[934] Cf. Langdon, op. cit., 72. Ea or “Enki est généralement représenté sous la forme d’un animal ayant la tête, le cou, et les épaules d’un bélier, et qui rampe sur les pattes de devant: le reste du corps est celui d’un poisson.”
[935] See the Nippur Poem, op. cit., p. 84, note 3.
[936] From Karl Frank, Babylonische Beschwörtunge Reliefs, p. 80. The South Wind was specially dreaded, because it caused destructive floods in the low-lying regions of the Euphrates valley. In Langdon’s Sumerian Epic of Paradise (op. cit., 1915), p. 41, we find that “Adapa sailed to catch fish, the trade of Eridu,” a pretty and simple touch identifying the god with his worshippers, and his pursuit with their trade; and one which supports the theory that to the Babylonian his god, in early times, was a being very similar to himself, if more powerful.
[937] See the Nippur Poem.
[938] Ea’s command sprang from the fear of losing the worship, etc. of his devotee, when once he had acquired immortality by eating and drinking of the Bread and Water of Life.
[939] Adapa stands out as a pathetic and cruelly-punished figure. In this, one of the prettiest of the clumsy legends by which mankind tried to explain the loss of eternal life, Ea forbids for selfish reasons his eating or drinking of the Bread or Water of Life, while Anu’s offer of immortality springs from his desire to deprive Ea, whom he suspects of having betrayed to Adapa the celestial secrets of magical science, of his devotee and fish-gatherer.
[940] Keller, op. cit., p. 347, is astray in stating that Ea was regarded “als Fischgott.” As god of the waters, he was the protector of the fish therein, but apart from this, there is no evidence that he was termed, even with a wide use of the word, a Fish God.
[941] For the omission of fish from the cargo of Noah’s ark, Whiston in his philosophic A New Theory of the Deluge (London, 1737), accounts by the fact, that fish, living in a cooler, more equable element, were correcter in their lives than beasts and birds, who from the heat or cold on land engendered by the sun or its absence were prone to excesses of passion or exercises of sin, and so were saved!
[942] The length of the flood varies greatly from the above seven days, to eight months and nine days of the Nippur Poem, to the nine months and nine days of Le Poème Sumérien, during which Tagtug is afloat, and to the one year and ten days which is the total duration in the Bible.
[943] See Poebel, Historical Texts (Publications of the Babylonian Section of the University of Pennsylvania), vol. IV., Part I., pp. 9 ff. In Langdon’s Le Poème Sumérien (Paris, 1919) is to be found much, which is not written in the later account of Adapa and of the Flood, and of Paradise, and many details which are different. In it there is no woman, no temptress, no serpent. But it does record that the survivor of the Flood was placed in a garden and apparently forbidden to eat of the fruit of a tree, growing in the centre of the garden. He does eat, however, and thereby loses immortality.