Assyria (Ashur)

Pul

“And I will set a sign among them, and I will send those that escape of them unto the Nations, to Tarshish, Pul, and Lud, that draw the bow, to Tubal, and Javan, to the isles afar off, that have not heard my fame, neither have seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the Nations.”

Pul is a word for Assyria after their king at the time (2 Kings 15:19, 1 Chronicles 5:26).

Culture

Immerson

Baptism was also a pagan ritual. One could assert that in the Christian era, the pagan idea has been brought into Christianity. In Christianity, the priests were cleansed before the sacrifice, not the people, and John the Baptist fulfilled that. We have taken the power to cleanse our sins which belongs to the sacrifice – which is what Yahshua is – and we have wrongly transferred it to the priests themselves, who merely conducted the ritual! We are cleansed through Yahshua's sacrifice, and not through the rituals of the priests. There are many ancient documents revealing baptism to be a pagan ritual. Here I will show that baptism was employed by our pagan ancestors in four of our own ancient cultures, Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, and Germanic.

From Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, Princeton University Press, J. Pritchard, editor, 1969:

Page 437, from an Akkadian inscription entitled “I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom”, which dates before 700 B.C., there is an exclamation that reads: “In the Gate of the Purifying Waters I was sprinkled with purifying waters”, which certainly describes a ritual. The exclamation is accompanied by others describing sacrifices and libations and incense-offerings in supplication to gods.