Snooping on you, I found this one interesting. Do you have the goods on (my guess) MLK or something, because I haven't found a core etymology as solid as yours sounds?
The goods on MLK the civil rights leader is that he faked his own death. The hilarious aspect is that if you look up photos of him, he was apparently buried in two distinctly different caskets, like no one else ever.
To be serious, though, if we're talking the Hebrew word root, no, it's through another path. You have to tentatively accept the thesis that the entity that has come down to us as Satan (although a metric shit ton of misunderstood and made-up cruft has collected around him) was one of the Anunnaki, namely Marduk. I hate to spoil the ending that way, but it's impossible to follow the plot without that in mind.
If you're familiar with Manley P. Hall's telling of the origin of the name, he's correct up to near the end. The mistake he makes (and he sounds 100% certain as he does it) is that the South American tribe lived in "Amaruca" or "the land of Amaru", and that this Amaru was also known as Quetzalcoatl. That's not correct.
If you look up the original cuneiform of Marduk, it can be read two ways, either logographically or syllabically. In one of them, you read AMAR.UTU. Well, we can see the barely altered "Amaru" right there, can't we?
Interestingly--and maybe this will help these novel ideas gel--is that if you read it the other way, you get NAMR.UD. Recognize it? Yeah, it's where we get "Nimrod" (and "Nemrut" and various other corruptions). Also, both of those readings mean something like "young bull of the Sun" or "golden calf". Intriguing, right?
These may strike as happenstance or long reaches or simply made up, but I can only add that I started discovering these things around 2017 or so, and you would not believe the pile of evidence I've collected since then.
Hmm, it becomes quite a web, and I totally affirm the amassing of piles and the distinction of solid evidence from stretchers.
Namr-Ud goes back to the old Jewish Encyclopedia, which is a bit suspect. I'll buy that Marduk comes from Sumerian Amar-Utu-Ak (with Utu being the Anuna), but then the other JE reading "ideographically" would have to be An-Amar-Utu, where the dingir is read as "An" meaning "sky".
Though Babylon was very minor in that day, we might speculate that Moses might have known of a then-local tradition of An-Amar-Utu via the Babylonian Chronicles about King Amar-Sin, which would have been available to Abram in Ur, so the transmission is not impossible, though ranked dubious.
The difficulties become (1) Moses regards Nimrod as a Cushite king, nor an obscure Ur deity; (2) It's a bit more likely Amar-Sin was not related to Marduk from the then-obscure Babylon, but to the Amorite namesake-deity Martu from Lagash (though I wouldn't be surprised if these were spiritual clones); (3) Hall is not a reliable source and though amaru is extant you'd think there'd be a better source for ka meaning soil in Incan or Mayan; (4) you'd need a transmission chain from Amar-Utu to amaru, which is highly unlikely.
So you're right it's intriguing, but there are so many intrigues in pseudoetymology that I brush some off or bookmark them to see if they ever accumulate better evidence. My take is that, first, although making Marduk/Merodach into Nimrod is not impossible, it's likelier that Marduk started out a relative nobody and Nimrod started out hot and heavy (here I propose his identity with Naram-Sin grandson of Sargon). Second, the theory of amaru-ka is somewhat competitive, but I don't have that linked to the east yet; the feathered serpent is a very different chain of transmission from the calf. Mental note: look for eastern serpents named similar to amaru.
Third, your most potent connection is that the original Marduk would have been an Anuna (using your term) and was probably one among several inspirations for the modern satan. The other connections may be better explained by convergent etymology than divergent. Summarizing for my own reference, amaru (Inca serpent), Martu or Amarru (Lagash representation of Amorites), and Amar-Utu (Babylon local calf deity) have tempting appearances of connection but not clear paths of identity. (The fact that Amar-Sin connects to both Martu and Amar-Utu does not converge them; the fact that Naram-Sin connects to Amar-Sin does not converge Nimrod and Marduk. Also today I discovered Nin-Urta (older Nippur barley deity, possibly later Nisroch), who is similarly not likely to be Nimrod despite the consonants.) If, however, "satan" is to be defined as the worst of the Anuna, I'm not sure offhand that'd be Marduk, who is dependent on Utu/Shamash.
Well, let me lay this on on you, and if this doesn't get you then nothing will. Personally, I almost fell out of my chair when I stumbled across it.
A few years back, I was getting hella tired of people on social media blaming everything on Satan. He didn't exist (or so I knew at the time) and so it was a real conversation (and investigation) stopper. I was trying to find some basic contradiction or plot hole in the Satan story to point people towards, like "Just check this out, m'kay?"
It eventually occurred to me that there might be an opening along the "son of the morning star" and "son of Venus" line. I knew a little bit about both astronomy and ancient pantheons by that time.
