Echoes of Gilgamesh

okay this works all right well we're going to go ahead and begin thank everybody for coming out uh tonight for our discussion of the epic of gilgamesh welcome everybody to our history theology and philosophy meetup we do these most tuesday nights not every tuesday night especially in the summer we're gonna have some gaps coming up but we are meeting again next week my name is john hamer and i'm the coordinator of this meetup i also serve as the pastor of the toronto congregation of community of christ here but my background in graduate work is in medieval european history and so my study of things like theology and things like that seems to come through a historian's lens i don't know if we this is just the introduction so it doesn't matter if it's a little bit noisy it's all right no i'm just it's actually the um it's actually the our our hand dryer is really really noisy the problem with those with the with when we were trying to figure out what to do about the uh the washrooms if you have paper towels that just just takes up this incredible amount of paper waste that you make and that's but then if you have the kind of air dryers that are really quiet they don't actually dry your hands so and so then we have instead we have the hand dryers that do dry your hands and are very noisy and so that's our that's how we kind of have you know dealt with that so our mission here in the community the congregation and also in the meetup is to invite everyone into community to continually learn and grow to abolish poverty and needless suffering to pursue peace and justice and to live life meaningfully together and i mentioned that we're going to have a another history theology philosophy meet up next week next tuesday at this time and we're going to deal with the idea of footprints of paganism in the bible and so specifically in the old testament and so or the hebrew bible essentially the way that the bible is now edited and redacted and put together it presents kind of a picture of a monotheist religion and has a monotheist perspective going all the way back to um mythic times uh but actually if you if we now look at what the components of the bible when they're actually written and we look at um when the bible starts to become historical we see that actually there's all sorts of reasons to understand that the people actually are coming out of a a kind of regular paganism and that there is a an evolution to monotheism that takes place in the course of the bible and so we'll look at all of these kind of footprints that are still left about what the actual history is that are embedded into the text and it's actually pretty interesting stuff i think so no that's no problem [Laughter] so tonight is gilgamesh so this is actually significantly before the bible and it's definitely paganism so this is uh something that's coming before the bible this i have a couple of these images that um our modern artist actually is rendition but i just think that uh the images were so cool that i put several of them in anyway but they're based on um mesopotamian artwork but it you can tell that it isn't it has a different sense of perspective and this kind of thing that it would coming out of a modern imagery okay so one of the things that we have in the epic of gilgamesh that i think everybody is especially familiar with is that it includes a flood narrative and so there's actually all kinds of modern images that people make of noah's ark and ozark is a exciting thing for a lot of people they've built a giant one in kentucky that's well kentucky's a good place for it too this is not the giant one in kentucky this i think is a i don't know if this is real but anyway maybe it is but it's it's not as big as the one in kentucky there's a this is i think this might be a model but anyway or maybe it might be photoshopped i don't know what this one is i just got it off of google but the one there's the one in kentucky that um recently they just started so there's a bunch of creationists that are running this and it's a big museum and theme park and things like that and at night time now they're right there um actually lighting it up like a rainbow so it really looks like you know like gay pride noah's ark theme park but they're doing it very deliberately because they're taking back the rainbow from the gays that's the idea and so anyway all right so there is the same um flood story that we find in that people are more familiar with from genesis uh noah essentially the there are common components here the divine destruction of all living things except for those that have been preserved inside this large ship that is divinely commanded to be built that includes plants animals and humans and then they're preserved from a cosmic flood the ship or ark lands on a mountain there's a the person in the ark sends out a series of birds including uh a dove which is where they where the dub come back with an olive leaf this is where our symbol of the of the olive branch and the doves representing peace even comes from from the same story and also it's in gilgamesh and the raven going out and then finally there's a um a sacrifice that takes place after uh in thankfulness for being saved from the flood and then they're the divine i'm saying it that way because in the gilgamesh it's definitely a polytheistic story so uh there are all the different gods are regretting that they um kind of went overboard with a flood they think boy wouldn't have better if we had just like let loose war and famine and plague and just had a couple people die instead of destroying everything and they decided they're not going to do it and in that same way in the genesis story the yahweh the god of the of the old testament uh hangs his bow you know which is in in this in the sky that's saying that that's no longer going to be used as a as a weapon against people in this kind of way the rainbow that's why the creationists are lighting up the their arc model or theme park as a in a rainbow so okay so we have used this um in several of our different uh lectures we've used this kind of early timeline but i've added a whole bunch of other stuff to it than what we normally see and so essentially we are using this before the common era which is the same thing as before christ but um it's trying to be less christian focused so the scholars now use this bce that's what it means um and so you know looking back you know when we're doing biblical stuff it's really here in this first thousand years the first millennium before the common era um uh and there's the whole what we can think of then as the second temple period of the babylonian captivity the destruction of the first temple so in that kind of time period and this is this is that time period when the bible is being uh composed and then we're getting the final redaction of it kind of right here so to get to gilgamesh you know and when that's being written down the earliest um tablets that have survived are coming just a mag order of magnitude before that and so um before we're looking at what's going on there in in canaan and in syria we have on going on side by side here the um the origins of civilization that are happening in egypt so the old middle and new kingdom and then the different um empires in the in what's now iraq the babylon the neo-babylonians the assyrians the cassides the old babylonians sumerians the acadians and the early city-states of sumer so dating all the way back and again the homer and the odyssey alien odyssey are happening kind of in the same time period of the bible and again this is just way earlier we might come back to the slide to try to remember our timeline and time frame but it's sometimes helpful to have this kind of context okay so we'll look at sumer sumeria ancient sumeria mesopotamia which is the greek name for the area that we call iraq now but it just means the land between the two rivers so the land between the tigris and euphrates rivers and so it's one of these very very early cradles of civilization that include the indus river valley egypt china and it's possibly the earliest one it often gets credit for being earliest but you know it depends on what you mean it's a very fertile region fed by these rivers but there are actually very few natural resources compared to some of the other places their main natural resource that they have is mud as the river is constantly filling you know silting in and so it actually uh well when we get to it the coast here is actually they've silted in much more substantially from where it was in ancient times so now the tigers and euphrates have kind of come together into one delta but they didn't back in the past so um we'll come back into the map so settlement is beginning here in the you know between the 5500 to 4000s before the common era we already have like this proto-writing um uh by 3000 bc the sumerians themselves are speaking in isolate language so it's not um like asiatic semitic afro-asiatic it's not called uh it's no not in that language group it's not in the indo-european language groups it's not one of these related families of languages scholars would have liked to try to connect it with different things and they haven't no that hasn't found any common people haven't decided that they agree that they found any to connect it to yet and unlike some of these like in egypt where it's fairly early on the civil civilization develops like a centralized