British geologist, Cambridge-trained, who worked in Iran in the 1930s and later published, with Barbara Joy O’Brien, The Genius of the Few (1985) and successor volumes arguing that Genesis and the Sumerian material record a small group of advanced people who established an agricultural settlement in a mountain valley in the Near East. The reading turns on a philological claim: that the sign lil derives from a pictogram of a plant in a pot meaning cultivation, so that Enlil should be read en-ge-li, Lord of Cultivation, rather than lord wind or lord air. On that base Eden becomes an uncultivated plain brought under the plough, the Adamah become the workforce, and Hebrew abad, worship, is read literally as to work for. The standard lexica do not support the derivation, and Piotr Michalowski has argued that the name may not be Sumerian in origin at all. O’Brien is a minor figure in the wider literature but a load-bearing one in Heather Lynn’s book, where the entire terrestrial thesis rests on this single reading, which is why the entry exists.
Connections
Heather Lynn · Anunnaki · Enuma Elish · Zecharia Sitchin · Michael S. Heiser