The Bible and Western Culture - Part 1 - The Gilgamesh Epic

[Music] in beginning any series of lectures on the Bible and its connection to Western art and Western culture it is useful to get a certain degree of historical perspective because the Bible being a very ancient text seems will rather distant from our present-day concerns and in many respects seems separate and dissimilar to the traditions of Western literature and art at least insofar as we have immediate access to them within this century is in some respects useful for our purposes to look back prior to the age in which the biblical stories were redacted and put together and look to the kind of foundations of Near Eastern and Semitic myths to see if we can't get a certain degree of perspective on the stories which the Hebrew Bible tells us and do also get a sense of the historical distance between the Bible and ourselves it's often the case that when we study the Bible because it seems so ancient and antique to us we feel a need to to treat it as though it were in a completely separate age in the past in fact there are works of literature in the Western tradition or at least in the tradition that feeds into the Bible which are at least as old in reference to the Bible as the Bible is with reference to us in other words there is a an epoch a Near Eastern Mesopotamian epic called the epic of gilgamesh which informs our reading of the Bible and which in fact goes back to the earliest strata of human society in human history so there are parts of the epic of gilgamesh which are borrowed and redacted and brought into the biblical tradition there are questions of genre and questions of intent which the study of Gilgamesh can help which we can use in the study of Gilgamesh to help inform our reading of the Bible and third it's very useful for us to find to think about the problem of redaction how it is that a story or a series of overlapping stories are gradually or perhaps immediately merged together to form one unified story our investigation of the myth of Gilgamesh which is a very very ancient tale will help us bring together and clarify some of the things that we will have to consider in the process of reading the Bible and reading it closely now the Gilgamesh epic is important for a number of reasons first off it's a relatively recent acquisition it's only in the last century or so that enough of the Sumerian and not Sumerian but Babylonian tablets have been translated and found so that we could piece the epic together prior to this century our tiny fragments of this epic only suggested that there was an epic tradition in ancient Mesopotamia we didn't know very much about it as it turns out further archaeological investigation particularly the University of Pennsylvania has shed new light on this which has allowed us to bring together the various tablets which have been found which tell the Gilgamesh story and once we formulate this epic we are given a new perspective a new way of thinking about the Hebrew Bible which will turn out to be very useful for our purposes now there are versions of the Gilgamesh epic handed down over a period of many centuries in the ancient Near East it is likely that the Gilgamesh epic was originally a separate set of stories perhaps with separate heroes which were eventually merged into the single hero Gilgamesh and their versions of this story in Sumerian in Babylonian in Hittite and Akkadian and an Assyrian because Mesopotamia is invaded regularly throughout its art its ancient history as new groups of invaders come in they absorb what's left of the culture in the area that they've conquered and they often adapt these stories particularly the epic story tradition to suit their own purposes so there are many versions of the Gilgamesh story but the story has some sort of permanent value to the residents of Mesopotamia and for that reason despite the regular waves of invasion the Gilgamesh epic is gradually fleshed together repeatedly redacted and eventually what we get is the stickiest parts which form the story that we have today now before talking about Gilgamesh himself and Gilgamesh is a real person he is in the Babylonian king lists from about 2700 BC it's worth thinking about epic though before we go too much further into the details of the story the reason why is that epic is the most archaic form not merely of literature but of the encyclopedia every or on virtually every ancient archaic culture has an epic tradition and built into the epic tradition is their whole view of the world it is not merely a literary exercise as we might think of say Paradise Lost instead the epic tradition in the ancient world contains within it their political theory it contains within it their sense of ethics their sense of law their understanding of things like physics and the physical world all of their knowledge is packed together in one in one easily transferable form it is worth noting that at the time when Gilgamesh is put together and also at the time when the Hebrew Bible is redacted literacy is a rare gift it is an unusual attribute most of society is illiterate and at the time when a pick is put together and at the time when the stories that comprise the Hebrew Bible are formulated they are transferred by word of mouth it isn't an oral tradition so like other epic traditions the Gilgamesh tradition is an oral is oral and what this oral tradition contains is the entire accumulated wisdom of the society that produces them all right now in addition to that epic always has a certain set of necessities certain milestones that we find in every epic story this will be true for the epic of gilgamesh but they'll also be true for the Iliad in the Odyssey be true for the Ramayana and in India it'll be true for the Sundiata in West Africa it'll be true for the Song