The Creation of Man

Before creating man in their own image, the Nefilim attempted to make a “manufactured servant” by creating a hybrid ape-man-animal.

Some of these artificial creatures may have survived for a while but were certainly unable to reproduce.

The enigmatic bull-men and lion-men (sphinxes) that adorned temple sites in the ancient Near East may not have been just figments of an artist’s imagination but actual creatures that came out of the biological laboratories of the Nefilim—unsuccessful experiments commemorated in art and by statues. (Fig. 150)

Sumerian texts, too, speak of deformed humans created by Enki and the Mother Goddess (Ninhursag) in the course of their efforts to fashion a perfect Primitive Worker.

The task of Ninhursag was to “bind upon the mixture the mold of the gods” got drunk and: “called over to Enki,” “How good or how bad is Man’s body? As my heart prompts me, I can make its fate good or bad.”

Through trial-and-error, Ninhursag produced:

• a Man who could not hold back his urine
• a woman who could not bear children
• a being who had neither male nor female organs.

All in all, 6 deformed or deficient humans were brought forth by Ninhursag.

Enki created:

• an imperfect man with diseased eyes, trembling hands, a sick liver, a failing heart
• another one with sicknesses attendant upon old age; and so on.

But finally the perfect Man was achieved—the one Enki named Adapa which was called Adam in the Bible.

This being was so much akin to the gods that one text even went so far as to point out that the Mother Goddess gave to her creature, Man, “a skin as the skin of a god”—a smooth, hairless body, quite different from that of the shaggy ape-man.

With this final product, the Nefilim were genetically compatible with the daughters of Man and able to marry them and have children by them. But such compatibility could exist only if Man had developed from the same “seed of life” as the Nefilim.

Both in the Mesopotamian and biblical concepts, Man was made of a mixture of:

• god’s blood or its “essence”
• the “clay” of Earth.

The very term lulu for “Man,” while conveying the sense of “primitive,” literally meant “one who has been mixed.” Called upon to fashion a man, the Mother Goddess “Washed her hands, pinched off clay, mixed it in the steppe.”

The goddess took sanitary precautions. She “washed her hands.” We encounter such clinical measures and procedures in other creation texts as well.

The use of earthly “clay” mixed with divine “blood” to create the prototype of Man is firmly established by the Mesopotamian texts.

One, relating how Enki was called upon to “bring to pass some great work of Wisdom”—of scientific knowhow—states that Enki saw no great problem in fulfilling the task of “fashioning servants for the gods.”

“It can be done!” he announced. He then gave these instructions to the Mother Goddess:

The second chapter of Genesis offers this technical version:

The Hebrew term commonly translated as “soul” is nephesh, that elusive “spirit” that animates a living creature and seemingly abandons it when it dies.

By no coincidence, the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) repeatedly exhorted against the shedding of human blood and the eating of animal blood “because the blood is the nephesh.”

The biblical versions of the creation of Man thus equate nephesh (“spirit,” “soul”) and blood.

The Old Testament offers another clue to the role of blood in Man’s creation.

The name Adam comes from “adama” which meant specifically dark-red soil.

• The Akkadian word is adamatu (“dark-red earth”)
• The Hebrew term adama and the Hebrew name for the color red (adom) stem from the words for blood: adamu, dam.

“The Adam” in the Book of Genesis could mean “the one of the earth” (Earthling), “the one made of the dark-red soil,” and “the one made of blood.”

The same relationship between the essential element of living creatures and blood exists in Mesopotamian accounts of Man’s creation. The hospital-like house where Ea and the Mother Goddess went to bring Man forth was called the House of Shimti; most scholars translate this as “the house where fates are determined.”

But the term Shimti clearly stems from the Sumerian SHI.IM.TI, which, taken syllable by syllable, means “breath-wind-life.”

Bit Shimti meant, literally, “the house where the wind of life is breathed in.” This is virtually identical to the biblical statement.

The Akkadian word employed in Mesopotamia to translate the Sumerian SHI.IM.TI was napishtu—the exact parallel of the biblical term nephesh. The nephesh or napishtu was an elusive “something” in the blood.

The Mesopotamian texts state that blood was required for the mixture of which Man was fashioned; they specified that it had to be the blood of a god, divine blood.

When the gods decided to create Man, their leader announced:

“Blood will I amass, bring bones into being.”

This suggests that the blood be taken from a specific god, “Let primitives be fashioned after his pattern,” Ea said.

Selecting the god, Out of his blood they fashioned Mankind; imposed on it the service, let free the gods… It was a work beyond comprehension.

According to the epic tale “When gods as men,” the gods then called the Birth Goddess (the Mother Goddess, Ninhursag) and asked her to perform the task:

In a parallel Old Babylonian text named “Creation of Man by the Mother Goddess,” the gods call upon “The Midwife of the gods, the Knowing Mami” and tell her:

The text “When gods as men” give a detailed description of the actual creation of Man.

The goddess Ninti “lady who gives life” accepted the “job”. He gave her requirements, including:

• some chemicals (“bitumens of the Abzu”), to be used for “purification”
• “the clay of the Abzu.”

To shape a man from the mixed clay, some feminine assistance, some pregnancy or childbearing aspects were also needed. Enki offered the services of his own spouse: