The Missing Divine Feminine - Part 2: How Ancient Sumerian Gods Became the God of Abraham
After discovering that the "Sky Father" appears across cultures worldwide, I had to dig deeper. How did this ancient archetype evolve into the God we know today? The answer took me to the cradle of civilization itself - ancient Mesopotamia - where I found something that shook my understanding of religion to its core.
The God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus has a family tree. And it goes back much further than most people realize.
Around 4000 BCE, in what is now southern Iraq, a civilization emerged that would profoundly shape our understanding of the divine. The Sumerians weren't just the first to build cities and invent writing - they created the theological framework that still influences billions of people today.
Here's what is puzzling about the Sumerians: nobody knows where they came from.
Their language is the first clue to this mystery. Sumerian doesn't match any other language in the region - not Arabic, Hebrew, or any Semitic tongue. Instead, it's agglutinative, meaning words are built by combining smaller pieces, morphemes, together. Think of how you might say "un-break-able" in English, but it is much more complex.
Are there only other languages that work this way? Yes: Turkish, Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian. Indigenous languages from the Americas are also agglutinative.
They are all from far regions - Central Asia and beyond.
This linguistic fingerprint suggests something remarkable: the Sumerians may have migrated from the same Central Asian steppes where we found those Sky Father traditions. It's as if the people who brought us Kök Tengri traveled south and founded civilization itself.
They didn't even call themselves "Sumerians" - that's a Proto-Semitic Akkadian word. I encountered various interpretations of this term, but the one that resonates with me the most relates to the central mountain of the world and the universe’s axis in Hindu cosmology.
On the other hand, Sumerians called themselves the "black-headed people" and their land "Ki-en-gir" - the "country of noble lords.”
But here's the part that connects to our story about the missing divine feminine.
At the head of the Sumerian pantheon stood An (𒀭) - the Sky Father we've been tracking.
Sound familiar? He's the same archetype as the Turkic Kök Tengri and the Indo-European Dyeus Phter I wrote about in part 1.
An ruled the heavens, but he wasn't alone. His consort was Ki - literally "Earth." Together, they represented the sacred marriage of sky and earth that we've seen across cultures. An and Ki were the divine parents of all the other gods, known collectively as the Anunnaki - "the offspring of An.”
Think about this: thousands of years before Abraham, people were already worshipping a Sky Father and Earth Mother whose children controlled the world.
An and Ki had many children, but one would eventually reshape human history: Enlil, the god of air, wind, and storms.
According to the Sumerian myth, heaven and earth were united initially until Enlil's birth. It was Enlil who separated them - taking the earth with him while his father An kept the sky. This separation story should sound familiar if you know Genesis:
"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." - Genesis 1:1
But here's what's really important: Enlil became known as the "Lord of the Earth" while An remained the distant "High God" of the heavens. This father-son dynamic - distant heavenly father, active earthly lord son - becomes the template for every major religion that follows.
When the Akkadian Empire, a Proto-Semitic group in today’s northern Iraq, conquered the Sumerians around 2400 BCE, something interesting happened. The conquerors adopted the Sumerian religion, but they renamed Enlil as "Ellil." He kept his role as the supreme active deity - the "Lord" who actually ran things on earth.
As different empires rose and fell across Mesopotamia, this "Lord" figure persisted. In Babylon, he evolved into Marduk. Each time, the same pattern repeated: a powerful storm god, a divine "Lord," the active ruler of earth, while the Sky Father retreated into the background.
These weren't just religious ideas - they were the organizing principles of entire civilizations.
Here's where it gets personal for anyone raised with Old or New Testament tradition.
When Mesopotamian culture spread west into the South Levant (modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories), the local Canaanite people adapted these same deities. If you're not familiar with the Canaanite people, the Canaanites, a Semitic group, became increasingly significant during the 2nd millennium BCE. They played an important geopolitical role in a larger region, located between the major world powers of their time, including the Akkadians, Egyptians, and Hittites of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey).
The Canaanites were a mix of settled and nomadic groups. Their population included Phoenicians, Philistines, Israelites, and several other groups, such as the Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites. Archaeological evidence shows significant overlaps among these groups, including their languages and religious customs. It is evident that modern Israeli culture has been influenced by earlier Canaanite traditions, as well as the impacts of various world empires over time.
In the land of Canaan, the people referred to Ellil as El. In Akkadian, ‘El’ means ‘God’ and becomes the root of the plural ‘Elohim,’ as well as representing the high god of the Canaan people.
Just like his Mesopotamian predecessor, El was:
The wise, compassionate father figure
The head of a divine council
Married to a goddess (Asherah, the earth mother)
The father of many divine children
And yes, one of El's sons was Yahweh.
Most people don't realize that the Bible itself preserves evidence of this ancient divine family structure. Look at Psalm 82:1:
"God takes his place in the divine council: in the midst of the gods, he pronounces judgment."
The word translated as "God" here is Elohim - the plural form of El. This isn't describing one God, but the divine council with El at its head, just like the Sumerian Anunnaki with An in charge.
Even more explicit is Deuteronomy 32:8-9:
"When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel. For the Lord's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.”
"Most High" here is El Elyon - the Canaanite El. The "Lord" who chose Jacob's people is Yahweh, El's son. The Bible describes how the high god El divided the world among his divine children, with Yahweh receiving Israel as his territory.
So what happened to this divine family? How did we get from a pantheon to monotheism?
The same thing that happened to An in Sumer and Ellil in Babylon: divine retirement.
As Yahweh grew more important to the Israelites, El gradually faded into the background - still acknowledged as the ultimate authority, but no longer actively worshipped. Eventually, Yahweh absorbed El's attributes and became the singular “God."
This wasn't unique to Israel. Around the same time, Babylon was doing something similar with Marduk, calling him the supreme "Lord" and diminishing the other gods' roles.
When I traced this lineage - An to Enlil to El to Yahweh - I realized something profound. The God that billions worship today isn't a completely new revelation. He's the latest evolution in humanity's oldest spiritual story: our relationship with the Sky Father.
But here's what we lost in that evolution: the divine feminine.
In Sumer, Ki stood as An's equal. In Canaan, Asherah was El's beloved consort. Archaeological evidence shows that even early Israelites worshipped "Yahweh and his Asherah." But as monotheism consolidated power, the goddess was written out of the story.
I'm not trying to diminish anyone's faith. If anything, from my perspective, understanding this lineage makes the spiritual journey more remarkable, not less. It shows that humans have been reaching toward the divine for millennia, building upon each other's insights and carrying forward the wisdom of our ancestors.
Whether you call the divine An, El, Yahweh, God, or Allah, you're connecting to the same ancient human impulse - that sense that something greater watches over us from the sky, that there's order and meaning in the universe, that we're part of something larger than ourselves.
But maybe - just maybe - it's time we also remembered the divine feminine who was there all along.
