For me, this is the fun stuff. What do a fiery furnace, magic underwear, an army invading heaven, idolatry, and a marriage between people who were born 1500 years apart all have in common? They’re all part of the wild development of Nimrod myths from the time of Jesus until modern times. But the Bible says almost nothing about Nimrod, and history says nothing. So why are there so many stories about him floating around out there? And how many different names can I come up with for magic undies?
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)
This is going to be so different! Last week I showed you what the Bible actually says about Nimrod, which isn’t a lot but more than a lot of people pick up because of the references to kings and empires that we find in art from ancient Assyria, where he lived. Nimrod, we found out, was a powerful hunter—which is what they called their kings because one of the jobs of the kings was to hunt lions, who were very dangerous and would attack travelers in packs. We looked at the different cities he was involved with and some that he built, plus the canals and all that. Nimrod would have been a very powerful king to get all that done and, as I Chron 1:10 tells us, he was the first to become a great warrior on earth. So, when we look at all the great empires of history (and by great, I mean big and violent because you don’t get to have an empire without a lot of fighting!), the Bible says that it all began with Nimrod. We’ll read about some of the greatest empires in history as we read the Bible—the Egyptian Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Medo-Persian Empire, the Greeks under Alexander the Great, and the Roman Empire. They were all able to conquer (which means to win the land through war) large territories and many different people and rule over them all. Hitler thought he could do it too, and we are so glad it didn’t work!
But this week, we’re going to look at the fictional stories people have written about Nimrod because you will probably hear them, and they cause a lot of problems and people fight about it because they believe the stories are real history and don’t understand that they were made up and why people made those stories up. And honestly, they hurt the way we read the Bible in a lot of ways if we think they are true. (Parents, I am going to link a really great article (starting on page 16) for you by Karel Van der Toorn in the transcript if you want to know my main source but it is very scholarly and so I am going to translate it into what I call “normal people language.” He is the expert. I have a book by him that is about three inches thick on this sort of thing. He’s a total brainiac.)
Okay, now the fun starts. You guys know if you listened last week that Nimrod only shows up three times in the Bible—once in Genesis 10, again in I Chron 1:10 and in Malachi 5:6. And not much gets said—he doesn’t even show up in the Tower of Babel chapter even though a lot of people put him there. And maybe he was but we don’t know for sure. But when the Bible says almost nothing about a person in the Bible, people love to fill in the blanks with creative stories. And it might surprise you all the different opinions people had that they wrote down over the last two thousand years.
The very first named person to write about Nimrod was a man named Philo, and he was alive at the same time as Jesus. He was an important Jewish Philosopher who was living in Alexandria, Egypt. Philosophers are people who like to think very deep thoughts because they are looking for wisdom and truth and Philo tried to find the deep meanings of Scripture by combining it with a more Greek way of thinking. Well, Philo looked at the names of Ham and Cush and Nimrod and decided they were all terrible and that Nimrod must have been the one to build the Tower of Babel because he was a “giant”—someone who was warring against God and all heavenly things. So, Philo believed that the giants of Genesis 6, the Nephilim, were guys who warred against God. Remember all the theories I told you about? This is another one. And Philo said something hateful, evil, and wrong that was going to cause problems later—he said that because Nimrod was the son of Cush, that he should be called “the Ethiopian because pure evil has nothing to do with light, but loves night and darkness,” (Questions and Answers in Genesis 2.81-82). What the heck??? And he had some nasty things to say about hunters too—but then, Philo was getting his dinner from the marketplace because he was from a wealthy family and he had servants to prepare everything for him. Maybe he thought the meat just got there without any animals needing to be killed for it! But this is the first place I have seen the idea of someone being evil because they have black skin in any Jewish writings. The Bible doesn’t say it, and one of Jesus’s earliest followers was an Ethiopian from the court of Queen Candace. But that’s one of the dangers of combining philosophy with the Bible and looking for symbolism in everything. Because of what Ham did, which was just awful and mean, his son Cush was branded as bad and so was Nimrod. But the Bible says nothing about Cush being good or bad, it just gives us his name. Legends and opinions can lead to a lot of trouble when they are used badly. Imagine how ridiculous it is to think that the color of a person’s skin makes them good or bad! We would have to just ignore all of the Bible and all of history to believe that! Philo wrote about the Bible, but that doesn’t mean that what he wrote is all good. Many people write terrible things about the Bible. The Bible is good for teaching us but not everything we grownups do with it is good.
