Enlil
| Fertile Crescent myth series | |
|---|---|
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| Mesopotamian | |
| Levantine | |
| Arabian | |
| Mesopotamia | |
| Primordial beings | |
| The great gods | |
| Demigods & heroes | |
| Spirits & monsters | |
| Tales from Babylon | |
| 7 Gods who Decree | |
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4 primary: |
3 sky: |
Enlil (EN = Lord+ LIL = Air, "Lord of the Open" or "Lord of the Wind")[1] was the name of a major Mesopotamian deity. In some inscriptions he is portrayed as the chief deity and father of the gods. Originally centered in the city of Nippur, he rose to more universal prominence as member of the triad of Babylonian gods together An (Anu) and Enki (Ea). Enlil was sometimes portrayed wearing a horned crown. He was the god of the sky and the eath, and the father of the Moon god Sin.
At one time, Enlil held possession of the Tablets of Destiny giving him great power over the cosmos and mankind. Although sometimes kindly, he had a stern and wrathful side. As the god of weather, it was he who sent the Great Flood which destroyed all mankind with the exception of Utnapishtim (Atrahasis) and his family.
Enlil appears frequently in ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Canaanite, and other Mesopotamian clay and stone tablets. The name was perhaps pronounced and sometimes rendered in as Ellil in later Akkadian, Hittite, and Canaanite literature.
As a member of the great triad of god, he was in charge of the skies and the earth, while Enki/Ea governed the waters, and An/Anu ruled the deep heavens. However, in later Babylonian mythology, it was the younger storm god Marduk who came to hold the Tablets of Destiny and ruled as king of the gods, while the triad retired to a more distant location in the cosmos.
Enlil in mythology
One story names his origins as the exhausted breath of An (god of the heavens) and Ki (goddess of the Earth) after sexual union.
When Enlil was a young god, he was banished from Dilmun, home of the gods, to Kur, the underworld, for raping the his consort, the young grain goddess Ninlil (Akkadian: Belit). Ninlil followed him to the underworld where she bore his first child, the moon god Sin (Sumerian Nanna). After fathering three more underworld deities, Enlil was allowed to return to Dilmun. [2]
The the Lord of the Winds, Enlil had charge of both the great storms and the kindly winds of spring, which came forth at his command from his mouth and nostrils.
Enlil embodied power and authority. In several myths he is described as stern and wrathful, as opposed to his counterpart Enki/Ea, who showed more compassion and sometimes risked Enlil's disapproval in siding with mankind or other gods. Enki risked the anger of Enlil and the other gods in order to save humanity from the Deluge designed by the gods to kill them. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enlil sets out to eliminate humanity, whose overpopulation and resultant mating noise is offensive to his ears. Enlil, convenes a council of the gods and convinces them to promise not to tell humankind that he plans their total annihilation. Enki, however, tells the secret to the walls of Utnapishtim's reed hut. He thus covertly rescues Utnapishtim in (elsewhere called Atrahasis) by either instructing him to build a boat for his family and animals. Enlil is angry that his will has been thwarted but Enki argues that Enlil is unfair to punish the guiltless Uptapishtim. The goddess Ishtar joins Enki an repents for her own role in supporting Enlil's plan. Enlil promises that the gods will not eliminate humankind if they practice birth control and live in harmony with the natural world.
Enlil was also known as the inventor of the pickaxe/hoe (favorite tool of the Sumerians) and caused plants to grow[3]. In another myth he is describing as dividing the heavens from the earth in order to allow for the growth of plants from their seeds. After this, he created the pickaxe/hoe and broke up earth's crust. It was this act that caused human beings to spring from the earth.
In later Babylonian religion, Enlil was replaced by Marduk the king of the gods. In the Enuma Elish, after his cosmic victory over the primeval sea goddess Tiamat, Marduk "he stretched the immensity of the firmament... and Anu and Enlil and Ea had each their right stations."
Thus banished to a distant corner of the cosmos, Enlil nevertheless continued to be venerated until approximately 1000 B.C.E. the high god of Nippur. He would be honored throughout the Babylonian and later Persian empires for several more centuries as a member of the great, if far away, triad of deities together with Anu and Ea.
Cosmological role
Enlil, along with Anu/An, Enki and Ninhursag was one of the four gods of the Sumerians [4].
By his wife Ninlil or Sud, Enlil was father of the moon god Nanna - (Suen) (in Akkadian Sin) and of Ninurta (also called Ningirsu). Enlil is sometimes father of Nergal, of Nisaba the goddess of grain, of Pabilsag who is sometimes equated with Ninurta, and sometimes of Enbilulu. By Ereshkigal Enlil was father of Namtar.
Cultural histories
At a very early period prior to 3000 B.C.E.—Nippur had become the center of an important political district. Inscriptions found at Nippur, where extensive excavations were carried on during 1888–1900 by John P Peters and John Henry Haynes under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, show that Enlil was the head of an extensive pantheon. Among the titles accorded to him are "king of lands," "king of heaven and earth," and "father of the gods."
His chief temple at Nippur was known as Ekur, signifying "House of the mountain," and such was the sanctity acquired by this edifice that Babylonian and Assyrian rulers, down to the latest days, vied with one another in embellishing and restoring Enlil's seat of worship. The name Ekur became the designation of a temple in general.
Grouped around the main sanctuary, there arose temples and chapels to the gods and goddesses who formed his court, so that Ekur became the name for an entire sacred precinct in the city of Nippur. The name "mountain house" suggests a lofty structure and was perhaps the designation originally of the staged tower at Nippur, built in imitation of a mountain, with the sacred shrine of the god on the top.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- ↑ Halloran, John A.; "Sumerian Lexicon: Version 3.0"; December 10th, 2006 at http://www.sumerian.org/sumerlex.htm
- ↑ [1].
- ↑ Hooke. S.H., Middle Eastern Mythology, Dover Publications, 2004
- ↑ Kramer, Samuel Noah, "The Sumerian Deluge Myth: Reviewed and Revised" Anatolian Studies, Vol. 33, Special Number in Honour of the Seventy-Fifth Birthday of Dr. Richard Barnett. (1983), pp. 115-121.
External links
- ETCSL "Enlil and Ninlil" and "Enlil and Sud": Unicode and ASCII.
- Gateway to Babylon: "Enlil and Ninlil," trans. Thorkild Jacobsen.
- ETCSL "Enlil in the Ekur": Unicode and ASCII.
- Houghton-Mifflin: A Hymn to the Sky-God Enlil.
- "The Song of the Hoe" in ETCSL—Songs, elegies and related compositions: Unicode and ASCII.
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