Hey elemenop!

Sorry I didn't catch your shot out right away. TP alerted me to this thread, so here I am.

I suppose most of the current interest in all things Sumerian comes from the oeuvre of Zecharia Sitchin. There are many people who denounce his scholarship with regards to the language and castigate him for his Erich Von Danniken type claims about aliens. But this doesn't necessarily deflate the crux of his presentation.

Fact is that the Bible clearly claims ol' Avram came from Ur in the land of the Chaldees. (before he got the h in his name from the original "he who should not be named") The Chaldeans were certainly related to the people of Shine-ar (sometimes called Shine-ur), and Ur in particular was dedicated to the Sumerian god of Nannar (Sin) who was a lunar god. (nanna in Sumerian means "he who illuminates" more or less) The fact that Abraham came from a city dedicated to this moon god, as the son of a high-priest and idol-maker no less... lends a lot of credence to the idea that much of the early Hebrew myths and legends borrowed from Sumer. Interestingly enough, Sinai is also named after Sin. The very mountain that Moses went up to talk to the big man was called the Mountain of Sin. To make matters even more interesting, the bull that the people were making out of their gold when he came down was also a symbol of Sin/ Nannar. The upturned horns of the young bull was always associated with the crescent moon. Both the male calf and the crescent were Sumerian symbols for the moon god Nannar.

All of the gods of Mesopotamia can be traced to the Sumerian gods. All of them. So much so, that our knowledge of the Sumerian religion is gleaned to a large degree from Babylonian and Akkadian translations of Sumerian epics. The Babylonian creation story, the Enuma Elish is a famous example. Furthermore, there is a lot of scholarship being done on the connections between pantheistic religions showing Egyptian, Greek, Vedic, and even Nordic gods as being connected to the Sumerian archetypes.

One simply can not dismiss Sumerian civilization and it's huge influence on everything that came after it. The list of Sumerian "firsts" is long and unparalleled. As far as we know, Civilization started in Sumeria. Government, the wheel, formal writing, astronomy, brick making etc. etc.

The fact that so many stories in Genesis (especially) are obviously retellings of older Sumerian stories suggests that Judaism was at the very least influenced by the Sumerian culture. Even if the Abraham connection is dismissed, they Jews lived amongst the Babylonians in captivity, dealt extensively with the Assyrians, and had direct linguistic relations to Akkadians who also worshiped the gods of Sumer. Only someone actively trying not to see the connection could miss all of this.

The Bible says that the nephilim were the sons of the Anakim. It isn't a huge stretch to see this as a corruption of Annunaki. The Bible goes on to say that the "giants" were the offspring of the sons of G*d getting it on with the daughters of men. It says that these giants were the "mighty men" of old. Curiously, the Sumerians also said that the gods had kids with humans, and that these children were mighty. In fact, in order to be a king or a high priest in Sumer one had to be a demi-god. Their word for kingship translates as mighty man. The Bible says that the first king on Earth was Nimrod. This name is also found in Sumerian King lists.

As this is getting to be on the long side, I will wrap it up by saying that most systems of royalty had the notion of "divine right to rule." Even in Europe, the idea was that the nobility were in charge because they were the direct children of the gods... physically different from normal people. They were "blue-bloods." This is the main reason that they would inbreed so extensively. This was why pharaohs would marry their half-sisters. To keep the divine blood as pure as possible. Inanna (Ishtar, Isis, Venus) was well known for having sex with kings and priests. Every new dynasty in Egypt started with a pharaoh claiming to be a son of Isis. Whatever you may think of this, it was common practice all over the world. From Japan to Peru, from India to Norway.

In conclusion, the notion of a race of superhuman beings creating humanity, interbreeding with them, and then letting their demi-god offspring rule them is nearly universal. The Sumerian > Hebrew migration of myth is very clear as well. Eden (E-din in Sumerian), forbidden fruits, the flood, direct parallels between Gilgamesh and Ezekiel... there are simply too many correlations to see this as unconnected. The Bible doesn't even completely edit out the tell-tale give aways... but that is a story for another post.