Nibiru and “The Twelfth Planet”: What the Babylonian Sources Say

Where it comes from

Sitchin's planet. The modern Nibiru begins with The 12th Planet, published in New York by Stein and Day in 1976 by Zecharia Sitchin (1920–2010). Sitchin read the Babylonian Epic of Creation, the Enūma eliš, not as a poem about gods but as a coded history of the solar system. In his reading Tiāmat, the primeval sea of the poem, is a planet that once orbited between Mars and Jupiter; Marduk, the god who defeats her, is a wandering planet that entered the solar system from outside; and a collision with it and its satellites broke Tiāmat apart, so that one half became the Earth and the debris the asteroid belt. Sitchin gave the wandering planet the name Nibiru, counted it as the twelfth body of the solar system, and made it the home of the Anunnaki, a group of Mesopotamian gods, whom he identified with the Nephilim of Genesis 6:4 and described as flesh-and-blood visitors to the Earth (Sitchin 1976).

The 3,600 years. Sitchin set the length of Nibiru's orbit at 3,600 years. He took the figure from the Babylonian number šār, 3,600, in which ancient lists count the reigns of the kings who ruled before the Flood, and read each šār as one year of the planet (Sitchin 1976). The lists themselves are discussed below.

The doomsday dates. The danger to the Earth is a later addition. In 1995 Nancy Lieder, who said that extraterrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli system spoke to her, began posting their warnings on her website ZetaTalk (Wolchover 2011). Her Planet X, which she later linked with Sitchin's Nibiru, was to sweep past the Earth and devastate it in May 2003 (Morrison 2009; Wolchover 2011). The year passed quietly. Her followers and other writers then settled on December 2012, the close of a long cycle in the Maya calendar (Wolchover 2011; NASA 2012), and a later author named 23 September 2017 (Greshko 2017). Each date came and went.

What the sources say

The word nēberu

nēberu is an Akkadian word, not a Sumerian one. It comes from the verb ebēru, "to cross", and means a crossing, a ford or a ferry (All Skies Encyclopaedia, "Nēberu"). King's translation of 1902 already writes it Nibir and Nibiru, the form Sitchin used. The texts that use the word are Babylonian and Assyrian works of astronomy, divination and myth.

In the Enūma eliš

The poem uses the word twice in L. W. King's edition of 1902. In Tablet V, after Marduk has made the world from the body of Tiāmat, he sets out the stars and the calendar and fixes a station named after the crossing:

He founded the station of Nibir to determine their bounds; That none might err or go astray, He set the station of Bēl and Ea along with him.

In Tablet VII, among the fifty names the gods give Marduk, the name is one of his titles, and he who bears it upholds the paths of the stars:

Saying, “He who forced his way through the midst of Tiamat [without resting], “Let his name be Nibiru, ‘the Seizer of the Midst’! “For the stars of heaven he upheld the paths, “He shepherded all the gods like sheep!

Read VII.109 in the Codex: Enūma eliš, tr. L. W. King (1902) →

"The Seizer of the Midst" is King's rendering; the words in square brackets are his restoration of a damaged line, and in modern editions these lines are numbered about VII.124–131 (Freedman 2015). In neither passage is Nibiru a body that travels into the solar system. It is a fixed station among the stars and a name of Marduk, whose crossing of Tiāmat's body in the battle the name recalls. Tiāmat herself is the primeval sea of the poem's opening lines (King I.4), whose body Marduk splits in two, setting one half as a covering for heaven (King IV.137–140). The Anunnaki appear in the poem as a body of gods, over whom Tiāmat raises Kingu in the assembly of the gods (King III.101–104), not as the people of another world. Sitchin's reading of the poem as an account of colliding planets is not supported(evidence: Not supported): nothing in the text makes Tiāmat a planet or describes an orbit.

In the astronomical and omen texts

Outside the poem, nēberu belongs to the vocabulary of Babylonian astronomy, and the texts give it more than one referent.

