The Epic of Gilgamesh. Any coments?

Question

Why Genesis copied from it?

To 've got the answer Genesis is a copy unfortunatedly for your beliefs.

The Epic of Gilgamesh focuses on a human character named Enkidu, who is uncivilized and lives, eats and mates with wild animals. He is ultimately tamed and befriended by Gilgamesh. The two become best friends, and they travel to distant lands and have a variety of adventures with friends and foes. The real "meat" of Epic happens when Enkidu, is killed. Gilgamesh is heartbroken. He becomes a man with a mission: to find eternal life.

Gilgamesh travels to where he has heard of eternal life -- to what is now Lebanon. He comes to a wide river and can go no further. He stops at a tent to rest and eat. Here he meets the innkeeper, Utnapishtam, who just happens to be very similar to the biblical Noah. The flood account of Utnapishtam is an earlier account -- almost 2000 years earlier -- than Genesis. It is likely that Genesis was based on this earlier account.

According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtam is warned of the flood well before it happens by one of the brother-gods, Enki. We know the complete legend of this warning from other tablets. It goes like this:

The chief deity, Anu, is disappointed that the hybrid humans have not progressed very far from their animal origins. He is particularly upset that the humans seem to want to mate all the time. He even is quoted as saying that the noise of their copulations kept him (Anu) awake at night, atop his ziggurat (step pyramid). There is talk among the godhead of what to do with the humans that were created, and some suggestions are considered. For a while, humans are deprived of food, at which point they are said to have resorted to cannibalism. Other extinction methods are tried until finally Anu announces that a "final solution" has been found.

Enki who has sympathy for some humans, arranges for Utnapishtam to "overhear" him talking aloud from behind a screen of reeds. He says things like, "a smart man would make himself a ship..." And so Utnapishtam is warned and Enki believes he has not violated his promise to Anu.

Rather than animals, Utnapishtam was told to bring humans with special skills, like stone masonry and animal husbandry and medicine on to the ship. Ultimately it rains, as predicted, and the ship and its cargo debark near Mt. Ararat in what is now Turkey. Here the story differs significantly from Genesis.

The first thing the sea-weary crew do on dry land is "burn" or cook some meat to eat. At this point, while the meat is burning, they are visited by members of the godhead who reward the survivors by telling them something of their origins and making a "pact" with Utnapishtam and his group.

Answer 1

Gilgamesh is the oldest written story ever found. Most scholars believe it was written in stone at least 1500 years before Genesis. Obviously there was a great flood since many cultures have written about it (was probably a massive tsunami). I always find it amusing when people say the Genesis account is the true one and Gilgamesh is the counterfeit (the older is suddenly the counterfeit when it suites them, hehe). It’s interesting that Gilgamesh is in stone (Moses was known for breaking tablets). Many of the OT stories and ideas were borrowed from the Sumarians, and others.

Answer 2

I believe that the borrowing from this myth was intentional for good reason. First, everyone knew the Gilgamesh story. Genesis re-tells the myth with important distictions in the story.

So, if you look at the similarities between the two stories, there are many. If you look at the differences, you will see some important new ideas emerging on the scene, such as monotheism, human freedom (in Gilgamesh, humans are created as slaves), faithfulness (in Giglamesh the Gods are spontaneous and frivolous, and humans are subject to the amusement of the Gods) and the other concepts that had not been a part of religion in the ancient near east up until this time in history.

Answer 3

It really is quite interesting, almost every culture to ever have inhabited the Earth has some form of the Great Flood Myth.
The similarities between Genesis and Gilgamesh are undeniable. In Genesis, God flooded the Earth because mankind had become to abnoxious-in Gilgamesh, too noisy.
In both stories, there was an Ark. It had a single door. The hero and his family left the ark, ritually killed an animal, offered it as a sacrifice.
If you really study mythology, you will find that everything in the Bible happened in some other culture that predated Christ and the Bible by thousands of years.

Answer 4

Interesting... do you know who wrote Genesis? How many accounts are there in Genesis that the author used to give it's accounting? Do you even know these answers?

I am familiar with the Epic of Gilgamesh... they are intertwined in that they give sound credible evidence to the cultural beliefs of the day. They are quite useful in research. But Genesis is not a carbon copy of it... it is a document that is historical in nature and may consist of the cultural beliefs of the land... the Epic actually strengthens the Biblical texts.

Read Josh McDowell's books... you might learn something from them. He was an atheist who got smart and saw the light... others have too. Do your homework.

Thank you.

Answer 5

Large parts of Genesis certainly were copied from it. Judaism, according to the scriptures themselves came out of Ur of the Chaldees -- a Sumerian city. Abraham's father was a god-maker for the common people of that city. The epic of Gilgamesh was almost certainly well known to the early Jews, and in a changed form became part of their oral tradition -- an oral tradition that subsequently was rendered into writing in the first copies of the Torah -- when the various traditions (the priestly, and so forth) were combined to form the actual writing of the first books we see in the Bible.

All religions and mythological systems borrow from one another and evolve into new forms.

Regards,

Reynolds Jones
http://www.rebuff.org
[e-mail]

PS I have read Josh McDowell's work -- its a joke. Belief in God and Christ is not about belief in a fictional bronze age text.

Answer 6

A fascinating epic about a real king. The Genesis authors took a good story and embellished upon it and declared that they were god's chosen people.

Answer 7

If Genesis is relating true events, wouldn't it make sense that someone else would write a book about it too?

Answer 8

NO