Religion: Mesopotamian Religions

From The New Encyclopedia of Judaism
Canaanite sanctuaries for cultic worship situated on hills or raised platforms (Deut. 12:2; I Kings 14:23); later adopted by the Israelites.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Legend of the origin of the world. All cultures have ancient stories of the creation of the Earth or its inhabitants.

From The Hutchsinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Religion of the Sumerian civilization. Sumerian society was ruled by gods - everything belonged to the gods and the kings were their representatives. Humanity's role was to serve the gods and to fulfil their will in their eternal struggles with each other.

From The Columbia Encycloepdia
In Babylonian legend, king of Uruk. He is the hero of the Gilgamesh epic, a work of some 3,000 lines, written on 12 tablets c.2000 B.C. and discovered among the ruins at Nineveh.

Ancient city, capital of the Ugarit kingdom, W Syria, on the Mediterranean coast N of modern Latakia. Although the name of this city was known from Egyptian and Hittite sources, its location and history were a mystery until the accidental discovery (1928) of an ancient tomb at the small Arab village of Ras Shamra.

From Gods, Goddesses, and Mythology
Ishtar (whose myriad other names included Ashtart, Ashtoreth, Astarte, Inanna and Isis); Ishtar was the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of love and war. She was closely associated with the Sumerian goddess Inanna. Sometimes her father was said to have been Sin, the moon god, but more often she was viewed as the daughter of Anu, the sky god, and Antum, an earth goddess. Her primary consort was Tammuz, the young shepherd who, according to some accounts, was also her son. The ancient city of Babylon, located in modern Iraq, was a main site of Ishtar worship.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
In Assyrio-Babylonian mythology, the two-headed sun god, creator of Earth and humans, and their intermediary with his father Ea, god of water and wisdom.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
In Mesopotamian religion, the god of the sun, who, with his father, Sin, and the goddess Ishtar, was part of an astral triad of divinities. As the solar god, Shamash was the heroic conqueror of night and death, and he became known as the god of justice and equity. He was said to have presented the Code of Hammurabi to the Babylonian king. At night he served as judge of the underworld.

From Gods, Goddesses, and Mythology
According to the Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish, the goddess Tiamat was the embodiment of the original watery chaos of the universe. She was a gigantic dragonlike creature who personified the saltwater (the ocean) or the "saltwater abyss" at the beginning of time. As the primeval mother, she also represented the forces of disorder and chaos in the universe.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Mesopotamian sky god, commonly joined in a trinity with Enlil, the god of storms, and Ea, the god of water.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
In Sumerian and Babylonian mythology, the head of the heavenly court, and the god of storms and the air (later also the land). He sprang from the union of the god An (Heaven) and goddess Ki (Earth). With the deities Anu and Ea, Enlil formed the oldest and supreme triad of gods. His greatest weapon was the flood.

From Gods, Goddesses, and Mythology
Inanna was the most powerful goddess of Sumeria, the ancient civilization that emerged during the fourth millennium BCE in the area of Mesopotamia that now forms part of Iraq. She was later identified with the Babylonian goddess Ishtar and the Phoenician goddess Astarte, and was worshiped throughout western Asia for over 2,000 years. Inanna was the daughter of the moon god Nanna and his wife, Ningal. She was most often referred to as Queen of Heaven.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
In Mesopotamian religion, the city god of Girsu. The son of Enlil and Ninlil, he was the god of thunder and of the spring rains and floods as well as the god of the plow.

From Macmillan Dictionary of the Bible
A Canaanite fertility goddess known in the Old Testament as Baal's consort (Judges 3:7), though she was the consort of El in the Ugaritic literature of ancient Syria.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
In Canaanite and Syrian mythology, a goddess of sexual passion (equivalent to the Babylonian and Assyrian goddess Ishtar). As goddess of maternity and fertility, she was associated with Tammuz or Adonis, who represented the passage of the seasons. She was also a warrior goddess.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Name used throughout the Bible for the chief deity or for deities of Canaan.

From The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language
A god widely worshipped by the Mesopotamians, Amorites, Phoenicians, and other peoples of the ancient Near East and often associated with grain, agriculture, and storms. In the Bible, he is presented as the chief god of the Philistines, and traditions dating from the first half of the first millennium ad depict him in the form of a merman.

From The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
Traditionally, (the) Moloch has been construed as a monstrous and pagan god whose wrath could only be appeased by the sacrifice of a child.