NERGEL (Hebr. Nèrghal, Sept. 'Εργέλ). — Name of the idol that the Assyrian colonists “made for themselves,” who had been sent to populate the Samaritan city of Cutha (II Reg. 17:30).
He is a divinity very well known from cuneiform religious literature, which in hymns and incantations calls him the god of the infernal regions (like the classical Pluto); through his demons, he is the author of pestilences, famines, wars, enemy invasions, fires, and diseases, as means by which he gathers a population for his subterranean kingdom. In some texts, however, he is also the god of farmers, who sends water not to devastate but to irrigate, and grants fertility to animals; and as such he would have been venerated by the colonists of Cutha.
BIBL.: A. Deimel, Pantheon Babylonicum, Roma 1914, no. 2332; G. Furlani, La religione babilonese, I, Bologna 1928, p. 243 and following. Giovanni Rinaldi