What a God is Not. The Earliest Sources from a Comparative Perspective

The paper discusses the nature of Ancient Near Eastern gods from the perspective of negative theology. It is based on the analysis of several 3rd-millennium Sumero-Akkadian sources showing that a god or a higher divine creature was distinct from all other living beings. A god – although immanent and residing inside the cosmos – was not a secondary idea or a creation of another being. A god can be seen as a natural idea or permanent form of existence in the cosmos while all other creatures such as men or animals can be considered later secondary developments. This Ancient Mesopotamian understanding of an immanent god residing inside the universe would only change with later first-millennium ideas of a divine being from Israel and later in Christianity, where a new supernatural or transcendent God emerged.