The chief active god of the Sumerian pantheon, patron of Nippur, holder of the Tablet of Destinies, and the god whose decree brings the Flood in the Atra-Hasis Epic. His name is read in the standard lexica as lord wind or lord air; his rank number is 50.
What he does in the texts
He is the executive of the pantheon where Anu is its figurehead. He separates heaven from earth, he is given the earth by lot, he is angered by the noise of humanity and decides to destroy it, and he is outmanoeuvred by Enki, who warns the survivor. That structure, a destroying authority and a warning counterpart, is one of the oldest patterns in the literature.
The two alternative readings
Zecharia Sitchin makes him Anu’s legitimate heir under a succession rule in which a son by a half-sister supersedes a firstborn, which supplies the motive for the whole dynastic history in The Wars of Gods and Men. Heather Lynn, following Christian O’Brien, reads the sign lil as a plant in a pot and arrives at Lord of Cultivation, and then at the identification of Enlil with Yahweh in The Anunnaki Connection. Both are single-source philology: the standard reading is lord wind, and Piotr Michalowski has argued the name may not be Sumerian in origin at all.
Connections
Anu · Enki · Anunnaki · Atra-Hasis Epic · Zecharia Sitchin · The Wars of Gods and Men · Heather Lynn · The Anunnaki Connection · Christian O’Brien · Ninurta · Michael S. Heiser