The goddess Inanna is ready to marry, but must first choose a mate. Her brother encourages her to marry the shepherd-god Dumuzi, but she finds that the farmer-god Enkimdu is more to her liking. Angered by her choice, Dumuzi picks a fight with Enkimdu, but Enkimdu is able to calm the situation by promising to give him gifts and, even, to let him have Inanna. And so it is that Dumuzi, the shepherd-god, seems to win the argument and the favour of the goddess.


Sound familiar? It should, because we covered it in Genesis 4.

As with the flood story (a Babylonian version of which is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh), we see that bits and pieces of many of the Bible’s stories were floating around in the collective cultural memory before they were written down (and edited) by the authors of the Hebrew Bible.