• Jupiter. MUL.APIN, the Babylonian astronomical compendium (its oldest dated copy, from Assur, was made in the early seventh century BCE), names Nēberu as the star of Marduk in its list of the stars of Enlil, a great star that divides the sky in two (edition: Hunger and Pingree 1989). The usual identification of this star with the planet Jupiter rests on that passage read with other texts, and Babylonian word lists give the name among the names of Jupiter (All Skies Encyclopaedia, "Nēberu").
• Mercury. Two omen tablets of the Kuyunjik (Nineveh) collection in the British Museum, K.6174 and K.12769, give Mercury the name when it divides the sky (Freedman 2015; All Skies Encyclopaedia, "Nēberu").
• A star or a point in the sky. Other texts use the name for a fixed star, or for the point at which a body crosses the sky. Immanuel Freedman has argued that it could mark any visible object that stands at an equinox, where the sky is divided in two (Freedman 2015).

Which object a given text means is debated(evidence: Contested): Jupiter is the usual reading of MUL.APIN and the word lists, while Freedman reads the name as a marker of the equinox that different objects could fill, and the answer may have changed over the centuries in which the word was in use (Freedman 2015). Every candidate, however, is something the Babylonian observers could see: a planet that every reader of the texts could find in the night sky, or a star, or a point on the sky's circle. No text describes nēberu as a body that cannot be seen, or as a planet beyond the five known to the Babylonians.

The number 3,600

The Sumerian and Babylonian number system counted in sixties, and šār (Sumerian šár) is its unit for 60 × 60, or 3,600; Greek writers called it the sarus. The large numbers in the lists of kings before the Flood are counted in this system:

• In the Greek fragments of Berossus, a Babylonian priest writing about 290–278 BCE, as quoted by later authors, ten kings before the Flood reign for 120 sari in all. Abydenus explains that a sarus is 3,600 years, a neros 600 and a sossus 60, and Alexander Polyhistor gives the total as 432,000 years (Cory and Hodges 1876, pp. 51–54 and 60).
• The Sumerian King List, in the composite text edited by ETCSL, gives the eight kings before the Flood reigns of tens of thousands of years, from 18,600 to 43,200, for a total of 241,200 (ETCSL c.2.1.1, lines 1–39). Several are whole numbers of šār: 28,800 years is eight, 36,000 is ten.

In these lists šār is a number of years, like a "score" or a "century". No text connects it with nēberu, and none uses it for the period of a planet. The reading of each šār as one orbit of Nibiru is not supported(evidence: Not supported): it joins a counting unit from the king lists to a star name from the astronomical texts, and no ancient source makes that join.

The sky

The claim also fails as astronomy. By Kepler's third law, a body that circles the Sun once in 3,600 years has an average distance from the Sun of about 235 times the Earth's distance, so even its farthest point would lie within about 470 astronomical units. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mapped the whole sky in infrared light in 2010 and 2011, and a search of its data for a distant companion of the Sun, published in 2014, found none (Luhman 2014). In NASA's own summary of the result, the survey leaves no room for a planet as large as Saturn anywhere within 10,000 astronomical units of the Sun, or for one bigger than Jupiter within 26,000 (NASA JPL 2014): both limits lie far beyond the 470 units that a 3,600-year orbit allows. Morrison added that a body heavy enough to threaten the Earth would pull on the inner planets, whose orbits show no such pull, and NASA that a planet on its way in would long since have been plain to see without a telescope and followed by observers everywhere (Morrison 2009; NASA 2012).

Why it matters

The Nibiru story puts Babylonian names in front of readers who may never see the texts themselves, and the texts tell a different story. Babylonian scholars watched the sky for centuries, followed the movements of the planets, named the star of their chief god "the Crossing", and wove that name into the poem they recited for him. The record of that work survives in the texts themselves, and it comes into view only when the word is read in its own sources.

The method matters too. The Nibiru claim takes a word out of its texts, takes a number from an unrelated list, joins the two, and treats the join as a discovery. AKASHA's research framework warns against exactly this: a match of names or numbers is not evidence until ordinary explanations have been ruled out, and here the ordinary explanation is in the sources themselves.

The claim has also travelled far beyond books. By mid-2009 NASA's "Ask an Astrobiologist" service had received nearly a thousand questions about Nibiru and 2012 (Morrison 2009). The library's entry on Mesopotamian cosmogony gives the Enūma eliš in its own terms, and the Codex gives King's translation of the poem line by line, so that readers can check every passage cited here.