Nimrod

“ The language of Scripture with regard to Nimrod is laudatory rather than the contrary; and it would seem to have been from a misapprehension of the nexus of the Mosaic narrative that the traditions above mentioned originated. Nimrod, “the mighty hunter before the Lord,” had not in the days of Moses that ill reputation which attached to him in later ages, when he was regarded as the great Titan or Giant, who made war upon the gods, and who was at once the builder of the tower, and the persecutor who forced Abraham to quit his original country. ”

“ The king had a large blacksmith's hammer brought into his throne-room, and with that his princes and nobles smote him on the head; and the more violent the blow, the greater was the relief afforded. Nimrod reigned a thousand years before he felt the torment of the gnat; up to that moment he had suffered no pains. He lived for five hundred years with the fly eating at his brain; and all that while, night and day, there were relays of men to strike his head with the hammer. ”

“ He established a national government, and he made Therach, the son of Nahor, his chief officer. When Nimrod had thus established his power he decided to build a city, a walled town, which should be the capital of his country. And he selected a certain plain and built a large city thereon, and called it Shinar. And Nimrod dwelt in Shinar in safety, and gradually became ruler over all the world; and at that time all the people of the earth were of one language and of one speech. Nimrod in his prosperity did not regard the Lord. He made gods of wood and stone, and the people copied his doings. ”

“ These legends have been taken up by the Arabs, and although his history has been lost and replaced by absurd and worthless stories, Nimrod still remains the most prominent name in the traditions of the country; everything good or evil is attributed to him, and the most important ruins are even now called after his name. From the time of the early Christian writers down to to-day, men have been busy framing systems of general chronology, and since Nimrod was always known as a famous sovereign it was necessary to find a definite place for him in each chronological scheme. ”

“ The last explanation is not allowed by the usage of the language, the second is irreconcilable with the context. The name itself, Nimrod from מרד, “we will revolt,” points to some violent resistance to God. It is so characteristic that it can only have been given by his contemporaries, and thus have become a proper name. [26]
In addition to this, Nimrod as a mighty hunter founded a powerful kingdom ”

“ One day, as Layard was returning to the mound from an excursion, he was met on the way by two Arabs who had ridden out to meet him at full speed, and from a distance shouted to him in the wildest excitement: "Hasten, O Bey! hasten to the diggers! for they have found Nimrod himself. It is wonderful, but it is true! we have seen him with our eyes. There is no God but God!" Greatly puzzled, he hurried on and, descending into the trench, found that the workmen had uncovered a gigantic head, the body to which was still imbedded in earth and rubbish. ”

“ If so, it would be the third person of the imperfect, formed by prefixing n, as in Aramaic. Schrader [377] regards this prefixed n in Nimrôd as a sound used for the formation of nouns. I will also call to mind incidentally that on Babylonian ground we meet also with the name of a god Merôd. [378] The wars of Nimrod with Abraham are not preserved in the Old Testament, but are in Agadic tradition, which has also retained from the Nimrod-myth an expression of a truly solar character; that three hundred and fifty kings sit before Nimrod, to serve him. ”

“ The name Nimrod has not been found in any ancient (say older than 500 B.C.) non-Israelite document or inscription; and there is no conclusive evidence for identifying Nimrod with any of the names found in such documents. In the absence of evidence, the theories are naturally endless, especially as both the legendary and the historical heroes of the ancient East were often “mighty hunters.” Nimrod would suggest to a Jew or Syrian the idea of “rebel,” mrd = rebel ”

“ Nimrod, when he had four cities under his command, could not be content till he had four more. 3. It is expensive; Nimrod will rather be at the charge of rearing cities than not have the honour of ruling them. The spirit of building is the common effect of a spirit of pride. 4. It is daring, and will stick at nothing; Nimrod's name signifies rebellion, which (if indeed he did abuse his power to the oppression of his neighbours) teaches us that tyrants to men are rebels to God, and their rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.
15. And Canaan begat Sidon his firstborn, and Heth, 16. ”