of Roland in Western Europe all epochs essentially do the same thing once you realize what they do you can actually sort of predict the path that an epic is going to take in the first case an epic always entails a journey you can't have an epic at home if you're going to have an epic there has to be the movement from one place to another place and the change in location will mirror some psychic change in addition every epoch has to have a hero there are no anonymous epic heroes you actually find out it's what some specific and superior man does and in every case the epic hero represents the linguistic and cultural group that generates it so the epic hero is a great example of the society that produces it for example Roland the is a great example of the medieval knight he's a fine and superior kind of warrior Achilles is a superior Greek warrior someone like David in the story in the Hebrew Bible is also a Paragon a sort of epic hero when he meets Goliath in each case in the case of David representing the Hebrews or Achilles representing the Greeks or role in representing the Europeans in every case we have a moral Paragon in every case the epic hero is the standard by which we judge an excellent and virtuous man well we're going to find that that's also true in the case of Gilgamesh in addition to that we'll find the epic always legitimate legitimise legitimizes the political powers that be you never find revolutionary epics whenever one has an epic tradition it always says that the authorities that are constituted are constituted by God or the gods aristocrats are aristocratic and superior and deserve their superior station in society they tend to be politically conservative they hold down people they hold down egalitarian expectations insofar as they exist but it also tends to justify the superior position that an aristocratic elite has and in every case the epic heroes are not only the divine the ideal personification of moral virtues but they are always the beloved of God or the gods whatever the local religion is the gods intervene in epic this epic is always full of magical mysterious divine doings and in every case not only will we see these divine doings but the Epicure is somehow chosen by God the beloved of God right without that divine backing they wouldn't be the superior people that they are now given this fact let's think about the plot of Gilgamesh and then once I sketch out the plot of Gilgamesh because it's a very simple and ancient story then let's look ahead to the Hebrew Bible and see what we're gonna get out of it here's what happens in Gilgamesh in the first case he's the king of orc right an orc is apparently a holy city a sacred city a city that is chosen and protected by the Babylonian gods or at least supervised by the Babylonian gods and the problem is that Gilgamesh is proud full of hubris and he presses the city the people are complaining about Gilgamesh and that's how the scene opens now at the same time that Gilgamesh is oppressing the city one of the citizens of the city a hunter or a stalker goes outside the walls of the city no outside the walls of the city in every case in the case of the Hebrew Bible but also in the case of say other sacred cities like Athens for example when you step outside the walls you are symbolically moving from the area of culture and society into nature so what happens is that the stalker is out side the walls of the city he's looking around trying to hunt down animals and he sees Enkidu Enkidu is the physical double of Gilgamesh he's a superior man he looks like Gilgamesh he's a powerful warrior full of natural vr-2 or virtue excellent qualities he could talk to the animals all right so he's a natural man the animals don't run from him he understands the ways of nature he is in some ways the personification of nature Gilgamesh back in the city dreams of this said he dreams effective a meteor and the meteor is of course always a heavenly celestial symbolic symbol in the ancient world and the symbolism behind the meteor dream is that yoga mat Enkidu his double is out there and he is going to make a remarkable appearance an important contribution to the history of work and to Gilgamesh his personal life and the way in which and could do is brought into the city is most interesting and has many biblical resonances a temple prostitute because ritual prostitution temple prostitution is common in ancient Mesopotamian religion a temple prostitute accompanies the stalker outside the walls of the city has sex with Enkidu and could do is thereby civilized is thereby tamed after they have sex she gives him wine to drink he become his drunk he starts to eat civilized or regular usual human food the result is that Enkidu is brought into the city in other words Enkidu is civilized but through the action of women and through access to sexual knowledge there is a sort of if not a fall of man a sort of loss of innocence a loss of natural separation from society which is developed through the agency of the temple harlot so what that means is that there's a connection between sex and religion and society or civilization and that's what the bringing in of Enkidu represents now what Enkidu comes into the city immediately he and Gilgamesh have a combat because in the epic tradition typically the way in which a hero shows his prowess is by finding some person that's worthy of his military attention that's worth having a fight with and then showing his prowess and just demonstrating the fact that he is a superior man and symbolically what that means is that the culture or the people that generate him are legitimately there and deserve to be dominating the society and the geography around them so Gilgamesh fights with Enkidu but they don't kill each other it's not an immediate bloody resolution to the fight