Nimrod: the mighty hunter before the Lord — the God-hating builder of the Tower of Babel — the idiot. This one might be my favorite episode yet, wherein we examine one of the most infamous biblical characters with the most extra-biblical lore, whose name maddeningly transformed to mean "dummy" in American pop culture during the 20th century.

It is because of this that few people appreciate the extraordinary legends about the greatest emperor and most evil villain who may have ever lived — a half-remembered Sumerian/Assyrian/Babylonian king (or possibly Gilgamesh). But for millennia, many theologians and writers spent a lot of energy examining Nimrod's legend.

We'll step into ancient Mesopotamia and review the wide array of apocryphal interpretations of Nimrod's story. Then we'll look at the way Nimrod has been embraced by two different modern political and aesthetic movements: the Israeli "Canaanites" and the Hungarian Turanists.

For these so-called Canaanites of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, who were inspired by European movements of the extreme right wing, Nimrod's pagan strength represented a turn away for Abrahamic religions and toward a new national identity inspired by taboo mythologies and modernist theories about language families.

For the Hungarian Turanists, Nimrod's legend in Simon Kézai's Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum has similarly inspired visions of an ideal national ancestor. Paradoxically though, some of these Turanists interpreted his legends inversely to the Canaanites — as a great enemy of the Semitic peoples and ideal Hungarian emperor who proudly ruled over his conquered nations.

This is also technically part 2 of the Hunnorum et Hungarorum mini-series where we'll gradually move through Kézai's Gesta, but you don't really need to listen to the first one to fully grasp most of the content in here tbh. It goes a lot of places all on its own.

Written by Turán Explorer and produced by Boss Moss. Follow on TikTok and Twitter @Turan_Explorer and support us on www.patreon.com/turan_explorer

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