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350 a passage in the Book of Proverbs in which the unsurpassed greatness of Yahweh is brought out by rhetorical questions: Who hath ascended up to Heaven, and descended too? Who hath cupped the wind in his hands, and hound the waters as in a cloak? Who hath established the Apsei-eretz— What is his name, and what is his son's name— if thou can tell? According to the Mesopotamian sources, when Enki di- vided the African continent among his sons, he granted the Apsu to his son Nergal. The polytheistic gloss (of asking the name of the Apsu's ruler and that of his son) can be explained only by an editorial inadvertent retention of a passage from the Sumerian original texts—the same gloss as had occurred in the use of "us" in "let us make the Adam" and in "let us come down" in the story of the Tower of Babel. The gloss in Proverbs (30:4) obviously substitutes "Yahweh" for Enki. Was Yahweh, then, Enki in a biblical-Hebrew garb? Were it so simple ... If we examine closely the tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, we will find that while it is the Nahash—Enki's serpent guise as knower of biologi- cal secrets—who triggers the acquisition by Adam and Eve of the sexual "knowing" that enables them to have offspring, he is not Yahweh but an antagonist of Yahweh (as Enki was of Enlil). In the Sumerian texts it was Enlil who forced Enki to transfer some of the newly fashioned Primitive Workers (created to work in the gold mines of the Apsu) to the E.DIN in Mesopotamia, to engage in farming and shepherding. In the Bible, it is Yahweh who "took the Adam and placed him in the garden of Eden to tend it and to maintain it." It is Yahweh, not the serpent, who is depicted as the master of Eden who talks to Adam and Eve, discovers what they had done, and expels them. In all this, the Bible equates Yahweh not with Enki but with Enlil. Indeed, in the very tale—the tale of the Deluge—where the identification of Yahweh with Enki appears the clearest, DIVINE ENCOUNTERS