Another person who lived at about the same time as Jesus told a really tall tale about Nimrod and the tribe of Ham wanting the built the Tower of Babel along with the tribes of Shem and Japheth but that Abraham and twelve others refused and were thrown in jail and that Nimrod was so furious with Abraham that he threw him in a fiery furnace but God saved Abraham—and that story sounds a lot like Shadrach, Mischach, and Abednego who were thrown into the fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel. But it’s about impossible for Abraham and Nimrod to have been alive at the same time and I think something as important as that would get mentioned in the Bible, right?
Josephus was an important historian who was born a few years after Jesus was resurrected, and he had an entirely different story to tell about Nimrod! “The people were provoked to hate God by Nimrod, grandson of Ham the son of Noah, a bold man who was fearless and full of energy. He convinced them that everything they had was not from God but because of their own courage and hard work, and little by little everything became a mess and he was a violent and cruel king over all of them, believing that the only way to keep people from loving God was by making them depend on him instead. He threatened to have his revenge on God if he ever wanted to flood the earth again, and he would build a tower higher than the water could reach and get revenge for what happened to their ancestors.” (Antiquities 1.113-14) Wow, those three stories are all very different, right? You ain’t seen nothing yet! This Nimrod wanted people to follow him instead of God and they were only building to tower so that God couldn’t flood them out again—guess they didn’t believe God’s promise, eh? Not only that, but they wanted the Tower to be tall enough that they could attack Heaven. If that was even possible, the angels would have totally kicked their butts.
The Targums were writings that were very popular in the synagogues around the time of Jesus, instead of being in Hebrew, they were in Aramaic because more people spoke Aramaic than Hebrew after the Jewish people came back from their exile in Babylon. Even though some of the stories have been strange so far, this one (from Targum Pseudo-Jonathan) is even stranger– “Out of that land [sc.Shinar] Nimrod went forth and ruled in Asshur because he had not wished to associate with the project of the generation of the divisions. And he left those four cities, and the Lord settled him elsewhere instead, and he built other towns, Nineveh, etc.” Okay, so here Nimrod left Babylon because he didn’t want anything to do with building the Tower of Babel! And how about this one from two hundred years later? (Ephraem Syrus, a Christian who lived over three hundred years after Jesus) “Nimrod was a strong giant before the Lord because he obeyed God’s will he waged war on the peoples in order to spread them out to the areas that God had given them. Therefore, if someone wants to bless a leader or king, he says: ‘May you become like Nimrod, a strong giant before the Lord, triumphant in the wars of the Lord.'” Okay, come on now, is Nimrod a good guy or a bad guy??? Obviously, these guys are picking up on the idea that the Bible doesn’t tell us one way or the other! And (Ishodad of Merv) someone who lived eight hundred years after Jesus said that if you wanted to bless a leader, you would say, “may you become like Nimrod, a brave hunter before the Lord,” and the reason he said that was because they believed that Nimrod had tried everything to get the people to stop building the Tower of Babel and tried to drive them away from the city because he hated the Tower just like God did. I don’t know about you but all this is making me dizzy!
Remember how that Targum said Nimrod was a good guy? Well, later on the author changed his mind! He wrote, “And when Nimrod threw Abram into the fiery furnace because he would not worship his idol, but the fire wasn’t burning him up, Haran [Abraham’s brother] wasn’t sure what he wanted to support, and so he said: “If Nimrod wins, I will be on his side, but if Abram wins, I will be on his side.” Gee, thanks bro—but here we have a story where Nimrod is throwing Abram in the fire for refusing to bow down before his big chocolate bunny. Okay, it wasn’t a huge chocolate bunny. And another Targum (Neofiti on Gen 10:9) says that Nimrod was “a hero in sin before the Lord.” And this, “He was very mighty as a hunter and mighty in sin before the Lord. He would trap men by what they would say and he would say to them: Stop listening to Shem and his God and listen to the laws of Nimrod instead!” How about this one (Targum Qoh 4:13)— “It is better to be like Abraham, a young man who was a prophet of God and who knew God when he was just three years old, who would not worship an idol, than to be like the wicked Nimrod, who was an old and foolish king. And because Abraham would not worship an idol, Nimrod threw him into the burning furnace, and the God rescued him from the fire by a miracle. Even after this, Nimrod didn’t learn his lesson not to worship those idols! Abraham went out from the family of idolaters and reigned over the land of Canaan, and during Abraham’s reign Nimrod lost everything.” Now, as we will go through the story of Abraham, we will also see that he was never a king and there is nothing in there even hinting that he ever met Nimrod.
