Ham and the Hindu gods...An Almost Certain Connection!
The Hindu religion is practiced by around 1.2 billion of Earth's inhabitants, with around 960 million of those being from India, so it is a very widely practiced faith indeed. With our current planetary population being around 8 billion, more than 1 in 7 people on Earth affiliate with Hinduism. It is known for having a mind boggling number of gods to worship in some branches of the faith. But there are a few agreed upon 'primary gods'. And interestingly, they provide a strong origins link with the Torah and the Bible. The names of some principal 'gods' of the Hindu faith are the same as or seem to contain the names of Ham (Noah's son) and his earliest descendants. The Ark seems to have survived the flood about 4,370 years ago in around 2,350 B.C. per the Biblical timeline. Ham was a 100 year old man who made the voyage on that Ark with his wife, his Father and Mother, and with his two brothers Shem and Japheth and their two wives. And I think you will conclude, as I did, that this link with Ham is strong enough to statistically qualify as being highly unlikely to have occurred by chance. One possibility is that the chief gods of the Hindu religion were in fact their early post flood ancestors, descendants of Ham, who they came over the centuries to regard as gods rather than ancestors. In this sense, some may see the Hindu faith as partially confirming the events of Genesis chapters 6 thru 8.
Here is a list of Ham and his descendants as given by Genesis chapter 10:
6 The sons of Ham:
Cush, Egypt, Put and Canaan.
7 The sons of Cush:
Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah and Sabteka.
The sons of Raamah:
Sheba and Dedan.
End Quote
Now compare that to the names of some of the principal Hindu gods:
Brahma (I have heard this pronounced Bra-ham) and the 'h' and the 'm' could be derived from Ham.
Kusha (like Cush, right?) is a son of Rama in the Hindu faith.
Rama is a Hindu god. Raamah, one of Ham's sons, obviously sounds like that.
Shiva is a chief Hindu god. Sheba, Noah's great grandson, Ham's son, sounds very like that. So does Seba, Noah's grandson, Ham's son.
Also, Vishnu is a chief Hindu god, but another name (manifestation as they describe it) for Vishnu is Ram, and the name Raamah, from Genesis as quoted above, may also relate to Ram.
Dhanvantari is a Hindu god and Ham had a great grandson Dedan. This one is more of a long shot, but they do share the 'dan' sound.
And perhaps an even more distant possibility, Ham had a descendant named Sabtah, and the Hindu's have a Sharabha.
The original Sanskrit word for ship is supposed to be Nau. Almost the same as Noah. Connected?
And so, there is a super high degree of correlation between the names of the handful of most principal Hindu gods and the names of Ham's descendants. And there are a few others that are homonyms of sorts.
Additionally, the Hindu faith believes in a Great Flood, and that a person named Manu (notice that there is a 'nu' in Manu. That might be a nod to the name Noah which is pronounced more like Nu in some languages) is warned by A FISH about the coming calamity and told by the fish (this fish is thought by Hindus to have been a manifestation of Vishnu) to build a boat to escape it. (As we know, the fish is an animal that turned out to be a Christian symbol eventually!) So this Manu and seven other people, wise sages, get on the boat and tie it to the fish's horn so the fish can pull them, and eventually it guides them to come to rest on a mountain and they are saved. The Bible also describes the Ark as having exactly 8 humans passengers, just as this Hindu flood legend does. Manu then makes a sacrifice to the gods, just as Noah made a sacrifice to God Almighty when the Ark of Noah came to rest and they all debarked the ship, as described at the end of Genesis chapter 8.
