Internet image, difficult to source to an original, showing a Marsh Arab village during the 1970s’ before the desertification caused by Saddam Hussein
This is the third and final (for now, anyways) blog post of my mini-series on the Epic of Gilgamesh; the purpose of this post is to summarize, in ordinary language, the highly unusual degree of similarities between the familiar biblical flood “story” and the Gilgamesh “story.” (Both words are enclosed in quotations to alert the reader to the fact that the stories have each been stitched together from several different sources, each a variant of the original myth.)
Perhaps the most salient problem that the general reader of the Gilgamesh epic might notice is the fact that there is no apparent reason for the gods’ decision to send the Flood. This is in contrast to the biblical version, which makes a very big deal out of humankind’s wickedness, especially violence–and most especially murders. It all began with Cain, of course:
Hilarious cartoon from Donny Fort’s comic book “Forty Years.” The seated figure is Moses, the traditional author of the Pentateuch.
In Gen. 4, God refuses to allow anyone to kill Cain. (It’s a great pity he allowed Adam and Eve to raise Cain.) Specifically, God says that if anyone kills Cain, God himself will avenge Cain sevenfold. Only a few generations later, a descendant of Cain, Lamech, said to his two wives that he had killed a young man for hurting him; Lamech then audaciously claimed that God would avenge him seventy-seven-fold. The idea in the biblical text seems to be that murder was a big problem, and after the flood, God himself orders the surviving humans to institute capital punishment (Gen. 9:6 NRSV):
Whoever sheds the blood of a human,
by a human shall that person’s blood be shed;
for in his own image God made humankind.
The matter is not as clear in Gilgamesh, of course. There’s no obvious reason for the flood. The only hint comes when Ea reproaches Enlil, saying:
You, the sage of the gods, the hero,
how could you lack counsel and bring on the Deluge?
On him who transgresses, inflict his crime!
On him who does wrong, inflict his wrongdoing!
One might conclude, then, that where the gods are beyond human ken in Gilgamesh, the biblical God at least makes somewhat more sense insofar as he has a clearer reason for ordering destruction. Certainly, one could not imagine the biblical writers comparing God to a dog as the poet of Gilgamesh does.
Each story has a catastrophic, capital “F” Flood. Each features a hero with a boat who saves his family and the human race. Each, perhaps, may have a similar motivation on the part of the gods. The similarities go much beyond this, though.
In Gilgamesh, Ea instructs Uta-napishti to build a boat; the god specifies the length, the width, and the roof; additionally, Uta-napishti refers to the number of decks his boat had. Similarly, in Genesis 6, God instructs Noah on the dimensions of the boat: the length, width, height, and number of decks.
The duration of the flood in each story appears to be different, on the surface: seven days for the rain, and seven more while the boat was stuck on Mount Nimush. In the Genesis story, the rain lasts for forty days. Because 7 and 40 were numbers symbolizing completeness in the ancient Near East, this counts as a similarity rather than a difference.
In both stories, the boat lands on a mountain. In both, the hero sends out birds to see if it is safe to open up the doors. In Gilgamesh, Uta-napishti sends out a dove, a swallow, and a raven; when the last does not return as the first two had, he goes out of his boat. Similarly, in Genesis, Noah sends out a raven (subtle change by the biblical writers here!); the text appears to say that the raven did not come back in. Then Noah sends out a dove, which returns to him. Noah again sends out a dove, which returns with an olive leaf in its beak. Finally, Noah sends out the dove again, and when it does not return, he empties the ark.
Upon leaving the ark, Noah immediately, and very shrewdly, offers a sacrifice. The biblical text specifically says that God “smelled the pleasing odor.” Similarly, Uta-Napishti offers a sacrifice immediately after exiting the boat, and
The gods did smell the savour,
the gods did smell the savour sweet,
the gods gathered like flies around the man making sacrifice.
At this point in the story, the God of Genesis swears that he will never again send a flood to destroy humankind; the sign of this is his bow in the clouds. (One must remember that Yahweh was a storm-god; a literal ancient Near Eastern visual depiction of the bow of a storm-god can be seen in the Assyrian iconography of Ashur, a symbol that would in time come to be used for the Zoroastrian religion):
Image of the Assyrian god Asshur taken from Wikipedia
These same two elements occur also in the Gilgamesh story, although they are somewhat more difficult to spot. Belet-ili, after the flood, holds up her necklace with painted flies on it, a necklace that her husband had given her when they were younger. She exclaims:
O gods, let these great beads in this necklace of mine
make me remember these days, and never forget them!
What follows is the upbraiding of Enlil for bringing on the flood:
Instead of your causing the Deluge,
a lion could have risen, and diminished the people!
Instead of your causing the Deluge,
a wolf could have come up and diminished the people!
It seems clear, then, that the gods will never allow another flood on this scale; furthermore, they have a sign in Belet-ili’s necklace to remind them, just as God’s rainbow comforts Noah.
The details are far too many and too specific for there to be a merely coincidental relationship between these texts, and non-prejudiced scholars are unanimous in making the biblical version dependent on the older Gilgamesh version, just as the story found in the eleventh tablet of the epic was adapted from earlier stories of the hero Atrahasis.
What really gets me, though, is that so many fundamentalist Christians persist in viewing the Flood story in a literal way, as though all the billions of kinds of organisms could fit into a box smaller than a city block. Not only are they scientifically naive, they have missed the biblical writers’ points. (These do not interest me here, but essentially their points may be observed in the differences between the Genesis and the Gilgamesh versions.)
Line for line, I prefer the Gilgamesh version. Its poetry is outstanding; the mostly-prose Bible version, in contrast, was cobbled together from multiple sources, one of whom was the infamous “P.” “P,” the “Priestly writer,” was concerned with sacrificial procedures, geneologies, lists, and calendrical information; his contribution to the story mainly is the note about seven pairs of “clean” animals for every pair of “unclean” animals in Noah’s ark. P could write masterful text (see Gen. 1), but he was not really a writer of stories. On the other hand, P was following the Gilgamesh text as his starting point, so perhaps we should be grateful to him, even if he and the other biblical writers ended out making the story into a mere morality tale.
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Note: The index of my journal entries on ancient and classical literature may be found here.
It seems to me that the best way to watch all six Star Wars episodes is still to start with the original trilogy first; Episode III ends where Episode IV begins, which in the lifetime of the Star Wars fans of my generation means there is a nice, emotionally-satisfying inclusio structure enveloping all six movies. The basic problem with failing to watch the original trilogy again at this point, though, is that it can result in a lack of proper consideration of the meaning of the events in Episode IV. This is a problem that is more than rectified in a somewhat recent post on the subject.
