“Sitchin posing with an enlarged, purported 6000-year-old cylinder seal
impression,”
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ZECHARIA_SITCHIN.jpg,
Lapavaestacaliente [CC0], from
Wikimedia Commons
[1st of 9 Parts]
Is
it true that there’s a 12th member of our solar system?
That
it played a major role in the stabilization of planetary orbits in the early
stages of solar system formation?
That
it once collided with the primordial Earth? That it seeded Earth with life and
made evolution possible?
That
the 12th planet’s inhabitants upgraded earth’s Homo erectus into Homo
sapiens?
That
the 12th planet catalyzed the
occurrence of the Great Deluge?
Is
it true that life on Earth as we know it--including civilization, art, and culture—is of extrasolar or extraterrestrial
origin?
Zecharia
Sitchin (July 11, 1920 – Oct. 9, 2010) answered
the aforesaid questions in the affirmative--in his first book, The Twelfth Planet (1976).
If his claims are true, Sitchin may well be
the world’s greatest scholar of, among many other things, the origins of life
on earth.
Among works
that he has authored, his fame rests on The
Earth Chronicles, a seven-book
account of what happened in many dark areas of prehistory: The 12th Planet (1976), The Stairway to Heaven (1980), The
Wars of Gods and Men (1985), The Lost
Realms (1990), When Time Began (1993),
The Cosmic Code (1998), and The End of Days (2007).
Sitchin’s
research findings are, to say the least, controversial.
Back in
2009 when I first introduced his first book to my humanities classes in the
form of a printed 35-page guide, with illustrations reproduced with his
permission, the common reaction of my students was one of awe.
Some previous
students, however, who had read the book in the late 70s, commented on FB in 2009 and 2010 how Sitchin
had given them a bigger picture of prehistory.
In 2010,
before Sitchin passed away, I had some of my articles on Sitchin published on
the web, through Triond.com--which disbanded without warning in 2015—and along
with it, the disappearance of all the articles I submitted.
Fortunately
for me, my laptop still has some of the drafts of my Sitchin articles—and what
I write here may already be familiar to some readers.
The purpose
of this article—as well as related articles in future—is neither to prove Sitchin
right nor wrong, but to simply share, as reader, some highlights from his Twelfth Planet.
I leave it
to the more informed readers, scholars, or critics who have read Sitchin, to form their respective
views.
Some who have
already taken a non-affirmative side, and given information as to why, include Michael
S. Heiser, Roger W. Wescott, C. Leroy Ellenberger, Peter James, and William Irwin Thompson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin).
Sitchin’s The 12th Planet: Overview
Central to Sitchin’s
research findings, as put forth in The
Twelfth Planet, seems to be the arrival on Earth in prehistoric times of
extraterrestrials or extrasolar beings known as the Anunnaki—the biblical
Nefilim, who came to Earth in search of gold needed for their “dwindling
atmosphere.”
The first
settlers on Earth, they came from Nibiru (Marduk in Babylonian), a planet that, Sitchin writes, visited the solar system once every 3,600 years.
Sitchin
attributes to the Nibiruans, or Anunnaki, a number of things that appear to shed
light on enigmas never before made clear by modern scholarship. These include,
among other things:
(1) the penning down in the Enuma
elish (Epic of Creation) of events relative to the formation of the solar
system;
(2) the “creation” of the human being some 300,000 years ago in Africa (that
is, the upgrading of Homo erectus
into Homo sapiens);
(3) the intermarriages between the Nefilim and the daughters of humankind
some 200,000 years later—that is, circa 100,000 years ago—which angered Enlil,
the Nefilim’s supreme commander on Earth, and caused him to plot the
annihilation of the humans through ailments and famine (and when the plan did
not work, to let them all perish in a forthcoming Great Deluge);
(4) the occurrence of the Great Deluge 13,000 years ago or circa 11,000
B.C.—a date never before made specific, it seems, even by the Old Testament;
and
(5) the granting, after the Deluge, of the arts of agriculture and
civilization to the survivors of the Flood and their descendants, and, later,
of Kingship—until the human beings had “crowded off their gods” (the Nefilim or
Anunnaki) from planet Earth.
Will the
Nefilim return? The 12th
Planet does not answer this question.
However, in his The End of Days, the last book of The Earth Chronicles series, Sitchin provides possible time frames,
including those of Sir Isaac Newton’s computations of the planet’s return (the subject
of a future article).
Shall
today's readers take Sitchin's findings as gospel truth?
Sitchin has
quite a great fanbase worldwide who believe in what he has written, though he
also has his share of naysayers (as mentioned above), most of whom view his writings
as “pseudoscience.”
Sitchin’s “Author’s Note”
In his
“Author’s Note” in The Twelfth Planet,
Sitchin states that the “prime source for the biblical verses” he quotes (in the
said book) is the “Old Testament in its original Hebrew” (vi).
He stresses
that “all the translations (he has) consulted” are “just that: translations or
interpretations,” and that in the “final analysis, what counts is what the
original Hebrew says” (vi).
The point
that Sitchin seems to imply is that all translations or interpretations of the
Old Testament are in need of updating.
This seems
to further imply that non-Hebrew versions of the Old Testament have not always
been rendered correctly, or in the appropriate context that they should have
been.
For instance,
Sitchin notes that the Hebrew word teba,
rendered in English as “ark” (which the biblical Noah was said to have used)
actually signifies, in the Hebrew text and context, not a mere ship or boat but
a “submersible ship” or a “submarine”—the only craft of its kind, Sitchin points
out, which could have survived the Great Flood.
Sitchin’s “Prologue: Genesis”
What
propelled Sitchin to write The Twelth
Planet?
In the said
book's “Prologue: Genesis,” he informs that the “seed” for the book “was
planted” almost “fifty years ago” when he was “a young schoolboy studying
Genesis in its original Hebrew” (vii).
To his
teacher’s translation of the term Nefilim
(“the sons of the deities”) as “giants,” Sitchin had “objected: didn’t it mean
literally ‘Those Who Were Cast Down,’ who had descended to Earth” ?
After 30
years of research, Sitchin “re-created a continuous and plausible scenario of
prehistoric events” (viii).
His
“evidence” consisted “primarily of the ancient texts”--among them, the Sumerian
Kings List, Enuma elish or the Epic
of Creation, Atra-Hasis Epic, and many others, as well as “pictures” in
cylinder seals and other ancient artifacts (ix).
Related Articles:
Chapters 1 and 2 of The Twelfth Planet
Chapters 3 and 4 of The Twelfth Planet
Chapters 5 and 6 of The Twelfth Planet
Chapters 7 and 8 of The Twelfth Planet
Chapters 9 and 10 of The Twelfth Planet
Chapters 11 and 12 of The Twelfth Planet
https://penvision.blogspot.com/2019/01/zecharia-sitchins-12th-planet-chapters_1.html
Chapter 13 and 14 of The Twelfth Planet
Chapter 15 or Last of The Twelfth Planet
https://penvision.blogspot.com/2019/01/zecharia-sitchins-12th-planet-chapter.html
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