instead they become fast friends and in the epic tradition that's not so unusual there are examples of such things in homer fights leading to a sort of mutual respect between combatants that's what we get between Enkidu and Gilgamesh and once they decide to merge once they decide to live together and be friends be very close and tight something like the kind of comradeship between military heroes that we see between saya Roland and Oliver in the Song of Roland well they become inseparable and close but there's not an asymmetry between them both are superior warriors both are superior men they decide to engage in a common military expedition they go and fight someone called Humbaba or hawawa it's hard to know exactly how to transliterate the sounds from the ancient Mesopotamian languages but Humbaba or hawawa is a monster and of course monstrous battles with giant opponents are what epic is all about usual sized human scale doings are not in the epic tradition if you're going to fight anyone it must be a worthy opponent it was this mana superior military prowess or better still some sort of monster Humbaba hawawa guards the Cedars and this is very important because a Cedars are a long way away there's virtually no no forest and no wood in Mesopotamia if they intend to build with wood they have to go someplace that has it and either trade for it or steal it and in this case what they decide to do is go on a raid now mythologically this is phrased as the conquest of whom baba hawawa the gardener of the cedars more likely what it is is just a raid to go out and steal some wood and kill the local inhabitants that should they decide to prevent you from taking the wood this is one of the ways in which actual historical events are gradually transformed into mythological doings once they're so transformed then they can easily be redacted into a general overall epic story so they go and they win the cedar wood they just get killed huh boom Baba and there's another dream that Gilgamesh has and it's a terrifying dream and Enkidu interprets the dream now this is worth thinking of as well the idea that dreams are a sort of message from the spirit world or the world of the gods or the world that is somehow apart and different from the world of space and time that we have is a very ancient idea it is worth comparing this to say Joseph's interpretation of the dream of the seven lean cows and the 7th fat cows whenever dreams emerge in the ancient world in particularly in the ancient literary tradition they are always all Greaves they are always foreshadowings of some important set of events which we will eventually see in this case it seems that Enkidu interprets the dream of Gilgamesh as relating to death forcing Gilgamesh to think about the problem of death changing Gilgamesh's perspective on the world well they come back after interpreting the dream and Ishtar the goddess or one of the goddesses in the Mesopotamian pantheon comes down and she's always taking mortal lovers it happens all the time in Mesopotamian theology and mythology and she comes down and offers herself to Gilgamesh Gilgamesh perhaps wisely perhaps not rebuffs her says no all the men who end up in your life or end up having sex with you end up coming to very bad ends I don't want anything terrible to happen to me now Gilgamesh himself is partly divine and partly mortal he's the product of sexual union between the goddess nin son and one of the priests of the temple so he is one of the lasts of the demigods semi gods he's not quite human he's not quite divine he's in-between but he does fused to make the direct connection with the divine in the case of Ishtar Ishtar when she's rebuffed by Gilgamesh takes it very badly she takes it so badly she goes back up to heaven or back up to the Mesopotamian pantheon where it is she lives and tells her dad who is a new to set who's apparently the head of the Babylonian Pantheon send down some terrible misfortune on Gilgamesh in the city of Uruk he treated me very badly he shows no respect for divinity what happens is that the bull of heaven is sent down and as a result they have first of all seven years of famine think about the story of Joseph and the the the cattle in addition to that they have earthquakes and of course the bull of heaven is the earliest in perhaps the most primitive way of accounting for earthquakes they don't have plate tectonics since ancient Mesopotamia is dealing with an entirely mythological physics you should come as no surprise later on that their physical outlook their understanding of the material world is going to be replicated and represented in their epic tradition so the bull of heaven is sent down and Enkidu and Gilgamesh fight the bull of heaven and they destroy it after that happens and of course that's a change that's a kind of it's something very Promethean about undoing the plagues or the evils which are sent down from above and there's a sort of tension between the human and the divine here it seems that divine initiatives divine intentions of being frustrated constantly by humans here and after the bull of heaven is dead and could do actively insults Ishtar they're cutting the bull apart he throws a big piece of meat at her and he's actively trying to generate a conflict between himself and Ishtar in other words Enkidu's hubris and qudoos refusal to accept his human status exceeds that even of Gilgamesh and for that reason Ishtar goes back up to the pantheon and it's decided among the gods that one of these two must die in other it's the only way to make good the evil that has been done here is to kill one of them Enkidu is the one that gets killed because Gilgamesh is still the chosen of the city and the chosen of the gods so Enkidu is faced with his own death over a period of days he sickens gets a fever and