Isaiah 14:12 is where we get that, as well as the only mention of "Lucifer". You'll find no shortage of people waving their hands around about exactly what that means and you're free to choose any of them. I, however, just wanted to check whether the verse referred to the planet, or a star, or what. The translations are all over the map so I knew I had to go to the Hebrew.
The line reads "ben shahar", so I looked up "shahar". He's actually Shahar, god of the dawn in the Ugarit pantheon. You should already be asking yourself why the Israelites thought Satan was the son of a pagan deity, and also why no one but me talks about it.
So I tried looking for more about Shahar and found his origin story: The king of the gods was walking along one day and encountered two women bathing... and each woman bore a son. They were Shahar, god of the dawn, and Shalim, god of dusk. Lucifer would then be the son of the elder half-brother.
That's when I almost fell off my chair.
I recognized that exact genealogy. In the Sumerian pantheon, Anu is the king of the gods and he had two sons who are half-brothers. Enki is the elder and Enlil is the younger. Marduk is the son of Enki.
Yeah, I like to say we found satan's mom, he's the Son of Dawn.
It's true that both lucifer (helel) and satan are titles so we don't get a real name, and both titles are highly overplayed in the churchianity wing of the real Jesus followers.
I can see your taking Anu-Enki-Enlil-Marduk and templating El-Shahar-Shalim-Helel over that (though Helel is the 8th-century title and the others are all very old Sumerian or Canaanite; Shahar as deity is rare enough we oddly have no older indications of any sons). But knowing the Isaiah tradition from his other poetry (some of the greatest of the millennium), he would be trying to rehabilitate "shahar" more than to build on an Enki-Marduk connection, even if that parallel is secondary in his mind. By the Isaiah II-III period (58:8), we have shachar as a positive feature of the messianic Day of Yahweh. I also found the Davidic "rehem mishchar", womb of the dawning (from shachar), in the messianic Ps. 110:3, which is definitely in Isaiah's mind; so the helel becomes a messianic claimant, an aspirant to the priest-king archetypal destiny.
Also by this time "son" is more metaphorical than regarded as genealogical among deities, i.e., helel is singularly representative of Venus-Dawn (Aphrodite, Astarte, Inanna). Seeing that Astarte was also later merged with Eos-Dawn, I'd venture to say that despite Shahar's masculine grammar (M) the word connects with more feminine contexts (F). So if Isaiah is familiar with Shahar weShalim, which is tenable, he could be invoking a connection between Astarte and helel that is representative rather than generative, and this would then be intended also to inform the character found in Job, the satan who is son of El (I don't generally say grandson as that concept is rarer than son's son).
So the thesis that El-Shahar(M)-Shalim is to be connected to Shahar-Helel to make a parallel history to Anu's family is not unmerited, but weaker than alternatives (which of course often coexist without being regarded as contradiction). I would certainly say the half-brother narrative as a recurring archetype is as significant as you note, and it makes one inquire of its original. But, at the same time, if I said El-Astarte?-Satan is also parallel to Elyon-Shahar(F)-Helel, that wouldn't be rejectable out of hand either.
Now the question then goes to what is the historian's intended narrative of all this. Either we're talking about history of some real family of humans or other sentients, or we're talking about categorization of deified concepts, with some overlap between the two. In the conceptual category it's not too troubling because concepts like Calf or Dawn are free to float around with multiple relationships. In the genealogical category we ultimately come to either dynasties or "watchers" and we have the harder problem that history is not allowed to contradict itself. In the overlap category I think we should consider deity names as we regard corporation names nowadays, namely they merge and split and take on or abandon meanings: so Marduk, if he is some spiritual entity, started out local but then may have taken on (some) connections that gave him rights in more names or titles, like satan. However, to me this doesn't rise to the level of plot hole in the Hebrew transmission, as I have such high standards for what would be irremediable holes that I can retcon most anything, and the ability to retcon later is often part of the intentional ambiguity of the originals.
I agree that people should talk about these things! I've noted that among Christians it's relegated to seminarians who then perceive that the Enlightenment covered it so exhaustively that there's nothing new to say or to "bore" the flock with. But unless we have robust understanding of the breadth of the sources (especially those taken as gospel), we fall prey to dropping one gospel for another hastily without validating either.
Add: Plus among my research tabs we have the pre-Davidic song "Aijeleth Shahar" (Ps. 22:1 KJV), dawn hind, which is the sun that reveals its horns (rays, wings) at dawn. This is certainly something Isaiah had seen preserved in Hezekiah's archives, which gives the relationship of Shamash-Utu intimate with Shahar, while Marduk's name comes from Utu. That might get us to Anu-Enki-Ninmah-Enlil-Marduk and templating El-Utu-Shahar(F)-Shalim-Helel over that (where Shahar is taken as the fertility goddess Ninmah wife of Enki). But it's all relative!
