Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Nergal
A Mesopotamian god of plague and the underworld, brought into Samaria by resettled foreigners.
2 Kings 17:30, in every translation this tool compares.
Brought into Samaria by people the Assyrians resettled there. In Mesopotamia he is the god you blame for plague, along with drought, famine, fire and sudden death, and kings called on him before going out on campaign.
Brought to Samaria by the men of Cuth after the deportations. In Mesopotamia he is the underworld and plague god, associated with pestilence, drought, famine, fire, and sudden death, and invoked by Assyrian and Babylonian kings on their foreign campaigns. DDD notes a chronological problem with the deportation: Cutha is absent from Sargon II's inscriptions, so its conquest and resettlement more likely belongs to Sennacherib's campaign of 703 BC, later than the Samaria deportations 2 Kings 17 otherwise describes, and the verse compresses more than one historical episode into a single sentence.
H5370, 1 occ
Ancient scribes themselves explain Nergal as "Lord of the Netherworld." He carries the epithet Meslamtaea, "the one who comes out of Emeslam," his temple at Cutha, and a Babylonian myth, Nergal and Ereshkigal, tells how he became consort of the underworld's queen. Late syncretistic texts fold him into Marduk's theology as "Marduk of battle."
- 2 Kings 17:30
- Mark Anthony Phelps, "Nergal," Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, 959
- Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary, "Nergal," 1186
- DDD s.v. "Nergal," 621-622
