“Whereas the power speaking to Moses in the desert disassociates itself from the bush, and identifies itself as the god of Moses’ fathers, numinous power speaking to the Mesopotamian Enkidu in the Gilgamesh Epic does not choose to disassociate itself from its locus and so needs no introduction. The Gilgamesh Epic simply states: ‘The sun god heard the word of his mouth; from afar, from the midst of heaven, he kept calling out to him.’ The power is here seen as immanent in the visible sun, it is what animates it and motivates it, is the god who informs it.”

—Thorkild Jacobsen, from The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion, 1976.