TABLE of CONTENTS Abstract 3 Author’s Preface: on a personal note 4–7 1. Flood Stories: a juggling act 8–13 2. Lead Character 14–24 3. A Memorable Week in Mesopotamia 25–32 4. The Great Calm 33–38 5. Clay and Tears 39–45 6. A Mountain Top Experience 46–52 7. First Things First 53–63 8. Grief, Wrath and Confrontation 64–70 9. Outcomes 71–78 10. Covenant/Eternal Life 79–89 11. Narrator and Creative Process 90–99 12. Imagined, Narrated, Visualised 100–108 • visit etana.org and search etact to download Gilgamesh Tablet XI in the translation supplied by Andrew George. APPENDIX 1: A Note on Names 109–110 APPENDIX 2: Flood Storm Hermeneutics 111–113 APPENDIX 3: Notes on Boats and Walls 114–117 Abbreviations & selected Bibliographical References 119–120 2 Abstract This monograph presents a Resource analysis of the Flood tellings in order to deepen appreciation for the literary skills of their narrators in their individual handlings of the tradition. It rests on the primary and painstaking work done by Assyriologists such as Lambert and Millard, Andrew George, Irving Finkel and Nathan Wasserman. As our launch pad, we work from the Flood telling of Gilgamesh Tablet XI in its Standard Babylonian Version (SBV). The Mesopotamain Flood tellings preserved on clay tablets range across 1000 years, from the Old Babylonian period, around 1700 BC to the 7th century BC, including specimens from Nineveh and from Ugarit on the coast of Syria. The Genesis scroll at Chaps. 6–9 adds a Hebrew language re-telling to those already known from sources in Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian. Each version comes with its own theology, literary devices, inclusions and omissions. There is compelling evidence to present. This situates the origin of all these tellings on the steppe of Iraq in the ancient cities of Mesopotamia, cities such as Shuruppak, Uruk and Nippur. Recovered fragments and excerpts composed in poetry and inscribed in cuneiform script document the spread of the Flood story westwards to cities in Turkey, Syria and Palestine. Their élite scribal scholars followed on behind the many oral story tellers that we can postulate who moved along the known trade routes of the ancient Fertile Crescent. This literary Resource analysis follows the narrators of each telling as they develop their plot, its actors and their characterisations. The narrators employ dynamic and at times emotional and confrontational speeches, the use of graphic and at times shocking imagery, plays on words, motifs such as secrets to be revealed, motifs of deception and betrayal, highlighting human violence and sinfulness, the lurking presence of Death, a quest for immortality, a reversal of the divine policy of destruction, the offering of sacrifice, conferral of eternal life, and, in the Genesis telling, a covenant with humans, animals and planet Earth. We liken each telling to a remake of a favourite movie, but with a new director each time. Film directors animate their own vision, developing scenes with the use of different angles and lenses, from telephoto to wide-angle to close-up framing. The visuals of the looming storm’s black cloud, the necklace of the Mother goddess held aloft, the sprig of olive in the dove’s beak and the rainbow as a sky-sign epitomise how these directors captured their audience’s visual imagination. We point out the narrators’ filmly skills along these lines. The prophetic testimony of David Attenborough as a Netflix production and his companion book A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future appeared during the writing of this monograph, as did Covid-19. Attenborough provides us with a new and disconcerting context for a re-reading of the Flood stories about survival for humanity and animals. Contact details:
[email protected]Dr. Deryck Sheriffs Postgraduate Tutor, Distance Learning Dept. London School of Theology 3 Author’s Preface: On a personal note. In 1944, the world was filled with the violence of World War II. Death stalked about, from the deserts of Africa to the jungles of Asia, from the winter sieges in Russia to the gas chambers of the extermination camps. Terror descended from the skies on the cities of Europe turning them into sheets of fire and piles of rubble. Men died at sea and on the beaches. The mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the icon of the era. I entered the world then at Liverpool Maternity Hospital, in the ark of my parents’ loving marriage that spanned 62 years of the 20th century. In the Lockdown, Level 5, of the Corona-19 virus pandemic, my wife signed us up for Netflix. There we encountered David Attenborough wandering around the ruins of Chernobyl, a nuclear wasteland reclaimed by the forest. I recalled the cover of his hardback book Zoo Quest for a Dragon that I had devoured as a youngster about sixty-five years previously. Here was this white-haired prophet in his 90’s offering us his eyewitness account. It was a reality check, spoken into the Anthropocene of his lifetime, telling us a story, his life story, of our collective destruction of species and habitats over that timespan.1 The photography for his testimony was stunning, but there was no rainbow promise at the end, only a fringe of green in the streets of Chernobyl. As he said, the choice of futures is ours—for the moment. In my lifetime in my faith community, I have seen many depictions of Noah’s Ark in pictures, and even photos of two physical builds, one by Americans and the other, a scaled-up coracle, constructed for TV under the watchful eye of the British Museum cuneiformist, Irving Finkel, according to measurements he read and translated on a newly available clay tablet, now called the Ark Tablet. That ‘boat’ was circular! The book shows us pictures of regular coracles in use for transport on the Euphrates. The author of the Ark Tablet had scaled them up imaginatively. The animals walk peacefully up the gangplank, two by two, in the children’s story books. There may be a bright rainbow overhead. The horror story of Genesis 6–9 has been turned into a happy ending children’s story. A veil is discretely drawn over what was happening outside the Ark. My five-year old daughter asked me: “But what had the zebras done wrong?” I can’t remember if the zebras were missing from the gangplank and from the patiently waiting queue where places were taken up by giraffes and lions and tigers and leopards and camels and elephants and more. I can’t recall my reply. I think I might have said: “Nothing, darling.” If so, I’d still stick by that. “What have the animals done wrong?” is still a good question to ask about zebras without boarding passes and unicorns that kicked and splashed playing in the rain, as the sad song has it. There are no convincing answers regarding the drowned animals that sets them up for punishment, or for God’s regret at their genesis. Certainly, animals eat one another. Birds eat birds. Fish eat fish. Pride males kill and chew on lion cubs not fathered by them. My affectionate pussy cats hunt geckos and lizards and moles and shrews, as well as catching the occasional small bird. They purr, but they are hunter-killers by instinct, an instinct implanted by their biology. It must be in their genes. I didn’t teach them. Nor did their mother cat. They left their animal rescue foster home too soon for that. We accept predator~prey relations as simply a biological given of life on our planet from its genesis. In God’s opening speech, he declares his intention of wiping out from the face of the ground humanity and all living creatures (Gen 6:7), regretting that he created them in the first place. At the end of the story, God himself announces that the era of vegetarian lockdown is over and 1 David Attenborough A Life on Our Planet, 1hr 54 mins, Netflix, 2020. See reviews and 5-star ratings. The book is published as A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future, Witness Books, Ebury Press (Penguin Random House), 2020. 