School of Suspicion

Tag: Sumerian

Myth and scripture from Sumer, Akkad, Babylon and the wider ancient Near East.

  • Enki and Ninmah — The Gods Who Made Us Work

    Enki and Ninmah — The Gods Who Made Us Work

    The gods are tired of their own labour, so humans are made from clay to carry the baskets. Then Enki and Ninmah get drunk and turn creation into a contest: she shapes bodies no one has planned for, and he must find each of them a use.

  • Jonah — Rebirth in the Heart of Darkness

    Jonah — Rebirth in the Heart of Darkness

    The prophet who drew Israel’s border is sent to save the city that will erase it. The whole book of Jonah with its Hebrew: four descents, a fish on an errand, five words that come true twice and a question he never answers, beside Jesus asleep in the storm, Caiaphas, the sign of Jonah, Inanna’s…

  • The Serpent Slayers

    The Serpent Slayers

    Genesis 3:15 is usually called the first messianic prophecy, and the reading is old and serious. God turns to the serpent, promises lasting hostility between its offspring and the woman’s, and says that one will be struck on the head and the other on the heel. Christian tradition has read that as the announcement of…

  • Sons of God, Daughters of Men, and Nephilim – The beginning of Ancient religions

    Genesis 6:4 ends with a phrase that belongs to Homer more than to Moses. The children born to the sons of God by the daughters of men, it says, became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. That is heroic vocabulary. It is the language a poet uses of Achilles or of Gilgamesh,…

  • 1. Eden and Göbekli Tepe — Stories Before Scripture

    1. Eden and Göbekli Tepe — Stories Before Scripture

    Genesis opens with no man to till the ground and closes the garden by making one. Read beside the gatherers who raised Göbekli Tepe, Enkidu’s first bread, Hesiod’s golden race and the law that sent farmers back to gathering every seventh year, with the birds that sow not and the bread asked for daily.