Saturday, November 13, 2021

King Midas might be mentioned in The Bible

Isaiah chapter 14 verse 4 after directing the Prophet's attention specifically to the King of Babylon says in the KJV "How hath the Oppressor ceased! how hath the Golden City ceased!".  In the Young's Literal Translation "Golden City" reads "Golden One".  This is two English words being used to translate one word in the Hebrew, a word that the Strongs Concordance says actually means "Gold Making".

The word in question is Madhebah, it's core root is Dhab the Aramaic word for Gold used in passages like Daniel 2 and 3, it's related to the equivalent Hebrew word Zahab.  A Mem as a prefix typically carried the meaning of "from".  And a Heh at the end as a suffix tends to make a word feminine, but scholars tend to feel that doesn't necessarily imply anything about the Gender of who or what's being referred to unless it's a personal name.

When you remember the lack of Vowels in the Hebrew Alphabet, and how the "S" at the end of a name in Greek transliterations are usually not part of the original name.  A connection between this word and Midas (called Mita in Assyrian inscriptions) is plausible.  Hebrew authors with a poetic style like Isaiah often give foreign Kings names that are on some level Hebrew word play, so I'm not saying the form here is the original.  And I don't think I need to explain how Midas is a name associated with Gold.

There was a historical Midas who did rule Phrygia and reigned around 700 BC, contemporary with Isaiah.  The Classical Greeks tended to consider that Midas the second Midas and attributed their legends of a King Midas to someone who lived way before the Trojan War.  But Homer himself makes no allusion to a past Midas when talking about the Trojan War (and I've recently come to support the 808 BC date for the fall of Troy).  The Greek myths of Midas are I feel clearly fantastical myths inspired by the 700 BC Midas who the Greeks pushed further back into the mythical past.

Some Greek sources also claim the Wife of the 700 BC Midas was the first to mint coins.  Modern historians scoff at that idea, feeling confident no coinage existed prior to Lydian innovation nearly 200 years later. But if this early coinage experiment used Gold rather then Silver coins, then I suspect all those coins were eventually melted down to be used for other things, especially after Silver coins became standard, explaining the lack of an archeological record for them.  

Thus the 700 BC Midas would be the origin of the name's association with Gold.  And it was actually his Wife, a Female, who did the "Gold Making".

But Midas wasn't the King of Babylon, so why mention him here?  Leaving aside my belief that the ultimate final fulfilment of this Prophecy is still yet future, which is the kind of thing I discus on a different blog where I have been flirting with the idea of eschatological Babylon being Turkey since before I even discovered this.

Midas was also in conflict with Assyria during the same time Isaiah's contemporary King of Babylon was, and was eventually also defeated and his capital city Gordium/Gordion was in turn destroyed by the Cimmerians in 695 BC not long before Assyria destroyed Babylon in 691 or 689 BC fulfilling Isaiah 21.  So Isaiah could have been throwing in a reference to an ally of Babylon.

But maybe Gordion also had a Temple that was thought of as a "Gate of the gods" or "House of Heaven" similarly to Temples of Enlil and Marduk in Mesopotamia?

1 comment:

  1. somewhere in the writings of the greek historians, they describe that their record of a "trojan war" is a greek re-telling of persian history 20,000 earlier (still extant at that time).

    ReplyDelete