4 “every moving thing that lives shall be food for you” (9:3). Bad luck animals. You have a predator at large. This permission must rank as one of the most popular things that God has ever announced. We have taken it seriously, unlike most of the Ten Commandments. Besides surviving arriving during World War II, one of the privileges I enjoyed later was reading the Atrahasis myth at Tyndale House in Cambridge with its co-publisher, Alan Millard2 and in the company of only two others, one of whom was Gordon Wenham who went on to write his well-informed commentary on the Flood story.3 In South Africa, I had engaging discussions with a South African geologist and personal friend. I was intending to contribute to what appeared as Genesis, Geology and Catastrophism: A Critique of Creationist Science and Biblical Literalism.4 This volume soon became a collector’s item—the publisher’s warehouse burnt to the ground. This was not a sign in the tradition of the rainbow. Biblical Studies spent a long time dissecting out J, E, D and P in the Pentateuch—from George Smith’s era as the decipherer of the first Flood tablet translated (1872) to well into the next century, and including the work of Claus Westermann5 who starts from this base but also offers a fully theological reading with attention to tradition history, literary devices and the Mesopotamian texts available to him. We now have an entirely new telling of the Flood in a brief 60 lines excerpt. Named the Ark Tablet, it joins witnesses from the era of Atrahasis and the Old Babylonian versions of Gilgamesh, an era that includes a truncated version of the Flood in Sumerian with king Ziusudra as lead character. It is timely to speak now of the possibility of a literary Resource analysis. This approach embraces narratology and the Ancient Near Eastern roots and transmissions of the Mesopotamian Flood stories, and highlights the literary skills of presentation. To these cuneiform texts, the Genesis re-telling adds its own literary touches as it incorporates the Flood tradition into its Yahweh/Elohim theology and into the canonical trajectory of covenant. Resource analysis, as I apply the term, aims for a greater appreciation of the received text, and an imaginative entering into the world of the story. The reader is first and foremost a participant in the story. I like the image of the directional flow of the river that results from a mingling of its streams of tradition. Each telling by a narrator is an expression of this flow of core ideas. The core ideas of the story, such as destruction–survival–restart, clothe themselves in the theologies of the specific narrator. By the Euphrates, the river of Babylon, we sit down and read. The existence of the Flood story in different dialects (Babylonian and Assyrian) and languages (Sumerian and Hebrew) is an indicator of its cross-cultural persistence and appeal, of a meta-level, of a species radiation and distribution from within the genus of Flood story telling. With the late Greek summaries that reflect Mesopotamian origins, the river slows and disappears into the sand. There are no further original and literary re-tellings of the Flood to match those of Atrahasis, Gilgamesh Tablet XI within its epic, and Gen 6–9 within the proto-history of Gen 1–11. So there is the back-then and wanting to be living in its story world. However, we cannot remain so academically sequestered as to read the Flood story today in isolation from David Attenborough’s postscript. We have to ask ourselves the ecological questions: “Has it all gone wrong—again!? Has there been too much violence, violation and planet pollution? Is there a cataclysmic set of consequences rolling our way with an unstoppable force?” We read the Flood stories now in a new and urgent context for our home planet Earth. 2 W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard, Atra-ḫasīs, The Babylonian Story of the Flood with The Sumerian Flood Story by M.Civil, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. 3 Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, Word Biblical Commentary 1, Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1987. 4 Michael R. Johnson, Paternoster Press, 1988. 5 Genesis 1–11: A Commentary, (1974), English trans., London: SPCK, 1984. 5 I would want to add, as one who enjoys stories, that it is worthwhile in itself to pay careful attention to the text of these Flood stories. We miss things easily when they are too familiar. Reading Gen 6–9 stereoscopically is a way of recovering a 3-dimensional perspective on the Flood story as it wells up in Mesopotamia and flows westwards towards Ugarit. A monocular reading of Genesis 6–9 is a flat reading. It misses what Gen 6–9 does not say, for one thing. Part of the problem for devout Bible readers is missing the point, the point being that story in the Hebrew Bible is a major genre of revelation for those who read Tanak as Scripture. Telling a story involves skills. Reading a story triggers our imagination. We can’t help visualizing the scenes as they are presented to us in words on a page. The imagination of the author—and of the listener—is also a main contributor to the creative art of story-telling. That creativity of imagination is implanted in us by our Creator, just as much as the hunting instinct is implanted in my cats. The ability to write down a story requires schooling, but telling a story is an art that does not require reading and writing. The texts of the Flood tellings are what will survive—they have for 3,700 years already as empires have come and gone, and will certainly outlive the writer and readers of this monograph. The languages and dialects of their earliest story-tellers and writers, on the other hand, have fallen silent. Those who have never spoken Sumerian, Babylonian or Hebrew need the mediation of translators. However, those who have never savoured the literary skills of a Flood writer can do so now, even when they are not reading what the writer actually wrote in his mother tongue, but are reading in English translation or another contemporary mother- tongue. I hope to demonstrate the truth of that affirmation. Wanting to offer a 3-dimensional perspective on the Flood story and a window into the world of its literary expression, I poured over the texts again and I noticed things that I had not looked at closely previously. I appreciated things in all the sources more, even the fragmentary ones. After painstaking work by Assyriologists, Gilgamesh Tablet XI is not fragmentary. So it is the baseline starting point in its Standard Babylonian version (SBV). Of course, we cannot date or do anything but speculate about prior unwritten, oral tellings. Assyriologists are rightly wary of postulating a written Sumerian or Akkadian version from the era of Sargon the Great’s empire in the late 3rd millennium. We must work from what clay tablets that we have to hand. There is none, so far, from the 3rd millennium that tells a Flood story. It is a wonder that any Flood telling in writing has come down to us at all from across the span of more than 3,500 years. When it comes to the Gilgamesh traditions, as opposed to its Flood tradition, there certainly are independent Sumerian stories, five well known, also covered by Andrew George, about the heroic figure of Bilgamesh, as he was called. The schools copied these stories in the early Old Babylonian period. We owe an immense debt of gratitude to Andrew George for his hard labour in bringing both the epic of Gilgamesh and the Bilgamesh stories to us in a single handy paperback, as well as across his two volumes intended for readers of the original languages.6 In the sections that follow this introduction, I will often cite a few lines from Gilg. XI, and then discuss their literary qualities and their relationship with the style and content of the Genesis telling. Where needed, I will refer to the Atrahasis myth when it has a fuller range of coverage. We can rightly assume that Atrahasis is the back story to the Gilgamesh version of the Flood. Other short versions like the Ark Tablet and the two Flood specimens from Ugarit will pop into view here and there. 6 A.R. George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation, Penguin Classics, 1999/2003 along with The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, critical edition and cuneiform texts, Vol. 1, Oxford Univ. Press, 2003. New text fragments have appeared since, leading to a new edition of the 1999 volume. These new pieces have seen the light of day first in academic publications for Assyriologists. 6 Atrahasis takes as its starting point the earliest times before humanity existed. It begins: ‘When the gods’ (enūma ilū…)7… and then goes on to describe how the hard labour of the junior gods in digging canals for food production by irrigation was transferred onto the made–for– purpose human beings. These humans multiplied and their rowdiness caused the chairman of the Divine Assembly to suffer insomnia. His annoyance led to the Flood. The rest lies in the tellings. ***** This is the digital age and academic scholarship has benefitted enormously from the ready access there is to papers uploaded onto the internet at sites such as Academia.edu. However, the conventions of academic literacies die hard, whereas Powerpoint presentations and recorded lectures flourish on You Tube, including Andrew George’s on Gilgamesh. I have broken with the printed tradition of scholarly monographs in order to make things reader- friendly for those who are reading online or from downloads, rather than from printouts. That is why I have used colour within the body of paragraphs for translations, and bold typeface to assist visually with picking up key concepts or the unfamiliar names of gods and cities. I have also wanted to write in a reader-friendly style rather than with a stiffly distanced ‘academic’ voicing. I hope that works well for you. ***** Before you read on, I suggest that you download the translation of Gilgamesh Tablet XI that Andrew George has generously made available digitally on Etana, and have a read through of this Mesopotamian Flood version known as Gilgamesh (SBV). etana.org On that website click on eTACT and then on Search eTACT and enter Gilgamesh This will show up two entries. The Flood Story in the Gilgamesh Epic will take you to Andrew George’s translation of Tablet XI. 7 L&M, 42f. reads ‘When the gods like men (enūma ilū awīlum) bore the work and suffered the toil’ that Dalley renders as ‘instead of man’ (Myths, 9) for clarification. There is no separate word for ‘like’ (Bab. kīma) in the text, just the two juxtasposed nouns in the phrase ‘when gods man’, but the story line does not support the concept of the gods actually being human originally (‘When the gods [were] men’), so what we have is an extreme anthropomorphism—the gods work for food, at least so far as the junior gods go. They burn their tools and go on strike as the plot unfolds! For the debated -um of awīlum, see L&M’s initial philological note (L&M, 146) that takes it as locative -um, yielding ‘man-like’. 