So, What is a god?

Although we wrestled with such questions [on the nature of the gods in the ANE], we came to no final agreement about the answers to them; it became abundantly clear, however, that the differences in how different genres represent the gods are of crucial importance for our question. Not only do the representations of gods in different genres suggest that there was no single, monolithic “idea of what a god was” in ancient Mesopotamia, even within a single chronological period and area, they also make it abundantly clear that we must understand more about each genre in question, its rules and conventions, its authors, its uses, and its intended purpose or impact, if we are really to understand how Mesopotamians envisioned their gods.—Herman Vanstiphout, in What Is a God? Anthropomorphic and Non-Anthropomorphic Aspects of Anthropomorphic Aspects of Deity in Ancient Mesopotamia, 11