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Endpaper 349 magical staff, the first miracle performed with it was to turn it into a serpent. Was Yahweh, then, one and the same as Enki? The combination of biology with mineralogy and with the ability to solve secrets reflected Enki's status as the god of knowledge and sciences, of the Earth's hidden metals; he was the one who set up the mining operations in southeastern Africa. All these aspects were attributes of Yahweh. "It is Yahweh who giveth wisdom, out of His mouth cometh knowledge and understanding," Proverbs asserted (2:6), and it was He who granted wisdom beyond comparison to Solo- mon, as Enki had given the Wise Adapa. "The gold is mine and the silver is mine," Yahweh announced (Haggai 2:8); "I shall give thee the treasures of the darkness and the hidden riches of the secret places," Yahweh promised Cyrus (Isaiah 45:3). The clearest congruence between the Mesopotamian and biblical narratives is found in the story of the Deluge. In the Mesopotamian versions it is Enki who goes out of his way to warn his faithful follower Ziusudra/Utnapishtim of the coming catastrophe, instructs him to build the watertight ark, gives him its specifications and dimensions, and directs him to save the seed of animal life. In the Bible, all that is done by Yahweh. The case for identifying Yahweh with Enki can be bol- stered by examining the references to Enki's domains. After Earth was divided between the Enlilites and the Enki'ites (according to the Mesopotamian texts), Enki was granted do- minion over Africa. Its regions included the Apsu (stemming from AB.ZU in Sumerian), the gold-mining region, where Enki had his principal abode (in addition to his "cult center" Eridu in Sumer). The term Apsu, we believe, explains the biblical term Apsei-eretz, usually translated "the ends of earth," the land at the continent's edge—southern Africa, as we understand it. In the Bible, this distant place, Apsei-eretz, is where "Yahweh shall judge" (I Samuel 2:10), where He shall rule when Israel is restored (Micah 5:3). Yahweh has thus been equated with Enki in his role as ruler of the Apsu. This aspect of the similarities between Enki and Yahweh becomes more emphatic—and in one respect perhaps even embarrassingly so for the monotheistic Bible—when we reach secret