative conclusions.
Most Bible scholars who trace the movement of the nations that dispersed from Babel in Genesis 10 place two nations that mentioned in Ezekiel’s prophecy of the Gog-Magog war, Sheba and Dedan, in Arabia. Sheba was the father of the Sabeans, who founded a kingdom in southwest Arabia, modern-day Yemen.
Dedan settled along the coast of the Red Sea in western Arabia, in the area called the Hejaz. Dedan was an important oasis along the caravan route between Sheba and Babylon. Because of the brutal desert that covers the interior of Arabia, the route traveled north through Edom, just southeast of Judah. Dedan eventually grew into an independent kingdom around the time of the prophets Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. The last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, spent most of his reign living at the important Dedanite oasis of Tayma while entrusting Babylon to his son, Belshazzar—he of the mene, mene, tekel, upharsin incident.
Sheba and Dedan were sons of Raamah, a son of Cush, the son of Ham. This makes Sheba and Dedan nephews of Nimrod, who we believe was the Sumerian king Enmerkar, would-be builder of the abode of the gods, the tower of Babel at Eridu. (Sheba and Dedan are also mentioned in Genesis 25 as grandsons of Abraham and his concubine Keturah, through their son Jokshan. Geographically, though, it still places them among the tribes of Arabia.)
Nobody is sure why Nabonidus spent a decade living in the desert, but the best guess is that he was seeking prophecy and guidance from his preferred deity, the moon-god Sîn, who the king elevated to the top spot in the pantheon.
I accomplished the command of Sîn, king of the gods, lord of lords, dwelling in the heavens, who, in comparison of the gods in heaven, his name is surpassing: (also) of Šamaš [sun-god], who is his brightest (peer), of Nusku [fire-god], Ištar [Ishtar/Inanna, goddess of sex and war], Adda [Hadad, the storm-god Ba`al], Nergal [Resheph/Apollo, god of war and plague, and gatekeeper to the underworld], (those) who accomplish the command of Nannar [Sumerian name for Sîn] their surpasser.3
Harran inscription H2, A & B, Col. III (text in brackets added)
Note that Marduk is missing from that list of deities. Nabonidus probably made an enemy of the established Marduk priesthood in Babylon, possibly creating a religious fifth column that contributed to the ease with which Babylon fell to the Persians.
It’s believed that Nabonidus’ mother Addagoppe (Adad-guppi—notice the theophoric element Adad) was a priestess of Sîn from Harran in northern Mesopotamia. Remember, Harran was the moon-god’s cult center that was so important to the Amorite Binū Yamina tribes in Abraham’s day, 1,400 years earlier. So Nabonidus may have been of old Aramean/Amorite stock, and for some reason—call it infernal revelation, if you will—he was compelled to revive the flagging cult of Sîn and transplant it to the Arabian desert.
The moon-god has a long history in that part of the world. Not only do we have the evidence of the cult centers of Ur, Harran, and Jericho that date back to the 3rd millennium B.C., but remember the account of Gideon’s victory over the Midianites, another people who lived in northwestern Arabia. Gideon’s huge haul of gold included the crescent ornaments from the Midianites’ camels, which presumably honored the moon-god. Symbols depicting a heavenly triad of Sîn, Šamaš, and Ishtar—moon, sun, and Venus—are common from the mid 2nd millennium B.C. at least through the time of Nabonidus, who is depicted venerating the three deities on stela that have survived.
While the star and crescent symbol prominent in the Islamic world today only came into use after the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453, it’s not too much of a reach to suggest that the ancient cult of the moon-god in the Near East and Arabia has been carried into the modern era by the descendants of the Amorites, Arameans, and their Arab neighbors to the south, especially with the boost given to the moon-god’s cult in Arabia by the king of Babylon during the last days of that empire.
Why is this of interest? While Sheba (Yemen) seems almost geographically irrelevant to end times prophecy (except maybe as a flashpoint for a wider Sunni-Shia war), Dedan, as we showed earlier, bears the same name as the ancient Amorite tribe Didanu/Tidanu, from which the Greeks derived the name of the Titans. And the area settled by the Dedanites, the Hejaz, includes the two holiest sites of Islam, Mecca and Medina.
While Muslim scholars would argue the connection, the symbolic link, at least, is obvious. Joel Richardson does an excellent job of establishing the pagan roots of Allah in his new book, Mystery Babylon. The historical link between Nabonidus, the moon-worshiping king of Babylon, and the region of Islam’s holiest sites may be coincidental, but you know our feeling about coincidence theories.
Now, please understand: We’re not suggesting a physical connection between the Watchers/Titans and the Arab tribes that spread Islam across the world. In other words, and we truly hope this doesn’t disappoint you, we do not see a role in the end times for ISIS Nephilim.4
Nevertheless, it’s fascinating that history has once again provided a spiritual link between the past and the future where we never expected to find one.
1 Bodi, op. cit., p.409.
2 Mello, Alex and Knights, Michael. “Losing Mosul, Regenerating Diyala: How the Islamic State Could Exploit Iraq’s Sectarian Tinderbox,” Combating Terrorism Center, October 25, 2016 (https://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/losing-mosul-regenerating-in-diyala-how-the-islamic-state-could-exploit-iraqs-sectarian-tinderbox), retrieved 12/22/16.
3 Gadd, C.J. “The Harran Inscriptions of Nabonidus,” Extrait d’Anatolian Studies, VIII (1958), pp. 35- 92. In: Syria. Tome 37 fascicule 1-2, 1960. pp. 194-196.
4 But thanks to Joel Richardson for the inspiration. Maybe as a novel…