7 CHAPTER 1 FLOOD STORIES a JUGGLING ACT 1. Juggling the Flood traditions. The Flood stories of the Ancient Near East share in a common Mesopotamian tradition in their diverse tellings. We will lead the evidence for this assertion. Yet there is a problem. How do we make comparisons among them when what we have are broken clay tablets from Old, Middle and Neo-Assyrian eras as our basis? Over against these Mesopotamian rooted tellings, the Genesis Flood story is as differently told as mainstream Yahwism is from polytheistic religions, and notably, from Israelite polytheism that included the worship of ‘the queen of heaven’, Baal, Tammuz, Molek and a number of others. The comparison between the Genesis Flood and the polytheistic versions commands attention because the relationship between all the versions forms an intriguing puzzle in which there are still missing pieces. The radical difference between a Divine Assembly ethos and a Yahweh only telling is all too obvious. This is a startling difference when we consider that all versions are Ancient Near Eastern texts, the Hebrew language telling just as much as those written in Babylonian and Assyrian dialects. The Genesis Flood is also more radical than the rest of Genesis. It dispenses with the Celestial Court in its telling, whereas for the rest of Genesis Yhwh/Elohim is present with the entourage of his Celestial Court. Members of this celestial set make their appearances in the form of cherubim (3:24; compare the ‘us’ of Gen 1:26 and 11:7) and other agents—agents of accompaniment (Gen 18), of rescue/destruction (Gen 19), and as intermediary links on the stairway in Jacob’s vision (Gen 28:12). To read Gen 6–9 without knowing the Mesopotamian traditions, without recognizing the similarities and differences between Yahweh’s Celestial Court and the Mesopotamian Divine Assembly, and without a feel for narratology is to set out for a destination without a roadmap. The Flood of the common tradition is a roadmap.The roadmap to hand admittedly has creases, tears and a few holes in it. It’s been lying around in the sands of the Fertile Crescent. For theological purposes, our destination when following this roadmap is to understand and therefore to more deeply appreciate how and why the biblical Flood story is told distinctively, the way that it is—and yet also has a Mesopotamian genealogy. To get the most out of these Flood tellings, we need to approach these texts as literary pieces created by skilled narrators who had literary devices at their command for engaging and delighting their audiences with their deft touches—devices such as plays on words, graphic images, twists and turns in the plot, characterisations, tensions built up and resolved. Given the bare bones of a watery catastrophe, ascribed, of course, to the powers of the universe, we need to remember that the narrators were themselves worshippers in local temples at the time they put reed stylus to clay or ink to scroll. They were penning their works within the framework of a community of faith, whether as a minority group of Yahweh alone devotees, or with a personal god among the 600 gods of the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian pantheons. 8 Each person in their audience feared, revered, entreated or praised the divine personalities in the stories. We, as those who do not assemble at the temples for Ancient Near Eastern festivals, live in a different world. For the Assyriologists, those temples and their festivals are replaced by international conference gatherings devoted to scholarship, where research papers are read, elucidating known texts or introducing newly discovered ones. The Mesopotamian view of the world has passed away because it deified the powers of nature. We have explanations for features and forces of nature such as tsunamis, volcanoes, viral diseases, fevers, fire, fertility, the planets, stars and much more. The thought of praying to the moon or receiving a message from the sun does not occur to us. So we read the texts of the Ancient Near East from a great distance, as it were. This said, I want to read the Flood stories as an insider. I cannot change what I think about god Sky, that is, Anu, the Sumerian father of the gods, or about goddessNintu–Mami-Belet-ili, ‘the creatress of human kind’. But I can live in the story, as easily as I can live in Star Trek, or Avatar, or The Lion King, or the African stories of my childhood books about Ndlovu the Elephant, Kalulu the rabbit, Fisi the hyena, Kamba the tortoise and many more. This paper is an academic study of the Flood versions. I have written it as an invitation to enter the world of the story and look where the narrator looks, to listen in to the characters talking, to observe their emotions, and to wonder what happens next. To do this, I need a coherent version to work from, and Tablet XI of the epic of Gilgamesh provides this. Immediately, a complication arises. There is an older version and a younger version of Gilgamesh, known as OBV and SBV, respectively. The one from the Old Babylonian era, say around 1700 BC, is not well represented among the recovered and legible clay tablets. We must use Tablet XI (SBV) as our base. Then, to mix metaphors, while keeping one eye on Gilg. XI (SBV) and registering our readerly response to it, we will have other balls in the air, juggling them in a rotating cascade of versions and excerpts. Four of those balls are the Atrahasis myth, the Ark Tablet, the Sumerian Ziusudra tablet, plus two fragmentary versions from Ugarit. But references to the Flood are certainly not confined to those few texts. There are other references that emerge to light on Mesopotamian tablets. We note a couple of these next. 2. Correlations. Gilgamesh assumes information that is written into Atrahasis—such as human beings created from clay by the Mother goddess, Mami/Belet-ili. In this sense, Atrahasis is the primary text with its plot ranging from the gods casting lots for their domains in the cosmos at the outset all the way to the social life and human reproduction of the narrator’s present. Likewise, the Genesis Flood story assumes knowledge of a vegetarian diet and the blessing on reproduction from previous chapters. So behind our various Flood tellings lies information that we can retrieve from connected sources. These connected sources are not necessarily Flood tellings. The Sumerian King List (Weld-Blundell prism 444) and related texts is one such with its pre- and post-groupings of kings, separated by ‘after the Flood swept over’ as an organizing pivot. The co-lateral texts include the Rulers of Lagash which starts off with the Sumerian stock 9 phrase ‘after the Flood swept over’(eger a-ma-ru ba-ur-rat-a) but goes on to add information: The rulers of Lagaš: c.2.1.2 (BM. 13203, ETCSL, text and translation) After the flood had swept over and brought about the destruction of the countries; when mankind was made to endure, and the seed of mankind was preserved and the black-headed people all rose; when An and Enlil called the name of mankind and established rulership, but kingship and the crown of the city had not yet come out from heaven, and Ninĝirsu had not yet established for the multitude of well-guarded (?) people the pickaxe, the spade, the earth basket and the plough, which mean life for the Land—in those days, the carefree youth of man lasted for 100 years and, following his upbringing, he lasted for another 100 years.8 ‘After the Flood swept over’, the text tracks the history of ‘the black-headed people’ which is the name that the Sumerians called themselves by. We learn that there was a Not Yet time, the time before the irrigation agriculture of Iraq got going. When it did, it was needing the tools for the toil involved in this operation. Those agricultural tools were of the very kind that the junior gods set alight and downed as they went on strike in the Atrahasis myth. This all happened before there were any Sumerians, or indeed before any human beings. So Atrahasis, that has a Flood story on its Tablet III of three, adds in ancient traditions about life on Earth before human beings. There is another co-lateral text example that we can turn to, that is useful if we are