In his 1976 novel The Twelfth Planet, Russian-American author Zecharia Sitchin wrote a fictional account tale about the origins of humans and before. In his novel (did you get that it was a novel?), Sitchin described how “Anunnaki”, a race of extraterrestrial beings from the undiscovered planet Nibiru, came to Earth around 500,000 years ago in order to mine gold. According to Sitchin, the Anunnaki genetically engineered homo erectus to create modern humans to work as their slaves. Sitchin claimed that the Anunnaki were forced to leave Earth when Antarctic glaciers melted, causing the Flood of Noah, which also destroyed the Anunnaki’s bases on Earth. These had to be rebuilt and the Nephilim, needing more humans to help in this massive effort, taught them agriculture. According to Sitchin, the Annunaki built the pyramids and all the other monumental structures from around the world that ancient astronaut theorists consider so impossible to build without highly advanced technologies. Sitchin also claimed that the Anunnaki had left behind human-alien hybrids, some of whom may still be alive today, unaware of their alien ancestry. Sitchin novel was so popular that he then wrote 11 more books on the topic. Sitchin expanded on this mythology in later works, including The Stairway to Heaven (1980) and The Wars of Gods and Men (1985). In The End of Days: Armageddon and the Prophecy of the Return (2007), Sitchin predicted that the Anunnaki would return to earth, possibly as soon as 2012, corresponding to the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.
Why is this of interest to us? Because many people in our society, including Christians, believe in the Anunnaki and that it was through them that the Nephilim, the “giants” of old (possible half-supernatural and half-mortal humans) mentioned in Genesis 6 came about. Please remember that Sitchin’s writings were NOVELS. Many, many people quote Sitchin’s writings as if they were real and believe that they are more accurate than the Bible concerning the Anunnaki and Nephilim.
But here is what Wikipedia has to say about the Anunnaki: ‘The Anunnaki are a group of deities of the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians Assyrians, and Babylonians. In the earliest Sumerian writings about them, which come from the Post-Akkadian period, the Anunnaki are deities in the pantheon, descendants of An (the god of the heavens) and Ki (the goddess of earth), and their primary function was to decree the fates of humanity. The name Anunnaki is derived from An, the Sumerian god of the sky. The name is variously written “a-nuna”, “a-nuna-ke4-ne”, or “a-nun-na”, meaning “princely offspring” or “offspring of An”. Samuel Noah Kramer identifies Ki with the Sumerian mother goddess Ninhursag, stating that they were originally the same figure. The oldest of the Anunnaki was Enlil, the god of air and chief god of the Sumerian pantheon. The Sumerians believed that, until Enlil was born, heaven and earth were inseparable. Then, Enlil split heaven and earth in two and carried away the earth while his father An carried away the sky.
The Anunnaki are chiefly mentioned in literary texts and very little evidence to support the existence of any cult of them has yet been unearthed. This is likely because each member of the Anunnaki had his or her own individual cult, separate from the others. Similarly, no representations of the Anunnaki as a complete group have yet been discovered, although a few depictions of two or three individual members together have been identified. Deities in ancient Mesopotamia were almost exclusively anthropomorphic. They were thought to possess extraordinary powers and were often envisioned as being of tremendous physical size…Deities were almost always depicted wearing horned caps, consisting of up to seven superimposed pairs of ox-horns. They were also sometimes depicted wearing clothes with elaborate decorative gold and silver ornaments sewn into them.
The ancient Mesopotamians believed that their deities lived in Heaven, after an earlier history of visiting earth in the mythological texts, and that a god’s statue was a physical embodiment of the god himself…The major deities of the Mesopotamian pantheon, which included the Anunnaki, were believed to participate in the “assembly of the gods”, through which the gods made all of their decisions. This assembly was seen as a divine counterpart to the semi-democratic legislative system that existed during the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 BC – c. 2004 BC)…In the poem Enki and the World Order, the Anunnaki “do homage” to Enki, sing hymns of praise in his honor, and “take up their dwellings” among the people of Sumer. The same composition twice states that the Anunnaki “decree the fates of mankind”. Virtually every major deity in the Sumerian pantheon was regarded as the patron of a specific city and was expected to protect that city’s interests. The deity was believed to permanently reside within that city’s temple…Major deities in Sumerian mythology were associated with specific celestial bodies. Inanna was believed to be the planet Venus. Utu was believed to be the sun. Nanna was the moon. An was identified with all the stars of the equatorial sky, Enlil with those of the northern sky, and Enki with those of the southern sky.’
In conclusion, the Anunnaki were “gods” of various Ancient Near Eastern religions. They had no relation to YHWH God. Also, they are not mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls, despite claims by various youtube commentators that they were. Just because words sound the same doesn’t mean that their etymology (origins) were identical. Zecharia Sitchin was a brilliant writer. The fact that so many believe his novels to have been historical truths proves how brilliant his writings were. But they do not reflect truth and Christians shouldn’t get too excited about them (though, they are interesting, even fascinating, science fiction).