Snooping on you, I found this one interesting. Do you have the goods on (my guess) MLK or something, because I haven't found a core etymology as solid as yours sounds?
The goods on MLK the civil rights leader is that he faked his own death. The hilarious aspect is that if you look up photos of him, he was apparently buried in two distinctly different caskets, like no one else ever.
To be serious, though, if we're talking the Hebrew word root, no, it's through another path. You have to tentatively accept the thesis that the entity that has come down to us as Satan (although a metric shit ton of misunderstood and made-up cruft has collected around him) was one of the Anunnaki, namely Marduk. I hate to spoil the ending that way, but it's impossible to follow the plot without that in mind.
If you're familiar with Manley P. Hall's telling of the origin of the name, he's correct up to near the end. The mistake he makes (and he sounds 100% certain as he does it) is that the South American tribe lived in "Amaruca" or "the land of Amaru", and that this Amaru was also known as Quetzalcoatl. That's not correct.
If you look up the original cuneiform of Marduk, it can be read two ways, either logographically or syllabically. In one of them, you read AMAR.UTU. Well, we can see the barely altered "Amaru" right there, can't we?
Interestingly--and maybe this will help these novel ideas gel--is that if you read it the other way, you get NAMR.UD. Recognize it? Yeah, it's where we get "Nimrod" (and "Nemrut" and various other corruptions). Also, both of those readings mean something like "young bull of the Sun" or "golden calf". Intriguing, right?
These may strike as happenstance or long reaches or simply made up, but I can only add that I started discovering these things around 2017 or so, and you would not believe the pile of evidence I've collected since then.
Hmm, it becomes quite a web, and I totally affirm the amassing of piles and the distinction of solid evidence from stretchers.
Namr-Ud goes back to the old Jewish Encyclopedia, which is a bit suspect. I'll buy that Marduk comes from Sumerian Amar-Utu-Ak (with Utu being the Anuna), but then the other JE reading "ideographically" would have to be An-Amar-Utu, where the dingir is read as "An" meaning "sky".
Though Babylon was very minor in that day, we might speculate that Moses might have known of a then-local tradition of An-Amar-Utu via the Babylonian Chronicles about King Amar-Sin, which would have been available to Abram in Ur, so the transmission is not impossible, though ranked dubious.
The difficulties become (1) Moses regards Nimrod as a Cushite king, nor an obscure Ur deity; (2) It's a bit more likely Amar-Sin was not related to Marduk from the then-obscure Babylon, but to the Amorite namesake-deity Martu from Lagash (though I wouldn't be surprised if these were spiritual clones); (3) Hall is not a reliable source and though amaru is extant you'd think there'd be a better source for ka meaning soil in Incan or Mayan; (4) you'd need a transmission chain from Amar-Utu to amaru, which is highly unlikely.
So you're right it's intriguing, but there are so many intrigues in pseudoetymology that I brush some off or bookmark them to see if they ever accumulate better evidence. My take is that, first, although making Marduk/Merodach into Nimrod is not impossible, it's likelier that Marduk started out a relative nobody and Nimrod started out hot and heavy (here I propose his identity with Naram-Sin grandson of Sargon). Second, the theory of amaru-ka is somewhat competitive, but I don't have that linked to the east yet; the feathered serpent is a very different chain of transmission from the calf. Mental note: look for eastern serpents named similar to amaru.
Third, your most potent connection is that the original Marduk would have been an Anuna (using your term) and was probably one among several inspirations for the modern satan. The other connections may be better explained by convergent etymology than divergent. Summarizing for my own reference, amaru (Inca serpent), Martu or Amarru (Lagash representation of Amorites), and Amar-Utu (Babylon local calf deity) have tempting appearances of connection but not clear paths of identity. (The fact that Amar-Sin connects to both Martu and Amar-Utu does not converge them; the fact that Naram-Sin connects to Amar-Sin does not converge Nimrod and Marduk. Also today I discovered Nin-Urta (older Nippur barley deity, possibly later Nisroch), who is similarly not likely to be Nimrod despite the consonants.) If, however, "satan" is to be defined as the worst of the Anuna, I'm not sure offhand that'd be Marduk, who is dependent on Utu/Shamash.
Well, let me lay this on on you, and if this doesn't get you then nothing will. Personally, I almost fell out of my chair when I stumbled across it.
A few years back, I was getting hella tired of people on social media blaming everything on Satan. He didn't exist (or so I knew at the time) and so it was a real conversation (and investigation) stopper. I was trying to find some basic contradiction or plot hole in the Satan story to point people towards, like "Just check this out, m'kay?"
It eventually occurred to me that there might be an opening along the "son of the morning star" and "son of Venus" line. I knew a little bit about both astronomy and ancient pantheons by that time.