Now we’re going to talk about a huge series of books called the Talmud and they were written about six hundred years after Jesus and they are filled with all sorts of opinions from different Rabbis who had a lot of trouble agreeing with each other! But the really cool thing is that they didn’t have a problem posting all of these disagreements. But, by this point, they were all agreeing on one thing—Nimrod was one bad dude. Isn’t it interesting what a difference five hundred years can make in changing legends? By that point, they were all pretty much sticking to the story that Nimrod had tried to burn Abraham alive in the furnace because Abraham wouldn’t bow down to Nimrod’s idols. And as you will notice when we talk about the Tower of Babel, there isn’t anything said about idols or furnaces or anything! Five hundred years earlier than the stories in the Talmud, people were still seeing that there were a whole lot of question marks about Nimrod and about the Tower of Babel and so they had different ideas about what had happened, which is fine. You know we all like “what if” stories. But there aren’t a bunch of what if stories anymore because there is pretty much only one story that everyone is agreeing on. Now we see stories of God rebuking King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon for being wicked just like Nimrod “who convinced the whole world to rebel against God.” (b.Pes.94b) And the archangel Gabriel was given permission to rescue Rack, Shack, and Benny from the fiery furnace in the future because he asked to be able to save Abraham from the fires of Nimrod but God wanted to do it Himself! (b. Pes. 118a)
But now we are going to get to the funny stories about the magic underwear. And although that seems like a crazy thing to be talking about in stories about the Bible, you need to know about Aggadah. You know about the “what if” stories that might have happened. But Aggadah is different. Aggadah is filled with legends and folklore and sayings and moral stories that were designed to teach people moral lessons. A lot of them are just wild, but then every culture has these kinds of stories. People know they aren’t true but they were very useful for teaching people the difference between right and wrong or making people understand confusing commandments by coming up with stories to explain why they might have been given to us. Have you heard the story of the boy who cried wolf? Did it really happen? Nope. Is the story true anyway? Yes! If you lie over and over again, sometime when it is important, people won’t believe you. The story may be over the top and silly, but it is a good story. Of course, not all stories are good or useful, right? The magic underwear stories aren’t really very useful either, but they started to show up in stories about five hundred years after Jesus.
There are two versions of this story, in one, Nimrod wanted to kill Esau—who was the grandson of Abraham and I don’t even believe that Nimrod was still alive when Abraham was around, much less his grandson who was like 140 years younger. But anyway, the story goes that Esau was an amazing hunter because he had Adam’s magic underwear that attracted all the animals to him. And, of course, Adam had magic underwear because it was the stuff God made for him. So, you know, Adam put on his mystical tightie whities and all the critters came a’runnin. Esau inherited them, and so he could catch anything he wanted. And Nimrod was super jealous because he was a hunter too just not as good as magic undies boy. (Gen. Rab. 37.2-3 and 63.13) But in another story three hundred years later, we see the opposite! Nimrod stole Adam’s magic undies from Ham, who had stolen them from his father Noah, who had brought them along on the ark. And when Esau saw that Nimrod was such an awesome hunter because of the panties of power, he got jealous and killed Nimrod. (e.g. Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer 24). And in Sefer HaYasher, which has been republished as the Book of Jasher but was written at least a thousand years after Jesus, it took just about every story ever written about Nimrod and combined them into one big story—and it also added even more! It said he was a good guy who served God and God loved him and have him all that success and made him king but then he turned evil and enslaved everyone and he tried to kill baby Abraham and all sorts of nonsense. But then so much of that book disagrees with the Bible, like saying that Shem’s son Asshur built all those cities instead of Nimrod. Do you see how legends start out small and get more and more elaborate and complicated and crazy??
And then, people started saying that Nimrod was the man whom the Persians called Zoroaster. And mostly what we know about Zoroaster comes from the Greeks who wrote about him. He lived sometime between 1500 and 500 years before Jesus, which is way after Nimrod and Abraham were both dead and gone. He is supposed to have invented magic and astrology, which is when you think that the stars and planets can tell you the future, like the silly horoscopes in the newspaper. And because fire was very important to Zoroaster, people began to combine the legends about Nimrod with Zoroaster and fire worship and all that jazz. Stories never get smaller, they get bigger!
