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The pious young man whom thou guardest lives long thereby.16

So too in Ugarit, a Canaanite city on the Syrian coast, the meeting between the god and a human hero was emphasized. There were, and in some religions there still are, important rituals in which humans and gods supposedly meet on various occasions. In Israel, the populace was expected to appear before God in Jerusalem as often as three times a year. In addition the priesthood and the king also participated in various rituals of ascent to the temple at these times. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest entered the holy of holies. He pronounced the name of God according to its letters and only the smoke of the incense prevented him from a full view of the deity. Even so, many Israelite heroes saw God. Adam and Eve and a variety of figures in Biblical history saw God face-to-face and lived because God spared them, though the penalty for this vision was explicitly death: “But,” He said, “you cannot see My face; for man shall not see Me and live” (Exodus 33:20).17

Inanna

THE HEAVENS or the high mountains were believed to be the domain of the gods. Some of the heavenly gods visited the underworld as well; when they went, like Adapa and Etana, they were out of place. The underworld was considered the domain of death. Sometimes not even the gods could escape death. That is what happened to Inanna when she visited the realm of the dead underground. The most spectacular of the journey stories is The Descent of Inanna (Akkadian: Ishtar) to the underworld. Inanna decides to visit her older sister Ereshkigal, the ruler of the underworld (“From the great above, she set her mind to the great below” [line 1]). Fearing that she might come to some harm in the netherworld, Inanna instructs Ninshubur, her messenger, to wait three days and, failing any report from her, to go for help to Nippur, the city of Enlil, and plead with him not to let her remain in the underworld. If Enlil refuses to help her, Ninshubur was to go to Ur, the city of the moon god Nanna, and repeat his plea. Failing there, he was to go to Eridu, the city of Enki, the god of wisdom, who would not fail to come to her aid. The story traces not just a succession of cities but, likely as well, a ritual journey of the cult statue of the goddess. Again, wisdom is linked to the issue of mortality and immortality.

Inanna then heads off, dressed in her seven mi or “attributes,” which are objects of adornment, tools, and implements of war: the crown of the plain, the wig of her forehead, the measuring rod of lapis lazuli, the lapis necklace, the gold ring, the breastplate, the pala-garment. She decorates herself in koḥl, a luxurious, blue eye makeup.18 In current parlance, we would call them her “signature fashion statements.” Then, as she descends to the underworld, she must progressively take off each of her seven mi, until she appears naked in front of the throne of her sister. Ereshkigal promptly condemns her to death. At once, Inanna becomes a corpse, hanged from a peg to decay and fester. Simultaneously, famine and infertility strike the earth, clarifying the climatological dimension of the story.

It looks as if the Mesopotamian poets anticipated our saying: “You can’t take it with you” by millennia. We might suppose that this truism would not need stating but the ancient world knew of the wonders of Egypt, where the rulers did take it with them-everything from their possessions to their body immortalized by enbalming. And they all placed grave goods in tombs.

After three days, Ninshubur, as instructed earlier, alerts the gods; but as expected, only Enki stands by Inanna. He makes two fly-like creatures, the kurgarru and the kalaturru, instructing them to sprinkle the meat with the grass and water of life sixty times so that Inanna’s body will be preserved enough that it can rise, perhaps a reference to a specific funeral custom in Mesopotamia. Ereshkigal does lament the dead, as part of her regal functions. When the two mourners join