“According to Mesopotamian religion, human beings were created to serve the gods. Each city had a patron god, and these gods lived in images in the temples dedicated to them. The priests and other people who worked at the temples were their servants. Kings were thought to be appointed by the will of the gods …. The Mesopotamians thought that their gods looked and behaved like people, though they had supernatural powers.” (48-49). Not out of sync with the Jews, Greeks, and the West.
At what point, by the way, did we start thinking of the Middle East as non-Western? After all, Jerusalem is Middle Eastern, and what’s more it was part of the Greek/Macedonian and Roman empires, though we also think of Marathon, Thermopylae, and battles like that as East-West confrontations.
(This book was classified by the library as juvenile literature.)