Let's Talk About the Two Babylons.
Semiramis was neither Nimrod's wife nor the basis for goddess worship or the mystery religions.
Believe it or not, this topic was the impetus for starting this newsletter. I immediately got sidetracked and I’m not sure why I’ve taken so long to come back around to it, but I’m feeling pressed this morning to get into this. SO MANY pastors and teachers and podcasters — many of whom I love and respect and who are usually otherwise good at checking and verifying facts — promote this myth. It’s so ubiquitous that I can hardly listen to a Bible or prophecy podcast without it coming up and being presented as straight-up facts.
So what is this? You’ve undoubtedly heard it yourself at some point, and I would venture that a good deal of those reading this have also accepted it as factual. This is the assertion that the Biblical figure of Nimrod was king of Babylon and had a wife named Semiramis, and together they had a son named Tammuz. As the story goes, Semiramis killed Nimrod and then told her subjects that he had risen again as Tammuz. Her people venerated both her and Tammuz as gods, and this is the basis for all pagan systems of worship, particularly both goddess worship and the mystery religions, and that out of this have sprung mother-son cults that have taken many forms and persisted down through the millennia, finally culminating in the Catholic church and their veneration of Mary as the mother of God, claiming that this is “Mystery Babylon” of Revelation 17.
The first time I heard this, it sounded somewhat convincing and seemed to have some explanatory power, but my first question was, where is this information coming from? Because it’s nowhere to be found in scripture. Yes, Nimrod and Tammuz are both mentioned by name, thousands of years apart in wildly different contexts, but very little information is provided about Nimrod and none whatsoever is mentioned about Tammuz. What it does tell us about Nimrod never mentions that he had a wife or offspring. Considering that he comes up in the genealogies it seems odd that it wouldn’t mention his sons, if indeed he had any.
So I looked it up. And it took me less than five minutes to learn that the sole source for this claim is a book by Alexander Hislop called The Two Babylons, published in 1858. Hislop was a Scottish minister who was known mainly for his staunch anti-Catholic rhetoric, and also known for making a lot of claims and not backing them up with sources.1
This was indeed the case with The Two Babylons, which cites very few sources, and the ones he does cite are highly dubious. He was primarily inspired by ancient Greek writings celebrating a Babylonian queen named Semiramis. These writings associated Semiramis with Ninus, whom the Hellenistic Greeks credited as the founder of Nineveh. Hislop basically assumed that Ninus equals Nimrod and then proceeded to make up the rest of the story whole cloth, tossing Tammuz into the blender along with a number of unrelated ancient myths, and drawing a direct link from Semiramis to the Babylonian goddess Inanna (Ishtar to the Assyrians), as well as pretty much every other pagan goddess throughout history.2
The Real Semiramis
Beyond the problem of him making a gigantic leap in logic based on very little data, another issue is that the Greek writings he based this off were not history texts, but basically historical fan fiction. Semiramis was the Hellenistic name given to Shammuramat, an actual historical figure who lived at least a thousand years after Nimrod is believed to have been alive. She was the wife of the Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad V who ruled from 824 BC to 811 BC. They actually had four sons, the eldest of which was too young to ascend to the throne when his father died, and so in an unprecedented move, Shammuramat ruled as Queen Regent until he came of age. During her reign, she erected a stele encouraging her subjects to venerate both her deceased husband and her son as King of the Universe.
Apparently some Greek writers — more poets than historians — were so taken with this idea of a woman ruling Assyria that they basically Hellenized her and wrote her into their own history and mythology, and this was basically how Hislop came to identify Semiramis as the wife of Nimrod.
What About Tammuz?
Tammuz is mentioned in passing in Ezekiel 8:14, in the midst of a vision Ezekiel is given of all the pagan worship practices that are taking place in the temple of YHWH. Tammuz is the Hebrew name for Dumuzi, an ancient Sumerian demigod — in other words, if he existed at all, he was a Nephilim, and a pre-flood one at that, which means he was KO’d a couple of generations before Nimrod was born, although if that is indeed the case, then we can assume his soul lives on in demon form.