**Related side note: The Christian church has a relation or two to the number '7'. Jesus sent messages to 7 specific churches in the Book of Revelation, for instance. So, if you think of Noah as a 'preacher of righteousness' (the words used to describe Noah in the Bible) and if you think Jesus was a preacher of righteousness (because he was and is!) then Noah is a figure that may be meant to remind us of Jesus...a person symbolic of Jesus in some respects. Jesus is a 'KING', and in the Book of Revelation we learn that kings can be symbolized by horns, meaning horns such as grow out of the forehead of sheep and goats and oxen. So, the '7' that the Hindu faith said traveled with 'Manu' on the ship to safety by being tied to the 'horn' of a great fish (Jesus is the great KING/horn of the Christians) are symbolically tied up with the church (and the FISH is a symbol of the Christian church also!) Christians believe that the Christian church is being used to save many, under Jesus' guidance and while in His service. Both the Christian church and this 'fish with a horn' are used to bring a certain '7' entities to safety under the supervision of a powerful 8th entity (such as Manu is to the Hindu and Jesus is to the Christian.) Maybe God was planting a seed of knowledge for the Hindu faith to use in order to choose Jesus when their time of decision about the welfare of their souls comes.
In keeping with the truth that the Bible is one very very deep deep book, there is the theme of God's people being quite flawed, but He loves them anyway, and will save them from their wicked oppressors and even from the occasionally necessary severe punishments that our offended Father sometimes metes out to men gone wicked. God is strict with His own faithful, but they are none the less rescued when they most need it if they stay faithful to Him. This is a theme repeated throughout the Bible. You might even call it 'the bones of the Bible message'. And humans have 206 bones as adults, just as there are 206 verses from Genesis 1:1 to the last verse of Genesis chapter 8 where Noah and his family have sacrificed to God after being rescued from the Great Flood that God used to wipe out all of the rebellious humans who had displeased Him so much. The bones of the Bible, 206 verses? The bones of a human, 206 bones? Both 206?
The name Vishnu derives from the Sanskrit word Vishvarupa which means 'the One Who Pervades Everything'. This would be a fitting title for God the Father or Jesus or the Holy Spirit, right?
So, there seems to me to be a tremendously high chance that Manu and Noah refer to the same person, and that Ham and his immediate descendants are now mistakenly worshiped as principal Hindu gods. After all, ancestor worship, where ancestors are slowly transformed from human ancestors to gods or godlike beings by the retelling of their stories over the course of many centuries, is pretty common. The Norse gods of the earliest Viking days seem to be an example. Real people with the names of the Norse gods seem to have led a migration of Black Sea area people to the Scandinavian region in the centuries around when Christ walked the Earth. Today's British royalty can trace their bloodline back to some of them, name by name by name, by all accounts. It is said to be viewed as another proof for their legitimacy as a royal blood line. I once read an article about Queen Elizabeth II having an extensive genealogy performed, at the cost of around 1 million pounds, establishing her as a genuine descendant of those Christ-era Scandinavian emigrants as I recall the article. She may be descended from a 3rd century person named Woden, in fact.
Since 1.9 billion Muslims, 1.2 billion Hindus, and 2.4 billion Christians all believe in the flood, as well as 16 million Jews, that constitutes about 5.5 billion humans out of 8 billion humans on this Earth that hold to the belief in a Great Flood that wiped out almost all of the Earth's people. Science does not hold with this, but they are a 'minority' viewpoint, aren't they? If 5.5 billion people believer in a Creator, then Scientists obviously represent less than half of the 8 billion person human population, and are therefore a de facto minority viewpoint. And there are many additional groups beyond these mentioned above that also believe in a Creator and the Great Flood. I read about an English gentleman who had gathered flood stories from well over a hundred cultures. These religious groups mentioned above believe in a Universe and life forms, including humans, that were created by a 'God', making Science a minority viewpoint (and deservedly so!) due to them having the absurd notion that these things all created themselves, without a plan, without a language, without brain cells, without a reason to undertake the effort and in fact without any notion of what the word 'objective' or 'goal' or 'process' or 'needed materials' or 'chemical formula' or many other such necessary concepts for any great undertaking, and these self anointed intergalactic mega-genius's would have you believe that all of the mind blowing design complexity around us happened through handy, dandy chance.