state that's all under the rule of the pharaoh this is the opposite kind of model where you have all kinds of independent city-states where there is a centralized state that is quite small and it's controlling all the territory around and it's centered on a city and the cities are all up against each other and that's the kind of thing that we have for example in the new world civilizations you have among the mayans and then mycenaeans and greeks in the in the old world also doing this kind of thing one of the differences when you have a city-state model it tends to be they tend to be uh very creative artistically and so there's all kinds of competent competitive powers where all the different states are patronizing um arts and and literature and all kinds of things like that but they also tend to be excessively warlike and so they're always fighting each other and so it's very hard for any one of those states to you can't stop fighting because you're right next to the borders uh with all these other states in egypt you can just kind of you have a very clear boundaries except for you know just at a certain point up the river you have to decide how far you're going to keep going until you until it's nubia otherwise you don't and you have one border with syria so we looked at a little bit of this map essentially all of these this is really early as you can see this is this map that i pulled here is the earliest settlements this is before any of the prehistoric times so it's before any of the proto-writing even starts happening but we have archaeological remains and so there's already these cities including down here uric which is going to be the important one for the epic of gilgamesh where gilgamesh is set and so they there is a um the hero of this epic that we're going to talk about tonight gilgamesh is portrayed as a demigod he's called two-thirds god one-third human one-third man however that works genetically it's hard to hard to breed for that but anyway that's how he gets created but he is probably a historic king so we do this a little bit where we have asked ourselves on several of the historic you know several um literary figures or figures of myth is there a historic colonel behind that and we had a we had a whole we had a whole lecture on is there a historical jesus or you know or is it or is this this theory that some people have had that it's coming out of a christ myth um in that kind of a thing uh this one uh it it's way earlier right and so it's much it's this is like our dealing with like a historical buddha and that kind of a thing where where the buddha is very far separated from the from the writing of it but in this case it's a little bit better even though it's this far uh back because we do have inscriptions uh with gilgamesh's name on it so the idea is that king has dedicated a particular temple and so it does look like there was a king it's the sumerian is probably bilgamesh i guess that's how it's it's deciphered although it is remembered in the akkadian version of it as gilgamesh he also um appears in the early mythic semi-mythic semi-historical king list that the sumerians have and so those those remind us a little bit of if you've read the old testament and they have all of the begat lists you know where adam begets seth who begets you know gets down to methuselah and noah and that kind of thing and then methuselah lives a thousand years and that kind of a thing and so those are these um ideas in the near east that the people living in the past or in the long long ago used to have very very long life and this is true in the sumerian king list although the the numbers get much bigger even so tens of thousands of years long and so gilgamesh is coming off of the really mythic ones where we're starting to get into actual historic figures and so he is only reigning for 126 years you know but this is still um you know therefore you can see he's like already entered into semi-mythic status by the time they're producing any king lists or anything else he's got a little lion he's very cute whenever you try a lot of times this you know like when you have a figure uh in art you know you always will see hercules and he's always wearing a lion skin and he's got a club and things like that and and saint george has got a dragon that he's always stepping on and the angel gabriel has a horn that he's always blowing gilgamesh has got this lion that he's holding around all he's carrying around with him that he's going to fought this fighter of lions so so when we talked about this kind of proto writing so the writing that the sumerians develop is called cuneiform which means wedge wedge-shaped writing and you can just you know it's very characteristic essentially i mentioned that they're one of their main uh resources that they actually have is mud and clay and so what they have to write on then unlike the egyptians who are blessed with this wonderful reeds that they can make into papyrus paper um they are instead taking making clay tablets and they're using their little stylus to make wedge-shaped impressions in it and that develops from kind of uh initially it's like tribute tallies so that people are um the whole reason why you need to have writing uh in these early civilizations is you are starting to have a centralized bureaucracy you are you have a city-state that relies on an irrigation network in order to actually have us an irrigation network and to have everybody go dig at the right time and to have everybody hard excuse me plant and harvest and all those things at the right time and then also frankly to defend against all the other city-states is by having a strong centralized authority system and that means taxes and bureaucracy so really very quickly you have a scribe system that um starts coming up with how we can did you pay your tally how do we how much tally do we have how much grain do we have how much do we need for these kind of things and so that uh evolves uh into a it's a combination of logophonetic alphabetic and syllabic signs so there means which is to say uh these symbols mean are not only they're not as there's not a true alphabet here and it's also not uh there's a some alphabetic symbols there's some of syllabary where you're having a whole like a consonant vowel cluster and then there's some where you have a symbol for a particular word so it's complicated as a result it took longer it took longer to decipher than if it had been a little easier can you read that no no i i'm i can i can't read arabic so it's much easier which is is an alpha rhetol or object anyway um i guess it's an alphabet yeah it's it's um aramaic it's hebrew that's uh abjad but now it has the dots that's made it into an alphabet [Music] yep okay so originally they create this for sumerian but in the same exact way that the um let's say the roman alphabet the latin alphabet has been adapted to uh which also where they they adapted that from earlier forms that going all the way to phoenician but anyway the the romans are the ones that made the system that we have for english which is why there's all of these letters that we don't have we don't have we have all these sounds that we don't have letters for so for example we use the very confusingly we use the letter t and h for both the the sound and the th sound because we don't have a letter for either of those sounds because the romans didn't have those sounds so anyway so then this this uh cuneiform writing is adapted and used by the assyrians the babylonians the hittites the old persian is in this too so from the city-state system one of the things that can happen to city states is that if somebody has an imperial system uh the empire can sometimes come in and conquer all the city-states as rome was able to do to all the greeks in the same way there is a neighbors to the north the acadians and their ruler sargon the great was able to create an imperial system for the acadians which is able to conquer uh the sumerian city estates and integrate them into the first great empire in mesopotamia and sargon is very famous because he's uh for one thing he's the original baby that is put into a basket the basket is lined with pitch and the basket sent in the river and then he's also famous because he's the original law giver so he creates this very serious mesopotamian law code that is remembered for acadians are um they're speaking a semitic language which means it's related to arabic and aramaic and hebrew and they adapted cuneiform to their language but in the same way that western europeans continued to use latin as a as a religious language sumerian even long after anybody speaking it on the streets is being used by the priests as a religious language so if we can this map is a little easier to see so essentially we're over here and again this is this area mesopotamia iraq and so the the um sumerian sumerian area is right here the acadian area is here this is the northern area that's places that become like assyria and so then at a certain point um sargon has this entire kind of thing and creates this first empire acadian empire and from that basis they don't the canadians aren't able to hold on to that very long just about a century or so but from that there's a big succession then of mesopotamian empires that go from uh that we went through on the timeline but essentially um the for a second the sumerians are able to take over and create a neo-sumerian empire and then the cassides