• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

[4] Further evidence of humans as being a mere whim of the gods to make them happy lies in the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is obvious the gods weren’t concerned with humankind, but rather with their own comfort. As the story goes, Enlil, the god of earth, wind, and air, couldn’t bear the noise humans were making while he tried to sleep, so he gathered all the gods together, and thus they jointly decided to get rid of their grief of having all the humans around by destroying them. Ea [the god of wisdom], however, warned one man (Utnapishtim) of the flood to come. He told him to build a boat for himself and his wife and for the “seeds of all living creatures.” […]

[5] Enlil later repented the harshness of his actions, deified Utnapishtim and his wife and then had the two live far away “on the distance of the rivers’ mouths.” It possibly could have been belittling to have Utnapishtim and his wife speaking to the new race of humans in terms of how rash and mindlessly the gods were capable of acting, so he immortalized them and had them live far out of the reach of human ears—”the secret of the gods.”

[6] It seems that the main objective of the gods was to remain gods; for that is what made them happy. And humanity’s role, then, was as the gods’ stepping-stone to their happiness. […] Witnessing the fall of humankind, for the gods, was like witnessing imperfection in themselves, and thus their fall; anything causing these feelings didn’t do the gods any good and therefore could be terminated without a second thought. It was the job of human beings to make the gods happy, and upon failure at this task, they could be “fired” (death), only to be replaced later—it wasn’t a position which the gods could hold vacant for long. Thus were the great flood stories.

The essay starts with a pan on the “big picture.” Panning on all three stories has allowed the writer to discover similarities among his blocks of evidence and to demonstrate that the examples he has chosen are representative of his generalization—his claim—that in all three flood stories men exist “solely to please the gods.”

The writer then constructs a series of tracks, summaries of each of the three stories that isolate some interesting parallels for readers to ponder. But at this point, rather than allowing his tracks to set up zooms, the writer returns again and again to versions of his original pan. In other words, a reflex move to 1-on-10 leads him to repeatedly match the evidence to his one governing claim.

To develop his central claim, the writer needs to devote much less space to repeating that claim, and more to actually looking at key pieces of evidence, zooming in on significant variations within the general pattern. In his second paragraph, for example, the writer allows the 1-on-10 pattern to rush his thinking and distract him from his evidence. He claims that the God of Genesis “had become unhappy with his creations so they were to be destroyed. Like a toy a child no longer has use for, humankind was to be wasted.”

This claim fits Enlil, the god in Gilgamesh who, as we are later told, decides to get rid of humans because they make too much noise. But it does not so easily fit the God of Genesis, about whom the writer has just told us that “the wickedness of man … grieved him to his heart.” If he did 10 on 1 on this passage, slowing down to think about the evidence, the writer would likely see that the difference between the two gods is significant. The grief that his evidence mentions suggests that God’s decision to flood the earth was possibly ethical rather than childishly selfish and rash. And the statement from Genesis that “every imagination of the thoughts of [man’s] heart was only evil continually” might lead him to see that humans were not simply victims of divine prerogative, but rather that they deserved punishment.

The writer doesn’t consider these other possible interpretations because his reliance on pans—the general pattern—has predisposed him to see his evidence only as another