dies and of course back then at that level of physical understanding of the universe if you sicken and die you sicken and die for some reason some spirit some magical agency is behind it I mean nobody has invented microbiology yet for that reason the way in which they account for the death is as a retribution for his disrespect towards Ishtar before Enkidu dies first of all he curses the temple that brought him into society but shamash who is the the god of the Sun also the god of wisdom in ancient Mesopotamia persuades him to relent says look granted you have to die but you would have died anyway out there in the wilderness it is better to be a man in society within the walls of the city and face mortality there than it is to die like an animal outside the walls of the city and Cadoo accepts that it is a validation of ancient Mesopotamia it's a way of saying that this is a good idea coming into society living a sedentary life well at the death of Enkidu Gilgamesh mourns but then he starts to think wow Enkidu looks an awful lot like me in fact and Cadoo is the image of me in fact and could do is not so different from me and then it begins to occur to Gilgamesh I'm going to die and this confrontation with one's own more mortality in some ways is the touchstone for what it means to have a bounded ego and this bounding of the ego this recognition that there are certain facts of human life in which all must participate that in some ways signals the fact that we're pulling ourselves out of the earliest and most archaic level of society and expectations about the world to a new more realistic more general understanding of what the human condition is and this recognition of death starts the quest remember there's always a journey and a quest well here we're going to continue our journey in a quest Gilgamesh is going to go look for a way to become immortal alright so this quest for immortality will become the last half the book Gilgamesh decides to take a long journey which is what all epic heroes do and he decide the journey to King Newton episteme King Nepean is a very fortunate man he lives alone very near paradise at a far distant point from where Eric is and it turns out that he and his wife get to live forever because they were both very good people and in the process of being very good the gods saved them from a terrible flood what we have in the case of King Guto pushed him and his wife is the earliest example of the Noah story this may be where the story of Noah and the flood was actually drawn from it suggests that the story of Noah and the flood like certain other themes like the interpretation of Dreams in the Hebrew Bible actually have a very very archaic origin they are probably they probably find their source in oral traditions that are some thousands of years old older than the Hebrew Bible itself so do not underestimate the antiquity of the materials particularly some of the themes that we're going to see when we do the Hebrew Bible here we have a book that goes back to the very earliest strata of human society right because Gilgamesh himself is 2700 BC more than likely there's an oral tradition even before Gilgamesh this is a very very old set of ideas King episteme then and the idea of a flood caused by people's ill behavior and God's wrath is a very very ancient theme well Gilgamesh goes on his journey to King who pitched him and he passes by a number of people or a number of figures mythological creatures which sort of mark waystations in his motion he talks to a group of people otherwise not well described called the scorpion men I'm not quite sure what the Scorpion men are perhaps other tablets will be found which will explain to us exactly what the Scorpion men are what they're doing there in another case he he goes up to the cosmic barmaid sidor II now why she has a bar near him paradise and what sort of traffic she gets never gets explained I guess perhaps some of the tablets have been lost or perhaps it isn't a well redacted poem because it's so early and primitive but in every case what he does is stop at a weigh station ask directions and asking directions means everything in the epic when you're on the way questing for some valuable thing asking directions always is pregnant with the greatest symbolic significance well he asks su dory he asked the scorpion men what to do in the scruffy men say what you're doing is unprecedented Gilgamesh he moves on he asks the dory what is it about human life that makes us mortal and limited why can't we live forever she says drink up it's the best you get alright this worldly wisdom is all she's gonna get from su dory so in some ways you might compare this to a to Kirk II and Calypso in Homer we're moving from place to place having adventure after adventure we keep on going towards the final goal eventually he meant Gilgamesh manages to cross the water of waters of death with the boatman or shinobi now this idea of crossing the waters of death whether it's sticks or some other waters of death is also a very very ancient theme alright and waters as being the primordial element as being the chaos as all sorts of residences of that kind here well they cross the water of death and he goes and actually sees King Guto pushed him and what does King Newton the pushed him say to him can't help you he says look only I get to live forever only I'm the friend of ER and only I have been given this possibility of living indefinitely my wife and I stay out here which is why we don't live back within auric with you and I'm afraid there's not much we can do for your young man you seem like a worthy and superior kind of heroic fellow but you are going to have to die the message here is that no matter how heroic you are no matter how superior you are on a human scale you must ultimately face your own