Mount of assembly (1)

Text
Isaiah 14:12-15 uses mythical material in the taunt-song, where the king of Babylon is addressed as Helel ben-Shahar, who ‘ascended the heavens above the stars of El’ and to ‘sit on the Mount of Assembly, on the slopes of Saphon’. This reflects the Syro-Mesopotamian mythological conceptions of the cosmic mountain as the place of the divine assembly. This cosmic mountain as the place of assembly probably derives from the Enlil’s main temple in Nippur, which was called é-kur ‘house of the mountain’ and was considered the navel of the earth. The idea of the cosmic mountain is represented in Mesopotamia, on a land in the plain, by the temple tower or ziggurat and in the Enlil’s epithet as “the big mountain” (Sumerian kur-gal). ‘Tower’ is also a name of Christ in both Aphrahat and Ephrem. Christ has given us in the Church a Tower which really leads up to heaven, in other places he himself is the Tower.

Source (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Isaiah 14:12-15

Bibliography

Amar Annus

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