In "Could the God of the Bible Really Be Satan?", Billy Carson argues that the God described in much of the Old Testament cannot be the creator of the universe, because the commands attributed to him contradict the attributes churches teach about God. He identifies that figure with members of the Anunnaki pantheon, chiefly Enlil, and concludes that the deity of these passages fits the description of Satan better than that of a loving creator. The live-streamed talk covers the Sumerian background, a list of divine attributes taught in Bible study, a series of biblical passages and the Gnostic texts of Nag Hammadi.
The question matters because it touches a tension believers and skeptics have argued over for nearly two thousand years: how the God of mercy and the God of the conquest narratives can be the same. Carson's answer is contested, and the fair way to weigh it is to set out what he says, which texts he uses, and how Jewish and Christian scholarship reads them.
What the video covers
The Anunnaki pantheon (from about 9:45)
Carson opens with the Sumerian setting. Anu, the father figure of the Anunnaki, rules from the sky, and his sons Enki and Enlil divide power on Earth. In Carson's reading these were not gods but flesh-and-blood beings with advanced knowledge of genetics and astronomy who posed as gods. Enki is the exception: a scientist who sympathised with humans, took a human partner and, in Carson's account, fathered Ziusudra, the Sumerian flood hero he equates with Noah. Enlil, a warrior-ruler, ends up holding power over Earth.
Edin and the making of Adam (from about 14:00)
Enlil builds the E.DIN in Mesopotamia, which Carson describes as an outdoor laboratory with armed guards at its gate, citing the apocryphal Book of Adam. Early clones of the native hominids died young and could not reproduce, so, in his retelling of the tablets, a sister of the two brothers carried a modified embryo for ten months and Adam was born. Eve was then made from Adam's own genetic material, taken from his bone. Carson stresses that people already lived outside the garden, citing Cain's fear of being killed in Genesis 4.
The serpent and the expulsion (from about 18:45)
In Carson's account the serpent was Enki. The serpent, he notes, stood for wisdom in the ancient world, and Enki told Adam and Eve that they were conscious beings, not animals, and that their rulers were not gods. Enlil returns, finds them changed and expels them so their awakened consciousness will not spread to the others held in the garden. Carson adds Amun Ra, a son of Enki whom he identifies with Marduk, and names Enlil, Anu and Amun Ra as beings whose words entered the Bible as the words of God. He also traces the word "amen" to Amun.
What Bible study teaches about God (from about 24:20)
To set up the contradiction, Carson reads a list of divine attributes from the website Bible Study Tools, each with its proof text: God is infinite (Colossians 1:17), immutable (Malachi 3:6), self-sufficient (John 5:26), omnipotent (Psalm 33:6), omniscient (Isaiah 46:9–10), omnipresent (Psalm 139:7–10), wise (Romans 11:33), faithful (Deuteronomy 7:9) and good (Psalm 34:8). He is explicit that he believes in a creator with these qualities: "I'm not an atheist," he says, pointing to quantum physics as evidence that we live in a creation. His objection is to assigning them to the God of the Bible, whose title Elohim he reads as plural.
Gnosticism and Nag Hammadi (from about 32:30)
Carson introduces Gnosticism, the belief that each person carries a divine spark trapped in a material world, and holds up his copy of the Nag Hammadi scriptures: thirteen codices with more than fifty texts, found in Upper Egypt in 1945, including the Gospels of Thomas, Philip and Truth. For Carson the Gnostics understood that one consciousness divides itself into every being.
The passages (from about 37:40)
The longest section reads passages that, Carson argues, a God with those attributes could never command: the destruction of Jabesh-gilead and the abduction of the women of Shiloh (Judges 21), Moses' order to kill the Midianite women and boys (Numbers 31), the terms of siege warfare (Deuteronomy 20:10–14), the law requiring a rapist to pay fifty shekels and marry his victim (Deuteronomy 22:28–29), the sale of a daughter into servitude (Exodus 21:7–11) and the plunder of Jerusalem (Zechariah 14). He continues with the slavery laws, the New Testament instructions to slaves in Ephesians 6:5 and 1 Timothy 6:1–2, and the death penalties in the Torah and the prophets. His point each time: a God who does not change cannot be both the God of the attribute list and the God of these orders. "This is not the Lord God," he concludes. "This is the devil himself."
The question for the street preacher (from about 61:00)
Carson recounts a preacher who approached him on a beach. The man described Satan as a genius nearly as powerful as God. Why, Carson asked, would such a being obey prophecies written by men and walk into a lake of fire? His alternative is that the deceiver shaped the text itself, so believers end up "following and worshiping the same entity and demon that you're running from." He says the Nag Hammadi writers reached the same conclusion.
Where the Bible came from (from about 67:30)
Carson closes with his view that the Bible was assembled from older material, from Sumerian tablets and the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, and altered over time like a whispered sentence passed around a circle. He contrasts faith practised out of fear of hell with commanding one's own reality, and urges viewers to study: "Break it down into ancient texts and find out where the sources of the material came from."
Key takeaways
- Carson's case rests on a contrast between the attributes taught for God and the commands attributed to God in the same Bible.
- He identifies the God of these passages with Anunnaki figures, chiefly Enlil, plus Anu and Amun Ra (Marduk), rather than with the creator.
- He casts Enki, the serpent of Eden, as the one who told the first humans the truth about their nature.
- He is not an atheist; he believes in a creator present as a spark in everything, a view he links to the Gnostics.