Isaiah 14:12 is where we get that, as well as the only mention of "Lucifer". You'll find no shortage of people waving their hands around about exactly what that means and you're free to choose any of them. I, however, just wanted to check whether the verse referred to the planet, or a star, or what. The translations are all over the map so I knew I had to go to the Hebrew.
The line reads "ben shahar", so I looked up "shahar". He's actually Shahar, god of the dawn in the Ugarit pantheon. You should already be asking yourself why the Israelites thought Satan was the son of a pagan deity, and also why no one but me talks about it.
So I tried looking for more about Shahar and found his origin story: The king of the gods was walking along one day and encountered two women bathing... and each woman bore a son. They were Shahar, god of the dawn, and Shalim, god of dusk. Lucifer would then be the son of the elder half-brother.
That's when I almost fell off my chair.
I recognized that exact genealogy. In the Sumerian pantheon, Anu is the king of the gods and he had two sons who are half-brothers. Enki is the elder and Enlil is the younger. Marduk is the son of Enki.
Anyway, best of luck with your studies.
Yeah, I like to say we found satan's mom, he's the Son of Dawn.
It's true that both lucifer (helel) and satan are titles so we don't get a real name, and both titles are highly overplayed in the churchianity wing of the real Jesus followers.
I can see your taking Anu-Enki-Enlil-Marduk and templating El-Shahar-Shalim-Helel over that (though Helel is the 8th-century title and the others are all very old Sumerian or Canaanite; Shahar as deity is rare enough we oddly have no older indications of any sons). But knowing the Isaiah tradition from his other poetry (some of the greatest of the millennium), he would be trying to rehabilitate "shahar" more than to build on an Enki-Marduk connection, even if that parallel is secondary in his mind. By the Isaiah II-III period (58:8), we have shachar as a positive feature of the messianic Day of Yahweh. I also found the Davidic "rehem mishchar", womb of the dawning (from shachar), in the messianic Ps. 110:3, which is definitely in Isaiah's mind; so the helel becomes a messianic claimant, an aspirant to the priest-king archetypal destiny.
Also by this time "son" is more metaphorical than regarded as genealogical among deities, i.e., helel is singularly representative of Venus-Dawn (Aphrodite, Astarte, Inanna). Seeing that Astarte was also later merged with Eos-Dawn, I'd venture to say that despite Shahar's masculine grammar (M) the word connects with more feminine contexts (F). So if Isaiah is familiar with Shahar weShalim, which is tenable, he could be invoking a connection between Astarte and helel that is representative rather than generative, and this would then be intended also to inform the character found in Job, the satan who is son of El (I don't generally say grandson as that concept is rarer than son's son).
So the thesis that El-Shahar(M)-Shalim is to be connected to Shahar-Helel to make a parallel history to Anu's family is not unmerited, but weaker than alternatives (which of course often coexist without being regarded as contradiction). I would certainly say the half-brother narrative as a recurring archetype is as significant as you note, and it makes one inquire of its original. But, at the same time, if I said El-Astarte?-Satan is also parallel to Elyon-Shahar(F)-Helel, that wouldn't be rejectable out of hand either.
Now the question then goes to what is the historian's intended narrative of all this. Either we're talking about history of some real family of humans or other sentients, or we're talking about categorization of deified concepts, with some overlap between the two. In the conceptual category it's not too troubling because concepts like Calf or Dawn are free to float around with multiple relationships. In the genealogical category we ultimately come to either dynasties or "watchers" and we have the harder problem that history is not allowed to contradict itself. In the overlap category I think we should consider deity names as we regard corporation names nowadays, namely they merge and split and take on or abandon meanings: so Marduk, if he is some spiritual entity, started out local but then may have taken on (some) connections that gave him rights in more names or titles, like satan. However, to me this doesn't rise to the level of plot hole in the Hebrew transmission, as I have such high standards for what would be irremediable holes that I can retcon most anything, and the ability to retcon later is often part of the intentional ambiguity of the originals.
I agree that people should talk about these things! I've noted that among Christians it's relegated to seminarians who then perceive that the Enlightenment covered it so exhaustively that there's nothing new to say or to "bore" the flock with. But unless we have robust understanding of the breadth of the sources (especially those taken as gospel), we fall prey to dropping one gospel for another hastily without validating either.
Add: Plus among my research tabs we have the pre-Davidic song "Aijeleth Shahar" (Ps. 22:1 KJV), dawn hind, which is the sun that reveals its horns (rays, wings) at dawn. This is certainly something Isaiah had seen preserved in Hezekiah's archives, which gives the relationship of Shamash-Utu intimate with Shahar, while Marduk's name comes from Utu. That might get us to Anu-Enki-Ninmah-Enlil-Marduk and templating El-Utu-Shahar(F)-Shalim-Helel over that (where Shahar is taken as the fertility goddess Ninmah wife of Enki). But it's all relative!