Gilgamesh Immortal

by Brian Godawa

  (Ecclesiastes 5:16–17)

  Man is one whose progeny is snapped off like a reed in the canebrake:

  (Tablet X:301)[7]

  For who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow? (Ecclesiastes 6:12)

  the comely young man, the pretty young woman,

  all [too soon in] their very [prime] death abducts (them).

  (Tablet X:302-303)[8]

  The wise person has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet I perceived that the same event happens to all of them.

  (Ecclesiastes 2:14)

  No one sees death,

  no one sees the face [of death,]

  no one [hears] the voice of death:

  (yet) savage death is the one who hacks man down. (Tablet X:304-307)[9]

  For man does not know his time…

  so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.

  (Ecclesiastes 9:12)

  At some time we build a household,

  at some time we start a family,

  at some time the brothers divide,

  at some time feuds arise in the land.

  At some time the river rose (and) brought the flood,

  the mayfly floating on the river.

  Its countenance was gazing on the face of the sun,

  then all of a sudden nothing was there![10]

  (Tablet X:308-315)[11]

  For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

  a time to be born, and a time to die;…

  a time to love, and a time to hate;…

  a time for war, and a time for peace.

  (Ecclesiastes 3:1–8)

  Vapor of vapors, says the Preacher,

  …All is mist and vapor.

  (Ecclesiastes 1:2)

  Oh, Enkidu, a team of two will not perish. He who is lashed to a boat will not sink,

  No one can tear asunder a three-ply cloth.[12]

  (Gilgamesh and Humbaba A)

  Two are better than one, …For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow…a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

  (Ecclesiastes 4:9–12)

  Thou, Gilgamesh, let full be thy belly,

  Make thou merry by day and by night.

  Of each day make thou a feast of rejoicing,

  Day and night dance thou and play!

  Let thy garments be sparkling fresh,

  Thy head be washed; bathe thou in water.

  Pay heed to the little one that holds on to thy hand,

  Let thy spouse delight in thy bosom!

  For this is the task of [mankind]!”[13]

  (Tablet XI)

  Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.

  Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head.

  Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life.

  (Ecclesiastes 9:7–10)

  The natural question that arises is whether or not the Biblical author got his ideas from Babylonia, or the reverse, or whether they both used a common source background. Regardless of which way the influence flows, the Gilgamesh Epic and Ecclesiastes certainly display a striking exchange of ideas. The last verses of Gilgamesh Tablet XI and Ecclesiastes 9:7-10 show a thought for thought progress of thinking that surely suggests a deliberate cultural exchange of ideas.

  But the differences are perhaps just as profound and striking as the similarities. First and foremost is of course the polytheism of Gilgamesh that is dutifully overturned by the monotheism of Ecclesiastes. Jewish ethical monotheism was a hostile unbridgeable chasm between the worldviews of Israel and her surrounding pagan neighbors, a chasm between Abraham’s bosom and Hades.

  But an equally profound separation lies in the anthropocentric (human-centered) paganism of Gilgamesh versus the theocentric (God-centered) optimism of Qoheleth. While both affirm a kind of meaningless despair that death brings to the human condition, Gilgamesh concludes with resignation that the best one can do is a substitute immortality of glory in the perpetual life of the state, a rather modern humanistic proposition for an ancient.

  But the Preacher argues that we are to eat, drink, and be merry, not merely because tomorrow we die (9:10), but because it is a gift from God (3:13), and that “for all these things God will bring you into judgment (11:9),” because “whatever God does endures forever” (3:14). So eternal life is found in connection with God in Ecclesiastes because not even the polis or city of the ancient world lasts forever like God does, and the individual life rooted in God is a life rooted in transcendence.

  Ecclesiastes 12:13–14

  The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

  Echoes of Eden

  The thematic existential pursuit of meaning and transcendence is not the only thing in common between the Babylonian epic and Biblical Scriptures. Echoes of Eden resound in the journey of Gilgamesh that scholars have long pointed out reflect a literary correspondence with the Bible.

  When Enkidu enters the Gilgamesh story, he is a “Wild-Born” untamed man who lives as an animal in the steppe with a hairy naked body, wandering the hills, feeding on grass and upsetting traps set by the hunter for his mammalian kin. He was in fact created by the goddess Aruru as a foil to the “civilized” oppression and “fierce arrogance” of king Gilgamesh over the city of Uruk.[14] Theirs is the perennial conflict between rural and urban human identity. The city dweller may be “civilized,” yet he can be barbaric and cruel compared to the “noble savage” who is the only redemption for such oppression.

  In the Standard version of the Babylonian epic, a hunter tries to stop Enkidu from ruining his traps by seducing him with a harlot named Shamhat. Enkidu is drawn to her with instinctual lust and he is ultimately tamed by his sexual satisfaction with the female, who then civilizes him with clothes and human etiquette.[15] It is the ancient classical paradigm of human nature: The sensuality of Woman tames the savagery of Man.

