For someone who is talked about so much, the Bible sure doesn’t say much about Nimrod! Or does it? This week we are going to look at what the phrases “powerful hunter” and “in the sight of the Lord” mean before having fun next week talking about all the different stories people have made up about Nimrod.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers, or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
(Parents, all Scripture comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible, and we will mostly be in Genesis 10)
So, this week and next week, we’re going to talk about a mysterious Bible figure and some really cool archaeology about lion hunting. I’ve told you all in the past that the less that is written in the Bible about someone, the more people come along and fill in the blanks with some really crazy stuff. This week we are going to talk about what the Bible says about Nimrod, one of the descendants of Ham, what the Bible doesn’t say about him, and whether or not he shows up in world history. Next week we’re going to talk about all the things that different people have made up about Nimrod and all their “what if” stories. The reason we are going to do that is because a lot of people take the “what if” stories seriously and they even fight over it so we are going to see who and where and when those stories come from. Some of them are from the time of Jesus and some are a lot closer to our time—even though they say they are telling the historical truth! Sometimes they were making things up and at other times people mistook “what if” stories for history, and sometimes they just had no archaeology to work with at all because it hadn’t been found yet so they were doing the best they could. So, this will be a fun and crazy two weeks but one of the things that I spent a lot of time studying years ago was ancient Babylonian religion and so when I heard these stories, I knew there was something terribly wrong because their facts didn’t match up with what we know. So, what does the Bible actually say about Nimrod?
Cush fathered Nimrod, who began to be powerful in the land. He was a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord. That is why it is said, “Like Nimrod, a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord.” His kingdom started with Babylon, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. From that land he went to Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-ir, Calah, and Resen, between Nineveh and the great city Calah. (Gen 10:8-11) Cush fathered Nimrod, who was the first to become a great warrior on earth. (I Chron 1:10) They will shepherd the land of Assyria with the sword, the land of Nimrod with a drawn blade. So he will rescue us from Assyria when it invades our land, when it marches against our territory. (Micah 5:6)
And that’s all the Bible ever says about Nimrod but if you google his name you will find that there are pages and pages telling us all about him and what he did and there are so many books written about him and who he was but the problem is that they are all make-believe because there isn’t enough about him to write a book about. They won’t have any footnotes linked to anything found in cuneiform tablets (clay tablets that are carved with letters and baked, which makes them last a long time), or any papyri (ancient paper made from reeds), and no ancient historians talk about him either or even about someone who specifically did all the things the Bible talks about under a different name. And that shouldn’t surprise us because humans weren’t writing a lot of those kinds of records back then, way before Abraham, so a lot of information was lost. It doesn’t mean that Nimrod wasn’t real, it just means that all we know about him for sure is in the Bible, and the Bible didn’t think he was important enough to talk much about even though people today talk about him a lot. You see, when we don’t know much of anything about a person, folks really like to make that person into whatever they want! Does that mean that the Bible isn’t telling us anything? Nope—but what it is telling us isn’t obvious to most people who haven’t studied ancient kings and how they are talked about! So, this is actually going to be really cool and fun!
What do we know? We know that Nimrod was a descendant of Cush—maybe his son or grandson or maybe even later than that because in ancient times, they didn’t always give the full family tree. We talked about that last week. They wanted to get to the point! It would be like if someone said, “Queen Elizabeth, who was descended from Queen Victoria…” and it wouldn’t matter that she was her great-great-granddaughter because they would only mention the really famous people they wanted you to be thinking about. But, let’s say that Nimrod was the son of Cush, which he might have been! Totally possible! That would make him the great-grandson of Noah, and the grandson of Ham, and the son of Cush. But wait? All the rest of the family headed toward Africa! Why does Nimrod’s kingdom begin in Babylon when it is 1,641 miles away from Egypt? What the heck? One, it means that maybe it took him a heckuva long time to get there because that’s not where his family seems to have gone. The answer to how and why he got there is a mystery but some other information is right there in the Bible if we know the idioms of the ancient world. Do you remember about idioms from the first episode where we played the idiom game? An idiom is a saying that sounds like it means one thing when it actually means something else—like yesterday I was so embarrassed when I told my friend Pastor Matthew that a friend of mine would be coming to his congregation “with bells on” and Pastor Matthew didn’t know what that meant—because I am old enough to be his mom. So, I felt like a super old lady when I had to explain to him that when someone says they will “be there with bells on” it means that they are super excited about being there.