wondering where the ‘mountains of Urartu’ are located. Many current Bible readers will not notice that the text reads ‘mountains’ in the plural, and will unconsciously delete that information in favour of thinking of ‘Mt.Ararat’, a single named peak somewhere or other. Instead, the biblical location presents us with a mountainous political region that was well known in Mesopotamia. For more information on this point, we can turn to the Assyrian king Sargon II.9 He commissioned a palace scribe to write up his 8th military campaign (714 BC). This report was cast in the form of a Letter-report to godAshur, to ‘godAššur, father of the gods’, as he terms him. Sargon departs from Calah (Nimrud) his capital and manages to get his army safely cross the Upper Zab river before heading up into the daunting mountains to the north-east of Assyria, passing Mount Simirriya. This is the first impressive peak before he heads over mountains and rivers into north-west Iran near Lake Urmiah to conquer the kingdom of Urartu. a large mountain peak which stands out like the blade of a lance, raising its head above the mountains where the goddess Bēlet-ilāni resides, whose summit reaches to the Heavens above, whose root strikes downwards into the midst of Arallu (i.e. the Netherworld) (Luckenbill II, §142, 74)10 In the Flood story, we will hear directly from this goddess, Bēlet-ilāni, whose title as ‘Ladylord of the gods’ is conferred on her in Atrahasis and whose investment in her human offspring is crucial to the Flood story in Gilgamesh, Tablet XI. With Arallu, we encounter a triple-decker universe consisting of ‘the Heavens’, the ‘Earth’ and the ‘Underworld’. We don’t think like this about our location on planet Earth, but we can enter imaginatively into a story that does. However, for now we press a keyboard button and open Google Earth instead. 8 The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature online. 9 Luckenbill’s work will be updated by Grant Frame, The Royal Inscriptions of Sargon II, King of Assyria (721–705 BC), Eisenbrauns, 2021. 10 Sargon’s route has been debated but seems to pass Mt.Sahand and go near Lake Urmiah (= ‘Sea of Nairi’). See E.S.Kroll ‘The Urartian Presence in the Lake Urmia Region’, pp.198ff. in Urartians: a Civililsation in the Eastern Anatolia, Symposium I, A.Cilingirogiu and colleagues (eds.), RHM, 2014. 10 On Google Earth we can locate the city Khoy, then visit Bastam, 50km north of Khoy, where a large Urartian fortress is located. From Bastam, and visible 100km to the north stand the twin volcanic cones of snow-capped Mt.Ararat (= Agri Dagi, 5137m above sea level). This volcanic phenomenon stands in the region of Turkey, Armenia and Russia. This region was once adjacent to the political kingdom of Urartu. On the shore of Lake Van, stand the ruins of a fortress at Ayanis. Mt.Ararat is north-east from Lake Van. So this Assyrian 1st person Letter to the God supplies us with information about the political kingdom of Urartu in the 8th century BC. At times, Urartu was a powerful kingdom, spanning from Lake Urmiah to Lake Van. It was still powerful in Jeremiah’s lifetime— Jeremiah mentions Urartu and the Mannai, who are both referred to by Sargon II. Raise a signal flag to the nations. Sound the battle cry! Mobilize them all against Babylon. Prepare them to fight against her! Bring out the armies of Ararat (meaning Urartu) Minni, and Ashkenaz. (Jer 51:27, NLT) Jeremiah seems to be drawing on the fringe of his geo-political knowledge for effect. The Assyrians mounted campaigns against Urartu as early as the reign of Ashurnasirpal I in the 11th century BC. On site archaeology in Urartu has traced things even further back than this. So this is a good example of how we can orientate ourselves to reading the Flood stories by drawing on available information outside the scrolls of the Hebrew scriptures and preserved on clay tablets written in Sumerian and Akkadian, the latter being the umbrella term for the Assyrian and Babylonian dialects of East Semitic. 3. Noise annoys, as does sin. Moving from Jer 51’s references to warfare used in divine judgment against Babylon, we look to the reason for the divine reaction to humanity that was the Flood. Gilg.XI passes over the motivation, but would have been well aware of the responsibility of this onslaught as lying with the god of Nippur, Enlil. Enlil has a major role in his telling. Enlil chairs the Divine Assembly. All that the Gilgamesh narrator says about the start of the Flood is: ‘when the great gods decided to send down the Deluge’ (Gilg. XI:14). He offers us no motivation for this. So this is where we juggle the versions, keeping Gilgamesh in the air but throwing up Atrahasis alongside it. It was the noise that people were making that motivates godEnlil to convene the Divine Assembly and get their agreement to wipe out humanity. The people, before this, had been created to take over the wearisome agricultural work done by the junior gods. However, the solution to one problem—the strike by the junior gods—which is to create human stand-ins for them, only leads to another problem, namely, the noise they create when their numbers increase. Atrahasis describes this second problem for us: Twelve hundred years had not yet passed When the land (mātu) extended and the peoples (nīšu) multiplied11 The land (mātu) was bellowing like a bull The god got disturbed by their uproar (ḫubūru). Enlil heard their noise (rigmu) 11 ‘the country became too wide, the people too numerous’ (Dalley, 20). 11 and addressed the great gods. “The noise of mankind (rigim awīlūti) has become too intense for me with their uproar (ḫubūru) I am deprived of sleep.” (Atr. 2, lines 1–8; Lambert & Millard, 72f.) The ‘noise of humankind’ in line 7 uses the collective noun awīlūtum – ‘humanity’, built from awīlu meaning ‘a man, a human being, a person, a free citizen’. These clamorous ones are living in the cities of Mesopotamia where Enlil’s temple, the É.kur (‘House, the Mountain’), was located and where Enlil was trying to get a good night’s rest. This temple, the E.kur, is mentioned by name in Atrahasis when it is surrounded in the middle of the night by the angry mob of gods who are on strike: ‘The temple (bītu ‘house’) was surrounded, but the god did not know’, ‘E.kur was surrounded, but Enlil did not know’ (Atr. 1, 2:71 and 73; Dalley, 10). This incident of rebellion by the workforce of gods takes place at Nippur, a city whose ruins we can pinpoint on the ground in Iraq as well as in the Flood literature. This E.kur shrine at Nippur (Nibru) stood about 180kms south of modern Baghdad. Nippur’s occupation levels date back to the 4th millennium BC, in other words approximately a thousand years before cuneiform writing began.12 Nippur is conveniently anchored for us at a location that we can pinpoint, with co-ordinates that we can type in and visit on Google Earth. We can say with assurance that Nippur was a location known to the audience for Atrahasis and Gilgamesh. Yahweh/Elohim also had a local temple. It is located on Mt.Zion in Jerusalem, but we are not to think of Yahweh as contained in this temple according to ‘orthodox’ Yahwistic theology (1 Kgs 8:27). The biblical Flood story is not anchored in Palestine—indeed, not anywhere as far as it goes as to where the Ark was built. 4. Sin, violence, war. In the Yahweh/Elohim theology of the Genesis stories before the Flood story, the sinfulness of humanity is prominent. It is a given of the Israelite narrator’s experience and of his storyline from Eden onwards. It is the before and after of any Flood that swept over. Congruent with this proto-history perspective is the violence and horrors of warfare that are part of the narrator’s perception of contemporary human experience. So, remotely, he captures the Mesopotamian legends of empire, kings, battles and conquests that were engraved on Early Dynastic and later Ur III monuments and recorded in literary forms. As I see it, the biblical writer, by highlighting ‘violence’ (hāmās )חמס, considers that both ancient and contemporary wars ruin life on earth. In Gen 4–6, there is an exponential growth in violence that started with Cain, the founder of cities. After cities came well organized warfare. The narrator of the Flood knew that armies and war had a long history—whether he knew anything directly about the 3rd and early 2nd millennium inter-city warfare in Mesopotamia or not. Yet the Genesis narrator does know about Uruk. Uruk is named along with Agade in Gen 10:10. Agade was the base of Sargon the Great’s empire of the 3rd millennium. Perhaps Sargon the Great’s sweep westwards to the Mediterranean coast was also legendary—in the sense of leaving behind a folk memory, something like the enigmatic reference to Nimrod (Gen 10:9). 