In part 2 of his live-streamed talk on the origins of religion, Billy Carson argues that much of the Old Testament was assembled from older Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian and Indian texts, and that the gods of those texts were flesh-and-blood beings, the Anunnaki, who posed as deities and used religion to organize human labor. The stream walks through the books on his desk, the Book of Enoch, the Atrahasis account of a revolt among the gods, a claimed “worship gene” and his distinction between religion and spirituality. It continues an earlier talk that centered on cargo cults and the way less technologically advanced peoples deify more advanced ones.
The relationship between the Bible and older Near Eastern literature is a real, well-documented field of scholarship. Carson's version goes much further than most scholars do, so the useful approach is to separate what he cites, what he concludes, and what historians of religion accept.
What the video covers
Recap: gods as advanced visitors (from about 5:00)
Carson recaps part 1: when a more advanced civilization meets a less advanced one, the less advanced side deifies the visitors, as in the cargo cults of the Pacific. A visitor today using what he calls metaphysical technology, a blend of spiritual practice and engineering, would be taken for a god too.
The books on the desk (from about 6:50)
Carson holds up the texts he has cited in past talks, telling viewers that “if I'm talking about something that means I actually have it.” First come the Enuma Elish, the seven tablets of creation, and the similar Atrahasis epic. He says these two underlie much of the Old Testament and were recopied from tablet to tablet, possibly from stories 40,000 to 50,000 years old, with copyists filling in chipped passages. He follows with the Bhagavad Gita, parts of which he says entered Deuteronomy; the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he links to Proverbs; the Egyptian Book of the Dead, properly the Book of Going Forth by Day, which he names as the source of the Ten Commandments; the Code of Hammurabi; and a ten-volume Mahabharata, which he compares to a Star Wars film.
He also corrects a common belief about Zecharia Sitchin, who he says “didn't translate any tablets” but wrote books from existing translations. Showing a primer called Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian and a beginner's hieroglyph book, Carson urges viewers to learn the scripts and read the sources themselves rather than take anyone's word, his own included.
The Book of Enoch (from about 15:05)
Enoch is revered in the Bible, Carson notes, but his book was left out of it. In his reading, the beings who descend in Enoch were flesh-and-blood people who taught humans to make weapons and fought beside them; he asks what kind of angel needs protection against being cut. Enoch's ascent, in his account, was an appointed departure: Enoch hands his records to his sons, is taken up, describes the Earth from above, and later returns. Carson argues the book was excluded because it describes contact with beings from elsewhere.
Religion versus spirituality (from about 17:30)
Here Carson draws the line that runs through the whole stream. Religion, in his view, routes people through intermediaries and borrowed texts; spirituality means connecting directly with the creator, with the body as the temple. Of a planned workshop on the subject, he says “the purpose is not to bash religion” but to show how much of modern scripture is copied. He says the Apocrypha was dropped at the Council of Nicaea, and cites the myth of Adapa, in which, in his telling, Enki tells Adapa, his Adam, that humans were made wiser than the Anunnaki, enraging Enlil.
Jesus and the Emerald Tablets (from about 20:45)
Carson says his Compendium of the Emerald Tablets sets sayings of Jesus beside passages from the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, which he dates to about 36,000 years ago. His explanation is the Gospel of the Holy Twelve, which he says sends the young Yeshua to Egypt to study the Kemetic mysteries founded by Thoth. His analogy: repeating what he learned in an MIT neuroscience course is not plagiarism, and Yeshua's words echo the tablets because that is where he studied.
How the Bible was assembled (from about 24:10)
Carson argues that the Bible was not written in real time, that the disciples could not read or write, and that the canon was curated between roughly 100 and 900 AD, like a streaming service hand-picking its catalog. He is clear that the book has value: “There's actually great information in the book,” he says, but readers need discernment.
Deuteronomy and the plural gods (from about 28:00)
Carson applies that discernment to the war commands in Deuteronomy. He reads the orders to destroy cities and take captives as the words of rulers, not the creator, and says the original text speaks of gods in the plural, whom he identifies with the Anunnaki and with the giant Anakim before whom the Israelite spies felt like grasshoppers. The soldiers, he says, were like modern recruits sent abroad to fight for someone else's gain.
