God clothed with humanity in the religious tradition of the Ancient Near East

Abstract

The Mesopotamian religious experience stated the divine impression on man and the humanity of God. Its accounts of creation reflect on the God’s footprint in man, who carried within him the yearning for a face-to-face encounter with God. This possibility had been intuitively perceived from the statues of the gods in the temples. Their images made them present in this world once they had undergone the life-giving action of the rituals known as «opening of the mouth» and «washing of the mouth». These rituals show that the cultic statues did not replace the divinity, but rather they incarnated it: the divine inhabited them. The Christian tradition manages to fulfill such a yearning when, because of the tender mercy of our God, the sunrise from on high visited us