Ea (Mesopotamian deity)

Ea, called Enki in Sumerian, was one of the three greatest gods of ancient Mesopotamia, ranked with Anu and Enlil. He ruled the Apsu (Sumerian Abzu), the fresh water the Mesopotamians believed lay beneath the earth and fed its springs, wells and rivers, and he was the god of wisdom, craft and incantation. He was the father of Marduk, the chief god of Babylon.

The Old Testament never names Ea. It names the chief god of the Babylonians as Bel, which is Marduk, and Marduk's son as Nebo (Isaiah 46:1; Jeremiah 50:2).

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His name and his city

Enki is usually translated "Lord of the Earth," but W. G. Lambert noted that the second part of the name is of unknown meaning, and the origin of the name Ea is also uncertain. Enki is first named in texts from Fara, ancient Shuruppak, of about 2600 BC; the name Ea first appears in the 24th century BC.

His home was Eridu, in southern Iraq, where his temple was the E-abzu, "house of the Abzu." The Sumerian King List names Eridu as the first city where kingship came down from heaven.

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What he was believed to do

Exorcist priests and diviners regarded Ea as the source of their ritual knowledge. In many incantations Ea supplies the spell and his son Marduk carries it out. The seven sages from before the flood, the apkallu, lived with Ea in the Apsu and were said to have taught humanity wisdom and the arts of civilization.

The word Apsu names both the deep he ruled and, in the Babylonian creation poem Enuma Elish, a primeval god whom Ea puts to sleep and kills. In the story of Adapa, Ea's sage, Ea tells him to refuse the food and water Anu offers in heaven, and Adapa loses the bread and water of life.

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How he was pictured

Art shows Ea as a bearded god in a horned cap and long robe, with streams of water and fish flowing from his shoulders, as on the Adda seal in the British Museum, a cylinder seal of about 2300 BC.

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Creation and flood

In the Atrahasis Epic, whose fullest copy was written about 1635 BC, Enki proposes making humans to bear the gods' labor, and the mother goddess forms them from clay mixed with the flesh and blood of a slain god, We-ila. When Enlil sends the flood and Enki is bound by an oath not to interfere, he speaks to the reed wall of Atrahasis's house: "Destroy your house, build a boat." In Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ea warns Utnapishtim through a reed fence in the same way.

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What Scripture says about such gods

The first two commandments forbid other gods and an image of anything "in the water under the earth" (Exodus 20:3-4), and Deuteronomy 4:18 names the likeness of any fish. Ea was pictured with fish-filled streams.

Isaiah describes a craftsman who burns half a tree for fuel and makes a god from the rest (Isaiah 44:15-17). When Babylonians made a new cult statue, a ritual had the craftsmen declare that they had not made it: a craft god, such as Ninagal, "Ea of the smith," had.

Jeremiah 10:11, written in Aramaic, says the gods who did not make the heavens and the earth will perish; verse 12 says the LORD made the earth by his power and established the world by his wisdom. Psalm 96:5 says all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the LORD made the heavens.

Mesopotamia gave wisdom and the deep to Ea; Proverbs 3:19-20 gives both to the LORD: by wisdom he founded the earth, and by his knowledge the deeps broke open. Ea was the gods' wise counselor and, in the myths, their crafty problem-solver; Isaiah asks whom the LORD consulted (Isaiah 40:13-14). The law forbids the divination and spells that exorcists and diviners practiced under Ea's patronage (Deuteronomy 18:10-12).

In Genesis God forms the man from the dust and breathes life into him (Genesis 2:7), and the LORD himself tells Noah to build the ark and promises never again to destroy all flesh (Genesis 6:13-14; 9:11).