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348 ling to serve as a Primitive Worker, and it had to be Enki whom the Bible quotes as saying "Let us make the Adam in our likeness and after our image." An Epithet of Enki was NU. DIM.MUD, "He who fashions;" the Egyptians likewise called Enki Ptah—"The Developer," "He who _ fashions things," and depicted him as fashioning Man out of clay, as a potter. "The Fashioner of the Adam," the Prophets repeat- edly called Yahweh ("fashioner," not "creator"!); and com- paring Yahweh to a potter fashioning Man of clay was a frequent biblical simile. As the master biologist, Enki's emblem was that of the Entwined Serpents, representing the double-helixed DNA— the genetic code that enabled Enki to perform the genetic mixing that brought about The Adam; and then (which is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden) to again genetically manipulate the new hybrids and enable them to procreate. One of Enki's Sumerian epithets was BUZUR; it meant both "He who solves secrets" and "He of the mines," for the knowledge of mineralogy was considered knowledge of Earth's secrets, the secrets of its dark depths. The biblical tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden— the tale of the second genetic manipulation—assigns to the serpent the role of triggering their acquisition of "knowing" (the biblical term for sexual procreation). The Hebrew term for serpent is Nahash; and interestingly, the same word also means soothsayer, "He who solves secrets"—the very same second meaning of Enki's epithet. Moreover, the term stems from the same root as the Hebrew word for the mineral cop- per, Nehoshet. It was a Nahash Nehoshet, a copper serpent, that Moses fashioned and held up to stop an epidemic that was afflicting the Israelites during the Exodus; and our analy- sis leaves no alternative but to conclude that what he had made to summon divine intervention was an emblem of Enki. A passage in II Kings 18:4 reveals that this copper serpent, whom the people nicknamed Nehushtan (a play on the triple meaning serpent-copper-solver of secrets) had been kept in the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem for almost seven centu- ries, until the time of King Hezekiah. Pertinent to this aspect might have been the fact that when Yahweh turned the shepherd's crook that Moses held into a DIVINE ENCOUNTERS