The Return of Gilgamesh
...eep [are] broken up and the windows of heaven were opened” (61), acts inspired by God. When the storm settles and Noah and Gilgamesh are searching for dry land, both characters release the raven which provides the sign that the waters have subsided. After this, both God and Ishtar form covenants with their chosen ones; God promising never to bring such a flood again, and Ishtar vowing never to forget the disaster brought upon her people. Both of these covenants are brought on by Gilgamesh and Noah’s altars and sacrifices offered to their divine after they are allowed to leave their boats. Another important moral similarity between Gilgamesh and Noah is that they each accept the task assigned to them by the divine without question. Gilgamesh only asks what he should tell the people (36). Neither attempt to reason with or persuade the divine to change their minds, nor do they display any remorse for the dead after the flood. This can be explained two ways: Through these actions, both men displayed their respect of and obedience to their God/gods. It may be for this precise reason that the divine chose them to be saved from the doom of mankind. Also, it is possible that Gilgamesh and Noah were aware of their surroundings and understood the justifications for the flood, which would also lead to them finding favor in the eyes of the divine. These similarities cannot be mere coincidences existing between two unassociated stories. The fact that Noah and Gilgamesh, both righteous men amidst a sea of unrighteous, were both directed down the same path with the same outcome, neither of them questioning their fate which points to something more significant than coincidence. There must be some connection between the Hebrews and Sumerians linking their cultures and literature together. By studying the cultural and political histories of these two civilizations, the connection can be made. The impact of the legend of Gilgamesh, the celebrated king of the ancient city of Uruk, stretches over thousands of years and throughout many areas of the Middle East. Tablets containing various parts of Gilgamesh have been discovered all over the Middle East and in all the languages that employed the cuneiform style of writing (10). Since the Hebrews were also a tribe in the middle eastern region, the Gilgamesh epic could have easily traveled to these peoples as well, forming a basis for their later religious writings. The Gilgamesh epic flourished in the Middle East, and as the art of writing developed, the story was finally written down in cuneiform, providing a written counterpart to the oral tradition. The style of writing chosen for the epic, though, was its downfall. Cuneiform was slowly forgotten as the Hebraic, Greek, and Roman civilizations evolved and their Phoenician alphabet replaced the old writing, causing the cuneiform literature to disappear. Gilgamesh disappeared along with it (10). But, even though the Hebrews did not translate the Gilgamesh story, it was not completely lost. The earliest written version of Gilgamesh dates from approximately 2000 B.C., but this did not eliminate the telling of the story, most likely because many of the people could neither read nor write in cuneiform. Instead, the oral tradition of the story persisted along with the written form (10). This shows that despite the loss of the written Gilgamesh, the Hebrews could have continued to tell the story, and over time adopted it as their own original story, reinterpreting it using the righteous man Noah, and the single, all-powerful God, with just a few other minor differences. The Hebrew idea of a single God was a revolutionary one at the time (5). The Hebrew history which formed the basis for the Old Testament was one filled with exile...