Ninurta the action hero god returns, this time in an adventure to recover the stolen Tablet of Destinies. In doing this, we will wrestle with Semitic concepts of godhood and destiny, as well as peek under the hood and see some of the things that would come to inspire the invention of the Jewish god.
The first story today, Ninurta and the Tablet of Destinies, doesn’t actually come from ETCSL but from Stephanie Dalley’s book Myths from Mesopotamia which contains a number of translations from this later periodand is invaluable in bringing stories that are not available online is good quality to the show. The epilogue, Ninurta and the Turtle, is from ETCSL
I should also note that there are fragments of the tablet of destinies story with an unnamed god as the hero, and possibly some with marduk as the hero, so like so many of these stories, I am presenting a single version of a work that shifted from city to city and century to century. Still, the core of the story is more or less as presented here.
Oldest Stories 