What is a God in the Ancient Near East?
June 2025 | Vol. 13.6
By Michael B. Hundley
What is a god? While the question is simple enough, the answer depends on context and perspective. For those raised in the shadow of the great monotheisms — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — the god category has a singular member who is the creator and perfect unchallenged ruler of the cosmos. For most other modern religious traditions, gods are multiple and variable.
Rather than being a matter of biology, a “god” is a culturally conditioned category. Humans tend to subdivide the world into distinct domains — such as persons, animals, plants, natural objects, and artifacts — and tend to have strong expectations about them. While some may be more or less fixed across cultures, others — like gods — vary considerably, leading to misunderstanding and even repulsion when others do not mirror their own (e.g., the demonization of Hindu gods by European Christians).
God the Father, by Jacob Herreyns (1643-1732). Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. Public Domain.
Beginning in earnest with the Age of Imperialism, Europeans applied their (Protestant) Christian expectations of God to the lands they encountered, judging other gods based on how closely they resembled the monotheistic archetype. Today too, though often in more benign and unconscious ways, interpreters tend to expect perceptions of ancient gods to conform to modern, and especially Western, divine stereotypes. Some even seem to dismiss native classifications, such as denying that some illnesses and instruments can be “real” gods because they lack personality.
Rather than projecting our ideas back onto ancient texts, we should try to reconstruct what ancient texts meant when they used the term “god.” Entities either explicitly called or marked as divine should be acknowledged as gods. Each ancient Near Eastern (ANE) language has a word for god, and Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Hittite Anatolia mark deity with a divine determinative. A determinative is a linguistic category marker that informs the reader which domain the word belongs to (e.g., animal, river, or god).
Vignette from the Book of the Dead of Nestanebetisheru, ca. 950-930 BCE. The seated god determinative (circled) is used after the names for the sky, earth, and eternity to indicate their status as gods. © The Trustees of the British Museum, CC By-NC-SA 4.0
In the Levant where determinatives are rare and in the Hebrew Bible where they do not exist, the task of identifying gods becomes more difficult. Other factors then may indicate divinity, such as being called gods, being treated like gods (e.g., receiving prayers and offerings), behaving in godlike ways (e.g., conferring blessings), or being depicted as gods (e.g., wearing the Mesopotamian horned crown).
In the ANE, the Hittite divine world is perhaps the most expansive in terms of the number and variety of deities, while surprisingly fewer elements of the Egyptian world seems to be divinized than its ANE counterparts. Nonetheless, while there is a good amount of variability across cultures, ANE ideas of divinity do overlap with each other and are far more expansive than most modern Western ones.
Across the ANE, gods may be human-shaped, animal-shaped, hybrids, celestial bodies like planets and stars, as well as natural elements like mountains, bodies of water, and occasionally plants, metals, stones, and wood. Humanmade objects also may be divine — like statues, standing stones, doors, weapons, musical instruments, standards, and symbols — as are some abstract qualities like truth, justice, order, and wisdom, and even some illnesses like epilepsy in Mesopotamia. In the Hittite world, even elements of the home like the door, the windows, and the hearth are labeled gods, while monsters and demons are sometimes marked as divine across the ANE.
Relief orthostat depicting two human-bird hybrids. From Carchemish, Türkiye, Late Hittite period (9th – 7th century BCE). Museum of Anatolian Civilization, Ankara. Photo by Carole Raddato, CC by-SA 4.0
Cylinder seal with modern impression showing a human-bird hybrid approaching a tree. Assyrian, ca. 1200-1050 BCE. The Morgan Library & Museum, Morgan Seal 609: https://www.themorgan.org/seals-and-tablets/84237
Despite the diversity, ANE gods seem to share the same core characteristics. All gods were believed to possess the power to help or harm humanity, and the vast majority had humanlike agency, even if they appear abstract or inanimate. For example, some Mesopotamians feared the wrath of a seemingly inanimate divine bed. They believed that it could be placated by offerings and possessed the ability to choose whether to act (for example, see this Assyrian letter from the time of Sargon II: SAA 1.55: 13′–rev. 1). In other words, people then as today viewed their gods through the human lens, according to how the gods affected humanity and the dominant human model. People tend to project humanlike minds onto the things that matter to them in their environments — whether more (e.g., gods) or less sophisticated than us (e.g., animals and objects) — a phenomenon cognitive scientists call the Theory of Mind. Since humans are the dominant species and the only ones we understand, humanizing gods is natural. It is also practical. Having human-like gods makes the world more comprehensible than speaking of the world as ruled by non-human gods or — more distantly still — a product of inanimate forces. Human-like gods also give humans some agency, allowing us influence the gods who control the cosmos.
At the collective level, ANE people seemed to view their pantheons as holistic orderings of the world, with specific deities assigned to the areas of the cosmos they deemed important, from nature to culture. In these collectivist societies, the gods were defined as part of a larger social organism rather than as discrete individuals, whose principal value lay in their contribution to the cosmos.
To make the divine world more comprehensible, we can break down the god category into a hierarchy consisting of central and peripheral gods as well as entities that are always gods, and others that only occasionally are treated as divine. Central deities tend to fall into three tiers — the high god(s), major gods, and minor gods — all taking roles akin to a modern government or a royal family. Like the US president, the high gods (e.g., Mesopotamian Marduk, Egyptian Amun, Hittite Tessub, and Ugaritic El) ruled, and the Mesopotamian and Egyptian high gods possessed a one-stop-shop-like complement of divine powers.
