Page Content (OCR)
44 the Bible drop the "the." It is only then that it starts to deal with a specific forefather of the human generations; but significantly, this listing omits Cain and Abel and proceeds from the person called Adam straight on to his son Seth, the father of Enosh. And it is only for Seth's son Enosh that the Hebrew term meaning “human being" is employed; for that is what Enosh meant: "He who is human." To this day the Hebrew word for "Humankind" is Enoshut, "that which is like, that which stems from, Enosh." The link between the biblical narrative and its Sumerian origins emerges most interestingly in this name of the son of Adam, Enosh, whom the Bible considers the real progenitor of Humankind as it came to be in the ancient Near East. A list of months and the gods associated with them (known as IV R 33), which begins with Nisan as the month associated with Anu and Enlil (the first month of the Assyrian-Babylo- nian year), lists next the month Ayar with the notation "sha Ea bel tinishti"—"That of Ea, lord of Mankind." The Ak- kadian term tinishti has the same meaning as the Enoshut in Hebrew (which derived from the Akkadian). The Akkadian term, in turn, was paralleled in the Sumerian by the term AZA.LU.LU which can best be translated as "the people who serve"; and once again, this conveys—and explains— the biblical statement that expounds on Enosh, the meaning of his name, and his time. It is in respect to Enosh that the Bible states (Genesis 4:26) that it was in his time that Humankind "began to call upon the name of Yahweh." It must have been an important devel- opment, a new phase in Humankind's history, for the Book of Jubilees states in almost identical words that it was Enosh "who began to call on the name of the Lord on Earth." Man has discovered God! Who was this new human, "Enosh-man," from a scientific point of view? Was he the progenitor of what we call Nean- derthal Man, the first true Homo sapiens? Or was he already the ancestor of Cro-Magnon Man, the first true Homo sapiens sapiens that still walks the Earth as the current human beings? Cro-Magnon Man (so named after the site in France where his skeletal remains were found) appeared in Europe some 35,000 years ago, replacing there the Neanderthal Man (so DIVINE ENCOUNTERS