the babylonians the assyrians the neo-babylonians the ultimately the persians then alexander the great and so on souza yeah so souza's over here in the elamite area which is just where it becomes persia so persia is right here and then of the here is the center of assyria in syrian power and then later baghdad you know will be in the middle for the i'm not that good babylon for the babylonians right next to her baghdad is now so when um in for a lot of these systems when we've dealt with paganism and polytheism when you have a lot of different gods you are coming up with these ideas of these gods you're envisioning various prima primal forces um as a god uh at a certain point uh they go from being more like a a force like the sky or earth or the ocean uh to starting to be more anthropomorphized and usually there's a succession of gods where you're starting with the uh the more primal ones and then they they generate uh children that are becoming more and more kind of human-like as the myths go on and um all of these gods begin fairly locally and so everybody in every little city kind of has their own conception of what all of these different gods are but in a lot of cases they are all kind of a shared concept and so if you have a god that represents death or a god that represents love and you meet for example somebody in the neighboring town and they also have a god of death then one of the times you think of is maybe well maybe my god death and your god of death are just the god of death and you understand them both as being the same person and so uh the um their systems are fairly easily able to synchronize and so on the one hand you will line up the different gods and decide oh well it sure sounds like aphrodite is the same as our roman god venus but if at a certain point you say well you're just scratching your head and no there's nobody in the entire roman pantheon who's like this apollo guy that you guys keep talking about and so then you just simply adopt apollo as a new god that can come to rome and that same kind of thing um uh happens here with the sumerians and the acadians so we have these anthropomorphized forces that get names they understand you understand them and you understand what they're doing and thereby you understand how the universe is working by telling stories about how the gods are interacting with each other so we build then from this diversity of contradictory local traditions i say contradictory because if everybody's got their own stories and you think that your gods are the same as their gods but they all have different stories to explain the same things at a certain point um you know you'll have if you if people try to make a systems which they did later and they try to make the genealogy of the gods and things like that uh often one particular god will have multiple different parent stories and they won't be the same parents and things like that because different places will have different traditions so um uh nevertheless then there's these associations and so one of them here then there's this very important sumerian goddess inanna and she's associated then with the acadian goddess ishtar and then that goes on to be associated when we think of the greeks and the romans as as aphrodite and venus yes especially in the wasn't the case more like a venn diagram where it's like they share some characteristics but then somewhere like that oh yeah the underworld right yeah she that's not aphrodite that's um that's persephone right you're exactly right and so we saw that too when we were doing like the norse gods right how um how how does it work that uh you know like our the days of the week don't line up how we would expect them to so because we have the norse names that are kind of not lining up you know so woden is not lining up as the king of the gods because of how the myth changed between when the days got lined up anyway and it's because there's a vin diagram you know so um so it depends on which god is in a sentence and so for me to even just kind of blithely do this we should remember that they're all independent individual goddesses here and at some point or other um as people are hearing about the other goddess they might say oh well that's this one but they could just as easily have said um no that's persephone you know because we we actually have an important temple and cult of persephone here in our city and we actually don't really care about aphrodite here and so in some cases even to even think that the greeks have it systematized is is actually also um a later illusion all these deities change over time right talking about many many centuries and inanna starts as the goddess of the storage updates and eventually she starts adding powers or realms and like she is she's not the goddess of the underworld until she defeats reshkegal and in the same ways there's like all these stories on how she tricks other gods and then you know just steals powers from other gods and she effectively becomes supreme or like the most important goddess but there's all this mythology about how she acquires all these powers because people remember oh but she didn't have those powers before yeah so sometimes within the myths themselves we can also kind of see like that development happening and then sometimes because we may have different artifacts from different time periods and different places they'll be different so so yes so we shouldn't make any all of this is going to involve lots of gross oversimplification another thing that's important about inanna and why we mention her here is that she's also a patron of uruk so one of the patrons of the thing for the city here so just even to now more of these gross oversimplifications as we have the sumerian acadian pantheon i'll have here like the sumerian name then a acadian name of a god or goddess that's associated with the sumerian one so for uh nana which uh lander's just given us a bunch of characteristics of um is associated with the planet venus so she can be the goddess of love beauty sex desire fertility war combat political power and then like i say the patriot of the city uruk which is the gilgamesh city and so venus here um she's identified here with the eight pointed star and so this is the the morning star the planet of venus right planet venus not the goddess venus there but the goddess venus is also associated with the planet venus right so uh and then um nana and sin so which is the moon and so in this for the sumerians is actually different from a lot of a lot of pagans where the moon is often uh female and the and the sun is often male in this case the the moon god here is also male then shamish and who's utu son who's the god of justice and so you can see shamish uh a creator god enki or aya and then the sumerians god chief god enlil who i don't think has a is just taken over directly and so i don't think there is the other name for so if we look at then enki aya um so this is one of these kind of gods who has uh this kind of characteristic who's kind of a mischievous god uh who's the trickster god right um so is interested in creation creating crafts or you know the kind of the arts that you need to have a civilization uh teaches those things also though as a god of water of intelligence and as a patron of the earliest sumerian city-state um so these kind of characteristics are um you know in terms of this trickster god kind of thing is also we see like in people like hermes and mercury those kind of gods thoth um so interestingly um uh this god and for the sumerians creates humans out of clay and blood in order to be servants for the gods and then also is the one who kind of teaches them all the arts and crafts of civilization how to actually make cities and things uh one of the aspects that you know this is just plucked out of a bazillion different aspects but i mention it just because it's kind of an interesting one so he creates someone called nintee whose title is the mother of all living is created actually out of a rib and so that's in the mother of all living is one of the titles that's given to eve in the old testament and who was also created out of a rip inky here is also the god that confuses the languages so when humans are first created they all speak one language and a certain point uh there's a story here about the languages getting confused and and so that there's multiple languages and also this is the god that in the in the flood story um you know talks to the person uh kind of let's let's loose the idea that the the gods are about to destroy all of the planet and everything like that and tells them to build a boat to be safe and to put all the animals and everything in the boat so this is that god who does that so anyway you can see some of the characteristic there with the um the god of the old testament who has some of these um some of these there's still some of these kind of trickster characteristics in that god where where the god of the old testament is also wrestling with people and that kind of thing um so the epic of gilgamesh itself we'll look at we're gonna look at it so originally apparently this is independently circulating sumerian poems and this is not unusual at all so we know that for example with the iliad and the odyssey with homer that there is in fact a a huge tradition of independently circulating uh trojan war poems and so that's why for example even the story that has the trojan horse in it and