12 Nippur (Sum. nibru) is a World Heritage site. See Google and Google Earth for maps, objects and details on this ‘Enlil City’. The co-ordinates for the ruins of Nippur are 32° 7'32.14"N and 45°14'0.63"E, a search on the name works too. 12 For the Israelite poet, Yhwh/Elohim characteristically takes action against the violence of war. That idea is embedded in the praises of Israel, as attested in the words of Psa 46: Come, behold the works of Yhwh how he has worked horrors in the Earth. He makes wars cease to the ends of the Earth he breaks the bow and shatters the spear he burns the chariots with fire! (Psa 46:8–9) This phrasing has the scope and vigour of a divine response and an equal assertion of the need that humanity has to acknowledge God, a God who is to be exalted universally ‘in the Earth’ and ‘among the nations’. The poet heralds the ‘horrors’(šammōt )שׁמותthat Yhwh is capable of in overthrowing human conquest. The narrator of the biblical Flood story can embrace the concept of Yhwh/Elohim’s destructive violence as vigorously as this canonical poet does—but one reason for this is that it is already written into his source tradition in terms of Enlil’s decree to wipe out humanity. Yet human life and fertility continues after divine judgments—according to Israel’s prophets. These divine judgments have resulted in the fall of empires. Human sin and violence continues beyond the fall of Nineveh, prophesied in Nahum, for instance. The armies of Alexander the Great rampage across the Fertile Crescent after the fall of Babylon, prophesied by Jeremiah. But uppermost in the narrator’s perspective, as expressed in his Flood story, is what Yhwh God wants. This is not destruction, but rather a covenant relationship in which loyalty from both partners is key to the extension of his grace to the sin that offends him. 13 CHAPTER 2 LEAD CHARACTER? Ūta-napišti spoke to him, to Gilgameš: “I will disclose to you, Gilgameš, a secret matter and I will tell you a mystery of the gods” George 2, Gilgamesh, 703, lines 8–10. Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, 2000, p.109. Narrator and Lead character 1. Narrator, plot and characterization. At line 1 of Gilg. Tablet XI, the narrator starts Gilgamesh talking. King Gilgamesh of Uruk is astonished that the Flood survivor looks human, just like himself, and asks Utanapishtim a key question: “How did you find eternal life?” (George, 88). This question triggers the telling of the Flood story by Utanapishtim. The narrator has stepped back in order to allow the Flood hero to tell his own story in the 1st person. From line 8 on, and for many lines, Utanapishtim holds the floor as he draws back the curtain on those days, those distant days, those nights, those distant nights of the Flood. So surely Utanapishtim must qualify as the male lead for Tablet XI? Perhaps, but before we foreclose, we should ask another question. Could a more complex answer better satisfy the question of lead character/characters? Even the two lines above have three participants in the plot—the gods of the Divine Assembly, the male survivor with eternal life, and the king of Uruk who is seeking eternal life. The question of lead character is further complicated by the skill with which the narrator of the epic as a whole has woven the Flood story itself into his overall literary work. Can we really ignore the ten previous tablets and isolate Tablet XI from the plot as a whole? Our focus is on a Resource analysis of the Flood tellings. That does restrict us from exploring all the interesting leads that are present in such a great literary piece as the Epic of Gilgamesh is, but we cannot ignore one motif that we have not mentioned so far. It is crucial because the two human characters in lines 8–10 above are in dialogue precisely because of this motif. So we could say that the monster–in-the-room to talk about now is Death. We spell it with a capital letter because it is personified by the author of Gilgamesh himself.13 2. Death ever looms. After Gilg.XI line 1, we hear Gilgamesh himself talk again only at line 231. Gilgamesh has not moved since listening to Utanapishtim’s narration of the Flood. Except that he has slumped down and fallen into a deep sleep: ‘sleep was wafting over him like a fog’ (line 211). No sooner 13 Cuneiform wedges know no capital letters or bold face or italics! 14 had Utanapishtim issued Gilgamesh with a challenge, than Gilgamesh began to fail it. The challenge was: “Come on! For six days and seven nights, do not sleep!” (line 209). There is an exchange of lines between Utanapishtim and his wife at this point. They are both looking at Gilgamesh who has nothing to say. He is ‘dead to the world’, as we say, utterly exhausted from his quest so far. In fact, we can say with some assurance that the narrator is presenting us with an image of sleep as ‘death’. The loss of consciousness in sleep and our human inability to stave off sleep is telling. It points to our final and total loss of consciousness in death. Staying awake for a week is beyond Gilgamesh. How much less can he avoid being overwhelmed by death! Sleep is sometimes used as a euphemism for death (e.g. Dan 12:2, 1 Thess 4:14 and 1 Cor 15:18), but in this scene sleep is a portent of Death. Gilgamesh’s deep sleep for a week points to the outcome of the story for Gilgamesh. The fact that this euphemism of death = sleep is found on the lips of Gilgamesh himself strengthens the case. The Sun god (dUtu) speaks to the questing Gilgamesh in an Old Babylonian fragment: “O Gilgamesh, where are you wandering? You cannot find the life that you seek.” (George 2, 276f. OB VA+BM, lines 7´–8´) To which Gilgamesh replies that he wants to be alive: “Within the Netherworld will rest be scarce? [ina libbu erṣetim = ‘within the heart of the Earth’ = Underworld] I shall lie asleep down all the years [nâlu, niālu – ‘to lie down (to sleep)’] atillamma kalū šanātim but now let my eyes look on the sun so I am sated with light.14 When may a dead man see the rays of the sun? [‘sun’ written as šamšu –‘sunlight’] (lines 11´–13´ and 15´) What follows on from the survivor couple looking at the all too human Gilgamesh, asleep, is Utanapishtim’s derisive comment on Gilgamesh’s personal quest for eternal life—“See the fellow who demanded life!” (line 213). His wife is more compassionate: 216. “Touch him, let the man awake! 217. (By) the road he came let him go back in safety, 218. (by) the gate he came out let him return to his land!” We might well hear an implicit contrast here between this road of safe return back to Uruk as doable over against a sub-text, namely, of the idiom of ‘the land of no return’ (mātu la tāri), which is the realm of death.15 Already the finality of death is captured by this idiom in the Sumerian version of Inana’s descent to the Netherworld where she is interrogated by the chief doorman with the following questions as to her business appearing there and bashing away: “If you are Inana going to the east, why have you travelled to the land of no return? how did you set your heart on the road whose traveler never returns?16 In response to his wife’s concern for Gilgamesh, her husband has three words of comment: 14 Compare Qohelet’s reflection: ‘Light is sweet and it is pleasant for the eyes to behold the sun… remember that the days of darkness will be many’. 15 In Sumerian, kur.nu.gi4.a, and as ‘Kurnugi’. 16 LAS, lines 82–84; Harps, 210; ETCSL project, c.1.4.1 15 “Being deceitful, mankind will deceive you’ (line 220, raggat amelūti iraggigki).17 This acerbic generalization chimes in well with a Wisdom aphorism to quote. As I read this couplet, it is a case of first the good news, and then the bad news. The abilities of human beings are frequently turned to malpractice. (With) complex18 speech bestowed on humanity, (Ea and Mami) bestowed on them dishonesty and untruth continuously šarkū ana amelūtu etgaru19 dababa [šarāku – ‘to confer, put at the disposal of’] šarratu u la kinātu išrukūšu santakku [santakku – ‘continuously, regularly’] This rings true for a recent president of America who was characterised—on good evidence— as being an inveterate liar. Dishonesty and deceit will be a constant feature of human relationships, as the sage observes. We could compare what James, the leader of the early Jerusalem church, has to say about the tongue, continuing in the Wisdom tradition.20 Utanapishtim anticipates that after a week Gilgamesh will protest that he has only just nodded off for a moment—untrue. Rather, the slumber week is an indication that time had vanished for Gilgamesh, as indeed it does for all in death. Gilgamesh proves Utanapishtim’s prediction right (line 232f.). But husband and wife had implemented their plan of a proof by loaf and wall mark. This will confront Gilgamesh with his physical failure, and the inevitable failure of his greater quest for eternal life, along with the undeniable fact that he will certainly die in the future. The row of loaves 1–7, the earlier the staler, provides incontrovertible evidence that a week has passed. Notable, is the resonance between this week of sleep with the ‘seven days and seven nights’ mourning that Gilgamesh spent at the side of Enkidu’s corpse. Gilgamesh is still partly in denial as he despairingly asks: “O Utanapishtim, what should I do and where should I go?” Although he answers his own inclination to denial in his next lines: 242. “The Thief has taken hold of my [flesh] [ekemmu] 243. In my bed-chamber Death abides [mūtum] 244. and wherever I might turn [my face], there too will be Death” (George 2, 719; George, 97) Death is personified metaphorically as a ‘Thief’. From the episode of sleep and this exchange between Gilgamesh and Utanapishtim (at line 246), we might wonder whether Death is a lead male character of the epic. Death pervades the epic from the moment that the maggot falls from the nostril of Gilgamesh’s dead friend, Enkidu. The maggot (tûltum) is a symbol of death, like the week’s sleep. These are both memorable and visual images employed by the narrator to accompany his speech-writing. To assess the claim for looming Death as a lead character in the Flood tablet, and indeed in the Flood itself where death is not insignificant, we will need to backtrack from Tablet XI to Tablet X where we hear some fine lines on the lips of Utanapishtim. He is speaking about Death who creeps up undetected and violently chops people down: “Man is snapped off like a reed in a canebreak! The comely young man, the pretty young woman… 17 The verbal root ragāgu I. The adjective raggu ‘wicked, villainous’ is used of evildoers, criminals and demons (CDA, 205). 