So what’s our important idiom? We see it twice in Gen 10:8, “Cush fathered Nimrod, who began to be powerful in the land. He was a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord. That is why it is said, “Like Nimrod, a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord.” And if it isn’t obvious to you what the idiom is, that’s okay—we don’t use it anymore. We actually have two idioms but the first is “powerful hunter.” And a lot of people think that means he was a giant who went out and hunted for critters to eat but that’s more like what Esau was—and we will come to him later in Genesis. In the ancient world, that was how kings were described—as mighty hunters. Their palaces were carved and painted with murals of the king hunting lions, because that was the way for kings to show how tough and manly they were. I am going to link a super cool article from the British Museum about it, which talks a lot about how popular this was and especially in Assyria, where the Bible talks about Nimrod having a Kingdom. The art goes back 3000 years before Jesus was born, which lines up pretty good with when Nimrod might have lived. And these kings would also claim that their gods had given them the special ability to kill lions, who were very feared by people and with good reason.
A lot of people think that lions have only been in Africa but that isn’t true. They roamed the roads all through the ancient world—in Israel, in Asia, and in Africa. It was one of the jobs of an ancient king to hunt them and keep the roads safe. I have three quotes that were written on Ashurbanipal’s palace walls, “In the steppe, a widespread place, raging lions, a ferocious mountain breed, attacked me and surrounded the chariot, the vehicle of my royal majesty. By the command of the god Ashur and the goddess Ishtar, the great gods…I scattered the pack of those lions.” See that? A powerful hunter kept the roads of his kingdom safe from dangerous lions that would attack travelers and livestock (that’s also something David did in the Bible). And he called it a command from his god Ashur—which is why his name is Ashurbanipal because it means “Ashur is the creator of the heir.” And it is a good thing he thought he had permission from Ishtar because she only had two favorite animals, one was an owl and the other was a lion because she was the goddess of war! Like Ashurbanipal, people often had the names of their gods as part of their own name—they did it in Israel too. Like Jehosaphat, which means that Yahweh (the name of our God) has judged or Yahweh rules. It’s cool when your name is saying something nice about God! All my name means is doorkeeper morning rose-twig.
Here’s another one, “I, Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria, while carrying out my princely sport, seized a lion that was born in the steppe by its tail and, through the command of the gods… shattered its skull with the mace that was in my hand.” Here he’s saying again that he can kill lions because the gods commanded him and gave him the strength. And one more, “I, Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria, to whom the god Ashur and the goddess Ishtar have granted outstanding strength, set up the fierce bow of the goddess Ishtar — the lady of battle — over the lions that I had killed. I made an offering over them and poured a libation of wine over them.” So, he’s describing all the ways he is killing these lions and, oh, by the way, it’s because the gods and goddesses are totally on his side, like, “Don’t mess with me, dudes, or you are messing with their favorite!” And if you think this guy is totally full of himself and bragging too much, yeah, he is, that’s how they talked about themselves and how other people talked about them too!
