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The Tablets of Stone
The ancient Hebrews inhabiting the northern Arabian peninsula before the time of Abraham "felt that mana pervaded certain sacred and mysterious objects, such as the strange outcrops of rocks in the desert and the trees of the oases. They venerated stone pillars as containing life-giving power and cajoled the personal spirits that haunted the sandstorms and the night."
- Ninian Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind
"I have a word of secret to tell thee,
a message to whisper unto thee:
It is a contraption that launches words,
a Stone that whispers.
Men its messages will not know;
Earth's multitudes will not comprehend.""Heaven with Earth it makes converse,
and the seas with the planets.
It is a Stone of Splendor;
To heaven it is yet unknown.
Let's you and I raise it
within my cavern, on lofty Zaphon."
- Ugarit tablet found at Rash Shamra (Canaanite)
"In a most thorough study on the subject, Wilhelm H. Roscher (Omphalos) showed that the Indo-European term for these oracle stones - navel in English, nabel in German, etc. - stem from the Sanskrit nabh, which meant 'emanate forcefully'. It is no coincidence that in the Semitic languages naboh meant to foretell and nabih meant 'prophet'. All these identical meanings undoubtedly hearken back to the Sumerian, in which NA.BA(R) meant 'bright-shiny stone that solves."
"Many records establish that an omphalos stone was Delphi's holiest object. It was set into a special base in the inner sanctum of the temple of Apollo, some say next to a golden statue of the god and some say it was enshrined all by itself. In a subterranean chamber, hidden from view by the oracle seekers, the oracle priestess, in trance-like oblivion, answered the questions of kings and heroes by uttering enigmatic answers - answers given by the god but emanating from the omphalos...Frequently, the oracle stones were depicted as twin cones connected to each other via a common base..."
"...We find the twin Sacred Stones, accompanied by the two eagles also depicted in Egyptian sacred writings; and many centuries before the Greeks even began to enshrine their oracle centers, an Egyptian Pharaoh depicted an omphalos with the two perched birds in his pyramids. He was Seti I, who lived in the fourteenth century BC; and it was in his depiction of the domain of Seker, the Hidden god, that we have seen the oldest omphalos to date."
- Zecharia Sitchin, The Stairway to Heaven
In reference to a conical object located at the temple of Ammon at the oasis of Siwa:
"The tine which is worshipped there as a god has not the shape that artificers have usually applied to the gods. Rather, its appearance is most like an umbilicus, and it is made of an emerald and gems cemented together."
- Quintus Curtius
"Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel; And they saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness."
- Exodus 24:9-10
Besides the narrative of Moses meeting God on Mount Sinai in the form of a cloud with thunder and earthquake there is a second separate story. "...Moses and Aaron go up the mountain with two companions and seventy elders and see the God of Israel...This full vision of God and heaven in its blue purity is probably the oldest of the Sinai stories."
- Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version
"They have presumably wandered through clinging, hanging mist before dawn; and at the very moment they reach their goal, the swaying darkness tears asunder (as I myself happened to witness once) and dissolves except for one cloud already transparent with the hue of the still unrisen sun. The sapphire proximity of the heavens overwhelms the aged shepherds of the Delta, who have never before tasted, who have never been given the slightest idea, of what is shown in the play of early light over the summits of the mountains. And this precisely is perceived by the representatives of the liberated tribes as that which lies under the feet of their enthroned Melek."
- Martin Buber, Kingship of God
"The clearest descriptions of the tablets [of the Testimony] are contained in the Talmudic-Midrashic sources which yield the following information: (1) they were 'made of a sapphire-like stone'; (2) they were 'mot more than six hands in length and as much in width' but were nevertheless enormously heavy; (3) though hard they were also flexible; (4) they were transparent."
"...Some of the most serious scholarship that I have studied [according to Funk and Wagnells' The Jewish Encyclopedia (1925) argued that the Tablets of Stone contained within the Ark of the Covenant had, in reality, been two pieces of a meteorite."
- Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal
"The Ark held not the two tables of the law but...a meteorite from Mount Sinai."
- Menahem Haran, Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel (1978)
"...Since ancient times, Semitic tribes such as the children of Israel had been known to venerate stones that 'fell from heaven'. The best illustration of this custom, since it had continued into modern times, was the special reverence accorded by Muslims to the sacred Back Stone built into a corner of the wall of the Ka'aba in Mecca. Kissed by every pilgrim making the Haj to the holy site, this stone was declared by the Prophet Mohammed to have fallen from heaven to earth where it was first given to Adam to absorb his sins after his expulsion from the Garden of Eden; later it was presented by the angel Gabriel to Abraham, the Hebrew Patriarch; finally it became the cornerstone of the Ka'aba - the 'beating heart' of the Islamic world."
- Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal
The Ka'aba is "a black stone believed to be a replica of God's 'Celestial Chamber'."
- Zecharia Sitchin, The Stairway to Heaven
"At the time of the Muslim invasion of India, the worship of the linga was still common all over the country, but many were destroyed by the reforming invaders. The most notable lingam, a polished black stone at Somnath in Guzerat, was demolished by Mahmud of Ghezni, but fragments of it ended up in the Ka'aba in Mecca, an ancient pre-Islamic geodetic and holy spot."
- Peter Tompkins, The Magic of Obelisks
"Geologists...unhesitatingly attributed a Meteoric origin to the Black Stone. Likewise the pairs of sacred stones, known as betyls, that some pre-Islamic Arab tribes carried on their desert wanderings were believed to have been aerolites - and it was recognized that a direct line of cultural transmission linked these betyls (which were often placed in portable shrines) with the Black Stone of the Ka'aba and with the Stone Tables of the Law contained within the Ark."
"...Betyls had been know in medieval Europe as lapis betilis."
- Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal
The name lapis betilis "stemming from Semitic origins and taken over at a late date by the Greeks and Romans for sacred stones that were assumed to possess a divine life, stones with a soul [that were used] for divers superstitions, for magic and for fortune telling. They were meteoric stones fallen from the sky."
- W. H. Roscher, Lexikon der griechischen und ršmischen Mythologie (1884)
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