Underneath the towering official pantheon of Mesopotamian religion, with its great temple households devoted to Marduk of Babylon, Ashur of Assyria, Enlil of Nippur and the rest, ran a second, more intimate layer of devotion that scholars call the personal god. Every individual, in this understanding, stood in a private relationship with a lesser or entirely personal deity, often a minor god otherwise unattested in the state pantheon, who functioned something like a patron, an intercessor and a conscience combined, watching over that one person's household, health and fortune specifically. Evidence for how seriously this relationship was taken comes above all from the ordinary record of personal names, since a very large share of Mesopotamian names are theophoric statements built directly around it, meaning roughly "my god has answered," "the personal god is my helper" or "trust in your personal god," turning something close to a private religious relationship into a piece of everyday identity carried by every namebearer.
Jeremy Black and Anthony Green's dictionary of Mesopotamian religion treats the personal god as one of the clearest points where official theology and lived religious practice diverge, since state temples devoted enormous resources to Marduk or Ishtar while an individual's daily anxieties and hopes were addressed, in practice, to this much smaller, closer figure.