Nimrod
And should it trample our country.Genesis 10:10 says that the "mainstays of his kingdom" (רֵאשִׁית מַמְלַכְתּוֹ rēšit̲ mamlak̲to) were Babylon, Uruk, Akkad and Calneh in Shinar (Mesopotamia)—understood variously to imply that he either founded these cities, ruled over them, or both.
Owing to an ambiguity in the original Hebrew text, it is unclear whether it is he or Ashur who additionally built Nineveh, Resen, Rehoboth-Ir and Nimrud (Kalaḥ); both interpretations are reflected in various English versions.
Walter Raleigh devoted several pages in his History of the World (1614) to reciting past scholarship regarding the question of whether it had been Nimrod or Ashur who built the cities in Assyria.
Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was.
The association with Erech (Babylonian Uruk), a city that lost its prime importance around 2000 BCE as a result of struggles between Isin, Larsa and Elam, also attests the early provenance of the stories of Nimrod.
The Book of Jubilees mentions the name of "Nebrod" (the Greek form of Nimrod) only as being the father of Azurad, the wife of Eber and mother of Peleg (8:7).
The Babylonian Talmud (Gittin 56b) attributes Titus's death to an insect that flew into his nose and picked at his brain for seven years in a repetition of another legend referring to the biblical King Nimrod.
[14][15][16] An early Arabic work known as Kitab al-Magall or the Book of Rolls (part of Clementine literature) states that Nimrod built the towns of Hadāniūn, Ellasar, Seleucia, Ctesiphon, Rūhīn, Atrapatene, Telalān, and others, that he began his reign as king over earth when Reu was 163, and that he reigned for 69 years, building Nisibis, Raha (Edessa) and Harran when Peleg was 50.
Later, the book describes how Nimrod established fire worship and idolatry, then received instruction in divination for three years from Bouniter, the fourth son of Noah.
[17] In the Recognitions (R 4.29), one version of the Clementines, Nimrod is equated with the legendary Assyrian king Ninus, who first appears in the Greek historian Ctesias as the founder of Nineveh.
However, this traditional identification of the cities built by Nimrod in Genesis is no longer accepted by modern scholars, who consider them to be located in Sumer, not Syria.
The Ge'ez Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan (c. 5th century) also contains a version similar to that in the Cave of Treasures, but the crown maker is called Santal, and the name of Noah's fourth son who instructs Nimrod is Barvin.
Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer (c. 833) relates the Jewish traditions that Nimrod inherited the garments of Adam and Eve from his father Cush, and that these made him invincible.
Another Muslim historian of the 13th century, Abu al-Fida, relates the same story, adding that the patriarch Eber (an ancestor of Abraham) was allowed to keep the original tongue, Hebrew in this case, because he would not partake in the building.
After the catastrophic failure of that most ambitious endeavour and in the midst of the confusion of tongues, Nimród the giant moved to the land of Evilát, where his wife, Enéh gave birth to twin brothers Hunor and Magyar (aka Magor).
[20] The hunter god or spirit Nyyrikki, figuring in the Finnish Kalevala as a helper of Lemminkäinen, is associated with Nimrod by some researchers and linguists.
Some accounts have a gnat or mosquito enter Nimrod's brain and drive him out of his mind (a divine retribution which Jewish tradition also assigned to the Roman Emperor Titus, destroyer of the Temple in Jerusalem).
[citation needed] Some Jewish traditions also identified him with Cyrus, whose birth according to Herodotus was accompanied by portents, which made his grandfather try to kill him.
The commentaries on this surah offer a wide variety of embellishments of this narrative, one of which by Ibn Kathir, a 14th-century scholar, adding that Nimrod showed his rule over life and death by killing a prisoner and freeing another.
[27] Whether or not conceived as having ultimately repented, Nimrod remained in Jewish and Islamic tradition an emblematic evil person, an archetype of an idolater and a tyrannical king.
Citing examples of God's power, he asks: "Has He not, in past days, caused Abraham, in spite of His seeming helplessness, to triumph over the forces of Nimrod?
"[29] The story of Abraham's confrontation with Nimrod did not remain within the confines of learned writings and religious treatises, but also conspicuously influenced popular culture.
]|— Historians, Orientalists, Assyriologists and mythographers have long tried to find links between the Nimrod of biblical texts and real historically attested figures in Mesopotamia.
Since the city of Akkad was destroyed and lost with the destruction of its Empire in the period 2200–2154 BC (long chronology), the much later biblical stories mentioning Nimrod seem to recall the late Early Bronze Age.
The association with Erech (Sumero-Akkadian Uruk), a city that lost its prime importance around 2000 BC as a result of struggles between Isin, Ur, Larsa and Elam, also attests the early provenance of the stories of Nimrod.
More recently, Sumerologists have suggested additionally connecting both this Euechoios, and the king of Babylon and grandfather of Gilgamesh who appears in the oldest copies of Aelian (c. 200 AD) as Euechoros, with the name of the founder of Uruk known from cuneiform sources as Enmerkar.
[46] He also claimed that the Catholic Church was a millennia-old secret conspiracy, founded by Semiramis and Nimrod to propagate the pagan religion of ancient Babylon.
Later influence modified the legend in the Mesopotamian tradition, adding such details as the hero's name, his territory and some of his deeds, and most important his title, "King of Kish".
[53]In modern North American English, the term "nimrod" is often used to mean a dimwitted or a stupid person, a usage perhaps first recorded in an 1836 letter from Robert E. Lee to a female friend.
The sarcastic moniker was used towards the foreman (named Hunter) of a gang of workmen as a play both on his surname and on his supposed religious beliefs and sense of self-importance.