everything like that is not actually in homer uh there's a whole bunch of stuff that isn't in homer but we know the rest of the story based on the rest of the rest of the epic cycle um all of these you know independently circulating ones were combined into an epic in old babylonian which is titled surpassing all other kings and so we actually have fragments of this from 1800 bce so the oral tradition is before that and it gets combined at some point there it's reworked then 600 some years later as what they call what we call now anyway not then back then but anyway we call it because we found many many copies of it as the standard version which is titled at the beginning he who sees the unknown so again these are referring to gilgamesh right so he is the king who surpasses all the kings and he's the king who went and was seeing uh the unknown and this was just very widely circulated so we have copies from mesopotamia syria kanan the hittite empire so it's translated into different languages and was preserved it does then fall out of it doesn't get copied out of cuneiform so when people stop being able to read cuneiform it's effectively lost until the 19th century when it's recovered with the decipherment of cuneiform so what's the topic so you know it's very interestingly this guy i find this this um one of the reasons why i even wanted to talk about it and why i go back to the epic of gilgamesh is that um i'm always amazed that when we're kind of dealing with what might even be what i kind of think of as being the very first work of literature itself about how um sophisticated it is how it is dealing with issues of uh human life that you know and meaning that we still are like kind of wrestling with very much now and so it's amazing when you think of how incredibly advanced humans have come since the beginnings of civilization and yet when you look back to the beginning of civilization uh thought wise there are some people that are thinking some pretty serious thoughts all the way back then so um he's thinking about mortality and the meaning of life um uh in contrast to uh pharaoh who had a pretty uh optimistic view about what was going to happen to him after death relatively to the a lot of people in the ancient world sumerians are not really looking forward to death they really feel like the afterlife is not going to be all uh fun and roses and and having all your slaves with you on a on a on a pharaoh yacht you know in a very happy after world uh rather you're under underground there's no it's in darkness you're in the great city of the dead the underworld gods judge you and assign you to different roles in this kind of extremely boring city where nothing really nothing much happens and you're kind of just plotting away doing nothing in the darkness for all of eternity and that's if you were lucky enough to have all of the rights properly done for you and so you were buried properly and people are are continuing to maintain the grave and that kind of a thing otherwise you can be kind of lose as loose as kind of a ghost that's in misery and this kind of a thing if you're not if you're not actually being properly propitiated to even get this kind of low end afterlife so let's look at the text i'm um following a mid 20th century uh translation from penguin books because that's the one i have but there are newer translations that um i didn't that i bought one that didn't come in time for me to be using so that's why we'll be quoting from it but it's pretty readable so um here's gilgamesh again he's got a lion you know as we've seen um oh gilgamesh watch because he also have a wristwatch yeah two of them oh gilgamesh this is quoting the text now oh gilgamesh lord this is the prologue right at the beginning lord of culab great is thy praise this was a man to whom all things were known this was the king who knew the countries of the world he was wise he saw mysteries and he knew secret things he brought us a tale of the days before the flood he went on a long journey he was weary worn out with labor and returning engraved out of stone the whole story so um one of the things in the epics is that they often give away the ending you know that was not the idea with an epic story isn't is not uh suspense uh because in fact you you're everybody's aware is generally of an epic cycle of everything that happens in the epic the exciting part is you know how is the epic poet how's the poet really going to handle any particular detail and so you you're and go ahead yeah sorry just the statue do you know from where it was discovered and how old it would be i put the dates on when i was able to find it it was this is i i i'm imagining that this is either an assyrian one or a babylonian one so this is not uh this is not from sumeria i don't think so the the epic continues to be important in the later peoples and so our best copies of the epic are actually not from the sumerian we have some fragments that are coming from that but it's got that archaic smile yes but it's really graceful too it's almost like modernly graceful and we have um i'll i i did point out the ones so when when they are in modern image i've also written it on there because i don't want it but yeah this is yeah but it is an interesting piece of artwork i don't think he's going to survive this cat the cat is not a pet gilgamesh is actually fighting lions and things like that so that lion is gonna is being killed so gilgamesh yeah here zooming in on him here um there's a portrait here in the in the epic right at the beginning when the gods created gilgamesh they gave him a perfect body shamish the glorious son endowed him with beauty the god of the storm endowed him with courage the great gods made his beauty perfect surpassing all others two-thirds they made him god and one third man so uh when we start at the beginning of the epic gilgamesh is this incredibly um glorious king he's two-thirds god uh he's very um he's running around and he can do things like take on hunts and kill lions and all the other stuff he's king of the city eric because he has no rival he wears his people out uh specifically he's taking all the sons off to war and he's taking all the daughters to bed which is actually even what the in the old testament the the song of the king or the prophecies against having a kings are why you shouldn't have a king because what'll the king do he'll take your sons off to war and he'll take your daughters to his uh household his harem so he is exercising what we later call primonocta uh which is made famous by the um uh mel gibson movie braveheart if you if you saw that which is completely not historical but anyway that it's uh oh yeah more famous from there but it's essentially i think so this is this idea that a um outrageous king a king that is overstepping the bounds of any kind of convention um they will exercise this idea that on the first night of any marriage the king gets to you know consummate the marriage first and then the husband gets the the wife on all other days whether or not this actually ever happened anywhere it is a um it's a trope for just completely uncivilized behavior or behavior where the king is a tyrant and so um it's i think process it's definitely written in here as in the epic as what gilgamesh is doing at the beginning of the epic and again the p this is causing all of his people to complain and so they complain very strongly to uh anu and araru who are god and goddess and they're asking um they actually have a plan sometimes people just complain to god in this case they actually ask for something in particular and specifically they want since our king has no equal make it equal for him so that somebody else can wear him out and he won't be wearing us out all the time so aru creates in kidu so the goddess conceived an image in her mind and it was of the stuff of anu of the firmament she dipped her hands in water and pinched off clay she let it fall in the wilderness and noble in kydu was created there was virtue in him of the god of war his body was rough he had long hair like a woman's his body was covered with matted hair he was innocent of mankind he knew nothing of cultivated land so essentially out in the wilderness that created the perfect uh animal savage man is the idea representing kind of this primeval force of animalness and and chaos as opposed to uh to counter gilgamesh so in kidu then in the in the course of fairly quickly in the as after he's introduced he loses his innocence and becomes civilized in a way that's almost allegorical for what civilization is like so he lives among the animals and uh one of the things that nikita is able to do among the animals is that he's prevents the hunters from being able to trap any of the animals because he's outsmarting him and letting them all out and things like that the hunters are complaining about that gilgamesh hears about it he has them he has a plan he sends them back with a a temple prostitute so a priestess of ishtar she goes out in the woods she seduces ankidu they are together for a whole long time and when he's finally kind of you know sated for a week of having fun with the temple prostitute he goes back to the animals and the animals no longer uh know him as one of their own so he's no longer an innocent savage anymore he is now known woman so at that point uh the priestess clothes him so she gives him half her robe and she brings him to shepherds so bedouins who are on the fringes