But then came the strangest story of them all. In 1853, almost two hundred years ago, and before almost all of the important archeological discoveries that I have been teaching you about, a minister named Alexander Hislop who hated Catholics, started preaching some very terrible lies about Nimrod. And some of these might be very upsetting because even though Hislop was a church minister, he was also a terrible racist—he hated people who weren’t white. And so, his stories about Nimrod are worse than anyone who came before him. He was from Scotland, and slavery hadn’t been illegal there for very long, so he told a story about how Nimrod was a big, ugly, deformed black man. Deformed means that his body wasn’t shaped correctly. I have someone I love whose feet are both badly deformed, and there have been people all throughout history whose bodies haven’t looked normal. But does that make them bad? No—it has nothing to do with anything! But Hislop wanted people to hate Nimrod as part of his plan to get people to hate Catholics. And Catholics are Christians who see things differently than some other Christians but that doesn’t make them evil. And no one should hate them. And no one should especially lie about them—because when that happens, it’s the liar who is acting evil. But in those days, there was a lot of hatred between Protestants and Catholics and between people whose skin was different colors–although it was mostly white people hating everyone who wasn’t white. And so Hislop made Nimrod out to be everything that the people of his time thought was hateful or inferior—he said that Nimrod was ugly, and that his body was messed up, and that he was black. And although now we know better, that those things don’t mean anything, that’s how Hislop wanted for people to see Nimrod—like he wasn’t even a human just like everyone else. And besides, ugly is nothing but an opinion! An opinion people should keep all to themselves!
But to make everyone angry, he said that Nimrod, a black man, was married to a beautiful white woman with blue eyes and blonde hair named Semiramis. Now, it was illegal for white people to marry black people and it was especially illegal for a black man to marry a white woman because they thought that was just the worst! Can you even imagine??? Of all the stupid things to think! But the other thing that was ridiculous is that Semiramis was a real person who was at least 1500 years younger than Nimrod. Jesus lived two thousand years ago, so you see how long a time that is. No way they were even alive at the same time but Hislop was making things up as he went along. He didn’t want people to join the Catholic church and so he said that the Catholics came from Nimrod and Semiramis and the Babylonian religion they founded and he knew that most people wouldn’t even suspect him of lying, because he was a church minister, and even if they did, it wasn’t like now when we have the internet and books and all the archaeology showing us what life was really like back then. That’s one of the reasons why I study so hard, so they can’t trick me with this stuff.
Semiramis was really unique in the ancient world, she was a Queen at a time when it was actually illegal for a woman to reign—she ran Assyria after her husband died while her sons were growing up. Long after her death, the Greeks began to write myths about her life because there wasn’t a lot of history. As we see with the Bible, the less history says about someone, the more people think they know about them. So, the Greeks really made her into a huge deal and she was, I mean she was Queen and three of her sons became kings of Assyria before being overthrown. She was responsible for an incredible number of impressive building projects. And how about the son they were supposed to have–Tammuz? He was a shepherd god, not a human. And from all the myths about Tammuz, we know the names of his mother and sister and wife. No Nimrod and no Semiramis. As for the rest of the stories Hislop told about Nimrod, I am not even going to talk about them because they are just all lies.
Believing Hislop’s story about Nimrod marrying Semiramis and her giving birth to Tammuz is the equivalent of this situation–Justinian, Holy Roman Emperor based in Constantinople (6th century AD) married Queen Elizabeth II (current Queen of England), and she gave birth to the god Apollo. That’s the equivalent timeline and claim–two people, separated by 1500 years, living in different places, marrying and having a god for a kid. A god older than his mother. And the really sad thing is that other people took Hislop’s stories and added even more to them, things that aren’t true and could never be true. And because people haven’t studied the ancient world and don’t know the people and how the religion of Babylon worked—they just assume that Hislop’s lies about our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ are true. But as we talked about last week, Nimrod is just a guy whom we know almost nothing about, and a lot of people who have heard the legends believe that they are from the Bible, or from history or archaeology, but they aren’t. And for almost two hundred years now, a lot of people have been hating and lying about Catholics because of it. My scholar friends who teach at Bible colleges and write books and are world-renowned experts—none of them teach this stuff because it just isn’t true.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful week reading the Bible with the people who love you.