mortality this in some ways might be thought of as one of the important stages in the historical construction of subjectivity in other words I'm not convinced that our conception of the ego is a ready-made thing my sense is that the construction of subjectivity has taken many centuries and that what we are doing here is working through one of the most archaic conceptions of subjectivity in which you do not recognize yourself in the other other people die you see that happen it eventually dawns on people that wow I'm going to die too that limitation of the self is a big step towards our conception of what the ego is so the Gilgamesh talks to depict him who'd niscitam says there's no permanence he tells him the flood story and then he says okay let's try you Gilgamesh let's have a look at how you work if you can stay up for seven consecutive days and remain awake I'll help you out and you'll be able to live forever now a couple of important things here first of all sleep is an analogue of death it's symbolic death if you cannot resist sleep for a day much less a week how much less are you capable of resisting death deep symbolism involved in that second of all this image of death will be brought up again when we see Jesus preparing for his crucifixion he says will you three remain with me can you remain awake and pray turns out they can't do it either because they are still subject to death as well the same symbolism and imagery is borrowed okay well Gilgamesh sleeps for a week he's tried by sleepy fails now here's a sort of it's not exactly a deus ex machina but it's a an imperfectly redacted part of the story mrs. Hooton have pushed him King Guto pitch to his wife who otherwise doesn't do very much in the story as soon as Gilgamesh wakes up she offers the possibility to her husband please help Gilgamesh out tell him about the plant of eternal life now what this suggests to me is that there's another story floating around about the plant of eternal life and they kind of ran out of story here in other words you can't get the picture tells me can't live forever but they want to get the rest of this story in another words they have all kinds of interesting stories about King Newton to pitched him so they kind of cram it in towards the end and it really doesn't make very much sense and it really isn't a very thorough or very impressive redaction it makes the Iliad or the Ramayana look incredibly sophisticated in other words this level of redaction is pretty crude but it does offer us more information about this kind of a journey in this kind of a spiritual quest what mr. tsuda pushed him does is says look tell him at the plant of eternal life well okay now King you Tanishq miss duck he's got to tell Gilgamesh about the planet of eternal life and of course this treat this will have all kinds of resonances of the tree of eternal life which we'll find in the Garden of Eden all right so I mean these these images are very very archaic who'd niscitam says yes there is one way and it doesn't really jibe very well with what he did saying before there is one way you can live forever Gilgamesh what you have to do is dive to the bottom of the sea I'll show you where get the plant of eternal life take it home with you and then you and the people in Anor can live forever and you'll be ok again not a terribly well redacted story there are lots of loose ends here you can see how someone who is used to reading Homer or used to reading something laden with the song of rolling wood bit rather impatient with the kind of in felicity's of this redaction but the point is that he does get the plant of eternal life and then sets home so Gilgamesh decides to go home with the plant of eternal life now this begs the question how come people don't live forever well there must be some part of the story where Gilgamesh fails to live forever and fails to bring home the plant of eternal life and it turns out that there is again this is not the most impressive kind of redaction the way in which this story ends Gilgamesh is on the way home but he's all hot and dusty and decides to take a bath and he leaves the plant with his clothes and so he's in the water and you know what happens a snake comes along it eats the plant and that's why snakes shed their skins and seems to live forever that people don't it's a shame if it hadn't been for that one bath people would be living forever now now obviously this is the most well poorly tacked on and poorly thought-out kind of deus ex machina snake ex machina there's got to be a Latin term for snake but right it's a snake ex machina obviously and this snake we're gonna see him again when we get to the Garden of Eden it's the same tempter it's the same person that denies us eternal life or in that person symbol which denies this eternal life so it explains to kids in Mesopotamia wife snakes shed their skins because they eat the plant of eternal life exchange explains why people in Mesopotamia died because Gilgamesh took a bath and see it explains how it is that we can have one grand story which talks about the quest for eternal life but also the quest for selfhood that's characteristic of the earliest stages of human civilization all right so the Gilgamesh story ends with Gilgamesh coming back to the city and saying it's a great city big thick walls and I'm a superior kind of a kingly kind of a heroic guy but I'm dying too and that's the end or that's as far as the story goes in other words Gilgamesh faces his own mortality there's a whole bunch of stuff going on here and my short synopsis doesn't really do justice to it is very much worth your reading the Gilgamesh epic is I think a neglected and underestimated masterpiece not because it's so sophisticated actually it's really crude I mean this business with the planet of eternal life that should