  But this civilizing of human nature is also depicted as a loss of innocence required for human maturity. Suddenly, Enkidu’s eyes are opened, “he had reason, he was wide of understanding.” His psychic link with the animals is broken, and Shamhat says to Enkidu, “You are just like a god.”[16]

  This little episode and its mythic metaphor of human growth and separation from the animals through loss of innocence has obvious parallels with the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3. Eve, seduced by the serpent, influences Adam to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which “opens their eyes” and they “become like God” losing their innocence.

  Critical scholarship has noted these parallels and has prioritized the Babylonian account, which results in twisting the Biblical account into a humanistic parable that subverts Original Sin into Original Wisdom, where it was a good thing to disobey God and take control of human destiny. God becomes the villain and the serpent becomes the hero of this interpretation in that the serpent helps mankind escape dependency on a jealous deity fearful of man taking his place and making him unnecessary. Liberal scholar James Charlesworth, quoting another liberal scholar suggests that to “characterize him [God] as villain is not impossible, in view of 3:8 (the Garden is for his own enjoyment), and vs. 23 (where he feels ‘threatened’ by the man!) As villain, he is the opponent of the main program.”[17]

  Charlesworth then concludes that,

  “The story of the serpent in our culture is a tale of how the most beautiful creature [the serpent] became seen as ugly, the admired became despised, the good was misrepresented as the bad, and a god was dethroned and recast as Satan. Why? It is perhaps because we modern humans have moved farther and farther away from
nature, cutting the umbilical cord with our mother earth?”[18]

  But this critical hermeneutic is autobiographical projection of fashionable modern prejudice against the Judeo-Christian depersonalization of nature. It completely misunderstands the polemical nature of most Biblical interaction with its pagan environment, and misunderstands the Gilgamesh story as well. Similarities in stories illustrate a common subject, but differences express a contrast of meaning.

  Charlesworth surveys iconography on archaeological artifacts in Bronze Age Canaan to accurately describe ancient Canaan as a “serpent cult civilization.”[19] Canaan was the land promised to the Israelites by God. They were commanded to devote all the giant clans and their cities to complete destruction because of the connection of the giant Anakim clans to the antediluvian Nephilim (Numb 13:32-33).[20]

  Joshua 11:21–22

  And Joshua came at that time and cut off the Anakim [giants] from the hill country... Joshua devoted them to destruction with their cities. There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel.

  I have explained elsewhere that the creation story of Genesis follows the ancient Near Eastern paradigm of justifying territorial and governmental control over a region. When a kingdom would assert its authority or power, it told a creation story of how its deity established order out of the primordial chaos and laid claim on the land.[21] The Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish does this with its ascendency of the Babylonian patron deity Marduk as king over the assembly of gods, and the Genesis account does this for Yahweh’s people as inheritors of the Promised Land. “The earth” in Genesis 1, is better translated as “the land” in Hebrew and, as John Sailhamer has pointed out, is most likely a literary reference to the Promised Land of Canaan.[22] Since the Old Testament is filled with a history of Israel constantly falling away from Yahweh and worshipping the false gods of Canaan, it makes perfect theological sense that the Tempter in the Garden that draws Israel’s forebear Adam away from obedience is the symbol of Canaan, the serpent.

  There is no meaningful way that serpents could be interpreted as a hero or positive symbol in Genesis 2-3 in context with the Israelite worldview. And the serpent is not a positive symbol in Gilgamesh either.

  Another episode in the Epic of Gilgamesh that carries overtones of the Genesis creation story is on Tablet XI. After Gilgamesh encounters Utnapishtim (Noah) and discovers he cannot attain eternal life, he leaves dejected. But Utnapishtim feels sorry for him and decides to tell him about the location of a magic plant that is able to make one young again. Gilgamesh journeys to find the plant, and then see what happens next:

  At thirty leagues they pitched camp.

  Gilgamesh found a pool whose water was cool,

  he went down into it to bathe in the water.

  A snake smelled the fragrance of the plant,

  [silently] it came up and bore the plant off;

  as it turned away it sloughed a skin.[23]

  The notion of a plant that rejuvenates and a serpent “stealing” the opportunity of renewed youth has long been connected to the Genesis account of the rejuvenating effect of the Tree of Life being withheld from Adam due to the serpent’s deception. But they also both contain etiological explanations of snake biology, Genesis for the serpent crawling on its belly, and Gilgamesh for the snake shedding its skin. These echoes of Eden reaffirm the negative character of the serpent as one who spoils the opportunity for renewed life, not the positive agent of human maturity.

  Noah and the Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh

  Perhaps the most fascinating connection that the Epic of Gilgamesh has to the Bible is in the presence of a Noah character and his story of the Great Deluge. Scholars have written endlessly on this topic ever since the first translations of the account were available in the late nineteenth century. A comparison of the two stories yields, yet again, some significant similarities that indicate a common origin, yet some even more significant differences that indicate divergent meaning.