“ Nimrod has been identified both with Merodach, the tutelar god of Babylon, and with Gilgamesh, the hero of the epic of that name, with Orion, and with others. The name, according to Petrie, has even been found in Egyptian documents of the XXII Dynasty as 'Nemart.'
Nimrod seems to be one of those giants who rage against the gods, as do the Titans of Greek myth and the Jotunn of Scandinavian story. All are in fact earth-gods, the disorderly forces of nature, who were defeated by the deities who stood for law and order. ”

“ When Nimrod was an infant he was taken by his mother to sea, and the ship being wrecked, all that were in it perished, save only the infant Nimrod who was saved through the pity of Izrail, the Angel of Death. God spared him, and nurtured him without the aid of mother or nurse; but when he grew up he proved ungrateful, and was puffed up with self-conceit and egotism, and showed enmity against God and Abraham His servant. When the prince found himself cast off by the King he came to himself, and repented and humbled himself with deep contrition. ”

“ Of course, Nimrod was blamed for not being a better mountaineer. 'He ought to have seen that broken turf by the trail,' or those 'blades of fresh pulled grass in the pine fork.' How could they know that a woman and her fears had hampered him at every step, especially as you see there was no need?
Always regulate your fears according to the situation, and then you will not go into the valley of the shadow of death, when you are only lost in the mountains. ”

“ Bibl., article “Nimrod,” are generally regarded as far too sweeping. Ball, Sacred Books of the Old Testament, marks verse 9, which describes Nimrod as “a mighty hunter,” as a later addition, giving a mistaken explanation of the gibbôr of verse 8. ”

“ The derivation of the name Nimrod may mean 'rebel.' In all his later legends, for instance, those of them that are related by Philo in his De Gigantibus (a title which proves that Nimrod was connected with the giant race by tradition) , [Pg 51] he appears as treacherous and untrustworthy. The theory that he is Merodach has no real foundation either in scholarship or probability. As a matter of fact the Nimrod legend seems to be very much more archaic than any piece of tradition connected with Merodach, who indeed is a god of no very great antiquity. ”

“ This Nimrod himself, against whom Abraham the Nomad contends in the same sense in which Jacob the Nomad against Esau the Hunter, is a hunter (Gen. X. 9) . The etymological explanation of the name Nimrôd cannot be established until the really primary signification of the root mârad has been satisfactorily traced; for it may be considered certain, that at the myth-creating stage mankind had no sense of the idea of ‘insurrection,’ which could only be formed after some advance in social life, and could not therefore endow a word with that special meaning. ”

“ For other publications of Haupt on the Gilgamesh epic, see the Bibliography, § 6. The identification with the Biblical Nimrod is now definitely abandoned by scholars, though the picture drawn of Nimrod is influenced by the traditions regarding Gilgamesh. See p. 515.
[858] The best general work on the epic (based on Haupt's edition) is A. Jeremias' Izdubar-Nimrod (Leipzig, 1891) , a reprint with additions, of his article on 'Izdubar' in Roscher's Ausführliches Lexicon der Griechischen und Römischen Mythologie ii. ”

“ The box was rather heavy, so Nimrod went to Yeddar's, which was not far away, to see if he could get one of the loungers to help carry the captive to a large wire cage that we had rigged up near our shack.
There were six men near the office, bronzed mountaineers, men of guns and grit, men who had spent their lives facing danger; but, when it came to facing a skunk, each looked at Nimrod as one would at a crazy man and had important business elsewhere. ”

“ 60 Proud Nimrod first the bloody chase began, A mighty hunter, and his prey was man: Our haughty Norman boasts that barbarous name, And makes his trembling slaves the royal game. ”

“ He ruled first in Babylonia over the region which from other sources we know to have been the centre of Nimrod's kingdom. He extended his dominion to the Armenian mountains, the boundary of his late conquests according to tradition, and one principal scene of his exploits and triumphs was the city of Erech, which, according to Genesis, was the second capital of Nimrod. ”