be saved for another story someone should have redacted this quite a bit better than it was but it does show that the earliest phases of human society are trying to link up these seemingly disconnected folktales into one general overview of the world in other words they are trying to put together a continuous understanding of the world around them the way in which they do that is through epic remember epic is more than poetry it is more than literature it is the encyclopedia of the ancient world now given that we have this understanding of Gilgamesh I'd like to switch now to some biblical themes which will turn out to be useful for us when we look at the Hebrew Bible a little later on in the first case the first big theme is women and civilization think about mother Eve generating the fall of Adam being tempted by the serpent well think of the of the position of the temple harlot in bringing Enkidu into society all right sexual knowledge leads to if not the moral fall of man certainly the transition from nature to society are from nature to the city Ishtar and Gilgamesh is very important and this I would I can't stress too much it seems to me that symbolically behind Gilgamesh's refusal to have sex with Ishtar is a recognition of a permanent and final separation between the human and the divine remember that Ishtar saw that Gilgamesh himself is half mortal half God his birth owes to the fact that a temple priest had sex with ninh son one of the goddesses of the Babylonian Pantheon he says no I refuse here on to be anything other than human from now on there will be an indirect there will be a an indirect connection between the human and the divine there'll be some partition which separates the human and the divine off you might want to read ascribe this as the invention of the human condition we are not human we are human we are not divine our access to it is only attenuated through myth or similar story we can't actually believe we're doing that anymore we are becoming realistic now beyond this question of women and civilization the construction of the self is very important here again as I argued a little earlier I believe that the history of the ego or the history of subjectivity has yet to be written and in fact what we see in the history of literature and particularly its prominent in the history of archaic literature is the construction the bounding the definition the delimitation of what the self is and the separation from the set between the self and all the other events and things in the world and we don't have a complete perimeter around the self until we recognize the inevitability of death it's when Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh recognizes his own mortality that he becomes human all right those are closely connected a sec another theme we were gonna have to think about it some like this myth history at its earliest phase myth and history are the same thing in the same way that myth and religion are the same thing myth and ethics are the same thing myth and politics are the same thing myth and history start out as the same discipline or the same big mishmash of ideas first let's consider the case of Humbaba or hawawa now what we're asked to believe here is that Humbaba is a great huge monster threatening to human beings and a terrible blight upon the earth more than likely there was no such thing as from baba there's a good chance that there aren't any monsters and if there aren't then we're still left with the question of what whom baba really was may I suggest that he is probably that whom baba is probably the personification of a tribe of people that lives near the Cedars and probably they had grown quite attached to their trees and probably they didn't want Gilgamesh and Enkidu to take their trees from them so probably they put up some resistance it probably had to be killed but killing peaceful villagers near a bunch of trees that's not the stuff of epic it's important when you have an epic to defeat something big and serious and dangerous a monster a dragon Humbaba you can't beat up your grandmother you can't destroy a cricket you can't slay a mouse you have to do something enormous so if you're going to kill some peaceful people living near trees turn them into Humbaba and you'll be all set because then you'll have real epic material um this may strike you as funny and it is funny in some ways but think about David and Goliath you know Goliath was 9 foot 9 inches tall think it over all right perhaps there aren't 9 foot tall people but perhaps the necessities of epic required that we have something sufficiently large and serious and imposing so that we have great admiration for the deeds and doings of the epic hero now beyond myth history oh and before I get beyond that um just the bringing together of any could do in Gilgamesh maybe there isn't a wild man living out in his own among the animals maybe what we have here is the symbolic unification of two tribes one that lives within the walls of auric and one that lives a nomadic existence outside the walls of work perhaps they fought initially which would account for the fight between Gilgamesh and Enkidu but then if they unified and decide decided rather than fight each other why don't we go kill the people who live near the Cedars that works out wonderfully and then you could transfer and then you can turn it into an epic story which accounts in a mythological way for the actual history of this city another important issue that we should consider when we look at Gilgamesh is the question of predictability and the Covenant it's often opaque rather difficult to people to comprehend why it is that the Hebrew Bible is so concerned with the question of covenant promise why is it that God has to make a promise and we have to make a promise and it's this