101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

70 101 Myths of the Bible
return to the land of the living, Innana had to find a substitute to take her place.
Accompanied by a host of demons known as the galla, Inanna traveled from city to
city in search of her replacement, eventually arriving in the city where Dumuzi, her
husband, ruled as king. Dumuzi angered Inanna and she put the eye of death upon
him. He then raised his hands in prayer to the sun god Utu and begged for help in
escaping the demon horde. Unfortunately, the tablet breaks off at this point but a separate
set of tablets, dating to about 1750 B.C., has a related account of Dumuzi’s efforts
to avoid death. In this version, Utu intervened on several occasions to assist Dumuzi
but to no avail. Finally, Dumuzi surrendered to the demons.
The first galla enters the sheepfold,
He strikes Dumuzi on the cheek with a piercing (?) nail (?),
The second one enters the sheepfold,
He strikes Dumuzi on the cheek with the shepherd’s crook,
The third one enters the sheepfold,
Of the holy churn, the stand (?) is removed,
The forth one enters the sheepfold,
The cup hanging from a peg, from the peg falls,
The fifth one enters the sheepfold,
The holy churn lies (shattered), no milk is poured,
The cup lies (shattered), Dumuzi lives no more,
The sheepfold is given to the wind.
In this Sumerian tale of the shepherd’s death, we may have the missing details from
the biblical account of how Cain slew Abel, with Cain replacing the galla as the killer.
Dumuzi’s various prayers and cries to Utu on the several occasions when the galla try
to drag him into the underworld echo in Genesis when God says to Cain,“What hast
thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground” (Gen. 4:10).
We see that the story of Cain and Abel started out as a variation of several of these
myths and evolved to the story we read today.