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Updated: September 6, 2025
Of this group of deities, Tammuz and Nin-gishzida are the most important. In the Adapa legend, it will be recalled, they are stationed as guardians in heaven. As solar deities, they properly belong there. Like Nergal, they have been transferred to the nether world; and in the case of all three, the process that led to the change appears to have been the same.
The story of Adapa is in part an explanation of how men came to lose immortality. There is, thus, in these myths a fairly full history of the origin of the large facts of human life, with little interest in the personalities of the divine actors. Hebrew mythical material is in general identical with Babylonian; its Old Testament form has been more or less revised by late monotheistic editors.
It is an interesting fact that among the numerous letters found at Tell el-Amarna were two texts of quite a different character. These were legends, both in the form of school exercises, which had been written out for practice in the Babylonian tongue. One of them was the legend of Adapa, in which we noted just now a distant resemblance to the Hebrew story of Paradise.
The wind sweeps Adapa into the waters, but, since this element is controlled by Adapa's father, the god Ea, Adapa succeeds in mastering the south wind, and, as we learn from the course of the narrative, in breaking the wings of the storm-bird. When the tablet becomes intelligible we find Adapa engaged in this contest with the south wind. The south wind blew and drove him under the water.
At the same time, other ideas have been introduced into it, and Adapa himself, while playing the rôle of Marduk, is yet not entirely confounded with this god. His name is never written with the determinative for deity. Moreover, the nature-myth is soon lost sight of, in order to make room for an entirely different order of ideas.
But the incidents which follow are so familiar to every one that there is no need to repeat them. Scholars have pointed out that this account is very similar to that current in Babylonia. The motives are like those found in the Gilgamish and Adapa myths.
The Adapa legend takes us back to the beginning of man's career to the time when, as in the early chapters of Genesis, man stood closer to the gods than at a later time, the time when there was a constant intercourse between man and the gods, and more especially between man and his protector, Ea.
Anu, it will be recalled, utters the same cry. See p. 546. Referring to his garments of mourning. I.e., Ea. I follow Zimmern's rendition of the line. Schöpfung und Chaos, pp. 168 seq. Adapa. See pp. 476 seq. The problem of immortality, we have seen, engaged the serious attention of the Babylonian theologians.
The story serves as an evidence of the intellectual activity displayed in the schools of theological thought that must have flourished for many centuries before a story like that of Adapa could have been produced out of a nature-myth.
Hardly less remarkable is it that the theologians and scribes of later times no longer understood the story, for otherwise they would not have identified Adapa with Marduk through the superficial circumstance that he is introduced into the story instead of Marduk, or some other solar deity allied to Marduk.
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