Enlil: Why Did the King of the Gods Send the Flood?

The lord of the wind and king of the gods at Nippur, who sent plague, drought, and finally the Flood because humans were too noisy.

Enlil was, for most of Sumerian history, the head of the gods, with his temple the Ekur at Nippur. In Atrahasis the noise of humans keeps him awake, so he sends plague, drought and finally the Flood.

Enlil was, for most of Sumerian history, the executive head of the gods. His name is usually read 'Lord Wind' or 'Lord Air', and his great temple was the Ekur, the 'mountain house', at Nippur in central Iraq. Kings across Sumer sought his approval, because kingship was believed to be granted by his word in the assembly of the gods.

He is a stern figure. In Atrahasis, the noise of multiplying humans keeps him awake, so he sends plague, then drought and famine, and finally the Flood. In the Gilgamesh flood story he is furious to find that anyone survived. In the Sumerian tale Enlil and Ninlil, the other gods arrest even Enlil for a sexual crime and banish him from his own city to the underworld.

Enlil also guards cosmic order. In later myth he holds the Tablet of Destinies, which the bird-demon Anzu steals and Ninurta, Enlil's son, recovers. Enlil set Humbaba to guard the Cedar Forest, and he is angry when Gilgamesh kills him. His word was thought to be final: a Sumerian hymn calls his command something that cannot be changed, and kings dated their authority to his approval.

In the first millennium BCE, Babylon's god Marduk absorbed many of Enlil's titles, including 'lord of the lands'. For readers today, Enlil is the strict commander to Enki's sympathetic scientist, a pairing that ancient-astronaut writers have built whole sagas on. In the texts themselves, though, Enlil is less a villain than the guardian of order, who reacts harshly whenever the balance between gods and humans is disturbed.