Enlil

The wind came down off no mountain, because there were no mountains on the flat Sumerian plain, and that was the unsettling part. It arrived from everywhere at once, flattening the barley, rattling the reed walls of Nippur, dragging the smell of wet dust ahead of the rain. People called the wind Enlil, and they did not mean it as a figure of speech. The breath that bent the fields and the god who ruled the assembly of heaven were, to them, the same force wearing two faces.

His name says as much. The Sumerians built it from en, lord, and lil, the moving air, the breath, the gathering weather. Lord Wind. Lord of the open sky and everything it could do to a person standing exposed beneath it. He sat at the head of the gods the way a storm sits over a valley, and the carvers gave him the form they gave all the great powers: a heavy bearded figure on a throne, robed in long pleated tiers, his head crowned by a tall cap ringed with as many as seven stacked pairs of ox-horns. The horns were not decoration. They were a tally of rank, and Enlil wore the full count. Behind him, in more than one telling, hung the shadow of the Anzu, the lion-headed eagle whose wingbeat was thunder.

He came, in the oldest accounts, from the joining of An, the sky, and Ki, the earth, when the two were still pressed together as one undivided mass. Enlil was the wedge between them. He forced heaven up and pushed earth down and held the gap open, and into that gap fell light, and weather, and room enough for living things. The plain owed its existence to that separation. Then he went further. He fashioned the hoe, struck the hard skin of the soil, and where the crust split the first humans pushed up through the broken ground like shoots. The world that the gods needed worked, and the labourers who would work it, both came out of the same act of breaking something open.

Each new year the gods assembled in the Ekur, his house at Nippur, the Mountain House that the people believed Enlil had raised himself and called the mooring-rope of heaven and earth. There he spoke the fates for the season to come, and what he fixed stayed fixed. No other god could pry a decree loose once Enlil had set it, and the proof of his authority was a physical thing: the Tablet of Destinies, a clay tablet that carried the decisions of the cosmos written into it, his to hold and no one else’s.

The stories about him are not all flattering. In the tale of Enlil and Ninlil, he sees the young goddess bathing in the river and forces himself on her, and for it the assembly banishes him to Kur, the land of the dead, even though he is their king. Ninlil, already carrying the moon-god Nanna, follows him down. On the road through the underworld Enlil disguises himself three times, as the gatekeeper, as the man of the river of the dead, as the ferryman, and three times deceives and lies with her again, fathering the underworld gods Nergal, Ninazu, and Enbilulu so that none would be taken from the world above to pay for Nanna’s release. Even the highest god answers for his crimes. He simply finds a way through the sentence.

His temper made him dangerous on a wider scale. When humankind multiplied and their din rose up off the earth and reached him, Enlil could not sleep, and a sleepless storm-god is a catastrophe. He struck them with plague, then drought, then a famine that hollowed the cities, and when they kept surviving he resolved to drown the whole race. The flood was his. It was Enki, cleverer and fonder of mortals, who whispered the warning through a reed wall to the man called Atrahasis in one version and Utnapishtim in another, and so a boat was built and the seed of humanity rode out the deluge. When the waters fell and Enlil found smoke rising from a survivor’s altar, the gods gathered around the offering like flies, hungry after their long fast, and his rage met their relief. He relented. The race lived, on new terms.

Enlil’s powers all run back to wind and word. He commanded the storm and the rain that made the barley grow or rot. He decreed fates that could not be appealed. He conferred kingship, which is why every ambitious ruler from Sargon onward wanted Nippur’s blessing, and why the city stayed a religious capital long after it stopped being a political one. But his authority had a seam in it. So much of it lived in the Tablet of Destinies that the tablet could be stolen, and in the myth of Anzu it is: the storm-bird snatches it while Enlil is undressing to bathe, and for a terrible interval the chief god is stripped of the power to decree anything at all, until his son Ninurta hunts the thief down and wins it back. He could be deceived, as Enki deceived him over the flood. He could be bound by his own oaths and his own pronouncements once spoken. And in the long run he could be displaced. As Babylon rose, Marduk inherited his offices and much of his myth, and in Assyria the god Ashur took his place at the head of the assembly, so that the lord of the wind slowly thinned into a title other gods came to wear.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Enlil in Mesopotamian mythology?

Enlil is the ancient Mesopotamian god of wind, air, and storms, and the chief of the pantheon for much of Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian history. He decreed the fates of gods and mortals, granted kingship, and was worshipped above all at the Ekur temple in the city of Nippur.

What does Enlil’s name mean?

Enlil’s name comes from the Sumerian words en, meaning “lord,” and lil, meaning wind, air, or breath, so it is usually translated as “Lord Wind” or “Lord of the Open Air.” The name reflects his identity as the moving force of weather and storm rather than a god tied to any single object or place.

What is the Tablet of Destinies and how does it relate to Enlil?

The Tablet of Destinies is a sacred clay tablet that holds the decreed order of the cosmos and grants its keeper supreme authority, and it belonged to Enlil. In the myth of Anzu, the storm-bird steals the tablet while Enlil is bathing, temporarily robbing him of his power, until his son Ninurta defeats Anzu and returns it.

Why did Enlil send the great flood?

In the Mesopotamian flood myths, Enlil sent the flood because humankind had grown so numerous that their noise disturbed his rest, and he resolved to wipe out the race. The god Enki secretly warned the man Atrahasis (also called Utnapishtim) to build a boat, so humanity survived, and afterward Enlil relented and allowed the survivors to repopulate the world.

How was Enlil connected to kingship?

Enlil was the god who conferred legitimate kingship, so Mesopotamian rulers travelled to his temple at Nippur to have their authority recognized. A king’s claim was considered semi-divine and properly valid only once Enlil had acknowledged it, which kept Nippur a sacred capital for centuries.

Related Entries

Enki, Ninurta, Ninhursag, Inanna, Marduk, Nergal, Sin, Anunnaki, Apkallu, Adapa, Utnapishtim, Tiamat, Ishtar, Shamash, Gilgamesh