And that’s also how people talked about Nimrod, only the god that they seemed to have attributed his success to was the God of the Bible and not some foreign god, as people did with Ashurbanipal. As we will see next week, during the lifetime of Jesus, many thought that Nimrod was a big hero serving God because of how they read these verses. When they said he was a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord, that’s the same as saying that he was a mighty king serving God. And that’s our second idiom, “in the sight of the Lord.” It shows up quite a bit in the Bible. The first time is when Adam and Eve are hiding from God, they don’t want to be in His presence, in His sight where He can see them (of course, He could see them anyway). The next time is with Cain, when he runs away from the presence, or sight, of God. Neither of them wanted to be in God’s sight but Nimrod isn’t trying to hide at all! Whether it is good or bad, and we don’t know, God sees Nimrod and everyone knows it. And God told Abraham to walk in His presence too, using the same exact Hebrew words. Curioser and curioser, right? So far, we know that Nimrod was a powerful king who was walking in the presence of God. Hmmmm…
And then we have all that talk about his Kingdom, a kingdom that began with Babylon. But does that mean he founded and built Babylon or that he came in with an army and took control of Babylon, because it was already there? As we will see in chapter 11, the people build the tower in the place called Bavel (aka Babylon), but Nimrod is never mentioned at all. So, we don’t actually know if he was before Babylon, and was part of building it, or after Babylon, and took it over—which would have been a lot easier once everyone’s languages got messed up and they scattered all over the place. It’s a mystery that the Bible doesn’t answer. We know from other histories that Babylon has been around since long before Abraham was born, at least 2300 years before Jesus was born. Archaeologists have actually found it and have been digging it up! And we also know where Erech is, also called Uruk, that’s southeast of Babylon. And Akkad is well known, northwest of Babylon. We have no idea what Calneh is, that’s a big mystery, but then there are a lot of places in the Bible that archaeologists haven’t found yet. These were all in the land of Shinar, which we call Sumer. Archaeology tells us that the oldest civilizations on earth are there, places where people lived and worked together and traded and bought and sold, so that sounds about right! Then, it says that Nimrod left those places and went ever further north into Assyria and built the great city of Nineveh, and if you know the story of Jonah, you know about Ninevah! And it was not filled with fish slappers and they didn’t worship fish—Veggie Tales was just being funny so that you would pay attention to the story of Jonah. Calah is called Nimrud now. And you know what? You can search the internet and find a lot of totally cool archaeological stuff like ancient city walls and temples and all that stuff. I will try to remember to link some sites in the transcript for you. As for the other places, there are many debates because they seem to be words referring to city squares and canals—which makes sense because you totally need canals when you want to have water for your cities and crops!
Who was Nimrod? We just don’t know. Different people have tried to link him to different historical figures like Sargon of Akkad, Hammurabi of Babylon (we will talk about him more when we get to Exodus), or Shulgi of Ur and you can find YouTube videos making it sound like we have it figured out for sure but we don’t know for sure because, so far, no one has uncovered records of anyone doing all those things. And that’s okay. Sometimes things happened so long ago that it’s amazing we know anything at all! But, archaeologists are always finding new places to dig and we just never know when they are going to uncover more. As it is, there are over half a million tablets already found and some claim that there are as many as two million. They all have to be cleaned up and translated—that’s a lot of work. Maybe some of them will solve the mystery or maybe not. Did you know that when they uncovered a library in Ninevah (Jonah again!) they found like 22,000 tablets? Each one was written on and baked so they would be preserved. And there aren’t very many people who are trained to understand and translate them—hey, maybe you could be one of the translators or maybe you will go out in a team to find them. Not me though—I am not good with languages. We are all different, right? We are all smart in different ways. And we need all kinds of people to know how to do all kinds of things.
What we do know about Nimrod is what we’ve talked about already. Nimrod was king over a huge area in a time with no cars or airplanes. He built a huge empire! The area he had control over was not that much smaller than the state of California! Genesis 10 is telling us that he was the first person in the world to be a king over such a large area with so many great cities. We don’t know whether he was part of building Uruk, Akkad, or Babel or not. He might have taken control over it after the people building it scattered for all we know, but the Bible does tell us that when he left there, he actually built Ninevah and that was a really big city! He probably had soldiers who were loyal to him, to control such a big area.
What I can tell you is that Moses’s original audience would have been very impressed with the story of Nimrod. He would have been seen as someone like Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon—a guy who kicks butt and takes names, really tough and charismatic (which means that people admired him enough to follow him and do what he wants them to do—like build cities and canals and go to war). Because he was called a mighty hunter, that would have told them that he was hunting down and killing the lions that the people were all scared of and doing a good job as king. Isn’t it funny that we can get all that from just a few verses? For a long time, no one really knew what it meant—not until those archaeologists got to work and found out about kings being called mighty hunters. Someone in one of the Genesis books I have been reading called Nimrod “the ultimate ancient man” because he was what is called an “ideal.” An ideal is someone who just seems to have everything and can do everything. Some people look at movie stars or sports stars or musicians and call them “ideal people.” Kinda like calling them perfect, but no one is perfect. The Bible is saying that this guy is “legendary” in that he was just amazing in all that he accomplished.
