Two things happen in a Mesopotamian summer: the heat becomes lethal and the epidemics start. Nergal is both. His city was Kutha, north-east of Babylon, and his temple there the E-meslam, from which he takes the title Meslamtaea; his Akkadian double Erra began as a separate god of scorched land and plague and was absorbed so completely that the two names are interchangeable in the first millennium. He is also war, in the specific sense of a city sacked rather than a battle won.
His weapons in art are unmistakable and unusually literal: a mace with a lion's head, or a staff topped with two lion foreparts back to back, and a curved scimitar. The lion here is not nobility. It is the animal that takes livestock and people from the edge of a settlement.
The Erra Epic, which is an object as much as a poem
Five tablets, composed probably in the eighth century BCE, and the most formally strange work in Akkadian. Erra is restless and bored; the Seven, a group of terrible beings created by Anu as his instruments, urge him to war; he talks Marduk into leaving Babylon so his cult statue can be refurbished — and in the god's absence he devastates the city, killing indiscriminately, righteous and wicked together. His own herald Ishum, a mild god of fire, spends the poem trying to restrain him, and eventually succeeds: Erra relents, promises Babylon's restoration, and the text ends in praise.
Then comes the colophon, and it is remarkable. The poem names its author, Kabti-ilani-Marduk son of Dabibi, and states that the god revealed the whole composition to him in a dream at night, that he wrote it down in the morning without omitting or adding a single line, and — crucially — that any house in which this tablet is displayed will be spared plague, sword and pestilence.
That last clause explains the manuscripts. Copies of the Erra Epic have been found written on amulet-shaped tablets designed to be hung up, and excerpts appear on protective plaques. It is a work of literature that functions as a vaccine certificate: the poem describes the disaster in order to be posted on the wall against it. Very little ancient writing states its own use so plainly.
Getting into the underworld by insult
His marriage to Ereshkigal is the other story he anchors, and it turns on a breach of etiquette at a banquet — the queen of the dead cannot come up, sends her vizier Namtar in her place, and Nergal does not rise for him. Ordered below to apologise, he is coached by Enki with a list of taboos that reads like advice for surviving a fairy hill: refuse the chair, the bread, the beer, the washing water, and do not look at her when she undresses. He breaks the last one. The two surviving versions of what follows end differently, and both are set out on her page. What matters here is the direction of travel: a god of violent death becomes the underworld's co-ruler not by conquest but by being summoned to explain himself and failing to leave.
Mars, and the man who lit a fire
In the sky he is Mars, called Salbatanu, and the planet's omens in the celestial series are almost uniformly bad — its brightening or its position among the constellations forecasting the death of livestock, enemy attack, or plague in the land. Mars in later Western astrology as the lesser malefic, the planet of war and fever, is a direct inheritance of this material; the horoscope tradition received the planet with its Babylonian reputation attached and never really revised it.
The Sebitti, the Seven who go with him, have a double life. As his war-band they are pure destruction; as a constellation they are the Pleiades, and as amulet figures buried under thresholds they are protective. Mesopotamian religion moves the same beings between roles depending on who is deploying them, which is the same logic that made Pazuzu's face a defence.
Read in Kings
Nergal makes an appearance in the Hebrew Bible with his city attached. When Assyria resettled foreigners in Samaria, the account in 2 Kings lists which gods each group brought: the men of Cuth made Nergal. It is a small notice that turns out to be exactly right — Kutha was his city, and the deportees carried their local god with them, which is precisely how ancient religion travelled. His name also stands in the Babylonian officer's title Nergal-sharezer, who appears in Jeremiah among the men who entered Jerusalem in 587 BCE.
What people ask about the plague god
Was he considered evil?
No, and the distinction the texts draw is worth having. Nergal is destructive in the way that fire and epidemic are destructive — dangerous, sometimes deserved, sometimes indiscriminate, but part of the ordered world and prayed to rather than against. Mesopotamian theology has no devil and no cosmic opponent of the gods. The nearest thing to a moral criticism of him is inside the Erra Epic itself, where Ishum argues that the destruction went too far and Erra ultimately agrees — a god censured by his own herald, in his own poem.
How is he related to Molech, Baal or other Semitic gods people group him with?
He is not, and the groupings are usually modern. Nergal's name is Sumerian in origin, plausibly from a phrase meaning "lord of the great city" — the great city being the underworld — and his cult is Mesopotamian throughout. He does spread west with Assyrian power, and he appears in Aramaic contexts and later at Hatra and Palmyra, sometimes with a Greek face; but the popular habit of pooling every ancient Near Eastern god into one composite figure of fire and child sacrifice belongs to nineteenth-century polemic, not to the tablets.
Does he take over from Ereshkigal or rule beside her?
The sources are inconsistent, which probably reflects the fact that his marriage was a later development grafted onto an underworld that already had a queen. Some first-millennium texts treat him as its king outright; others keep her in charge with him alongside. What does not change is the character of the place itself: no judgement, no reward, dust and silence for everyone. Whoever sits on the throne, the land of no return works the same way, and the comparison of underworlds shows how unusual that is.