Significant Details: The Gilgamesh Epic

Significant Details: The Gilgamesh Epic

Significant Details Fiction or history, story or truth, myth or religion, these are questions that are applied to the ancient epic of Gilgamesh. Interestingly, these same questions apply to another major work, the Bible. Who is to say what is real and what is fiction of these two very old books? They were written many years ago, both with many different versions, and in different languages with slight variations. While it is claimed that Sumerians wrote Gilgamesh as early as 3000 B.C., there is much controversy surrounding the time the Bible, mainly the Old Testament was written (Loery). Strangely, these two books have similar accounts of very meaningful events and symbols in today’s society, yet one is a myth and the other is the basis of many different religions. The similarities between parallel stories in Gilgamesh and The Bible make it hard to believe that one work did not influence the other. While the two flood stories are obvious parallels, there is one pair of other similar accounts that deserve as much attention, the creation of Adam and the creation of Enkidu have four important similarities in the Bible and in Gilgamesh. The most talked about and obvious parallel in these two works is the depiction of a very large flood. In Gilgamesh, the main character, Gilgamesh, talks with Utnapishtim, the man who survived the flood. He tells Gilgamesh the story, revealing details strangely similar to those of Noah’s flood in the Bible. Utnapishtim was ordered to build an ark in a dream by one of the gods who had pity on mankind (Sin-Leqi-Unninni XI, I). God told Noah to build an ark because he was “blameless in that age” and deserved salvation from total destruction (Genesis 6:9). Though God did not use a dream to notify Noah, both were instructed on what to take on the ark. “Load the seed of every living thing into your ark,” Ea says to Utnapishtim (Sin-Leqi-Unninni XI, I, 27). Likewise, God told Noah to take pairs of each type of animal with him to “keep their issue alive all over the earth,” (Genesis 7:2). Noah and Utnapishtim both took family members with them in the ark. Noah took take his wife and his sons and his sons wives

(Genesis 7:18). Utnapishtim took some friends with him, along with his family (Lorey). Overall, the frameworks of the descriptions are comparable from how the main character learns of the flood to the sacrifice that man makes after landing (Clough). Both men had seven days to complete the arks before it started raining, however, in the Biblical account, it rained for forty days and forty nights (Genesis 7; 12), while, according to Utnapishtim, the flood lasted six days and seven nights (Sin-Leqi-Unninni XI, ii, 127). When the flood was over, the two boats proved to have landed in the same region of the Middle East (Lorey). Supposedly, Noah’s ark landed on Mount Ararat, while Utnapishtim’s ark landed some 300 miles away on Mount Nisir (Casselman). There are somewhere around 80,000 flood stories in seventy-two languages, yet these are two have the closest landing spots (Kneisler). Landing so closely together, it must be maintained that one writer or people borrowed the concept from the other, while modifying it slightly to fit that geographical area. After landing, both survivors thanked their protector by sacrifice. Utnapishtim “set out a drink offering upon the ziggurat of the mountain” and set up the sacrifice. Noah offered an animal up to God and God, seeing this, said to Noah “Never again will I doom the earth because of man,” (Genesis 8:21). Enlil, a minor god, blesses Utnapishtim with immortality, which is intersesting, considering Noah was already six hundred years old at the beginning of the flood. Here, the Sumerians may have taken the fact that Noah was so abnormally old as immortal, weaving it in to their own flood story. Taken as a whole, the flood stories have similar details that make it impossible to believe that there is some connection between them. A less obvious parallel is in the creation of Adam in the Bible and in Gilgamesh, the creation of Enkidu. There are actually two different stories in the Bible in which Adam is created while there is only one story of Enkidu’s formation. Combining the two Biblical accounts, however, gives many parallels to Gilgamesh. In Genesis, chapter 2, Adam, the first man, is created out of clay (line 7). Similarly, when Aruru, the mother goddess forms Enkidu, she throws clay into the wilderness where she gives birth to Enkidu (Sin-Leqi-Unninni tablet I, column ii, line 35).