Sitchin - The End of Days

When will they return?

I have been asked this question countless times by people who have read my books, the they being the Anunnakithe extraterrestrials who had come to Earth from their planet Nibiru and were revered in antiquity as gods. Will it be when Nibiru in its elongated orbit returns to our vicinity, and what will happen then? Will there be darkness at noon and the Earth shall shatter? Will it be Peace on Earth, or Armageddon? A Millennium of trouble and tribulations, or a messianic Second Coming? Will it happen in 2012, or later, or not at all?

These are profound questions that combine peoples deepest hopes and anxieties with religious beliefs and expectations, questions compounded by current events: wars in lands where the entwined affairs of gods and men began; the threats of nuclear holocausts; the alarming ferocity of natural disasters. They are questions that I dared not answer all these yearsbut now are questions the answers to which cannotmust notbe delayed.

Questions about the Return, it ought to be realized, are not new; they have inexorably been linked in the pastas they are todayto the expectation and the apprehension of the Day of the Lord, the End of Days, Armageddon. Four millennia ago, the Near East witnessed a god and his son promising Heaven on Earth. More than three millennia ago, king and people in Egypt yearned for a messianic time. Two millennia ago, the people of Judea wondered whether the Messiah had appeared, and we are still seized with the mysteries of those events. Are prophecies coming true?

We shall deal with the puzzling answers that were given, solve ancient enigmas, decipher the origin and meaning of symbolsthe Cross, the Fishes, the Chalice. We shall describe the role of space-related sites in historic events, and show why Past, Present and Future converge in Jerusalem, the place of the Bond Heaven-Earth. And we shall ponder why it is that our current twenty-first century A.D. is so similar to the twenty-first century B.C.E. Is history repeating itselfis it destined to repeat itself? Is it all guided by a Messianic Clock? Is the time at hand?

More than two millennia ago, Daniel of Old Testament fame repeatedly asked the angels: When ? When will be the End of Days, the End of Time? More than three centuries ago the famed Sir Isaac Newton, who elucidated the secrets of celestial motions, composed treatises on the Old Testaments Book of Daniel and the New Testaments Book of Revelation; his recently found handwritten calculations concerning the End of Days will be analyzed, along with more recent predictions of The End.

Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament asserted that the secrets of the Future are embedded in the Past, that the destiny of Earth is connected to the Heavens, that the affairs and fate of Mankind are linked to those of God and gods. In dealing with what is yet to happen, we cross over from history to prophecy; one cannot be understood without the other, and we shall report them both. With that as our guide, let us look at what is to come through the lens of what had been. The answers will be certain to surprise.

Z ECHARIA S ITCHIN
New York, November 2006

Wherever one turns, humankind appears seized with Apocalyptic trepidation, Messianic fervor, and End of Time anxiety.

Religious fanaticism manifests itself in wars, rebellions, and the slaughter of infidels. Armies amassed by Kings of the West are warring with armies of the Kings of the East. A Clash of Civilizations shakes the foundations of traditional ways of life. Carnage engulfs cities and towns; the high and the mighty seek safety behind protective walls. Natural calamities and ever-intensifying catastrophies leave people wondering: Has Mankind sinned, is it witnessing Divine Wrath, is it due for another annihilating Deluge? Is this the Apocalypse? Can there bewill there beSalvation? Are Messianic times afoot?

The timethe twenty-first century A.D. or was it the twenty-first century B.C.E. ?

The correct answer is Yes and Yes, both in our own time as well as in those ancient times. It is the condition of the present time, as well as at a time more than four millennia ago; and the amazing similarity is due to events in the middle time in betweenthe period associated with the messianic fervor at the time of Jesus.

Those three cataclysmic periods for Mankind and its planettwo in the recorded past (circa 2100 B.C.E. and when B.C.E. changed to A. D. ), one in the nearing futureare interconnected; one has led to the other, one can be understood only by understanding the other. The Present stems from the Past, the Past is the Future. Essential to all three is Messianic Expectation ; and linking all three is Prophecy .

How the present time of troubles and tribulations will endwhat the Future portendsrequires entering the realm of Prophecy. Ours will not be a mlange of newfound predictions whose main magnet is fear of doom and End, but a reliance upon unique ancient records that documented the Past, predicted the Future, and recorded previous Messianic expectationsprophesying the future in antiquity and, one believes, the Future that is to come.

In all three apocalyptic instancesthe two that had occurred, the one that is about to happenthe physical and spiritual relationship between Heaven and Earth was and remains pivotal for the events. The physical aspects were expressed by the existence on Earth of actual sites that linked Earth with the heavenssites that were deemed crucial, that were focuses of the events; the spiritual aspects have been expressed in what we call Religion. In all three instances, a changed relationship between Man and God was central, except that when, circa 2100 B.C.E. , Mankind faced the first of these three epochal upheavals, the relationship was between men and gods , in the plural. Whether that relationship has really changed, the reader will soon discover.

The story of the gods, the Anunnaki (Those who from heaven to Earth came), as the Sumerians called them, begins with their coming to Earth from Nibiru in need of gold. The story of their planet was told in antiquity in the Epic of Creation , a long text on seven tablets; it is usually considered to be an allegorical myth, the product of primitive minds that spoke of planets as living gods combating each other. But as I have shown in my book The Twelfth Planet , the ancient text is in fact a sophisticated cosmogony that tells how a stray planet, passing by our solar system, collided with a planet called Tiamat; the collision resulted in the creation of Earth and its Moon, of the Asteroid Belt and comets, and in the capture of the invader itself in a great elliptical orbit that takes about 3,600 Earth-years to complete (Fig. 1) .

It was, Sumerian texts tell, 120 such orbits432,000 Earth-yearsprior to the Deluge (the Great flood) that the Anunnaki came to Earth. How and why they came, their first cities in the E.DIN (the biblical Eden), their fashioning of the Adam and the reasons for it, and the events of the catastrophic Delugehave all been told in The Earth Chronicles series of my books, and will not be repeated here. But before we time-travel to the momentous twenty-first century B.C.E. , some pre-Diluvial and post-Diluvial landmark events need to be recalled.