Enki is unusual among the great gods of Mesopotamia in that his interests and humanity's tend to coincide. The pattern shows most clearly in the flood. In the Old Babylonian poem Atrahasis the gods make human beings to do the work of digging the canals, because the lesser gods have gone on strike and refused to keep digging. Humanity multiplies, and the noise of it keeps Enlil awake. He sends plague, then drought, then famine, and each time Enki tells the man Atrahasis how to divert the disaster. Finally Enlil resolves on a flood and binds all the gods by oath to say nothing.
Enki keeps the oath and breaks it. He does not speak to Atrahasis. He speaks to the reed wall of the man's house, telling the wall to tear down the house and build a boat, while the man happens to be listening on the other side. The device is not a joke at the gods' expense; it is a serious point about how oaths and speech work, and the same scene appears in the flood tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the survivor is called Utnapishtim. When the waters recede and Enlil discovers that someone lived, Enki argues him down: punish the sinner for his own sin, send lions and famine to thin the population rather than a flood that takes everyone.
That argument is worth noticing. It is a god telling another god that collective punishment is unjust, in a text written down well before 1600 BC. The relationship between these Mesopotamian flood accounts and the one in Genesis has been debated since George Smith read the Gilgamesh flood tablet to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in 1872, and the number of shared details, the boat, the birds sent out, the sacrifice on the mountain that the gods smell, makes some connection generally accepted, though the route by which it travelled is not settled.