Zealotry, the feminine and the worship gene (from about 31:20)
Carson argues that religion produces zealots willing to kill for what they worship, says most wars have been religious, and cites the Inquisitions with a toll of more than 50 million deaths. Traditions that pushed out the feminine, he argues, lost their balance, and “God is not a man. God is a frequency.” He rejects the image of a creator who picks the winners of games and wars, recalling Jesus saying that those killed by a falling tower were not being punished for their sins. He then describes a study he says found a worship gene that appeared about 200,000 years ago, matching the Sumerian account of humans engineered to labor for the gods, and links it to the fusion of human chromosome 2.
Egypt, offerings and forgiveness (from about 44:30)
The pyramids, Carson says, were built by paid workers who even received medical care, not slaves, while temple offerings filled storehouses that fed the gods, by which he means the Anunnaki. Against outside absolution he sets self-forgiveness, and being born again, in his reading, means rising to a higher level of consciousness.
The Atrahasis revolt and the first humans (from about 51:00)
Returning to Atrahasis, Carson tells of the Igigi, junior gods who in his account came from Lahmu, which he identifies as Mars, to Earth after long labor and surrounded the compound of Enlil and Enki in revolt, at a site he places at Adam's Calendar in South Africa. The settlement was to create workers: in his reading, a goddess he identifies with Isis carried a modified embryo for ten months and bore the first Adamu, and Eve was later made from Adam's genetic material, the origin of the rib story. Genesis having two creation accounts, and Cain fearing people outside Eden, show him that humans already lived elsewhere. In his framework the Igigi who took human wives are the sons of God who fathered the Nephilim, Enki is the serpent who told humans of their potential, and Enlil, whom he equates with Yahweh, is the destructive one. He states plainly that he believes in a creator of the universe, and recommends William Bramley's The Gods of Eden.
Viewer questions (from about 66:50)
In the Q&A Carson says the Anunnaki were many peoples, not one race, and that some left after a war started by Marduk while their bloodlines remain. Revelation, he says, was written for its own era, not as a forecast of imminent end times.
Key takeaways
- Carson argues that the Old Testament drew on older texts, above all the Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis epic, along with Egyptian, Babylonian and Indian sources.
- He reads the gods of those texts, and the plural gods he finds in the Bible, as the Anunnaki: flesh-and-blood rulers rather than the creator.
- He frames religion as a system of labor and control and spirituality as a direct, inner connection with the creator, in whom he says he believes.
- His main textual evidence is the Book of Enoch and the Atrahasis revolt of the Igigi.
- He repeatedly tells viewers to learn cuneiform and hieroglyphs and read the primary sources themselves.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson's position rests on a single framework, set out in his Compendium of the Emerald Tablets: beings with advanced technology ruled early humanity, engineered people to work for them and were remembered as gods. Through that lens, the parallels between Genesis and Mesopotamian literature are shared history rather than shared myth, and the commands he finds troubling in Deuteronomy belong to those rulers, not the creator. That is how he can value the Bible's teaching while rejecting much of its theology. His fuller argument about borrowing is in [Was the Bible Copied from Ancient Texts?](/was-the-bible-copied-from-ancient-texts-billy-carsons-case-explained); the figures he names, Anu, Enlil and Enki, are profiled in [Sumerian Gods and Goddesses Explained](/sumerian-gods-and-goddesses-explained-anu-enlil-enki-inanna-and-the-pantheon); and his reading of the plural divine name is weighed in [the Elohim pillar](/who-were-the-elohim-the-plural-god-of-genesis-and-the-anunnaki-question).
What mainstream scholarship says
Historians of religion agree with Carson on one large point: the Hebrew Bible grew out of a shared ancient Near Eastern world. The flood story of Genesis 6–9 closely parallels Atrahasis and Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh; Genesis 1 echoes the watery chaos of the Enuma Elish; the Covenant Code of Exodus 21–23 shares cases, such as the goring ox, with the Code of Hammurabi; and Proverbs 22:17–24:22 follows the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope. Scholars describe this as adaptation, often deliberate reworking around a single God, not verbatim copying. Israelite religion itself evolved: scholars such as Mark S. Smith trace a development from the worship of Yahweh alongside other deities toward strict monotheism by the Babylonian exile, which is why traces of a divine council survive in Psalm 82 and Deuteronomy 32:8–9. Elohim is plural in form but takes singular verbs when it refers to Israel's God, as in Genesis 1:1, and the grasshopper line comes from Numbers 13:33.
