Yanbushad

Alias: Yanbushadh
Location: Babylon, Nabataea, Syria, Assyria
Estimated Date: 1400s B.C. - 1300s B.C.

1. He is associated with Dumuzi and may be linked to the Arabian version of Dionysus

   In a book now lost but quoted by the 9th or 10th century Mesopotamian historian Ibn Yahshiyya, called The Book of Nabataean Agriculture, Yanbushad is described as a Nabataean philosopher who was connected to Tammuz and lived thousands of years before the 1300s B.C., when the Babylonian author, Kuthami, is said to have lived. According to Herodotus, the Arabians believed in no other god other than Orotalt, who Herodotus identified with Dionysus, and his wife Alilat, who Herodotus associates with Mithras of Persia and Mitra of India and identifies her with Aphrodite (Inanna), although other ancient sources identify her with the goddess of the netherworld, known in Sumerian myth as Inanna's sister Ereshkigal, who keeps Dumuzi for herself when he dies for the winter.

2. Like Jesus, he has a more historical biography than most god-men

   Legendary figures tend to have biographical details that make their existence seem realistic enough but the lack of contemporary references and variability in details coming from different sources makes it difficult to confirm what is real and what is mythical about them. For example, the founder of Zoroastrianism in Persia is was said to have been born into a priestly family, had a daughter whose marriage was presided over by her father, had difficulty spreading his teachings, and was rejected in his own hometown. While Zoroaster has traditionally been dated to the 500s B.C., Diogenes and Plutarch oth said he existed over 8,000 years ago. Jesus has likewise been dated to other time periods by various sources. Yanbushad has many biographical details as well. He is described as a freethinker who denied the divinity and astrology of the planets, the temples, the holy days, and the prevailing religion of his time yet was a deeply religious man, an ascetic prophet and lawgiver. A statue of him and a temple dedicated to him were said to have been erected in his lifetime, and his popularity spread to Syria and Assyria. Books ascribed to him range in subjects from astronomy, meteorology and agriculture. Although some scholars believe the book to be a forgery, it is described as being written during a time when the Canaanites were in control of Babylon, which would put it around the 1300s B.C. or earlier. According to Ibn Yahshiyya, Tammuz worship continued in the city of Harran up until his own time.
   
   
   Zoroaster, founder of Zoroastrianism
   

3. His death was ritually mourned

   Like Dumuzi, people wept for him while stories of his life and death were read aloud in temples. The idols of Babylon were also said to have wailed for his Yanbushad's death for a whole night.

4. He was said to be the teacher of Adam

   Adami is described as the inventor of agriculture and thus was the founder of civilization. Kuthami claims that Yanbushad taught Adam.

5. The flood myth is connected to his death and the death of Dumuzi

   According to Kuthami, Yanbushad was killed and then mourned over in the same fashion as Tammuz.

   The contemporaries of Yanbushadh assert that all the seka’in of the gods and all the images lamented over Yanbushadh after his death, just as all the angels and seka’in lamented over Tammuzi. The images (of the gods), they say, congregated from all parts of the world to the temple in Babylon, and betook themselves to the temple of the Sun, to the great golden images that is suspended between heaven and earth. The Sun image stood, they say, in the midst of the temple, surrounded by all the images of the world. Next to it stood the images of the Sun in all countries; then those of the Moon; next those of Mars; after them, the images of Mercury; then those of Jupiter; after them, those of Venus; and last of all, of Saturn. Thereupon the images of the Sun began to bewail Tammuzi, and the idols to weep; and the image of the Sun uttered a lament over Tammuz and narrated his history, whilst the idols all wept from the setting of the sun till its rising at the end of the night. Then the idols flew away, returning to their own countries. They say the eyes of the idol of Tehama (in South Arabia), called the eagle, are perpetually flowing with tears, and will continue, from the night wherein it lamented over Tammuz along with the images of the Sun, because of the peculiar share that it had in the story of Tammuz. This idol, called Nesr, they say, is the one that inspired the Arabs with the gift of divination, so that they can tell what has not yet come to pass, and can explain dreams before the dreamers state what they are. They (the contemporaries of Yanbushadh) tell that the idols in the land of Babel bewailed Yanbushadh singly in all their temples a whole night long till morning. During this night there was a great flood of rain, with violent thunder and lightning, as also a furious earthquake (in the district) from the borders of the mountain range of Holwan to the banks of the Tigris near the city Nebarwaja, on the eastern bank of that river. The idols, they say, returned during this flood to their places, because they had been a little shaken. This flood was brought by the idols as a judgment upon the people of the land of Babel for having abandoned the dead body of Yanbushadh, as it lay on the bare ground in the desert of Shamas, so that the flood carried his dead body to the Wadi el-A’hfar, and then swept it from this wadi into the sea. Then there was drought and pestilence in the land of Babel for three months, so that the living were not sufficient to bury the dead. These tales (of Tammuz and Yanbushadh) have been collected and are read in the temples after prayers, and the people weep and lament much thereupon.