18 The Babylonian word etgaru is used metaphorically. CDA, 84 offers ‘crossed over, intertwined’ as the literal meaning with ‘complicated’ as the transferred meaning. 19 Translation mine. George 2, 521 sourcing W.G.Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, 88. See too Muses3, 921 Theodicy, section XXVI, lines 279f. 20 See James 3:3ff. 16 Death abducts them! No one at all sees Death No one at all sees the face [of Death] no one at all [hears] the voice of Death Death so savage, who hacks men down.” (SBV, Tablet X, lines 301–307, George, 86; George 2, 696f.; Dalley, 108) From an OB version, we can add lines about the destined and natural ‘fate of humanity’ without any Flood wrecking human life: “(Enkidu) went to the doom of mortal men illik šimātu awīlūtim (line 4) [alāku – ‘to go, walk’; šimtu – ‘fate, destiny’] Weeping over him day and night I did not surrender his body for burial— ‘Maybe my friend will rise at my cry!’ for seven days and seven nights until a maggot dropped from his nostril [tûltum – ‘maggot, (invasive) worm’] After he was gone I did not find life wandering like a trapper in the midst of the wild.” (George, 123; George 2, 272ff., OBV join, ii: lines 2´–11´)21 And again, from the SBV, we hear that this death is the common reversal to clay. The Flood victims of Gilgamesh XI will do the same. How can I keep silent? How can I stay quiet? my friend, who I loved, has turned to clay [tiṭṭu – ‘clay’; ewû, emû – ‘to become’] ibrī ša arammu itemi tiṭṭiš (line 145/K1f, line 246) my friend Enkidu [whom I loved, has turned to clay] [Shall] I not be like him and also lie down [nâlu, niālu – ‘to lie down (to sleep)’] never to rise again, through all ete[rnity]? [dūr dār] (SBV, Tablet X, lines 244–248); (George, 85; George 2, 692f. with K1f, 144–48; Dalley, 103f.) This experience of Enkidu’s lifeless corpse has thoroughly spooked Gilgamesh with the prospect of his own death, and he has already told of his fear to Shiduri the tavern-keeper, and now to Utanapishtim. Living with this fear of Death, he must perforce speak about it. Of course, the motif of mortality makes this epic an epic for all seasons. It is the irreducible certainty of each of the 7 Billion of us on planet Earth, and of any astronaut on a Moon base of the future, or a colony on Mars. Humanity is going nowhere without Death accompanying it. There is no rainbow of hope over the Ocean of Death. Covid-19 and variants has forcibly reminded us all of this presence of death. To add insult to injury, when Gilgamesh is travelling home, he is outwitted by a chancer snake that steals his precious plant of rejuvenation while he is refreshing himself in the cool water of a pool: ‘of the plant’s fragrance a snake caught scent… and carried off the plant’ (line 305f.). The snake sheds its skin. This proves the ‘Old Man Grown Young’(line 299) magic plant would have worked if only Gilgamesh had had the chance to get the plant home and use it. Death, so prominent, is personified—and hence, in some sense, is a character in the story. However, Death has been given no speaking lines by the narrator. So although death outside the vessel is all around the survivors of the Flood inside the boat, Death is not a character in the Flood story itself, nor does it compete in Tablet XI for male lead character. We should look 21 George 2, Fig. 9 is a photo of the joined tablets that date from the OB period. The SBV version retains the most wisdom about humanity’s fate for Utanapishtim speeches in his counselling of Gilgamesh. 17 for a character or characters who the narrator animates with significant speeches. After all, in his telling of the Flood, a narrator has complete control over who speaks and who does not. He receives the ancient bones of the story from oral tradition but then he brings them to life in his drama for his audience who speak in the Babylonian or Assyrian dialects, or can read Sumerian, or who talk in a dialect of Hebrew, with a recognizably Jerusalem accent, or one from further north. The biblical Flood story is conspicuously thin when it comes to dramatic speeches, to put it mildly. But Death is prominent—except we should write that in lower case since death is biological death, the drowning of all living things outside the Ark. The report of death is matter- of-fact. There is no imagery applied and no reflection on it. There is nothing about Sheol, Abaddon or the Netherworld in the Genesis Flood story. This said, death is certainly prominent. Three verbal roots ( )מחה גּוה מותare used in Gen. 7, for the destruction and die off, as follows: • “…and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground” (7:4 maḥāh )מחה • And all flesh expired that moved on the Earth… (7:21 gāvāh )גּוה • everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died (7:22 with mūt )מות • He blotted out every living thing… (7:23 maḥāh )מחה • …they were blotted out from the Earth (7:23b maḥāh )מחה To which we must add the announcement of Chap.6 in order to pick up the announcement~fulfilment motif: • So Yhwh said, “I will blot out from the Earth…” (6:7 maḥāh )מחה • “I will destroy…” (6:13b and 16 šāḥāh )שׁחה It is notable that Gen 6:7, 13b and 16, as well as Gen 7:4, are all located within speeches by Elohim/Yhwh. The intensity lies in the speeches. A place where there is narration without speech, but with an increase of vigour, is when the narrator describes the Flood results, the outcome of death as a total wipe-out. The Genesis narration says it, and underlines it with repetition, but does not allow us to see it. As for the issue of lead character in the Genesis telling, it is the speaker, namely, Elohim/Yhwh, no contest. After noticing, very briefly the significance of direct speech within narration, we will return to Gilg. XI. 3. Lines count as a literary criterion. Literary analysts can, obviously, agree on the maths of counting up lines of speech allocated by a narrator. Of course, in the case of the Gilgamesh epic as a whole, there are lines that are still missing. In 2000 AD, Andrew George reckoned that the complete epic would run to around 3,000 lines of which 575 lines were still missing. Does this invalidate applying this test to the Flood in Gilgamesh? No, not at all. In Tablet XI, we have is a complete text in its Standard Babylonian Version (SBV) thanks to the endeavours of Ashurbanipal’s librarians. The telling of the Flood, explicitly, takes less than 200 of the 328 lines of Gilg. Tablet XI, namely lines 9–206.22 By good archaeological luck and by the hard work done by the Assyriologists subsequently, we have all that we need at our disposal. 22 Presented in Akkadian and English translation in George’s academic Vol. 1, (2003) pp.702–717 and in his paperback translation (1999) on pp.88–95. 18 On this count, the speech of Flood hero Utanapishtim is the front runner by metres for lead character because the narrator of the Standard Babylonian Version (SBV) of Gilg. XI itself has opted for a 1st person telling by the Flood hero that occupies these lines 9–206. This is diametrically different from the Genesis style of narration. Noah never speaks! Gilgamesh gets in his question, the question behind his quest, and the whole purpose of his visit to the Flood survivor: “How was it you stood with the gods in Assembly?23 … How did you find life?”