Randy,
I very much enjoyed Jonsson's incisive review. Just one very small quibble...in his review of Chapter 3, Jonsson writes:
On pages 49-56, Furuli provides general information about Akkadian signs for words, syllables, and numbers. In the middle of this discussion, on pages 52-54, he attempts to identify Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, as a deification of Nimrod. This is an old theory suggested by Julius Wellhausen in the late 19th century and subsequently picked up by many others, including Alexander Hislop in The Two Babylons (1916, 2nd ed. 1959, footnote on p. 44). It was adopted for some time by the Watchtower Society, which presented it in the book "Babylon the Great Has Fallen!" God's Kingdom Rules! (1963, pp. 33, 34) with arguments similar to those Furuli quotes from The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Jewish Encyclopedia, and The Two Babylons. The theory was included in the Watchtower Society's Bible dictionary Aid to Bible Understanding (1971, p. 668) but was dropped in the revised 1988 edition, Insight on the Scriptures (Vol. 2, p. 974). It was still briefly mentioned in The Watchtower magazine of April 1, 1999, on page 11.
The link between the two was actually first made in the critical literature by A. H. Sayce which was then "adopted with modifications" by Wellhausen according to John Skinner (A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis, 1925:209). Sayce first suggested this in his article "Nimrod and the Assyrian Inscriptions" in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, vol. 2 (1873:243-249). He derived "Nimrod" from the Akkadian (derived from Sumerian) equivalent of Marduk, Amar-ud, from which he thought Nimrudu would be the regular Assyrian niphal form. As for Wellhausen, he explained the initial nun as an Aramaic imperfect performative of the root *mrd, through which the DN Marduk became corrupted through folk etymology, and the name and myth of Nimrod reached the Hebrews from the Syrians of Mesopotamia (Die Composition des Hextateuchs, 2nd ed., 1889:309f). In neither case did the authors designate Marduk as a "deification" of a historical Nimrod. This idea rather is that of Alexander Hislop (and perhaps writers before him), who published in 1853 and 1858 before either Sayce or Wellhausen, who similarly linked Nimrod with the biblical Merodach (=Marduk), by deriving both from *mrd (explaining the -uk away through fanciful folk etymology typical of Hislop). The idea that Nimrod derived from *mrd is even older, dating at least as far back as the Mishnaic rabbis. Marduk, incidentally, has no etymological relation to *mrd, being a shortening of AMAR.UTUG "Calf of (the sun god) Utug". Sumerian coda consonants often delete in Akkadian (e.g. Dumuzid > Dumuzi; Eridug > Eridu), so Utug is otherwise known as Utu, and Amar-ud is a further reduced form which happens to preserve the inital vowel.
The Society also claimed that "Dr. Alexander Hislop identifies [the dying-rising god] Tammuz with Nimrod" (Watchtower, 15 September 1972, p. 572), but in fact Hislop claimed that Tammuz was the son of Nimrod, which conforms to his claim that the worship of Jesus as the son of God and the son of Mary disguises a continued worship of Nimrod, his son, and his wife Semiramis. The same article tried to link the two by saying:
"The fact that Nimrod is recognized by scholars as identified with Marduk, the chief god of the Babylonians, enables us to see why the Jews, then tributary to Babylon, and in danger of being swallowed up by this World Power of the day, might be induced to take up Tammuz worship."
In reality, Tammuz (< Dumuzi) worship while syncretized with the Akkadian Tammuz cult was perpetuating the same native Canaanite ideas about Baal who likewise undergoes a seasonal death and rebirth. The syncretism was aided by the fact that in Sumerian mythology, Dumuzi's consort was Inanna who was equated with Ishtar (a deity of fertility and astrally represented by Venus) in later Babylonian texts, and Baal's consort in the Canaanite texts was Athtart who was equivalent to Ishtar in name and function. Also, Dumuzi and Inanna were siblings in Sumerian myth (the son and daughter of An "Heaven"), and Baal and Astarte (=Athtart) were siblings as well (both being the son and daughter of Ouranos/Shamem "Heaven", though Baal was raised by Dagan as his own son) according to Philo of Byblos. The "weeping for Baal" (analoguous to the "weeping for Tammuz" in Ezekiel 8:14) is mentioned in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, where we read of the sun-god Shapsh: "Until she was sated she wept, like wine she drank her tears" (KTU 1.6 i 9-10). The other gods mourn Baal by cutting their hair and gashing their cheeks, chin, chest, etc. with sharpened rocks (KTU 1.5 vi 15-22). It is specifically shaving the head and gashing oneself in mourning that is prohibited in Leviticus 19:27-28 and Deuteronomy 14:1-2 (compare Isaiah 22:12; Micah 1:16; Jeremiah 16:6, 41:5), with the latter text implying that it is idolatrous to do so. So the mourning of Tammuz was not a wholly new practice that was introduced into Judea, but more of a continuation of Baal worship under a new name. Regarding Hislop's notion that Tammuz was the son of Marduk in Babylonian mythology (which continued into Catholicism), this is not the case. The reality was that Marduk (i.e. Sumerian Enlil) was the son of Ea (i.e. Sumerian Enki), who himself was the son of An, while Dumuzi (< Tammuz) was usually designated as the son of An and sometimes as the son of Ea/Enki (that is, grandson of An). In no case do I know of that Dumuzi is designated as a son of Marduk/Enlil. On the contrary, Marduk's son was Nabu/Nebo who was the chief patron of the Neo-Babylonians (i.e. Nabopolassar, Nebuchadrezzer, Nabonidus, etc.), and Nabu was not a dying-rising god like Tammuz (or Baal, or the Greco-Phoenician Adonis). Through the late and sometimes confused notices in classical Hellenistic and Roman sources (as well as Berossus), Hislop basically made up his own construct of Babylonian mythology which bore little resemblance with the actual pantheon and myths of the Mesopotamia as revealed in cuneiform records (and I didn't even get into the matter of Semiramis who Hislop believes was the wife of Nimrod and mythological mother of Tammuz but in reality was a famous 9th-century BC Assyrian queen, the wife of Shamshi-Adad V and mother of Adad-Nirari III!).
I know most of this is tangential to the brief mention of Hislop and Marduk in Jonsson's review, which itself was making a very minor point, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