   
   
   
   Tammuz of Petra in Nabataea
   
   

6. The ark from the flood myth is also related to the chest Adonis and Dionysus are locked up in

   The Greek flood hero, Deucalion, is the son of Prometheus, the wise Titan who created humans from clay, just as the Sumerian flood hero Ziusudra was warned by Dumuzi’s father, the wise fish-totem god Enki, who also made man out of clay, just as the Hindu flood hero Satyavrata was warned by the fish god Matsya, who like Krishna is an incarnation of Vishnu. Deucalion and his wife survived the flood in a giant chest instead of an ark, but just as with the other flood stories, the chest lands on a mountain and Deucalion makes a sacrifice to Zeus upon leaving the chest. Deucalion means “gleucos haliéus”, or “New-Sweet-Wine Sailor,” which correlates with the fact that Noah, like Dionysus, is credited as the inventor of wine. When the Finno-Ugaric sky god Numi-Tarem creates a “holy fiery-flood” to destroy the prince of the dead, Kulya-ter, he builds an iron airship for the gods and a covered raft for the humans and then tells his wife how to invent beer. Adonis was also locked in a chest when he is transported to Hades as a symbol of the vegetation’s death during winter. Pausanias, a Greek traveler and geographer from the 100’s A.D., tells a Laconian version of the Dionysus myth in which Dionysus and his mother Semele are locked in a chest and cast into the sea by Semele’s father Cadmus because he does not believe Semele was impregnated by Zeus. In this version, Semele dies in the chest but Dionysus lives to be adopted by her sister. This infancy story was also used for Perseus and is probably related to the infancy stories of Moses and the Akkadian emperor Sargon being exposed to a river in a bitumen basket after they are born, but it may also be a variant of Yanbushad’s flood story: the fertility god being “locked away” during the catastrophe and reemerging once it is over, just as Baldr’s body is sent away in a great ship to return at Ragnarok. Another Norse story has Adam-and-Eve-like characters, Lif (“Life”) and Lifthrasir (“Lover of Life”), who survive Ragnarok by hiding in Hoddmimis’ holt (probably another name for the World Tree, Yggdrasil), which is paralleled by a Bavarian myth about a shepherd living in a tree whose descendants repopulate the land after a plague. The ark story is also used as a symbol of surviving the Apocalypse in 2 Peter.

   "The inhabitants [of Brasiai in Sparta] have a story, found nowhere else in Greece, that Semele, after giving birth to her son by Zeus, was discovered by Kadmos (Cadmus) and put with Dionysos into a chest, which was washed up by the waves in their country. Semele, who was no longer alive when found, received a splendid funeral, but they brought up Dionysos. For this reason the name of their city, hitherto Oreiatai, was changed to Brasiai (Brasiae) after the washing up of the chest to land . . . The people of Brasiai add that Ino in the course of her wanderings came to the country and agreed to become the nurse of Dionysos. They show the cave where Ino nursed him, and call the plain the garden of Dionysos."

   They deliberately ignore the fact that long ago there were the heavens and the earth, formed out of water and through water by the Word of God, and that it was through these same factors that the world of those days was destroyed by the floodwaters. It is the same Word which is reserving the present heavens and earth for fire, keeping them till the Day of Judgement and of the destruction of sinners. But there is one thing, my dear friends, that you must never forget: that with the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