(balāṭa tešû) (w)atû – ‘to find, discover’ (George, 88; Tablet XI, lines 7f.) balāṭu – ‘life, vigour’ After the Flood story is told, and Gilgamesh has woken up to his failure, confronted by the evidence of the tell-tale stale loaves of bread next to him, and has grasped that indeed no one will summon the Divine Assembly back into session to agree to conferring on him eternal life, he feels the grip of Death taking hold of him (lines 244–246). He speaks again to Utanapishtim as one would speak to a wise man, to a counsellor: “O, Utanapishti, what should I do and where should I go?” (SBV, XI:line 243; George, 97; Dalley,117) Do we not feel moved by the emotional pathos of Gilgamesh’s plea? He has exhausted all possibilities. Hope is gone. Despair sets in. On the other hand, in Tablet XI, when we ask about the lead character, the Mother goddess (Nintu/Mami/Bēlit-ilī) has a huge claim to put in when it comes to speech-dialogue among the gods of the Divine Assembly, the convocation that Gilgamesh alludes to in line 7 above.24 Which is why Nathan Wasserman devotes a whole section of his literary discussion to the Mother goddess,25 remarking that she is the ‘most human character in the myth, and her speech is the emotional highpoint of the story’. He makes an excellent case for Nintu, without coming to it in order to offer a so-called ‘feminist’ reading. Clearly, there is interplay among the narrator’s characters, divine and human. So let’s pursue this interaction of lower deck/upper deck, human/deity, as a focus of the various tellings. 4. Flood hero, the Divine Assembly, neither? The Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian gods of the Mesopotamian Flood tellings are many, but only three are relevant here. We could make a case for godEnlil or godEa/Enki as the leading male character who is pivotal to the plot. Each has significant speaking parts, and each appears at key points. Enlil motivates the Flood; Enki thwarts his intentions. We could make a case for the ingenious Ea/Enki in Atrahasis as well as in Gilgamesh, Tablet XI. However, because Enlil, Enki and the ‘Ladylord of the gods’ are all three prominent in the story, we may read them as foils to one another, rather than singling out a male deity versus a female deity, or one of the male deities over against the other in terms of being essential to the plot. In fact, the interplay of the major deities, such as Shamash, Adad, Enlil, Nintu and Enki is the strong point of the Mesopotamian versions of the Flood, but also in terms of its worldview. 23 The verb ezēzu – ‘to stand’ and ina puḫur ilī with the noun puḫrum from puḫāru – ‘to gather’. Jeremiah stands in the Celestial Court of Yhwh (Jer 23), in contrast to the false prophets who manufacture their own dreams. 25 Wasserman, Section 3.5, pp.140–145, noting that her lines and emotions have been reduced from the Old Babylonian version in the SBV version in order, he thinks, ‘not to compete with that of his hero, the narrator, Ūta-napištī’(p.145). 19 How so? This is because an interplay between the forces of nature is how we experience the world and how science understands climate, predator~prey populations, parasitism, disease and the immune system, extinctions and adaptations. Making a single deity responsible for everything as its creator or its controller complicates things. It invites an attempt at a theoretical systemization, a theological equivalent of Quantum theory. The contrast of Mespotamian Divine Assembly tellings of the Flood story with the biblical telling of the Flood is obvious. There is only one speaking part in Gen 6–9, namely, that of Yhwh/Elohim. The weeping Mother goddess is missing, as are any other members of the biblical Celestial Court as actors or agents. The agents of the Celestial Court certainly do appear elsewhere in Genesis, so we need to remember this as we read Gen 6–9. Indeed, before we move on, we need to recall that Israelites in Jerusalem were worshipping ‘the queen of heaven’ (Jer 44), and inscriptions further afield that were also penned by Israelites speak of ‘Yhwh and his asherah’, the Asherah likely being a cultic tree, forbidden in Torah, because it was a symbol of Yahweh’s consort, whose name we know from the Ugaritic texts as ‘Asherah’, the chief consort of El, head of the pantheon. If we read the biblical Flood story without a single reflection on the missing consorts and gods, then we are reading this Israelite story naively and less appreciatively than we should do. So Yhwh alone is the intended male lead character of the biblical Flood story. Yahweh/Elohim and his speeches are key to the whole plot, and, additionally, he is the only one who expresses emotions. We learn nothing about how Noah feels. This is very obviously the choice of the Israelite story tellers. Firstly, because whether God ( )אלהםor Yhwh ( )יהוהappears in the sentences, they are penned by devout monotheists, loyal to the nation’s covenant with Abraham and subsequently with the nation of Israel. This weighs against a retention of ‘gods’ with a small letter in the story, and certainly excludes the foreign deities named in the Hebrew scroll collection, gods such as such as Molek, Baal, Anat, Horon and Tammuz. They face an exclusion zone in the Flood story. However, this theological censorship that the biblical narrator chooses to impose, he cannot extend to the bare bones of the traditional plot. This is a received and perhaps a too well known story in Palestine for a total rewrite. The choice to include the Flood tradition in the proto- history of Gen 1–11 must, therefore, include such features as the divine decision, the motivation for it, tension about this, destruction by Flood waters, everything outside the boat dead, survivors, and arrangements afterwards—all these features will be the bones of any Flood story brought to life in Hebrew. This said, the Genesis story does change everything that is theologically significant: the state of society, the motivation for judgment, the alerting of the survivor to the pending destruction, what happens at the sacrifice, the reversal of policy by the CEO of the Celestial Court, the nature of the blessing in the aftermath; the concept of covenant-in-perpetuity, the restatement of the encouragement to populate the Earth, the explicit inclusion of the Earth and its animals within the covenant so that it is not with an individual, his family and his nation only; the extension of the Creation~unCreation motif to the more explicit Creation~un-Creation~re-Creation motif. 5. The Characterisation of God. If we rule out Noah, Shem, Ham and Japeth—all the male characters in the biblical Flood story—because they have no speaking parts, then we may note them as witnesses to the androcentricity of the cast, remaining as names only. None of these four will be auditioning for the male lead role. They are scarcely characters at all, in any sense of the word. This leaves us with God only in the Genesis telling. God has speaking lines, God is agent/actor, 20 God is observer/participant in the story. God drives the plot forward from its start to its dénouement. The first personal pronoun that we meet with in the Flood story is ‘his’, alongside the 3ms verbs of ‘he saw’, ‘he was sorry’, and ‘he had made’ (6:5f.). Verse 7 starts the lines of Yahweh’s first speech: ‘So Yhwh said: “I will blot out…” (v.7a, ʾemḥeh אמחהfrom root mḥh )מחה, and with this decision, the plot unfolds. Characterisation emerges from role, actions and attitudes, as well as the interplay with other characters and what is said. What God says aloud to Noah and what God says to himself animate the story and prevent it from reading like an after-the event-report just for the record. The Genesis Flood story is not a chronicle. 6. Narrator’s choices. If we have distinguished a potential male lead character on the basis of quantity of spoken lines and of agency in the plot, then what remains is to join up some dots regarding characterization. Now people who read the Hebrew Scriptures will already be so familiar with God as male and God as agent that they may never step back to think about a narrator who tells a story with God in it. The narrator has the power to shape his narrative with his chosen literary devices. This is plainly true for the Flood story. For instance, the narrator alone decides where to start the story and whether to name all the by-standers present, and when to introduce his main characters. He might set the scene first. He also has to decide how many episodes or scenes to include in the story as a unit. He may set his story in places where events were known to have happened, and, in that sense, be constrained and seemingly have no choice. He might take time to describe how they got there, or not. He can decide how much he will disclose to his reader as regards what his characters have said or decided previously, before they appear. One additional feature of story- telling is that it cannot possibly include everything that happens, is said, and who all were present. To get a feel for this selective power of narration, think only of recounting your experience of your day to a friend or spouse. You need to select from your day what to mention and what is not relevant, how much detail to go into, whether to repeat verbatim what someone said to you, or summarise it in your own words. 