Several of Carson's sources do not fit the timeline. The Enuma Elish is a Babylonian work in Akkadian, generally dated to the second millennium BCE, and the oldest Atrahasis copies date to about the 17th century BCE. The core of Deuteronomy is usually dated to the seventh century BCE, before the Bhagavad Gita took shape, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead was compiled in the 14th century CE. Spell 125 of the Book of the Dead, a list of wrongs the deceased denies before Osiris, overlaps with the Ten Commandments in ethics, not wording. The Emerald Tablets of Thoth first appeared in Maurice Doreal's translation in the 1930s, and the Gospel of the Holy Twelve was published by Gideon Jasper Ouseley in the early 1900s; scholars treat both as modern works. In Atrahasis the Igigi dig Mesopotamia's rivers and canals; the text says nothing of Mars or Africa, and Assyriologists read the Anunnaki as gods of myth.
On the canon, the Council of Nicaea in 325 did not decide which books belong in the Bible; the canon formed gradually, Athanasius listed the 27 New Testament books in 367, and the Apocrypha remains in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. The Book of Enoch is quoted in Jude 14–15 and is canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Historians reject the 50 million Inquisition figure: studies of the Spanish Inquisition put executions at a few thousand across three and a half centuries. The worship-gene idea traces to geneticist Dean Hamer's The God Gene, which made no claim of an insertion 200,000 years ago, and the chromosome 2 fusion is explained by ordinary evolution. On one point Carson matches the archaeology: excavations of the workers' settlement at Giza support paid, organized labor rather than slavery.
Watch, read and go deeper
The audio edition is on the podcast episode page. For the Sumerian sources behind Carson's framework, start with [Who Were the Anunnaki?](/who-were-the-anunnaki-sumerian-texts-vs-ancient-astronaut-theory), which sets the tablets beside the ancient astronaut reading. [The Anunnaki topic hub](/topics/anunnaki) gathers the articles on Sumer, the pantheon and the Genesis parallels.
Frequently asked questions
Was the Bible copied from Sumerian texts?
Scholars agree that parts of Genesis share themes with older Mesopotamian literature, most clearly the flood story, but see adaptation within a shared culture rather than word-for-word copying. Billy Carson goes further, arguing that much of the Old Testament came from these texts and that their gods were real beings.
Why was the Book of Enoch left out of the Bible?
The Book of Enoch, written in stages from about the third century BCE, was widely read in Second Temple Judaism, and fragments survive among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It did not enter the rabbinic Hebrew Bible or most Christian canons, though the Letter of Jude quotes it and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes it. Carson says it was excluded for describing contact with beings from elsewhere; scholars point to its late date and pseudonymous attribution.
Is there really a worship gene?
The idea comes from Dean Hamer's 2004 book The God Gene, which associated a VMAT2 gene variant with higher self-transcendence scores. No gene has been established as a cause of religious belief. Carson's claim that such a gene was inserted about 200,000 years ago is his own interpretation, tied to his reading of the Sumerian tablets.
What does Billy Carson mean by religion versus spirituality?
For Carson, religion places intermediaries, institutions and edited texts between people and the creator, while spirituality is a direct, inner connection with the creator, with the body as the temple. He says his aim is not to attack believers but to encourage them to study the sources themselves.
Sources mentioned
Carson shows or cites the Enuma Elish, the Atrahasis epic, the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Book of the Dead with the Papyrus of Ani, the Code of Hammurabi, the primer Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian, the Book of Enoch, the Apocrypha, the myth of Adapa, the Gospel of the Holy Twelve, the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, the Book of Adam, the Nag Hammadi scriptures, the Sumerian King List and William Bramley's The Gods of Eden, along with his own Compendium of the Emerald Tablets and the work of Zecharia Sitchin. From the Bible he draws on Genesis 1–4, Deuteronomy, Numbers 13, Luke 13 and Revelation. Further reading: W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atra-hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (1969); James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament; Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God (2nd ed., 2002); Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (1987).
