Ancient Kingdom Of The Sabeans

Killion: Weekend wrap -- Giant wake-up call

In some quarters, the benefit of the doubt that Brian Sabean earned by winning the World Series has already expired.

But it’s not quite time to panic. The Giants have been swept before. The last time they were swept on the road -- in June against Oakland -- they were only a few miles from home, weren’t operating in suffocating heat and humidity and didn’t have Barry Zito start.

In other words, they had fewer excuses than they did over the past weekend when they lost all three to Cincinnati.

But the Cincinnati sweep could have some benefits. Like:

-- Forcing Zito out of the rotation for good. All the rest of the Giants games are going to be critical. There’s no way -- barring injury or illness to another starter –--that the Giants can hand the ball to Zito.

-- Reminding everyone that nothing has been won yet. When the Giants traded for Carlos Beltran last week, the stories all spun ahead to how Beltran could help the Giants in the playoffs. Uh, not there yet folks.

-- Refocus the AT&T Park crowd. Not that the fans haven’t been on their game all season. But the Giants play 22 of their next 35 games at home. Time to make that home field advantage count.

-- Spur Brian Sabean to try to make more waiver-wire deals like he did last season.

There are two more months left for panic. Remember people, you have to pace yourselves.

***

The A’s offense continues to roll. When I asked Conor Jackson if it was frustrating that it was too little, too late, he said no.

“There’s two months of baseball left,” he said. “That’s a lot of baseball.”

Jackson cited the Colorado Rockies, who were seven games back and in fourth place on Sept 10 in 2007. Yet the Rockies made the playoffs and knocked Jackson’s Arizona Diamondbacks team out of the NLCS before losing in the World Series.

 “I think this is what they envisioned when they put the team together,” Jackson said. “Of course, they didn’t want it to happen after the All-Star game.”

Billy Beane didn’t hear any deals that enticed him. So, aside from trading reliever Brad Ziegler to Arizona, he kept the A’s together to see if they can make a Rockies-like run. The A’s are currently 11.5 back but playing the best ball of the season.

Queen of Saba [Sheba] – IIumquh of the Sabeans

Version of Sheba according to Islamic traditions :  Sheba is the Anglicized Hebrew spelling of Saba, the name of an ancient southwest Arabian kingdom roughly corresponding to the modern territory of Yemen, originally settled by Semites from western or central Arabia during the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. Excavations at Ma’rib, its capital, during the 20th century have revealed an imposing temple to the moon god. Like the sabbath it has a meaning of “seven”.

“The South Arabians before Islam were polytheists and revered a large number of deities . Most of these were astral in concept but the significance of only a few is known. It was essentially a planetary system in which the moon as a masculine deity prevailed. This, combined with the use of a star calendar by the agriculturists of certain parts, particularly in the Hadramaut, indicates that there was an early reverence for the night sky.

Amongst the South Arabians the worship of the moon continued, and it is almost certain that their religious calendar was also lunar and that their years were calculated by the position of the moon. The national god of each of the kingdoms or states was the Moon-god known by various names:

 ’Ilumquh by the Sabaeans, ‘Amm and ‘Anbay by the Qatabanians, Wadd (love) by the Minaeans, and Sin by the Hadramis”. The term ‘God is Love’ is characteristic of Wadd (Briffault 3/85). ‘the Merciful’ ascribed to Allah is also South Arabian (Pritchard).

The sun-goddess was the moon’s consort; she was perhaps best known in South Arabia as Dhat Hamym, ’she who sends forth strong rays of benevolence’. Another dominant deity was the male god known as Athtar corresponding to Phoenician Astarte (Doe 25). Pritchard claims their pantheon included the the moon god Sin etc., Shams (Shamash) and Athtar or Astarte as in the Semitic trinity, however it would appear that the sun was female as the Canaanite Shapash who figures in Ugarit myth alongside Athtar (Driver 110).

The earliest temple known is the Mahram Bilquis or Harem of the Queen of Sheba, previously called the Awwam the temple of the Moon God ‘Ilumquh which dates from around 700 BC, although its lower levels may be substantially older. Sabean moon worship extended through a long period of time to around 400 AD when it was overtaken be rescendent Judaism and Christianity around a century before Muhammad.

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