mutual promise that fundamentally changes the world this is why remember when there's a flood as a result of well there's a flood down in heaven each talk comes down and this guy was talking to Gilgamesh and Gilgamesh says Ishtar we have a flood here do something about this because all our cities are city walls and are sitting on the houses in it are made of mud and when we have a flood we have all kinds of terrible problems in our city runs away Ishtar looks at it and says oh wow I'm sorry should kind of a valley girl its chart looks at and says wow I'm sorry you're having a flood we didn't know much about that must be really terrible to have a flood sure I'm glad I'm not mortal in other word she's totally unsympathetic and she's useless she's not in control of nature she doesn't run all of everything the way Yahweh will later on when you go to Yahweh with a problem Yahweh know it knows what's going yahweh's behind it you go to itch start where the problem citas wow that's tough now no one is going to worship Ishtar for any length of time if she keeps on saying stuff like wow that's tough she's got to actually have some some answer to why to how we're gonna solve this problem of the flood we know why God and he sends the flood and Noah and all that business but Ishtar hey it's not her job very clearly polytheism has its discontents and one of the discontents is that it's hard to talk to the boss it's hard to get to the top and even when you talk to the boss you never know where Zeus is down chasing mortal women or he's been asleep or drunk or something with Yahweh it's all one-stop shopping you go straight to mini he's running everything it's obvious what a big jump then we're going to get when we move from the polytheism of Mesopotamia to the monotheism of ancient Israel the reason why we need a covenant is we can't worship a god that's incompetent and the only way that you can have a competent God is running everything is to have an agreement between us and him that he always holds up to and that we don't all right so the covenant which we can only have with Yahweh because he's running things you can't have a covenant with this jar because she's useless now another point we should think about redaction the Hebrew Bible like the New Testament is redacted and redacted and redacted it is put together out of a collection of stories which overlap to some degree and somehow cases have gaps some cases of contradictions and ancient scribes and thinkers tried to sew them all together with varying degrees of success so when we find odd jumps or strange movements from Jerusalem to Galilee and back to Jerusalem or odd seemingly contradictory details usually the source of these details is the fact that it was redacted over a period of many years think for example of the fact we have two creation myths in Genesis one would have been enough but no they have do traditions and they want to bring it together and this is God's authentic Word so you find a way to make them work so the redactions in the Hebrew Bible are in some places quite as jarring as the reductions we see in Gilgamesh right away well I'll discuss that at some length when I cover Isaiah but what we do see here is the attempt to pull together separate and various stories into one coherent account of how the world works compared to Gilgamesh the Hebrew Bible is super sophisticated right there are still gaps and jumps and an obvious redaction but it's a much better job that was done over a far greater period of time now finish up think about it this way all right first off the state of ancient knowledge which will apply not just a Gilgamesh but to the Bible as well is that all is one so you're going to find all kinds of knowledge mishmash together in ancient texts so astronomy in astrology are the same discipline and you'll find those inside your ancient texts say in the epic tradition or the Hebrew Bible not only astronomy and astrology magic and mathematics the same discipline and so you're going to find all kinds of numerology built into both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament political and moral theory is really mythology and you're going to find that all built in physics well since our physics is mythological will account for a physical reality chain why is it that snakes shed their skin because the snake ate the plant of eternal life it's not that's not a question of herpetology it's a question of theology the lucky snake happened to be there while Gilgamesh was taking a bath overall let's think about it this way Gilgamesh shows us that what I would call the archaic dream time of humanity is ending we can no longer live in an exclusively mythological world we will try and create instead of piecemeal narratives that explain this particular aspect of that particular aspect we're now shooting for the big picture and it's this movement towards the big picture out of these local and separate myths that suggest that we're seeing a big change in the self in the conception of the self and also the conception of the external world that we see in ancient Mesopotamia and now I want to conclude by trying to show you the connections or what I understand the connections to be between the epic tradition and the Bible now this is kind of a strange take but bear with me and think it through I think this some worthwhile stuff here it seems to me that it's possible to look at the Bible as having many of the characteristic qualities motifs organizing principles of the epic certain modifications you can make this work let's stop and think about the epic first of all it has to have a hero right there are no epics without people in them all epics involve a superior man superior things usually the military things and he's a man the commands general respect even the loser in an epoch is a