Son of Enki, city god of Babylon, and the hero of the Enuma Elish, in which he kills Tiamat and makes heaven and earth from the halves of her body. He rose from a local deity to head of the pantheon as Babylon rose, which is one of the clearest cases in the ancient world of a theology following a political fact.
Why the name is everywhere in this vault
Because Zecharia Sitchin uses it twice, in two incompatible senses, and the literature that followed him did not always notice. In the Enuma Elish reading, Marduk the invading body is Nibiru; in the dynastic history of The Wars of Gods and Men, Marduk the god is Enki’s disinherited firstborn, who spends the whole book pursuing a supremacy the succession rule denied him, is tried by the gods and sealed alive inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, and is eventually enthroned at Babylon.
The standard reading
Nibiru appears in Mesopotamian astronomical texts, including MUL.APIN, as a name for Jupiter, for Mercury, for a star and for the god Marduk himself, and never for a body beyond Pluto. That the same word attaches to a planet and to a god is ordinary Babylonian astral theology, and it is the hinge on which the entire twelfth-planet argument turns.
Connections
Enki · Enuma Elish · Tiamat · Nibiru · Zecharia Sitchin · The Wars of Gods and Men · Great Pyramid of Giza · Inanna · Ninurta · Michael S. Heiser · Erra Epic