  As mentioned earlier, extant tablets prove that the Gilgamesh epic had gone through a literary evolution. One very distinct change involves the addition of the Flood story that probably did not exist in the oldest Babylonian version of the epic poem, but does exist in a later Babylonian version. This has prompted Tigay to suggest, and most scholars now agree, that an additional Akkadian story of the Flood called Atrahasis was used as a source to add to the Gilgamesh cycle. And a third and older Sumerian version called The Deluge may also have had some influence on Gilgamesh.[24]

  But what about the Genesis story of Noah’s ark? While it is virtually unanimous among scholars that Genesis was written and edited over time using multiple sources, the more extreme view of this has been adopted by the scholarly establishment that has sought to divide the Old Testament, and in particular the Flood story, into contradictory sources that have been woven together from an older “Yahwist” source and a newer “Priestly” source, all with opposing agendas.

  This radical view is falling from favor with the advent of literary and form criticism and because of the complete absence of manuscript evidence to support the remote speculation of such radical redaction.[25] What is coming more to light is the genius of composition that exists in the final canonical literary form that virtually defies categorizing of specific sources. For example, Gordon Wenham has pointed out the complex literary poetic form of “chiasmus” used in the Flood narrative. Chiasmus is a kind of mirroring literary structure that builds the plot with increasing succession, to the middle of the story, where the thematic message is highlighted, only to conclude the second half of the story in a reflective reversal of the first half.

  At the risk of overwhelming the reader, here is the literary structure of the Genesis Flood narrative as detailed by Wenham, emphasizing the superior originality of authorship over alleged source material.[26]

  Early Biblical criticism tried to reduce the Biblical Flood narrative to a derivative of the Babylonian version, but that theory is now thoroughly discredited.[27] Archaeologist P.J. Wiseman uncovered the existence of a “toledoth” formula in the repeated Genesis phrase, “these are the generations of,” that indicates original source material of inscribed clay tablets rather than a hodgepodge of Yahwist, Priestly, and other contrary sources.[28] Whatever narrative congruity exists between the Bible and the Gilgamesh Epic, their genetic ties are not found in being a derivative of one another.

  In Gilgamesh Immortal, while I do write of Gilgamesh visiting Noah and his wife on a distant island, and I do have Noah tell Gilgamesh the story of the Flood, just as he does in the Epic of Gilgamesh, I bring a subversive twist to the scenario. The story that Gilgamesh inscribes onto clay and stone is not the one that Noah told him. Why? Because Gilgamesh is not a repentant follower of Noah’s god, Yahweh Elohim, the God of the Bible. So it would make sense that if he rejects the living God, he would reject the living God’s metanarrative and replace it with his own that would exalt himself or his biased religious construction. So the version we read in the Epic of Gilgamesh today is the deliberately fabricated version of a rebel against Yahweh. This is the nature of all subversive storytelling as I have indicated in previous appendices of the Chronicles of the Nephilim.[29]

  So what is the storyline of the Flood in the original Gilgamesh Epic?

  In Tablet XI of the epic poem, Utnapishtim, the Gilgamesh Noah, explains that because of some unexplained sin of man, the pantheon of gods decide to send a Deluge to kill all of mankind. But the god of the waters of the Abyss, Enki (or Ea) defies the decision and sneaks away to give a dream to Utnapishtim, a wealthy man who lives in the city of Shuruppak in Mesopotamia. Through the dream, he tells him to tear down his house and build a large boat to save “the seed of all living creatures.” He gives him the dimensions of the boat and instructions of how to build it.

  Utnapishtim is to lie to his neighbors when asked about the large boat by explaining that he is going to move downstream to the city of Eridu. When he finishes the boat,
he loads on it all kinds of animals as well as all his extended family members and some skilled craftsman.

  The gods then start a storm of wind and rain, led by the storm god Adad, that devastates the land with such force, even the gods get scared and hide up in heaven like frightened dogs with their tails between their legs. The blowing wind and gale force downpour lasts six days and seven nights until “all the people are turned to clay.”

  The boat finally runs aground on Mount Nimush, and after seven days, Utnapishtim lets out a dove to see if it can find a perch, but it does not and returns to him. He waits and sends a swallow, and then finally a raven that does not return, indicating enough dry land to get out of the boat.

  Utnapishtim then offers a sacrifice to the gods, who “smell the sweet savour” and “gather like flies around the sacrificer.” But when the great god Enlil arrives, he is angry to discover Utnapishtim survived the destruction. When he finds out that Enki had leaked the plan to Utnapishtim, they quarrel. But the crafty Enki denies violating the will of the gods because he did not tell Utnapishtim directly, but through a dream.

  Enlil resigns himself to the trickery and decides to bestow immortality on Utnapishtim and his wife, so they would be like the gods, but placing them “at the mouth of the rivers” to dwell faraway from normal mankind.

  Utnapishtim then explains to Gilgamesh that the gods will not assemble for his benefit to bestow upon him eternal life. He is destined to die like all humanity. To prove the impossibility, Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh to stay awake for six days and seven nights to prove his worthiness of becoming immortal by exercising power over the stepchild of death: sleep. Gilgamesh cannot do so and he is sent on his way with the consolation prize of finding a magic plant that will restore his youth. As stated before, the serpent then steals that plant away from him.