"... 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 ..."