7. Noah and Enoch may be linguistically related to the Babylonian and Hindu Adam

   Lamech is also the name of Noah’s father, although this Lamech was supposedly of the “Sethian” line, from Adam's third son Seth that the patriarchs are descended from rather than the “Cainite” line, but as the Hebrew scholars Richard Elliot Friedman and Hyam Maccoby have independently shown, the “Sethian” line is really just an elongated version of the “Cainite” line with multiple corresponding names: Enoch = Enosh, Mehujael = Mahalalel, Methushael = Methuselah, and Jabal/Jubal/Tubal-Cain = Shem/Kham/Japheth. Maccoby notes that since Jabal (the father of tents and livestock), Jubal (the father of music), and Tubal-Cain (“Bringer of Smiths”) are the progenitors of important cultural legacies, it would make more sense if they survived the flood in the original source and must have therefore been alternate names for the three sons of an alternate flood hero, Lamech. Dumuzi the Shepherd, the fifth king on the Sumerian king list and the fourth-to-last king mentioned before the flood, ruled from the city of Bad-Tibira (“Fortress of Smiths”). The seventh king, Enmenderana of Sippar, whose name means “Lord of the Power-Crux of Heavean and Earth” was also taken to heaven by the sun god Smamash and the storm god Adad (Ba'al Hadad) in a Semitic myth, where the learned the power of divination, just as Enoch, the seventh in the line of Adam and Seth, was taken up to heaven instead of dying and whose divinations make up the Enochian literature. Sippar was the city of the sun god Shamash and Enoch's 365-year age insinuates solar aspects as well. Expanding on Friedman and Maccoby, Enosh, Enoch, and Noah (Noach in the original Hebrew) may all be variations of the same name: Oannes, or Uanna, which is the name that the seventh century B.C. Library of Ashurbanipal and the third century B.C. Babylonian priest of Bel Marduk, Berossus, uses for the name of the first of the famed Seven Sages, Adapa. The idea that Adam and Noah may have been the same person in some versions of the Creation myth may seem strange, but it may help explain why one of the names for the Hindu flood hero is Manu, which, being rooted in Indo-European, is linguistically related to the English word “man”. The human-turned-archangel Enoch from the lost proto-Christian Enochian literature that resurfaced in both the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the Dead Sea Scrolls can likewise be seen as a remodeling of the “Son of Man” to fit the Zoroastrian dualism of the Second Temple era while keeping the same basic theme from the Myth of Adapa of a human being given a tour of heaven. Enoch then became a divine chronicler that reappeared in the second century A.D. in the guise of the “Second Yahweh”, Metatron, who like Jesus sat at the right hand of the Father in the teachings of rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah, which one version of the Jewish Toledot Yeshu anti-gospel implies is the historical Paul.
   
   

   Cainite Line	Sethian Line	Sumerian King List
   Adam	Adam	Alulim (Adapa) of Eridu (enters heaven)
   Cain	Seth	Alalgar of Eridu
   Enoch	Enosh	Enmenluanna of Bad-Tibira
   Irad (Jared)	Kenan	Enmengalana of Bad-Tibira
   Mehujael	Mahalalel	Dumuzi the Shepherd of Bad-Tibira
   	Jared (Irad)	Ensipadzidana of Larsa
   	Enoch (enters heaven)	Enmendurana of Sippar (enters heaven)
   Methshael	Methuselah	Ubara-Tutu
   Lamech (flood hero?)	Lamech	(Gi-Lgamesh meets flood hero much later)
   	Noah (flood hero)	Ziusudra, son of Ubara-Tutu (flood hero; not on kinglist)
   Jabal, Jubal, Tubal-Cain	Shem, Kham, Japheth

8. His story is based on a World Myth

   Based on this story and other findings, the 19th-century Anglican priest and antiquarian scholar Rev. Sabine Maring-Gould believed the story of Yanbushad to be connected to a myth known throughout the ancient world.

   “And for my own part, I see no difficulty in believing that [the legend of the cross] formed a portion of the primeval religion, traces of which exist over the whole world, among every people; that trust in the Cross was a part of the ancient faith which taught men to believe in a Trinity, in a War in Heaven, a Paradise from which men fell, a Flood, and a Babel; a faith which was deeply impressed with a conviction that a Virgin should conceive and bear a son, that the Dragon’s head should be bruised, and that through Shedding of blood should come Remission. The use of the cross, as a symbol of life and regeneration through water, is as widely spread over the world as the belief in the ark of Noah. May be, the shadow of the Cross was cast further back into the night of ages, and fell on a wider range of country, than we are aware of.
   
   “It is more than coincidence that Osiris by the cross should give life eternal to the Spirits of the Just; that with the cross Thorr should smite the head of the Great Serpent, and bring to life those who were slain; that beneath the cross the Muysca mother should lay their babies, trusting by that sign to secure them from the power of evil spirits; that with that symbol to protect them, the ancient people of Northern Italy should lay them down in the dust.”