of civilization so the city is at the center of it then the surrounding area then the better ones than the wilderness beyond um they teach him to eat bread and wine so they put bread in front of him and he's like he doesn't know what that is he's never eaten like that he's always been having milk directly from the animals this kind of thing now he is becoming civilized and finally once he's spent time among the bedouins then he can actually enter the city so when he does that so this is a modern image as you can tell it's not as any some of the modern images are good some of them are are more modern and they don't capture it as well so uh one of the things that he does then when he gets in the city is he plants himself in front of a bridal a bridal threshold so as gilgamesh is about to you know again exercise primonocta and kiru stops him uh and that where they're essentially like holding each other's like bowls locked together and so they fight can't have any progress one to the other since they're both so uh strong and powerful and valiant great warriors but finally in kitu's throne uh he acknowledges uh just how great gilgamesh is and once once that's happened they embrace their friendship together and their friendship together is sealed so it's the very original quintessential bromance so now these guys are going to be um fast friends and companions for for the rest of their uh for in kid's life anyway so um despite uh you know now that he they have they've got all this going for him gilgamesh is unsatisfied so he has all this glory he has this great city but he says i have not established my name stamped on brick as my destiny decreed so he wants to make a real name for himself and he wants it to be stamped on brick because that's going to be in sumerian culture the way that everything survives and actually it is the way it all survives right therefore i will go into the country where cedar is felled they just don't have any wood in in sumeria so in order to do their um to do great building they need to go all the way possibly to lebanon but in any way to syria or what is now turkey either way in order to get wood i'll go to the country where cedar is felled i will set up my name in the place where the names of famous men are written and where no man's name is yet written i will raise a monument to the gods so essentially the idea of wanting to stick the flag on top of mount everest or on the south pole or something like or the moon uh you know or where is still dating all the way back here to gilgamesh this time so the guardian of the forest is a primeval ogre giant creature called humbaba whose name it means hugeness they say according to the epic there's actually been a recently discovered gilgamesh tablet that we didn't have before that has added some lines to the epic just within the last decade that it indicates it gets a little bit more back story so when he inquire had been a savage he had actually been kind of on the same he'd been friends or known humbaba and so humbaba also sees him as a as a traitor you know in coming and bringing gilgamesh back to the to the forest in order to kill him after again a big titanic fight they are successfully slay humbaba entering all this glory they harvest the cedar for buildings and then one of the things that's almost always happening at the end of each one of these is the story is a myth so the story is uh describing how the world got to be the way it is and so from this chaos uh power this um original giant the gods take the things that are making humbaba uh wild and and powerful and distribute that among wilderness types of things so for example some of the strength goes to lions some of it goes to the wilderness itself and some of it it goes to the barbarians so essentially people who are either the bedouins or beyond uh wild people they are endowed with some of the zimbabwe power according to the uh text so when that happens uh gilgamesh becomes so famous that inanna ishtar proposes marriage to him hey you're now coming up in the world guy why don't we get married and gilgamesh is not excited about uh this uh this marriage proposal he goes through a litany of all the different uh lovers that ishtar has had before and all of their dire fates and criticizes her and says this suggests that he doesn't wanna have the same kind of thing happen to him which makes her very very very angry she um it's always interesting whenever ishtar talks again she she she when she goes and complains to her parents that uh that gilgamesh has been bad-mouthing her she doesn't repeat it the exact same way right so she puts a good spin on what's happened right yeah yeah and so uh anyway after a lot of complaining she convinces anu her father to create and let loose the bull of heaven upon the humanity upon the sumerians in revenge and the bull is essentially the embodiment of drought so the bowl appears and drought is in the land and that's of course uh one of the other you know other than flood one of the worst things that can happen for an agricultural people so uh again there's a huge fight we have on there's one of these roll cylinders here's a bowl of heaven and kedu and gilgamesh these unbeatable duo they fight and slay the bull of heaven which gives them even more glory uh more than any other heroes that have been before however at this point the guts and goddesses get together in a council and they realize this is too much these guys have transcended one too many uh boundaries of what mortals are allowed to do and so they decide that one of the two of them at least has to has to die now as a as a consequence of passing these these boundaries and so enlil says okay well it's going to be in kedu so uh now uh they've decided that enkidu is marched for death uh and cutie then falls ill and after an illness uh dies in no ignobly in sickness and so he really laments that he's dying of of this curse and this illness as opposed to if he had been able to be slain in the in the battle with the bull of heaven or with him baba uh and in the course of this loss then gilgamesh is totally inconsolable uh he says for seven days and seven nights he wept for in kedu until the worm fasted on him so until he's embracing his friend until such a time he's actually rotting and there's worms and only then did he give him up to the earth for the enaki unonaki the judges had seized him so essentially that's this idea of this underworld that we're talking about where the um the dead are placed with the judge by the judges in the city of the dead so uh gilgamesh is trying to work through his grief so he does all the kind of mourning things throwing off his good clothes dressing bad not washing all those kind of things but he also orders for example a statue of his friend to be made and for all of the um appropriate libations and things so that ankito is got you have his underworld status assured in that way but none of this stuff is a solve for gilgamesh's despair this is a modern image again where we went oh okay so this uh so so coming off of this uh the staggering loss then uh gilgamesh now has a new idea that he's thinking of now he wants to find how can he avoid this death that his friend has just suffered how can he find everlasting life so in bitterness he cries how can i rest how can i be at peace despair is in my heart what my brother is now that i shall be when i am dead so you know this is kind of thing that we're all maybe aware of eventually going to die but when you actually experience this loss that's when it really sinks and right comes home and so now it's he's thought of it for the first time because i am afraid of death i will go as best i can to find napishtim who they call the whom they call the far away for he has entered the assembly of gods so he's thinking to himself okay there is one guy i've heard of one mortal man who has entered the assembly of the gods who has become immortal who isn't going to die so i need to go find that guy and find out how he did it so that i can do that too so gilgamesh goes on the biggest quest ever uh it goes through a tunnel of unending darkness and he travels beyond the ocean goes to the garden of the sun and beyond the edges of the mortal world to a place the sumerians are calling dilmoon which is essentially a garden eastward in eden kind of thing and so or maybe the precursor of that this is a this is a later map of the babylonian world which is essentially um mesopotamia surrounded by you know the primordial ocean so in the garden of the sun as he's on this quest he encounters sheamush and this is going to be one of the many um people who he encounters along the way who are talking about this quest that he's on so seamus says no mortal has gone this way before to gilgamesh he said you will never find the life for which you are searching that's a repeated thing that happens on his quest so but gilgamesh says to gloria shamish now that i have toiled and strayed so far am i to sleep and let the earth cover over cover my head forever although i'm no better than a dead man still let me see the light of the sun so he does not want to die and go to the underworld the next god that he encounters goddess is sudori and when he encounters saduri who's the goddess of wine sadhuri advises him gilgamesh why are you where are you hurrying to you will never find the life for which you are looking when the gods created man they allotted to him death but life they retained for