Stele of Baal brandishing a club and holding a thunderbolt, standing on a pedestal bearing images of mountains and the sea in relief. From the Temple of Baal, Ugarit, Late Bronze Age. Louvre AO 15775. Photo © 2006 GrandPalaisRmn (musée du Louvre) / Franck Raux.
Major gods tended to be specialists in charge of major potencies like the sun and weather, not unlike governmental cabinet members. Like political functionaries, minor gods served their superiors as advisors, messengers, and even service workers such as divine hairdressers. Although some were tamed and incorporated into the hierarchy, monsters and demons as well as natural elements like stars and rivers tended to be peripheral. These peripheral gods were often viewed as wild and relatively uncivilized. Foreign gods, too, were peripheral but generally less wild and uncivilized than monsters and stars.
Although practically all gods possessed some humanlike agency, central deities tended to be more anthropomorphic (meaning “human-shaped” but used more expansively to mean humanlike in any way). In particular, while high and major gods were often imagined as humanlike externally (with some, especially Egyptian, exceptions), they all were understood to be humanlike internally. In order to distinguish them from normal humans, their anthropomorphism was elevated in various ways, such as possessing more powers and the ability to shapeshift and adopt multiple simultaneous forms. Minor gods tended to be anthropomorphic, especially internally, but diverged more in external form, ranging from hybrid guardians to a deified sword as Ninurta’s chief advisor. By contrast, the peripheral gods tended to be the least humanlike or the least like “us.” Although they maintained some level of anthropomorphism, they often adopted non-human or hybrid forms and represented the chaotic threat of the other, in contrast to the “civilized” central deities.
Lamassu (hybrid Assyrian guardian deities with the head of a human, body of a bull, and wings of an eagle) from the palace of Sargon II at Dur-Sharrukin (ca. 722-705 BCE), now at the Louvre, Paris. Photo by Poulpy, CC By-SA 3.0.
High and major gods represented the quintessence of divinity and as such were always deified, while minor gods were often but not always deified. The definitional lines begin to blur at the periphery, as peripheral deities were only occasionally deified. More often, they belonged exclusively to different domains, such as natural phenomena like stars, rivers, and animals. Demons and monsters too were only occasionally divine. Deification of diseases and humanmade objects occurred but was rarer still.
Egyptian star goddess, possibly Sopdet (Sirius), form the tomb of Seti I (c. 1300 BCE). Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra. CC By-2.0
Rather than being fixed, deification was often pragmatically and contextually driven. Things slipped into the god category in contexts that stressed their power to affect humanity and where humanlike agency was beneficial. For example, while the vast majority of Mesopotamian musical instruments were simply objects, balag-instruments were occasionally classed as deities. Used in high-stakes lamentation rituals to placate an angry deity, deifying the instruments practically gave them the affective power and agency to fulfill their essential purpose. In the Hittite home, the door, window, and hearth served as the primary access points, the places where various evils threatened to enter. The Hittites thus likely found it reassuring to imagine these entry points as (under the control of) divine beings with the power and agency to protect the home.
Inlaid mosaic scene from “The Standard of Ur” depicting a man playing a balag-instrument. From the royal cemetery at Ur, ca. 2500 BCE. British Museum 121201. © The Trustees of the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
“God” then was not a one-sized-fits-all category either within or across cultures. The prototypical anthropomorphic masters of the universe certainly qualify as deities but so do a host of other things that today we might hesitate to call animate, let alone divine. The diversity and range of deification should give us pause when we are tempted to expect other people’s (god) categories to align with our own. Worthy of attention in their own right, ancient Near Eastern gods also provide the necessary context for understanding deity in the Bible, the subject of the companion articles in this series.
Michael B. Hundley is Assistant Professor of Teaching in Religious Studies at the University of Memphis. He has published multiple books on the intersection of human and divine in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near East.
Further Reading:
Michael Hundley, Yahweh among the Gods: The Divine in Genesis, Exodus, and the Ancient Near East (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Michael Hundley, “Divinized Instruments and Divine Music: A Study in Occasional Deification,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 82 (2023): 119-32.
Michael Hundley, Ancient Gods and Monsters: The Bible, the Ancient Near East and Beyond (forthcoming).
Brett Maiden, Cognitive Science and Ancient Israelite Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Barbara Nevling Porter (ed.), What Is a God? Anthropomorphic and Non-Anthropomorphic Aspects of Deity in Ancient Mesopotamia (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009).
How to cite this article:
Hundley, M. 2025. “What is a God in the Ancient Near East?” The Ancient Near East Today 13.6. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/god-ancient-near-east/.
Want to learn more?
From Monolatry to Monotheism: The Changing Face of the Biblical Pantheon
What is a God in the Hebrew Bible? Part 2: Characteristics and Hierarchy
What is a God in the Hebrew Bible? Part I: The Divine Cast of Characters
Doug Mason
I believe that the analysis of the Biblical account of “God”, and of YHWH in particular, needs to be viewed through the prism of the political objectives of the sect promoting those views. We are being informed only of the positions held by an unrepresentative sect located at a particular temple.