Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [58]
Furthermore, Ishtar’s immortality is no guarantee of her constancy; rather her open and aggressive sexuality is accompanied by an unacceptable inconstancy, which seems to be her most salient trait. Does that mean that this vibrant, sexually explicit culture also contained a rather large mythological warning against unbridled sexuality? Perhaps, though it is not clear what social realities lie behind this notion. It could be a story that maintains that arranged marriages are preferable to relationships dependent upon desire alone. But in any case, immortality with Ishtar was neither a permanent nor honorable position. In the end, one would be reduced to some animal existence, as when she tired of the shepherd husband and arranged for him to be killed by the wolf, or the gardener husband, who was transformed into a mole. This represents a return to a state before knowledge was achieved as an ironic punishment. Perhaps the Akkadian and Hebrew versions share a common male complaint that they are trapped into unwise unions or even marriage because of their sexual attraction to women, and that unbridled sexual attraction is foolishness, as the proverbs of all ancient Near Eastern nations make so clear. This is hardly what our culture would conclude but it seems to underlie the ancient mythological view of the institution of marriage.
Lastly, we review briefly the central issue of mortality in these two stories. We will have an occasion to compare Gilgamesh with Genesis and Homer’s epics in more detail in following chapters. But, for the moment, we should note some additional similarities between Genesis and Gilgamesh which we need to unpack. Both The Gilgamesh Epic and the Genesis account of creation centrally involve the acquisition of knowledge and the explanation of death. The Gilgamesh Epic is concerned with the issue of death and the recognition that it is a constant in human life. Gilgamesh wearies himself greatly searching for a solution to the problem, only to realize that he knew it all along: Death must come to all. The narrative is really about his coming to understand what mortality means, a recognition that is the essence of the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. That wisdom makes him, finally, the king he ought to have been in the beginning.
The Bible too faces the issue of death, albeit obliquely, at the beginning of Genesis. The Bible, to be sure, notes that death is the consequence for disobedience. We could have lived innocently in the garden as intelligent animals, had we not disobeyed the command not to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But the emphasis of the story shifts. In the Biblical account, it is the coming to moral knowledge that takes up all the narrative space of the story. And the reason for this is simple to see. The Bible is primarily concerned with the depiction of a covenant between God and humanity. In order for the covenant to have any significance, humanity has to be divinely aware of the differences between good and evil and make a conscious choice for good. The moral vision of Genesis replaces the quest for immortality in The Gilgamesh Epic as the central concern of the narrative.
We do not wish to denigrate either The Gilgamesh Epic or the Genesis account. Each has a grandeur and a subtlety that come from its use of mythological motifs to arrange and order human life in a chaotic world. But the human worlds of culture which they create are quite different. The Gilgamesh Epic shows us a sophisticated and civilized world, at home in great urban centers, and proud of its own accomplishments. The Bible, which borrows and uses