Dumuzi is featured in the ancient Akkadian and Sumerian texts describing Inanna’s Decent Into the Underworld, in which he’s named as the husband of Inanna/Ishtar. Inanna’s sister and rival, Ereshkigal, was queen of the underworld, who tricked Inanna into visiting her there and trapped her and killed her. She was rescued and revived by the convoluted sort of means that is typical of ancient pagan myths, and when she returned home she found her husband living his best life and not grieving for her one little bit. And so she has him dragged to the underworld to take her place. But later on she actually misses him and relents somewhat, deigning to allow him to leave the underworld for six months out of every year.
Dumuzi is also mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh (another figure who is often linked to Nimrod) as the husband of Ishtar (whose Hebrew name is Astarte). And there was indeed an Ishtar/Dumuzi cult that persisted up through the time of Ezekiel, which apparently the “women weeping for Tammuz” in the Jewish temple belonged to.3
The Real Source of Pagan Worship
Whatever other issues Hislop might have had, one that we must consider is that, as a post-enlightenment minister, he was probably unknowingly indoctrinated into a humanist scientific worldview, as so many of our pastors and Bible teachers still are today. Which means that he was prone to look for naturalistic explanations for supernatural realities. Fortunately, we don’t need books like The Two Babylons to explain the origins of pagan worship and Satanic mystery religions — we need only look to scripture for the truth.
That truth is that high-ranking angelic beings left their heavenly abode, took human wives and produced hybrid offspring, which were the Nephilim. (Genesis 6:4, Jude 1:6). God flooded the earth to wipe out the Nephilim and all their destructive influence on humanity. Afterwards, Noah’s great grandson Nimrod built a number of cities, including ancient Babylon (Genesis 10). Though not explicitly stated in scripture, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus credits Nimrod with leading the attempt to build the Tower of Babel, a blatant act of defiance toward YHWH and the first attempt to establish a One World Order (Genesis 11).
In response to this attempt, YHWH scattered all the people and confused their languages, thus establishing the nations. He then disinherited the nations, washing his hands of them and handing them over to the Sons of God (i.e., the Bene ha Elohim, high ranking angelic beings) to watch over and govern (Deuteronomy 32:8 ESV). Many, if not most, or even all, of these Sons of God in turn defied YHWH and abused their authority along with their human charges, and were summarily judged and sentenced to “die like men” because of it (Psalm 82).
These are the Princes depicted in Daniel 10, the Powers, Principalities and Rulers in Ephesians 6, and, along with Satan, the O.G. divine rebel whom Jesus himself identified as the being behind both Ba’al and Zeus, are the source of pagan worship and all of the mystery religions. Really, it’s not that mysterious.4
Why Does This Matter?
It matters because The Two Babylons is both a distortion of and a distraction from the truth. It credits mere humans with being the root of false worship, denying the extremely important reality of the supernatural beings who have power and influence over the world, who are destined for the Lake of Fire and who want nothing more than to drag us along with them, enslaving us and tormenting us as much as they can along the way. It lends to a watered-down gospel that’s about nothing more than forgiveness of sins and going to heaven when we die — which, yes, is a big deal in and of itself, but it leaves out the whole picture, which is that Jesus came on a rescue mission to deliver us from enslavement to these entities and sharing in their death sentence, and to reverse their works and restore all that they destroyed in including us in their rebellion.
Not only that, but it also takes the focus off of Nimrod, who is alluded to in various prophecies and is a typological proto-Antichrist figure — and perhaps, according to some, will be somehow either resurrected as or reincarnated into THE Antichrist.
The Real Mystery Babylon?
The main purpose of Hislop’s book is to denigrate the Catholic church as the ultimate manifestation of this mother-son mystery cult, identifying Roman Catholicism as “Mystery Babylon” of Revelation 17. Of course, the problems with this are many and varied, and I don’t have time to get into all of them. But to be fair to Hislop, this belief, along with the Pope being the Antichrist, goes back almost to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. He didn’t originate it, he simply attempted to prove it.