- His conclusion echoes Gnostic writings that mainstream Judaism and Christianity have rejected since antiquity.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson's position follows from two convictions. The first is that the creator is consciousness itself, present in every atom, which lets him affirm omnipresence and goodness while rejecting the God of the conquest narratives; as he puts it, "the people in the Bible, and I do mean people, that ain't them." The second is his Sumerian framework, set out in his Compendium of the Emerald Tablets, in which beings with advanced technology ruled early humanity and were remembered as gods. Read that way, a plural Elohim who orders wars over land and demands obedience looks like a ruling family, not a creator. For the grammar and history of that word, see [the Elohim pillar](/who-were-the-elohim-the-plural-god-of-genesis-and-the-anunnaki-question); for the Sumerian sources, see [Who Were the Anunnaki?](/who-were-the-anunnaki-sumerian-texts-vs-ancient-astronaut-theory). The step from lesser ruler to Satan comes from his Gnostic reading, covered in [the Gnostic gospels pillar](/the-gnostic-gospels-and-nag-hammadi-explained-the-gospel-of-thomas-and-why-they-were-buried).
What mainstream scholarship says
Jewish and Christian traditions both hold that God and Satan are distinct. In the Hebrew Bible, ha-satan, "the adversary" or "the accuser," appears in Job 1–2 and Zechariah 3 as a member of the heavenly court acting under God's authority, not a rival deity; later thought developed Satan as a created, fallen being. Neither tradition ignores the passages Carson reads. Rabbinic law narrowed many of them; the Talmud, for example, reads Deuteronomy 22:28–29 as letting the woman refuse the marriage. Christian theologians appeal to accommodation and progressive revelation, and writers such as Paul Copan argue that the conquest accounts use the stock hyperbole of ancient Near Eastern war reports. Immutability, in this tradition, means God's character and covenant faithfulness (the context of Malachi 3:6), not that every law stays in force, and abolitionists such as William Wilberforce argued against slavery from the same Bible.
Carson's thesis has a documented ancestor. The Secret Book of John, a Nag Hammadi text, portrays the maker of the material world, Yaldabaoth, as an ignorant lesser power who boasts that there is no other God beside him, a deliberate echo of Isaiah. In the second century Marcion separated the God of the Hebrew Bible from the Father of Jesus, and Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies largely to refute such views. Even in Gnostic texts the demiurge is usually distinct from the devil, so merging the two is Carson's own synthesis.
Assyriologists read Anu, Enki and Enlil as gods of Mesopotamian myth, not historical visitors; the flesh-and-blood reading comes from Zecharia Sitchin's The 12th Planet (1976), and no mainstream scholar identifies Yahweh with Enlil. Parallels between Genesis and Mesopotamian literature are real and widely accepted, especially between Noah and the flood heroes Ziusudra, Atrahasis and Utnapishtim. The etymologies are another matter: amen comes from a Hebrew root meaning "firm" or "true," and Elohim, though plural in form, takes singular verbs when it refers to Israel's God, as in Genesis 1:1.
Watch, read and go deeper
The audio edition is on the podcast episode page. For the texts behind the argument, start with [the Gnostic gospels pillar](/the-gnostic-gospels-and-nag-hammadi-explained-the-gospel-of-thomas-and-why-they-were-buried) and [the Book of Enoch pillar](/the-book-of-enoch-explained-the-watchers-nephilim-and-why-it-was-left-out), another ancient work left out of most Bibles. [The Anunnaki topic hub](/topics/anunnaki) gathers the Sumerian side of the story, and more of Carson's lectures are in [/watch/best-of-billy-carson](/watch/best-of-billy-carson) on 4BK TV.
Frequently asked questions
Does Billy Carson believe in God?
Yes. Carson says he is not an atheist and believes in a creator, understood as one consciousness present in everything. What he rejects is identifying that creator with the God who issues the commands in the passages he reads.
Who does Billy Carson say the God of the Old Testament is?
He identifies the figure with members of the Anunnaki, the pantheon of the Sumerian texts, above all Enlil, along with Anu and Amun Ra, whom he equates with Marduk. In his reading these were powerful beings who posed as gods. Mainstream scholars do not accept this identification.
Did the Gnostics believe the God of the Old Testament was evil?
Some did. The Secret Book of John describes the creator of the material world, Yaldabaoth, as an ignorant and arrogant lesser god, and the second-century teacher Marcion separated the God of the Hebrew Bible from the Father of Jesus. Jewish and Christian orthodoxy rejected these views.
How do Christians explain the violent passages in the Old Testament?
Christian scholars give several answers: that God accommodated ancient societies and revealed himself progressively, that conquest accounts use the exaggerated language of ancient war reports, and that the Mosaic civil law was fulfilled in Christ. Jewish tradition reads them through rabbinic interpretation that narrowed many of the laws.
Sources mentioned
Carson reads from the Bible, chiefly the attribute verses listed above, Judges 21, Numbers 31, Deuteronomy 13, 20 and 22, Exodus 21 and 22, Leviticus 20:13, 2 Chronicles 15, Zechariah 14, Isaiah 13, Ephesians 6:5 and 1 Timothy 6:1–2. He draws on the attribute list published by Bible Study Tools, the Sumerian tablets, the apocryphal Book of Adam, the Epic of Gilgamesh and The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (the revised and updated translation edited by Marvin Meyer), and names the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata, the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead and the Emerald Tablets of Thoth as source traditions, alongside his own Compendium of the Emerald Tablets. Further reading: W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atra-hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (1969); Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (1979); Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies; Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? (2011).
