Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [57]
The most obvious comparison between the two stories is in the flood narrative. Even the motif of sending out birds to spy out dry ground is present in both. They are so similar as to leave little doubt that the Biblical account borrowed liberally from its Near Eastern milieu in presenting it, though possibly not directly from The Gilgamesh Epic itself. One striking difference between the two narratives is in the reason for the destruction of the world. In the Babylonian version, the reason seems to be overpopulation, as the gods grow discontented over the noise that humanity is making. In the Biblical account, God must destroy humanity because of the sin of ḥamas, violence, as it is called in Hebrew. The theme of a magical plant is also common to the two stories, as indeed it was in many of the previous ones. Through pharmacology, this plant links the themes of knowledge and eternal life. In the Bible, the plants are the tree of the knowlege of good and evil and the tree of life. In Gilgamesh, the plant is one that rejuvenates the old. Humanity is denied the full benefits of both in each case. In addition, the snake in both stories serves as the villain who prevents a totally happy outcome. In shedding his skin, he receives rejuvenation which Gilgamesh desires.
But the Bible and The Gilgamesh Epic part company radically in their mythical depiction of civilization. For the epic, civilization is truly comfort against mortality. But the Bible sees civilized life as the beginning of corruption. The temples of Mesopotamia with their ziggurat towers become in the Bible the tower of Babel. That tower is a sin against God, another example of humanity’s trying to make itself like God. And the enterprise inevitably fails. So too, the victory of the agriculturalist Cain over the pastoralist Abel is seen as an act of murder. No doubt, we see in these stories a mythic portrayal of the original pastoral ideal with its freedom, sadly replaced by city life in the rise of civilized life, sedentary life as the destruction of the idolized Hebrew past of herding.
Both narratives deal with the human institution of marriage. In the Biblical version, the separation of Eve from Adam explains the institution of marriage (“Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh,” Gen 2:24). Furthermore, the punishments that God administers to Adam and Eve suggest that marriage is the normal state of postlapsarian humanity.40
The Gilgamesh Epic also represents a kind of developmental story of a hero who begins his career as a rebellious teenager acting out his hostility. Through various stages of his life, he learns how to behave in civilization. When he returns home after his failed quest, we know that he will fulfill his role as adult and father. But, while for the Hebrews marriage advances the claims of civilization, in Mesopotamia it is more ambiguous. Even more, marriage advances the counterclaims of human love and cultural innovations over against the divine realm. Inanna (Akkadian: Ishtar), the goddess of love and war is, in some ways, the protectress of human cultural life, in that the arts of love are civilizing and in other ways inimical to human cultural life. But she is “the goddess testosterone,” governing lust and war. Inanna is everywhere depicted as both kindly and ferocious in demeanor, a terrible ambiguity that follows