their in their own keeping as for you gilgamesh fill your belly with good things day and night night and day dance and be merry feast and rejoice let your clothes be fresh bathe yourself in water cherish the little child that holds your hand and make your wife happy in your embrace for this too is the lot of man so this is um as we you know as we are kind of in this you kind of start seeing like all these different suggestions for um kind of the meaning of life in the face of mortality right and so um this one is even more uh uh it's you know the the thumbnail is eat drink and be merry for tomorrow you die right but this one's even calling out all kinds of other things you know be happy for the your be happy with your children your grandchildren uh be happy with your wife that's also man's lot okay but ultimately he does get past all of them uh he goes with the uh ushenabi the ferryman like sharon who ferries people into the land of the dead or across the river sticks he goes all the way to dill moon uh at this point he's completely wasted away uh he's in terms of uh you know the fasting and everything he's gone physically he's a shadow of his former self and he finally reaches the far away the guy who's the survivor of the flood to whom the gods have given eternal life gilgamesh explains why he's made this quest and he says i wish to question you concerning the living of the dead how i shall find how shall i find life the life for which i am searching so he finally gets to ask ask for how do i live forever here's tim's response and it's again a very um i think uh sophisticated thing you know to that people are having to come to terms with this he says there is no permanence do we build a house to stand forever do we steal a contract to hold for all time the sleeping the dead how alike they are they are like a painted death what is there between the master and the servant when both have filled fulfilled their doom when a new i'm sorry when the anunnaki the judges come together and mametoon the mother of destinies together they decree the fates of men life and death they allot but the day of death they do not disclose so essentially you know again undepiction is the same here the same thing that everybody's been telling him you're gonna die you don't know when and there's really no difference whether or not you were a master or even a slave because at the end of the day you're just going to be the same debt uh open piston then explains um did i just say yeah so gilgamesh essentially asks him has asked him here okay well what about you you know you you um you are immortal and you look just like me why is it that you how why have you been able to live forever so udapishtim explains that his own immortality is a gift from all the gods after he survived the flood this is another modern image of noah's ark but it could also really illustrate the napistum story from what it's described which essentially he has a giant ark filled with people and and animals and it comes to rest on top of a mountain so he tells the story of the flood which is actually probably another epic that's embedded in gilgamesh so this is an earlier story that the gilgamesh epic poets have embedded here and it's actually just summarized and so it actually misses all kinds of details that we have we have bigger versions of it in different mesopotamian versions where there are standalone of this story but as i mentioned this is also very strikingly similar to the noah's story in genesis so buddha piston concludes by saying by asking okay all the gods assembled together to give me eternal life who is going to call all the gods together for you that's not there's nothing like this this was a one-time gift it's not going to happen again so to prove his point in piston challenges gilgamesh to conquer sleep for six days and seven nights so the idea is that um death is they've already said here is envisioned to be like sleep and sleeping is thought of as being like death so the dead in some ways i mentioned that the underworld of the city of the dead uh there's not a lot going on in some ways it's sort of like sleep where there's everything is in darkness and no no big movement is happening and they have this analogy for it um gilgamesh tries to stay awake he actually falls asleep for uh for seven days uh and they actually bake little cakes his wife uh mutant fish and his wife bakes uh bread each day and that because um epistem doesn't believe that gilgamesh will believe that he'd been asleep the entire time and so when he wakes up he sees that the seven day old bread is already moldy and he sees it in each state of decay and he realizes yes i have been asleep this entire time so it didn't happen it's only through the adventures to when he goes to kill and baba that you know for the first time he starts sleeping and he's got these kind of prophetic dreams yeah and then has to interpret but at the beginning he's so divine yeah he's so energetic that he isn't which is one of the reasons yeah and that's an additional detail that didn't brought me brought in thanks for doing that so yeah so that's one of the reasons why he's wearing everybody out at the beginning because because they're they're just all mortals and he's not and they need somebody to take care of it but like you say then there's one of the things that i have skipped here is that there was a lot of uh visions and foreshadowing all of this kind of thing so a lot of times people will have a dream and then they'll interpret it but so now he's now he is uh he really has uh slept for a whole long time and it's had to be proved to him he's like no i wasn't sleep you know that kind of thing but when he does that he sees the cakes and he was asleep the whole time so as a consolation um you know after all of this since he's not going to get eternal life out of uttanapishtim hishtim at least reveals a design secret and so he tells them that there is a plant there's a flower that grows into the sea that will at the very least restore lost youth um and so uh gilgamesh and this is a modern depiction of again so he goes back with the with the fairy men uh across the sea and when he's across the sea he goes underwater and he uh recovers this flower and brings it back with him and he says to himself i'm going to take this to and there i will give it to the old men to eat and last i shall eat and have my back my lost youth so he's going to all the old men that are sitting along the walls who are just hanging out and they're all suddenly going to be young men again and so uh landry you were making the point that one of the things that is gonna would happen here is uh this isn't making you immortal but it is making you like also young again so that you also are gonna lose all the wisdom that you've gained on this quest right if you takes cold again okay however as he's returning with the flower that restores youth gilgamesh takes the opportunity to rest and bathe by a pool and out of the pool comes a serpent uh who who snatches this flower away and devours it and again you know as all with with all myths this is explaining one of the things that people observe with serpents which is when they get old uh then they start they shed their skin and a new youth and snake comes out right and so this explains uh serpents why serpents have that power because they are the ones that got to eat the flower not humans so gilgamesh laments was it for this that i have rung out my heart's blood for myself i have gained nothing and the animals have gotten away with uh with the youthening flower and we have nothing so um the actual immortality so when gilga and gilgamesh though returns apparently empty-handed to uric he then at the end of the epic he shows the city to the ferryman and it begins the epic begins just like it ended i'm sorry ends just like it began where we see this glorious city the greatest city that has ever been gilgamesh doesn't have anything he's not immortal but he actually does have something because he's not the same as he when he left he now has an incredible degree of wisdom he now knows things that he didn't know he's not this carefree capricious and bad king that he was at the beginning instead it concludes like i say just as we begin this too was the work of gilgamesh the king who knew the countries of the world he was wise he saw mysteries and new secret things he brought us a tale of the days before the flood he went on a long journey was weary worn out with labor and returning engraved on stone the whole story which we have and in that way also in addition to you know this uh changed gilgamesh the gilgamesh who's who uh whose quest yields enlightenment he also has a different kind of immortality the immortality of the epic poem and so uh we might just conclude then by saying that all the epic uh through this epic telling you know hasn't gilgamesh found through all these millennia the life that life for which he was looking that's it observations questions comments yes in um in the odyssey um when odysseus crosses over into the underworld and he speaks to the ghost of the killings um achilles says to him you know achilles is complaining about the underworld and elise is like yeah you're you're king of all dead yeah i'd rather be a slave right on earth than the king of the dead down here he was searching his immortality through fame as well yes yeah although yeah so achilles had had it through fame right and so achilles