How the Sumerian Pantheon Sounds like a Twisted Version of the Trinity

 The Sumerian Pantheon reads to me like a twisted version of the Christian Trinity. An or Anu the Sky god would fill the role of God the Father. He is a more distant deity and while He was supreme, usually one of His two sons were in charge of interactions with humans. 

The sympathetic brother was Ea. Yes, it is pronounced just like the shortened version of the Divine Name, used many times in scripture: "Yah!".   He was the one who was the father of the sage Adapa, who fits with the biblical Adam if you look at Adam through the lens of the Christ-centered model for early Genesis. He was the one who warned humanity of the coming flood. So this would make Ea a distorted version of God the Son. 

The other less sympathetic brother is Enlil. He is the one who brings plagues on man, including the flood. Not because we were evil but because we "made too much noise". So there is blame-shifting there going from humans being evil to the god's being capricious. Basically all of the merciful actions of Yahweh are attributed to Ea, all of the judgemental actions to Enlil. Perhaps once they switched the motives for god's wrath to be weak rather than just, they needed another character to be the "heavy". So Anu had one son sympathetic to people and one hostile. In the text of Genesis, Yahweh, I believe acting through God the Son, fulfilled both roles. He helped deliver but He also brought judgement. I still think that but there is also this to consider concerning the origin of Enlil's name..

"The Sumerian word "líl", whose Akkadian equivalent is zaqīqu, means "ghost, phantom, haunted" (Michalowski 1989: 98; Tinney 1996: 129-30; Michalowski 1998) but a translation of Enlil's name as "Lord ghost" makes little sense in the context of his mythological attestations. The interpretation of líl as "wind" is apparently a secondary development of the first millennium BCE (Tinney 1996: 129), which has led to an interpretation of Enlil's name as "Lord Wind" or "Lord Air" (e.g., Jacobsen 1989). This interpretation has led some scholars to reconstruct a vertically ordered cosmology that consisted of the gods An (heavens), Enlil (atmosphere), and Enki (earth), but this remains very problematic. Other scholars make reference to Enlil as the "Lord of the Air", when he is seen acting in co-ordination with the storms and winds, e.g., Enlil "the roaring storm" (The Cursing of Agade, ETCSL 1.5.1: 151). There are issues, however, with both ideas, the vertical ordering of Mesopotamian pantheon is rather simplistic, and the references to Enlil as a storm are usually in the context of wider destruction, where the storm could be apposite imagery for Enlil as a powerful, devastating god rather than as a specific "storm deity", e.g., The Lament for Sumer and Urim, ETCSL 2.2.3."

The most straight-forward approach to Enlil's name sounds like it could be referencing the Holy Spirit. They did not give Enlil the personality of the Holy Spirit, but it isn't hard to see how this would be part of a Triune Godhead. They then blasphemed by attributing injustice to Him.

The quickly added spouses and sons and grew the pantheon, but there is little doubt these three were pre-eminent. Did the Sumerians get these names from the Semites? Very possibly. Some of the southern Sumerian cities seem to have had a semitic population, and were controlled by Nipper which was associated with Semetic kings. By the time we get to written records of northern Mesopotamia though, the names had been changed. Asshur, grandson of Noah, had been deified and fit into the role of Ea. They did not hesitate to alter their history when it suited some agenda that they had. The Hebrews considered it sacred and would have been loathe to do so. This should tell us that the Hebrew record is the more original account.

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