.jpg "Serug, son of Reu")
I was born one hundred and sixty years after the flood, and my firstborn Nahor was born thirty years after I.
Man is a vulnerable thing and the cosmos is a tempestuous place.
I mourned my firstborn, who died when he had lived but one hundred and forty-eight years. The Nephilim and the Gibborim, those men of old and of great renown in the days before the flood, lived more than nine hundred years. But the Annunaki became angry with us, and flooded the earth to drown us, and when Utnapishtim outwitted them with his great ark, in their anger they declared that their breath would depart from us. The strength of man alone, without the breath of the Annunaki in him, does not endure on the earth so long.
Though I suspect that the great Enki was actually allied with Utnapishtim in his actions and is even now our heavenly ally. It may be that without this special friendship we could not hope to live even three or four hundred years. For without the breath of a god in our nostrils, how could we live at all?
I had lived but one hundred and seventy-eight years, and was still young and strong, when my son went down to the dark waters of the underworld in my presence. It is an unnatural despair to lose one’s child. The grief of it is so great that only on my strongest days does my soul in its resilience catch some small glimpse of that vast, vast world which is the uncrossable desert of my pain. To be rid of that pain is impossible; to feel even some small part of it is the labor of my life.
And what of my father, Reu, who lived to bury the son of his son? My father’s father, Peleg died not one year before my son Nahor. As the lifespan of man shortens it seems that all the glory of the ancient world dissipates. Indeed, things just are not as they used to be.
Concerning my deceased son Nahor: as his name, so was he; a man whose life burned hot and short. And in the strength of his youth, when he had lived but twenty and nine years, Nahor begat Terah.
Terah, the son of my son, is an unusual man. He lives his life not with the hot intensity of his father but in a sort of calm and daydreaming contentment. Yet his calm demeanor by no means indicates a lack of religious devotion, for even from his youth Terah was especially religious in his worship of the Annunaki.
This was my hope even before Nahor named him for the moon, who is our great god Nanna. And given the atmosphere of Ur, and the upbringing he received from myself and his other living fathers, his religious devotion was to be expected.
Young Terah watched in amazement as the great Ziggurat of Nanna rose before his eyes at the zealous direction of King Ur-Nammu. When it was complete, it was 480 cubits in circumference and almost as tall as it was wide. The pride of Chaldea and a place practically crawling with the melam of the Annunaki.
The magnificence of the Ziggurat seemed to the inhabitants of Ur to be an obvious sign of the favor of the Annunaki upon the town, and this inspired great devotion in young Terah. On the other hand, its ambitious size and flamboyant multicolored design inspired in myself not celebration but a certain dread, lest the great structure be interpreted by the Annunaki not as an act of worship but as an act of human pride. And this dread inspired me to instill in Terah a devotion even greater still.
With great zeal I sought to avoid offending the Annunaki, and this zeal of mine resulted in our family being rather well regarded by the priests and priestesses of Nanna.
None heeded my religious warnings with as much purity and dedication as did young Terah. His was a faith pure, childlike, and unquestioning. And as he grew into the strength of manhood his faith did not waver. It was with great pleasure that I learned that Nahor had arranged for Amathlai, one of the leading priestesses and a daughter of Cornebo, to become Terah’s first wife.
In time it became Terah's occupation to oversee the shop where Cornebo sold idols of the Seven: Nanna, Enlil, Enki, An, Ninhursag, Utu, and Inanna.
Yet for all his devotion, what great trouble would eventually beset Terah! This man so religious would find in religion such turmoil.
Man is a vulnerable thing and the cosmos is a tempestuous place.
May the Annunaki look down and have pity on us.