“ It is very possible that there might be some national tradition respecting him. Nimrod, as we shall presently see, was a popular personage in Chaldæa in the first centuries of our era. It is difficult to unravel, amidst the confusion of ideas which then prevailed in the East, the origin of legends so denuded of true character, and over which is thrown that general level of mere platitude which gives such a singular air of monotony and conventionalism to all the traditions transmitted to us by Arabian writers. ”

“ THE TOWER OF BABEL.
FIRST we will take Jewish traditions, and then Mahommedan legends. The Rabbis relate as follows:—
After the times of the great Deluge, men feared a recurrence of that great overthrow, and they assembled on and inhabited the plain of Shinar. There, they no longer obeyed the gentle guidance of Shem, the son of Noah; but they cast the kingdom of God far from them, and chose as their sovereign, Nimrod, son of Cush, son of Ham. [1] Nimrod became very great in power. Having been born when his father was old, he was dearly beloved, and every whim had been gratified. ”

“ From the parallel passages in Genesis (x. 10, 11) it is apparent that Nimrod is the name of an individual, the traditional founder of the Babylonian-Assyrian Empire. As Cush is here called the father of Nimrod and in verse 8 is the son of Ham, Hebrew tradition would appear to have regarded Hamites as the founders of the Babylonian power. Possibly the Redactor of Genesis who combined these verses which belong to the tradition of J with verses 5‒9 which are from “P” may have thought so. ”

“ Merodach, it must be remembered, is always represented as a man, and is armed with weapons of war.
Mr. Smith first fancied that Nimrod might be Khammuragas, whom he identified with the first Arab king of Berosus, as this line of kings appeared to be connected with the Cossæans. This identification failing, after the discovery of the Deluge tablet in 1872, he conjectured that the hero whose name is provisionally read Izdubar is the Nimrod of the Bible, a conjecture which has since been adopted by several other scholars. ”

“ I queried. "Who ever heard of a man killing a mammoth with a hand-axe? And, for that matter, with anything else?"
"O man, have I not told you I was mad?" Nimrod replied, with a slight manifestation of sensitiveness. "Mad clean through, what of Klooch and the gun. Also, was I not a hunter? And was this not new and most unusual game? A hand-axe? Pish! I did not need it. Listen, and you shall hear of a hunt, such as might have happened in the youth of the world when cavemen rounded up the kill with hand-axe of stone. ”

“ The ship behaved splendidly—no other ship, not even the Discovery, would have come through so well. Certainly the Nimrod would never have reached the south water had she been caught in such pack. As a result I have grown strangely attached to the Terra Nova. As she bumped the floes with mighty shocks, crushing and grinding a way through some, twisting and turning to avoid others, she seemed like a living thing fighting a great fight. If only she had more economical engines she would be suitable in all respects. ”

“ Up rushed a fellow, white with rage and running, bang into the middle of the spectators, and shook the knot of them asunder. It was one of the two men from whom Nimrod had broken. He had a pitchfork in his hands which he proceeded to level. Clare flung his weight against him, threw up his fork, shoved him aside, and got close to the maddened animal. ”

“ Just as we came in sight of Merstham, the distant view halloo of the huntsman broke upon our ears, when the near-leader rising upon his haunches and neighing with delight at the inspiring sound, gave us to understand that he had not always been used to a life of drudgery, but in earlier times had most likely carried some daring Nimrod to the field, and bounded with fiery courage o'er hedge and gate, through dell and brake, outstripping the fleeting wind to gain the honour of the brush. ”

“ These verses will then read (Genesis, x. 11, 12) : "Out of that land he went forth to Assyria, and builded Nineveh, and Rehobothair, and Calah, and Resen, between Nineveh and Calah: the same is a great city."
As my identification of Izdubar with Nimrod has met with some objection, I think it will be useful to notice the various accounts of this hero, and the different hypotheses propounded with respect to his identification.
The two passages already quoted from Genesis afford the only reliable information with respect to Nimrod outside the cuneiform inscriptions. ”