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Gudea Cylinders

The Building of Ningirsu's Temple

About this book

The Stone Basins, Shade Trees, and Awesomeness of Eninnu

Column A 29

1 The seven stelae set up around the temple 2 stand ready to take counsel with its lord. 3 Its funerary chapel is a pure place, 4 as clean as the Abzu. 5 The stone basins set up in the temple⁠ 6 are like the holy chamber of the purification priest, where water never ceases to flow. 7 Its lofty battlements, where the doves rest, 8 are like Eridu upon its terrace, 9 where the princess sits.

10 Eninnu offers rest to the doves:⁠ 11 it is a sheltering tree of wide branches and pleasant shade, 12 where swallows and other birds chirp loudly; 13 it is like Enlil's Ekur 14 when a festival is celebrated within it. 15 The temple's great awesomeness settles upon the land, 16 and its praise reaches to the highlands; 17 the awesomeness of Eninnu 18 covers all lands like a garment.

Texts in conversation

Compare Gudea Cylinders A xxix 5 and Ezekiel 43:2

Ancient Near East, Sumerian · Hebrew Bible

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Summary

Ezekiel describes a renewed temple filled with flowing water and abundance after ruin, echoing a Sumerian hymn about Gudea rebuilding Ningirsu’s temple, where restoration after foreign rule also highlights renewed divine presence.

Passages

Gudea Cylinders A xxix 5

Ancient Near East, Sumerian · The Building of Ningirsu's Temple
1 The seven stelae set up around the temple 2 stand ready to take counsel with its lord. 3 Its funerary chapel is a pure place, 4 as clean as the Abzu. 5 The stone basins set up in the temple 6 are like the holy chamber of the purification priest, where water never ceases to flow. 7 Its lofty battlements, where the doves rest, 8 are like Eridu upon its terrace, 9 where the princess sits.
2125 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in the Gudea Cylinders

Ezekiel 43:2

Hebrew Bible
1 Then he brought me to the gate that faced toward the east. 2 I saw the glory of the God of Israel coming from the east; the sound was like that of rushing water, and the earth radiated his glory. 3 It was like the vision I saw when he came to destroy the city, and the vision I saw by the Kebar River. I threw myself face down. 4 The glory of the Lord came into the temple by way of the gate that faces east.
600–501 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Ezekiel

References

"... Ezekiel’s final chapters, dazzling in their graphic description of the divine majesty re-establishing residence in the magnificent re-sanctified precincts of a rebuilt temple, conclude with an unmistakable allusion to fertility and abundance (47:9–12). In notably parallel circumstances, Gudea’s temple-building occurs toward the end of the seventy or eighty-year domination of Sumer by a people known as the Gutians. The Gutian invasion, described in the Sumerian lament, “The Curse of Agade,” resulted in dire famine for Sumer, with “misery, want, death and desolation thus threatening to overwhelm practically all ‘mankind fashioned by Enlil’.” After these decades of oppression, the Sumerian people experience a renewal. Gudea builds a temple at the direction of the storm god Ningirsu. The temple’s construction and consecration represent the presence of the god’s blessings of abundance among the people, and may indeed have the same “redemptive” implications as Ezekiel’s visionary temple, that of a people rebuilt at long last after devastation by an invader and many years of foreign oppression. For Gudea, the temple is a sign of the divine presence, bringing with it abundance ... In the final chapters of Ezekiel, YHWH, too, partakes of this image of divine abundance associated with water, though to be sure the associations are attenuated and not always clear-cut. For example, in Ezekiel’s second vision of theophany, the sound of God’s voice is compared to the sound of “the voice of mighty waters,” (Ezekiel 43:2). Ezekiel compares this theophany to his first experience many years before, both specifically located by the river Chebar ..."
Diane M. Sharon, “A Biblical Parallel to a Sumerian Temple Hymn? Ezekiel 40–48 and Gudea,” JANES 24.1 (1996): 99–109.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Gudea Cylinders A xxix 5 and Ezekiel 43:2

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