Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [452]
25. Our use of the name Gilgamesh is conventional. The signs can be read in a number of ways-Izdubar, Bilgamesh, etc,-and the Sumerian stories used Sumerian names. Also the epic was assembled from separate stories, which appeared even in literary form as early as Sumer but also evidently orally before that. The story of the composition is fascinating, even confirming theories of biblical composition as well. See Tigay, Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic.
26. See R. Harris, “Images of Women;” and especially Frymer-Kensky, “The Marginalization of the Goddess.”
27. See also the language used of the friendship between David and Jonathan: e.g., 1 Sam 18:1, 3; 20:17; and especially 2 Sam 1:26.
28. T. Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal and Gilgamesh’s Refusal.”
29. See T. Abusch, “The Epic of Gilgamesh;” “Ishtar’s Proposal and Gilgamesh’s Refusal.”
30. See also The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated and edited by B. Foster.
31. See Dorn, “The Beatific Vision,” p. 47.
32. Translation by Tigay, p. 168, taken from Gardner and Maier, Gilgamesh Translated, p. 214.
33. Ibid., p. 57.
34. Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying. Also see Ray, “The Gilgamesh Epic.”
35. See Tigay, Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic and Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism.
36. Gadd, RA, pp. 126ff; for a new translation of this additional material, see George, The Epic of Gilagmesh, pp. 175-208.
37. George, The Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 177.
38. The primary translation is in French, Antoine Cavigneaux and Farouk N. H. Al-Rawi, Gilgames et la mort: Textes de Tell Haddad VI avec un appendice sur les textes funéraires sumériens, Cuneiform Monographs (Groningen: Styx, 2000). It has now also been translated into English, George, The Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 195-208. George had access to further fragments from Nippur. There is no evidence that this was ever included in the so-called Epic.
39. For example, see Sommers, “Expulsion As Initiation,” pp. 26-29 and notes.
40. The punishments essentially set up the marriage power arrangements of the Hebrew world and end the comic, “topsy-turvey” which had existed until that time: “To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply your pain in child-bearing; / in pain you shall bring forth children, / yet your desire shall be for your husband, / and he shall rule over you.’ And to Adam he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, / and have eaten of the tree / of which I commanded you, / “You shall not eat of it,” / cursed is the ground because of you; / in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life’” (Gen 3:16-17). See next chapter for more details.
41. There is some evidence, in fact, that the Akkadian Ishtar was originally a male deity who was subsumed to her closest correlative, the female Inanna.
42. From Livingstone, “Court Poetry and Literary Miscellanea,” p. 71, as quoted in Scurlock, “Death and Afterlife,” p. 1887.
43. Scurlock, “Death and the Afterlife.”
44. See daSilva, “Offrandes allimentaires aux mortes en Mesopotamie.”
45. M. Pope, “Cult of the Dead at Ugarit;” for Mesopotamia see J. S. Cooper, “The Fate of Mankind,” pp. 19-33; Tsukimoto, Untersuchungen zur Totenplege; Bernstein, The Formation of Hell, p. 1-18.
46. See Shaffer, “The Sumerian Sources of Tablet 12 of the Gilgamesh Epic,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1963), pp. 116-119, as quoted in Scurlock, p. 1888.
47. See Abusch, “Ascent to the Stars,” pp. 15-39; S. Sanders, “Writing Ritual and Apocalypse.”
48. S. Sanders, “Writing Ritual and Apocalypse,” p. 161.
49. Ibid., p. 158.
50. For the connection between Israelite Apocalyptic, Jewish mysticism, and shamanism, see Davila, “The Hekhalot Literature and Shamanism;” “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Merkavah Mysticism,” pp. 249-64; “4QMess ar (4Q534) and Merkavah Mysticism.”
51. See Cross, “Yahweh and ‘’El,” in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, p. 45.
52. See Cross, “’El and the God of the Fathers,” in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, p. 13.
53. Coogan,