man the conventional respect some like Hector right everyone admires Hector second every epic has a journey motif you always have to be going somewhere you can't have an epoch in your backyard you can't have an epoch at home you never hear about the epic movement from my living room to my kitchen it doesn't work that way you have to go on some vast journey and has to involve overcoming tremendous obstacles because you're a superior man it's through these ordeals of overcoming these obstacles that lets everybody know what a superior guy you are if King Goethe pitched him live next door to Gilgamesh wouldn't be nearly so good a story but if he has to go through all these changes and all these journeys of our mountains and rivers and meets the scorpion man and the cosmic barmaid and all that great stuff well then you have a story another thing we're going to find an epic is the quest for the valuable in every question every case in every epic there's always something valuable at the end of our journey and we're gonna go get it and what's valuable changes from epoch to epoch the wife of Rama in the Ramayana something like Penelope and Ithaca in the case of The Odyssey in every case or whatever it is we're looking for we're always going to obtain something valuable think of the the legends of the Grail its same sort of an idea as we go on our quest for these valuable things we have ordeals and these are not usual regular arbitrary sufferings they are initiatory ordeals you'll learn something from these ordeals you suffer you realize what you are think of a of Odysseus cruising through the Mediterranean from island to island finding out something about himself finding out something about the human condition at the end of these or Denisha Tory ordeals the big payoff the homecoming every epic not only ends but it ends at home you can't just cruise around from island to island keep doing that and then have the epic end arbitrarily in the middle you have to get back to Ithaca or if what you're doing is the Bible you have to get back to the sacred city Jerusalem final thing that we're going to see when the in this homecoming it always involves a triumph of the sacred the sacred overcomes the profane in every epic think of the Sundiata in West Africa where Islam overcomes the forces of animism think of the Song of Roland where although Roland himself and Oliver die the forces of Christianity defeat Islam in every case the sacred is vindicated and we vindicate the sacred we vindicate our society we vindicated so legitimacy politically morally everything about us turns out to be great and that's what epic tells you in other it's epic reinforces our collective identity I might have been willing to argue that it constructs our collective identity so that's what epic does now let me connect this to the Bible if an epic if we take give it a little latitude and say that an epic can have either an individual or a collective hero I'd like to argue that the chosen people Yahweh's special group of people are a sort of collective hero and their doings are in fact a journey think of Exodus think of the Babylonian captivity think of returning from Babylon back to Jerusalem think of the Diaspora journey motifs run all through the Bible think of the Trant of Paul's journeys in the New Testament think of the movie Hagia the movement from Mecca to Medina in Islam from Medina to Mecca in Islam in every case we get that journey motif the journey motif is always a new Exodus so we're always going someplace we have a collective hero in the case of the Old Testament it's the chosen people in the case of the New Testament it is the Saints the saved the Church of God right 144,000 that get saved in the book of Revelation in the case of Islam it's the true believers but in every case there's a sense of a corporate identity and there's a sense of being a hero on a journey moving towards some vindication of the sacred moving towards a final homecoming it turns out then that if we take the hero of the Bible to be a collective hero and it could be in the the chosen people it can be the Christian believers it can be the Islamic believers but they are moving on a journey and that means that all the events of history are thereby vindicated because we get a providential view of all the things that they undergo and these tests these trials these invasions and these difficulties are all God's Way of testing the chosen people and that means that these initiatives mean something you'll learn something from them every time Yahweh punishes people it's always for a reason and they always are restored to the good city and when they're restored to it we have a triumph of the sacred so what I want to argue then is that the Bible can be thought of as having many important connections to the tradition of epic literature that the tradition of epic literature is the sort of or stuff out of which subsequent important cultural developments will be made and that the Bible in the process of creating this Universal moral hero is also implicitly creating a universal moral code and one can be thought of as coextensive with the other I would make this argument to finish up then I think that the process of coming to know God or the process of having God revealed to his chosen people or to the Christian believers or even later on to the Islamic believers is a Reedus ssin of the process of moral self-discovery and moral invention and for that reason I would be inclined to read the Sacred Scripture of the West as an epoch of moral self invention

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 13,680

Rating: 4.9480519 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Gilgamesh, Bible, Western Culture, Epic

Id: MKOoVMg9x1M

Length: 45min 47sec (2747 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020