But was he good or evil? The Bible says nothing about that. Oh sure, people have theories and there are so many stories about Nimrod that it isn’t even funny (okay, some of them are funny), but if we are going on the Bible as it is written, you can make a case for him being good or him being terrible. Remember how we have talked about all those “what if” stories? That they are a good way to explore what might have happened or maybe what God might have been trying to say to the people who originally heard this story, and maybe they all knew about Nimrod and so they were totally understanding and nodding to themselves as Moses told them about him. You know, it is almost the same thing as when Moses told them all about Enoch in Genesis 5:21-24–
Enoch was 65 years old when he fathered Methuselah. And after he fathered Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years and fathered other sons and daughters. So, Enoch’s life lasted 365 years. Enoch walked with God; then he was not there because God took him.
And a thousand years after Moses wrote that down, people started writing legends about Enoch, and Jewish authors even wrote some amazing fiction about him! Jewish authors used to love to write fictional stories about Bible characters during the three hundred years before Jesus was born. And after Jesus was born, even more stories were written. Those stories were called Midrash and Aggadah. They are stories that “fill in the blanks” so that the Rabbis could teach important lessons. Kinda like the boy who cried wolf, which is a great story that teaches us the importance of not telling lies. And boy oh boy the things they came up with—different authors told some very different stories about Nimrod for thousands of years. All because people hate a mystery, or maybe they love mysteries because they get to use their imaginations to fill in the blanks. Enoch is mentioned twice in the New Testament as an example of faithfulness—because that is what it means to walk with God—but Enoch never says a word and we have no idea about anything he ever did. We know a lot more about Nimrod than about Enoch for sure, but what most people think they know, or believe they know, actually doesn’t come from the Bible. We just heard someone else tell a story and when we read what the Bible says, in our minds we are thinking about that story and it changes what we think we see there. Nimrod is never talked about again, except to have his name mentioned twice more. Once was in a family tree and the other time it was just calling Assyria the “land of Nimrod” and that’s it.
Was Nimrod at the Tower of Babel or not? We don’t know because he isn’t even mentioned in the same chapter. If he was there, what was he doing? There are a lot of different stories about that and we will talk about some of them next week. Sometimes he was the good guy and sometimes he was the bad guy. Some of the stories are crazy and others are more reasonable, but what they all have in common is that they are guesses. Some guesses are better than others. Some are absolutely impossible—like the one about him marrying a woman who was born over a thousand years after he died and their having a god for a son!
Isn’t it strange? We have this guy who was written about as the ultimate guy in the ancient world, king of the world, and all he gets is a tiny little paragraph and doesn’t even come up again. That’s an important lesson for all of us. The people who seem like a big deal to us are usually not very important in the long run. Sure, he had a huge kingdom and he built canals and cities but we don’t even know who he was anymore. He has been forgotten by everyone except for in the Bible. He has people making up stories about him because we know so little about him. How would you like it if you went from “King of the world” to someone who is so totally unknown that everyone is just making guesses about? I know I hate it when people make up stories about me—even when they are true. And I am not really very important at all. Nimrod was important—he was probably the most important man alive during his life and now he is just a nobody. But think about Jesus—He didn’t lead an army or build cities or canals and he died very young, when he was in His early thirties. Not only did he die but He died as a criminal! He never killed anyone but He sure went to war against Satan and his demons and sickness and made blind people see again and deaf people hear and paralyzed people walk. He didn’t live in a fancy house and He never had servants! The people who had Him killed thought to themselves, “Well, that’s over, everyone will forget him now!” But people have never stopped writing about Him or talking about Him because Jesus was the true “ultimate man.” He wasn’t anything like Nimrod the “mighty hunter.”
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful time studying the Bible with the people who love you.