Setting the issues with Catholicism aside for a moment, one of the core issues is that, again, it ascribes a human origin to a spiritual reality. By imagining the goddess Inanna/Ishtar as nothing more than an inflated, imaginary version of the human Semiramis, Hislop once again detracts and distracts from the fact that Inanna is a very real fallen angel, one of the spiritual rulers over not just ancient Babylon, but the Babylonian system that continued through Persia, Greece, ancient Rome, and persists in the western world, and that she may indeed be depicted in Revelation 17 as the prostitute who rides the beast.
For more on that theory and why it seems probable that Inanna, a gender-bending deity who transitions back and forth between being both a female goddess of free love, sex and gender fluidity and a male god of war and violence, is the currently reigning Spirit of the Age and a likely candidate for the prostitute of Revelation (whose name in the text is not “Mystery Babylon,” but is a mystery — something previously hidden — revealed as Babylon), I’ll refer you to Derek and Sharon Gilbert, who have done extensive research on this deity and her various roles and influence throughout the ages. Here are some articles they’ve written on the subject for a jumping-off point if you want to go deeper:
Inanna: Goddess of Sex and Violence
Let’s talk about the Catholics for a minute
I want to tread carefully here. I have Catholic readers as well as Protestant and Evangelical, and I neither want to come off as a Catholic apologist nor throw my Catholic brothers and sisters under the bus. While I recognize that the Roman Catholic church has a lot of unbiblical practices and beliefs, as well as issues with idolatry and sexual sin and abuse, frankly, so do both mainline Protestants and Evangelicals.
I’ve mentioned the book of Revelation a few times, and I want to step back and point you to the first three chapters, in which Jesus has John pen seven letters to seven churches located throughout what’s now modern-day Turkey.
There are several different views of these letters and the churches and what they represent (which I think are all simultaneously correct). One of those views is that the churches represent the whole of the Church Age, with each church representing a different period or faction of Christianity throughout Church history.5
According to this view, the Church of Thyatira represents the Roman Catholic church. Jesus had a lot of harsh things to say about this particular ecclesia, in particular calling out their tolerance of a Jezebel in their midst who was leading them into sexual sin and syncretism, as well as idolatry. BUT: he also commends a remnant within the church of genuine believers who are true to the faith.
I feel like we Evangelicals, many of whom are on the same page as Hislop regarding the role of Catholicism and the Pope in the Tribulation, need to tread with care and be mindful of not making sweeping generalizations about Catholics in general, denying even the possibility of their salvation or refusing to acknowledge them as part of the universal (small-c catholic) Church. If the Church Age view of Revelation 2 and 3 is correct, then Jesus himself includes Catholics as part of the Church. And I’ve gotten to know a number of Catholics here who I’m certain are part of that faithful remnant which he commended and, for all our doctrinal differences, are every bit as Christian as I am.
And for some additional perspective, do you know who Jesus didn’t speak a single positive word about? The church of Sardis, which in this view represents the Mainline reformed denominations. He also had nothing good to say about the church of Laodicea, in which it’s all too easy to recognize those Evangelical off-shoots of the Word of Faith prosperity movement and the New Apostolic Reformation and other New Age infiltrations.
Being a Berean and Testing the Spirits
As I mentioned above, it took me all of five minutes with a search engine to discover the origins of this Semiramis theory, and another 20 minutes or so of clicking and reading to learn why it’s completely false. I’m not saying that to pat myself on the back, but only to show how it often doesn’t take that much time or effort just to verify whether or not something we hear is the truth. And when we hear something that isn’t scriptural, we should be doing that, no matter who says it and how much we admire or trust them. Not being willing to do that simple step can open the door to all kinds of deception — and in this age of rampant deception in which we live, it’s more crucial than ever.
Footnotes
For more on this, see: The Two Babylons: A Case Study in Poor Methodology by Ralph Woodrow.
Incidentally, Hislop and this book are also the source of the persistent, pervasive and false claims that Easter is the worship of Ishtar and that the name of the holiday is derived from her name.
Incidentally, Dumuzi was credited as the ancient mythological “dying and rising god” which atheists and skeptics attempted to use to debunk Christ’s resurrection, prior to discovery of the full text that clarified that he never died, he was only forced to live in the underworld for half the year.
This is the Divine Council worldview in a nutshell.
Chuck Missler’s teaching on Revelation covers this view and is also just really good.
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