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105 by my side. Standing between us, he touched our foreheads an Ltann en The Bible simply states that after Yahweh had repented, "Elohim blessed Noah and his sons." From the Mesopota- mian sources we learn what the blessing had entailed. It was an unheard-of ceremony, a unique Divine Encounter in which the deity had physically taken the chosen humans by the hand and, standing between them, physically touched their foreheads to convey a divine attribute. There, on Mount Ara- rat, in full view of the other Anunnaki, Enlil bestowed Im- mortality upon Utnapishtim and his wife, proclaiming thus: Hitherto Utnapishtim has been just a human; henceforth Utnapishtim and his wife shall be like gods unto us. Utnapishtim shall reside far away, at the mouth of the waters. And "thus they took me and made me reside in the Far Away, at the mouth of the waters," Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh. The amazing part of this tale is that Utnapishtim was relat- ing it to Gilgamesh some ten thousand years after the Deluge! As a son of a demigod and, in all probability, a demigod himself, Utnapishtim could well have lived another 10,000 years after having lived in Shuruppak (before the Deluge) for 36,000 years. This was not impossible; even the Bible allotted to Noah another 350 years after the Deluge on top of the previous 601. The really extraordinary aspect is that the wife of Utnapishtim was also able to live that long as a result of the blessing and the sacred place of residence to which the couple were transported. Indeed, it was such famed longevity of the Blessed Couple that had led Gilgamesh—a king of the city of Erech, circa 2900 B.C.—to search for the hero of the Deluge. But that is a tale that merits close scrutiny by itself, for it is filled with The Deluge to bless us.