actually um you know is this hero of the epic and yet in the other epic you know uh the the his shade um you know definitely says that you know i'd give it all just have life as opposed to afterlife in this kind of way and so in that way the greeks also had a um a kind of dismal view of afterlife in general or at least in as described there and so it's not exactly the same but it it may well be one of the things that in addition to the kind of a biblical how there's echoes of gilgamesh in the bible that are pretty direct through the flood myth and some of the other um other components there's it's completely possible that there is actually overlap for homer as well so there are greek mercenaries throughout the uh the middle east uh the the cuneiform the the the um it was still known well there's a transmission moment so the so the epic of gilgamesh is still a known story at the time that um homer is is actually composing so there's also possibilities that there's influence there um apparently the this idea that the that the mesopotamians have about um afterlife is a little bit different from the greeks idea which is way more dualist in terms of like a real body and spirit ghost kind of thing there i couldn't get anybody to describe it very easily though because i mean i'm kind of so infected with the post greek ideas of that that apparently there's some kind of more of a full transformational state that is going on in the underworld and maybe that's related to how middle easterners also came up with the idea of resurrection as opposed to um like living in a ghostly heaven or something like that or spirit heaven but it's definitely not a happy place no it's not a happy place i mean they talk about again there's like they have like the elysian fields or something like that yeah right but they mean i'm saying the greek underworld has an elysian fields but it's not exciting right they thought that was a separate place where you know if you had the right connections isn't it described well maybe i don't know it seems to me it's described in the aeneid so when aeneas does the same thing he goes into the underworld and i thought that he kind of walks through that i'd have to look at it yeah so but in any event it's all less it's all less fun and games than when um when christianity comes and has an idea of a really nice afterlife right so that's yeah it sounds somewhat similar to the idea of shawl which is kind of right yes so i think it is similar to that so i mean i think that they're um you know uh uh the ancient hebrews and the canaanites are semitic people and there's this idea like you're saying of shoal is um that the people are resting there or sleeping there so whether or not there's an actual city that's running around in shoal i don't think that's described in the bible but people are essentially described as being asleep and so the one the one example where um anybody's brought back from the underworld or what the what's going on in the underworld in the old testament is when uh the prophet uh samuel uh is uh saul and the and the witch of endor who's a necromancer you know raise it raise uh samuel's spirit any any is it samuel it's sam yeah samuel spirit and and he's he's woken up essentially so he's been under the in shoal sleeping like all the dead and then he's woken up and and he prophesies essentially that saul's gonna you know you know bite it you know or whatever if saul is not gonna have a good fate right and so yeah oh i'm sorry okay i forgot yeah it says repeat question on my sign so we are streaming other questions or comments so the people that the scholars that oppose the documentary hypothesis they sometimes say well if you put the bible the genesis narrative and you compare it to gilgamesh it only makes sense as it is as it appears in genesis and it appears in the same order and pretty much all the elements and then if you separate that into p and j then it no longer makes sense so what do you think about them so um so the question is pretty technical about the noah story um so i was going to maybe do more when we first started this i was going to do maybe more in-depth analysis of the flood story and we looked at the the other mesopotamian flood story we look at how it's summarized in gilgamesh and then we look at it in genesis in genesis according to the documentary hypothesis the the flood story is actually coming from two separate sources that are then kind of intertwined uh and so the the idea of that theory in noah why you have to why we think that there's two different stories is at one point or other i mean we probably know the the story where it's you know take animals two of every kind two by two into the arc and and then there's a certain point though in the story where it says and of the seven pairs of clean animals that you brought in you know do this and that and then at the end of that one um you know uh noah obviously has a at the end of that portion of the story or whatever the the noah uh has a sacrifice animal sacrifice with the clean animals and if you'd only brought two you know you know of each kind or whatever then that's really going to affect how many of the clean animals you end up have surviving the the whole deluge thing and so the argument is that there's actually two different um flood stories that have been meticulously you know ripped apart and and put verse by verse interlaced almost as part of the documentary hypothesis and so the idea of it is that the two by two story where you only have two and that's coming out of the what's called the priestly source the priestly source is very concerned that uh only descendants of aaron only aronids the people who are running the uh the temple cult in jerusalem are the only people that are allowed to perform sacrifices so the levites in the high places uh everything like that that's that's all forbidden to perform any sacrifices only the erenades and so in the p source the idea is that nobody has any sacrifice so noah doesn't do a sacrifice there's no rainbow none of that stuff is in the p source it's only in the in the j source where that version of the story is anyway so that's the idea and so one of the a scholar who doesn't believe in the documentary hypothesis and so not it's not a it's not a firm thing it's just the most um accepted scholarly hypothesis for the origin of the first five books of the bible um he argues that because each one of these things parallels so closely gilgamesh and the gilgamesh flood story that it would be very hard-pressed to believe that it's interlaced because the details follow in order but i i think that this doesn't make any sense as a theory at all because the redaction happening so in other words when the redactor is putting those pieces together that's happening after the babylonian captivity so any of them at at minimum the redactor is could be very very familiar with the epic of gilgamesh as it is and the reactor would have the capacity and their their doctor we don't know what the texts were like before the redactor the reductor is the editor that's lacing them together the redactor is throwing things away even so the reactor is reductor is saving some things the things that make the most sense and and also lining them up and so the redactor could be putting it directly in that order the reductor also may be introducing things so i don't think it's an argument against the documentary hypothesis since it's happening so far after gilgamesh anyway so yes this is totally different from that but i've been reading a book quite an interesting book and the author says that uh it's only when um society's got big enough that people didn't all know each other that they developed religions with gods that rewarded and punished you for good and bad behavior because before that your neighbors knew what you did and you'd get [Laughter] all right so the idea about it is is a theory in terms of religious development and and and the evolution essentially uh to of ethical religions as opposed to um like earlier stories that are more about capricious gods i guess to the gods that don't seem to be i mean a lot of these early gods i mean leandra was making the point in the story um that uh ishtar is simply routinely lying right and so you can kind of see negative qualities that these gods have that don't seem very particularly ethical and then it's later that we start having very ethical gods that are enforcing things that you wanted to say okay i think they discovered about eight or nine years somewhere around there a site in turkey which they have discovered to be like a temple complex and this predates civilization it goes back to 11 000 yeah this is this thing that we what yeah but this is just an amazing site right and so it's like a very i mean it's a city that is predate predating history by a huge amount and and we have to kind of still piece together exactly what it's working and what it means for our understanding of the development of society and religion and every other thing right so yes yeah regarding that i was thinking that surely because i mean they had stone works and you know temple site and carved animals it wasn't surely that indicates some kind of economic surplus like grain surplus or whatever to allow for yeah i have to say i have to i mean i think it's such an interesting find that i have to sit down and read a book about it so that i can be better informed about it but i just have seen it i mean