Nergal

Nergal is the Mesopotamian god of war, of plague, of the scorching heat of the midday sun, and of the underworld, a fierce and destructive deity who brings death by fire and pestilence. He gathers together the powers that kill without mercy: the fever, the epidemic, the burning drought and the violence of battle, and he is associated with the planet Mars, the red star of war. His chief city was Kutha, whose great temple made it a centre of his cult, and his name became almost a byword for the deadly and the infernal. Nergal's path to lordship of the underworld is told in a myth of how he came to share the throne of the dead.

Invited to a banquet of the gods, the ruler of the underworld Ereshkigal sends her messenger up to fetch her portion; Nergal offends the messenger and is summoned below to answer for it. There, in the version best preserved, Nergal and Ereshkigal become lovers, and after an attempt to leave he returns to remain with her as king of the dead at her side. The story explains how a god of the burning surface world came to rule the dark realm beneath it, uniting in one figure the sun's deadly heat above and the silence of the grave below.

Nergal's cult at Kutha left a distinct trace in the Hebrew Bible, in the second Book of Kings' account of the aftermath of the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE. When the Assyrians deported the Israelite population and resettled the region with peoples from several conquered cities of Mesopotamia, the text records that the men brought from Kutha continued to worship the god of their home city there, naming him directly as Nergal, one of a short list of foreign gods the resettled populations are said to have carried with them into their new land.

The notice is brief, a single clause among several naming different transplanted cults, but it independently confirms, from a source with no interest in flattering Mesopotamian religion, the same association between Nergal and the city of Kutha that cuneiform sources establish from the Mesopotamian side, and it is a rare case of a named Mesopotamian deity's regional cult center being corroborated in an entirely separate literary tradition. Nergal's grim portfolio, plague, war, the burning heat that kills, made him a fitting object of this kind of hostile foreign notice, since biblical writers reserved particular scorn for gods associated with destruction and death, and later interpreters in the Greco-Roman world drew their own parallel, identifying Nergal, like several Near Eastern war and plague gods, with the Greek Ares and the Roman Mars, a comparison ancient astrological texts extended to his standing association with the planet Mars itself.