Common Questions
As I answer questions about “The Creation of God” video in various places, I will copy the answers here, to save typing in the future. Of course, all the answers are in Laughing At The Devil, if you would like to dive to the bottom of the pool.
How do you know that the sexagesimal system came into being because of observations of Jupiter and Saturn?
This is a good question because Wikipedia currently says the system came into being through a mishmash of ‘five’ and ‘twelve.’ The problem is our intellects have gotten too excited thinking intellectual thoughts, and forgotten the humble roots our intellects grew out of. Those incorrect intellectual thoughts are reflected in the current Wikipedia article.
But there are several clues that point out the real ‘humble roots.’
The major fact indicating the sexagesimal system came from celestial observations is that to the Babylonians, Anu was represented by the number 60. Anu was their god of the sky. That is a pretty direct way of saying the number was found there.
In addition, the first use of the sexagesimal system occurred around 3200 BC. Quoting from my book,
“The French Assyriologist and Sumerologist F. Thureau-Dangin wrote about clay tablets using this system discovered in layer IV of the Uruk ruins in ancient Sumeria, dating them from 3300 to 3100 BC. The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative says the most prominent area in Uruk at that time was a precinct called the “House of Heaven.” In other words, the priests watching the sky were the active investigators of those times.”
I said the sexagesimal system comes from humble roots, and this is reflected in another quote by F. Thureau-Dangin:
…[In Sumeria] the unit of 60 has been incorporated in a system of numeration which was still in the process of formation, which had already the unit of 10, but had not yet, had never had the unit of 100. The new unit seems to have found its entrance into usage prior to the rise of the academic speculation, which intervened later, not in order to change the base, but in order to coordinate the system.
This, by itself, pretty much demolishes the idea that the sexagesimal system came about because of advanced intellectual thinking. Back then people were not sitting around pondering the advantages that combining a base 5 number system with a base 12 number system would have.
Another item indicating the sexagesimal system came into existence from observations of Saturn is that the Sumerian word for ‘sixty’ (as well as ‘one’) was geš. Back then their language was syllabic, where each syllable represented a distinct concept. (For more on this, see The Sumerian Lexicon.) The word for Saturn was ‘gena’, which incorporated the same ‘ge’. ‘gena’ also meant ‘constant, regular’, reflecting the regularity/constancy of the celestial pattern by its use in geš, as well as the regularity of Saturn’s own orbit.
And the last clue indicating the sexagesimal system came from observing the Jupiter/Saturn conjunctions is that ‘sixty’ was counted in ‘three twenties,’ directly reflecting the twenty-year/sixty-year Jupiter/Saturn conjunction sequence.
Added to the Samson astronomy, I have no doubt that the priests noticed this pattern around 3200 BC. Because it was ‘given to them by their god,’ so to speak, they revered the number, and because of that they used it. It was only through using it that they found out just how useful ‘sixty’ was! It still reverberates in our own times, on our watches, and in our angular measurement systems. But its original discovery has been hidden by the centuries, and the cleverness of our intellects!
Do you have any other proof that the Samson story was really derived from sixty-year astronomic observations, over the course of 440 years?
In addition to the thirty-three astronomic correlations in the story that mirror the celestial events step-by-step, our ancestors themselves linked Samson to ‘sixty.’ The Babylonian Talmud contains:
It has been taught: R. Simeon the Pious [about 100 AD] said: The width between Samson’s shoulders was sixty cubits, as it is said: And Samson lay till midnight, and arose at midnight and laid hold of the doors of the gate of the city, and the two posts, and plucked them up, bar and all, and put them upon his shoulders; and there is a tradition that the gates of Gaza were not less than sixty cubits [in width]…
In addition, Wikipedia currently states:
In the Talmudic period, some seem to have denied that Samson was a historical figure, regarding him instead as a purely mythological personage. This was viewed as heretical by the rabbis of the Talmud, and they attempted to refute this.
This indicates the most knowledgeable priests two-thousand years ago probably still knew about Samson’s astronomic backbone, and kept the knowledge alive with the ‘obtuse’ sixty reference. Of course, even if they did, ignorance prevailed at a later date, as is reflected by our current ignorance of the Samson astronomy, and the roots of the sexagesimal system.
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