American biblical scholar, PhD in Hebrew Bible and Semitic Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who from the early 2000s published sitchiniswrong.com, the sustained philological rebuttal of Zecharia Sitchin. The case is lexicographic and therefore checkable by anyone with the dictionaries. Anunnaki reads as something close to “princely seed” or “offspring of Anu” rather than “Those Who from Heaven to Earth Came”. Nibiru appears in the Mesopotamian astronomical texts as a name for Jupiter, for Mercury, for the god Marduk and for a star, and never for a body beyond Pluto. Shem is the ordinary Semitic word for a name, and by extension a monument, rather than a vehicle. Nefilim reaches English as “giants” through the Septuagint’s gigantes. The rayed symbol on Cylinder Seal VA 243 is the conventional star motif that sits above deities on a great many seals. That each step can be taken back to a standard lexicon is what separates this from a rebuttal by authority. He was an evangelical scholar, which Sitchin’s defenders raise and which bears on his theology rather than on the dictionary entries. He died in February 2023. The 2015 Sitchin anthology names no critic and answers none of it.
His critique has landed inside the genre as well as outside it. Heather Lynn, writing in 2020, accepts that Sitchin’s translations contain errors and cites Heiser as the most vocal critic, while noting that his own publisher is an evangelical press. Her response is not to defend the translations but to reclassify them, arguing that Sitchin’s work should be called an interpretation rather than a translation, and that accepting it is therefore an act of faith rather than of science.
Connections
Zecharia Sitchin · Anunnaki · Nibiru · Nefilim · Cylinder Seal VA 243 · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Enuma Elish · Heather Lynn