you know maybe more than i have because i just have seen read a brief article or something like that and i just thought this is interesting stuff and so it'll be it'll be interesting for further looking at it further yeah [Music] like this and then um so these are temple sites that aren't your cities but are kind of like stonehenge but with statues yeah so anyway like i say i need to research more about it but because it's fascinating so somebody back here had a question that yeah um that section that you were showing on the slide where seems to be saying um there's no grand plan there's nothing you can change in your life but the king and the popular both yeah and so forth seemed like a kind of argument against themselves as it were or a more atheistic just forget about you know praying and all that kind of thing and then just whatever happens will happen so random yeah well i would say i would say not atheistic but fatalistic right because the the idea is the gods i mean there's a behind it is the idea is there is a god that is the gods of fate that has have decreed how things are going to be anyway but however you want to call atheistic nihilistic maybe um but um but yeah fatalistic so there's a concern about about fate um yeah i don't know it's in that way so people because of this this uh there's so many uh components of this where this epic doesn't seem particularly priestly so we have had that before with some of our components also of the bible right where we were looking at the different source components we identified the one i said as the priestly text and that really that text really is crazy priestly because it's not only concerned with guarding the priest's uh authority to do the sacrifices but then it just it's that whole boring part of the bible where you're reading about like in in numbers and things where it just goes on and on and on about all the different kinds of the size of the vessels and what you have to do and all this kind of priestly stuff that nobody cares about except priests and then they and then the other difference is that then there's this text we saw about the j text where it's just filled with all these courtly intrigue where people are uh having you know adultery and all the all this kind of thing that's incest and everything else like that is all going on and you think why are priests writing that you know and so it may well be that um that that some of these kind of things are coming out of a more courtly narrative you know people want to call it secular but i mean i think it's that's anachronistic but essentially it's the people maybe the um the people that are composing an epic like this as opposed to priests who compose the mesopotamian flood narrative we have it it's way more boring you know and way more uh uh the priests have a there's a sense of why you would have to then why you appreciate the gods in order to do this kind of thing whereas this is way more is the kind of thing that you're going to sing to the warrior class of people or the kingly classes they are very concerned with heroic exploits and things like that so they are interested in in making their name in living forever in all in glory and and big fight scenes and things like that so it's really an action hero kind of story and so it's probably not um coming out of a priestly uh cast i'd say but even in the priestly parts of the torah there isn't a concern with the afterlife no it's still not about afterlife so afterlife isn't it but it wasn't whatever i'm just saying like a priestly concerns as opposed to this um this isn't expressing priestly concerns um kingly versus yes cast do you know some city states have a priest king yeah so i mean i would also say so i shouldn't put too fine a point on this to try to that's why i even wanna i was reading some of it where people are calling this like a secular story which i thought was i mean i listened to about seven or eight different grace great courses you know on gilgamesh in the last couple weeks and some of them i'm just like uh no i don't agree with you at all you know in this kind of a thing because i think that that's it's probably an anachronism to kind of be saying that but but yeah so initially all kings are from i mean kings and priests are the same and and at a certain point there's a um there can be in different societies of differentiation as as the roles are kind of separated out and they specialize and so at a certain point there may well be a line of priests that is completely um you know kind of institutionally separate but completely you know dependent on in working with the kings and so like you say in some cases though um they'll be like priest kings and that's happening that'll that happens in all kinds of different societies so we have um all through the middle ages for example there's places where where you'll have a duke side by side with an archbishop but sometimes the archbishop of milan is duke of milan both you know and and it doesn't usually mean that they're uh very pious you know when that happens you know but it'll be like a tradition you know like where that'll just evolve that that's how the power structure ended up working you know where this archbishop of salzburg and mozart's did yeah right right yeah and so that also happened in more modern times where there emerged in the um the holy roman empire large ecclesiastical states where there continued to be princes of the church that are essentially sovereign in large territories of germany and austria including um at a certain point uh one in r in a rare rare case in medieval or early modern uh europe where like a abbess of very like hildesheim i think a very important like monastery she's also like kind of the sovereign of the whole territory as a result of that yeah but also the sense of piety was very different because if you have it like in that the largest temple was the temple of inanna that's right yeah there are different practices than what a lot of religions have today so that's what we might say so things like that change and are relative to where the time and place that they are some for the better i've sang in a synagogue choir for some years and on yom kippur and the afternoon part of the service is a recounting a description of the services at the temple before it was destroyed animal sacrifices right and i'm reading this and i say they want to bring this stuff back it's nuts yeah yuck yeah so bad rubbish so a lot of a lot of um i mean that's a animal sacrifice you know is the focus of the religions that were going on here so that's what and that's definitely happening one of the things that happens at the end of the episode story is that he brought all kinds of animals and he actually brought all kinds of people with him in his big arc and uh and one of the things that happens at the very end is when he has this animal sacrifice like you say the savory smell goes up to the heaven all these gods that had actually even freaked out about house they got scared even about how bad the flood was and so now they also were regretting all of that they had destroyed oh would it would that we had just um you know sent a plague again to to kill some men or would that we had just sent war to kill some men instead of the flood that kills them all and now they smell uh this uh sweet smell of the sacrifice which the pagan gods were meant you know believed to really enjoy and then they they gather around it like flies it says you know they're just so excited that this did not that they you know didn't end up killing everybody and that's why the piston gets uh this very special reward of immortality and so like you say though the focus of all a lot of the sacrifice until uh in the case of judaism the destruction of the second temple in which case there's no more capacity to do it and then and uh and then torah reading becomes the central focus and prayers becomes the central focus and the same thing for them christianity where it's not about there's no temple there's not about sacrifice the sacrifices metaphorically it's christ and so it's reenacted with the sacred meal so then it ceases to be a core thing yes yeah it's possible so i mean i've heard that ex just i've heard that exegesis before you know of the story which is that it's not described in the story it doesn't say why um you know so you are supposed to sacrifice grains according to the law in the in the bible which is you give the first fruits of the of the crops in addition to um an animal sacrifice but for whatever reason it's not explained why uh god finds in the old testament god finds uh the the able sacrifice uh of the meat to be acceptable but cain's sacrifice is not acceptable it may be coincidence that it's me or not but what then it's i've heard as an exegetical explanation is that uh that cain then kills abel as a meat sacrifice and say hey take that then if that's what you wanted you know i that's not that's not in the text so that's somebody's surmise you know uh based on it so well we should end probably the question time period and uh we can just go in uh the formal thing we can just uh continue our discussion with over snacks and stuff like that and i want to thank everybody for coming out today so thanks

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 41,211

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Id: RcYne1Wf3ow

Length: 84min 29sec (5069 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 25 2021