7. Gaps in the telling. In the biblical Flood story, as in the other tellings, there are going to be constraints and there are going to be gaps of detail. We can mention some below by way of illustration. They are of rather different weights. Some are mere curiosity items, others not so much. Here are 35 items to test your inclination to question a narrator: • What are the actualities of being righteous and ‘walking with God’? • When God spoke to Noah, was it loud, like at Sinai? (6:13 with Exod 24) • Could Noah see God when God spoke to him? • Was it like Moses at the burning bush or on top of Sinai? • Did God speak to Noah in a before-Babel language that was not Hebrew? • Did the narrator know what that language was like? • Why didn’t Noah ask God questions or even question God, the way Abraham does? • Where did Noah get the gopher-wood from? (6:14) • What construction tools did he need, and how did he do the building? • What workforce did he employ? Or was it just him and his three sons? • Where did he get the bitumen from? (6:14) • How much of it did he need to waterproof the boat? • How did he explain to the onlookers what he was up to? Or didn’t he? 21 • What was Noah’s wife called? (8:16) • Did the narrator not know the names of Shem, Ham and Japheth’s wives? (8:16) • What other relatives did Noah leave behind? • Where was Noah living at the time he built the Ark? • How did the animals ‘of every living thing of all flesh’ assemble to embark? (6:20) • How far away did they come from? • How did Noah know which were ‘clean’ animals and which were not? (7:2) • What sort of food was included in ‘every sort of food that is eaten’? (6:21) • What did the lions eat? • How was the food stored and served? (6:21) • How did the narrator know that the water covered the mountains by 15 cubits? (7:20) • Where did all the water go to? • What did the raven eat when it was relased? (8:7) • Where was the olive tree growing that the dove sampled? (8:11) • Were any of the wives pregnant by the time they disembarked? • How did Noah understand what a ‘covenant’ was? (9:8ff.) • What did the narrator know about ‘the mountains of Urartu’? (8:4) • Where was Noah when he got off the Ark? • Where did he go next? • What colours were there in the rainbow? (9:13) • Had Noah seen a rainbow before? • How does God ‘require a reckoning’ when animals turn man-eater? (9:5) Obviously, a narrator can leave gaps for a variety of reasons: • he doesn’t know certain facts that might once have been common knowledge. • he is not personally interested in that detail • too much detail would distract from his main theme • he wants to move the story on, not slow it down • the omitted detail was not in his sources, written or oral; he does not invent detail • nobody asked a question about that when the story was read aloud publicly Perhaps it is easier to think these thoughts in a biblical story with human characters only as speakers, in a telling such as we have in the book of Ruth, where we want to think about the kind of person Ruth is. The narrator helps us. He is interested in that. For instance, he won’t allow us to think of her only in terms of her being a widow and a Moabite. He has much more to offer his readers. It may seem irreverent to devout readers—on first encounter with narratology—to think that we can ask questions about God’s character in the Flood story. On reflection, we will find it impossible not to ask questions. Why? Because God definitely has a character in this story, unlike Noah, about whom we learn so little—however many questions we might put to the narrative. 8. Character revealed—by speech. Now consider that we get to know someone from their postures, gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, accent, clothes, age, bearing and mannerisms—none of which are available to us as readers in encountering God in the Flood story. We can only meet God there through the words on a page, his words and the narrator’s reporting words. Besides these important clues just mentioned that we pick up routinely in daily encounters, perhaps the most important aspect of getting to know someone is what they choose to they tell us about themselves in words. This highlights the point that God speaks and when he speaks in the Flood story, it is revealingly so—that is, revealing of his thoughts, feelings, attitudes and intentions. We can certainly identify the narrator’s boldness in his use of anthropomorphisms in God’s 22 inner disclosure of himself through his inner speech and reported thoughts. And then there is perspective. In vv.5–7, God is elevated above the Earth so that he can look down on its inhabitants, as he does in the city of Babel story. Hence, ‘God saw that the wickedness of humanity was great in the Earth’. This is a conclusion drawn from observation. If we think of Noah as 500 years old when his three sons were born, and another 100 years before the Flood, as well as Noah not being the first human being around, then God obviously has accumulated plenty of data on human beings to confirm his conclusion. Things have only got worse after Cain due to human multiplication on the Earth and the very evident present state of widespread violence (v.11). Yet God, being God, as the narrator understands him, can also directly observe the thoughts, heart, mind, imagination and motivation of human beings before they do anything. If we believe in an observant deity, there are times when we might wish that we were not that transparent to God. This leads us to the next and rather shocking anthropomorphism: ‘Yhwh was sorry that he had made human beings, and it grieved him to his heart’ (v.6). That is a narrator’s summary statement, but it does not stand alone. It is followed up by God’s own reported direct speech: ‘So Yhwh said: “I will destroy humanity that I created… I am sorry that I have made them” (v.7). Now here we meet with characterization. God has deep feelings, and very human-like deep feelings they are. This is not Frank Sinatra singing “I did it my way”. This is God taking responsibility for his creating, regretting it, and actively deciding to reverse his policy up until then of tolerating humanity’s sinfulness. Is God hitherto unobservant, extraordinarily patient, or pushed to his limits at this point, and reactive? These are questions that the narrator will offer no comment on. Yet he risks us raising these questions. We might take it that God has been patient and tolerant for a long time until things reached a tipping point. If so, this is the mother of all tipping points as far as life on Earth goes. We can hardly miss the fact that this most shocking window into God’s feelings and self-reflection are placed front and centre stage in the narrator’s story. The story could have been told quite blandly at this point. For instance: ‘As human beings multiplied, so their sin multiplied to the point where God intervened in judgment. The form that the judgment took was the Flood.’ This is a passionless way of putting it. But the narrator did not write it like that. 9. God speaks his mind. God is a complex character in the biblical Flood story because the narrator lets us see into his heart, into his emotions and his decision-taking, before, during and after the Flood. When we encounter God in 6:5–7, we might recoil at his decision of v.7: “I will destroy…”. It is decisive, even ruthless and implacable since the biblical Flood story has no room for warnings by plague or drought and words of prophecy. No place for the preliminary wipe-out fails of Atrahasis when his fellow council members undermine Enlil’s decision, agreed to in Assembly. In Atrahasis, the gods Plague and Rain are flattered and bought off by human beings stepping up their individual attention to godNamtar and godAdad. Hence Namtar and Adad ‘lifted’ their hand, whereupon the šuruppu-disease ceases, and Adad’s mist and dew relieve the drought (Atr .Tablet 1, vii: 395–410 and Tablet 2, ii:9–34; L&M, 68–71 and 74–77; Dalley, 19–21). Enlil is also a complex character. He is undermined in the telling of Atrahasis. He makes good after his annoyance, motivation and after-Flood anger when he is confronted by two senior deities, Mother goddess Mami/Nintu, and scheming Ea/Enki. No one confronts or challenges Yhwh/Elohim in the Flood story—unlike what happens in the prologue scene in Job. There is no talk-back from Noah, no pleading for God’s mercy, or an appeal to reasonableness such as we encounter in Abraham’s exchange with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah 23 (Gen 18). Noah is no Abraham. Or we could say that the narrators of those two stories set about their task very differently. There is no room in the biblical Flood plot for use of the device of delay to create suspense. The biblical narrator lets us know that God is upset and regretting his decision to create human beings. Thereafter things happen. The plot advances steadily with every speech that God makes (6:13, 7:1, 8:15, 9:1, 9:8, 9:17). At 6:13, God discloses his decision: “I have determined to make an end of all flesh…”. This is as radical as 6:7 that includes writing off humanity and animals. It even adds ‘with the Earth’(v.13c). At 7:1, God tells Noah to board the Ark, adding the theological explanation for this exceptional survival: ‘for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation, (v.7b). This recapitulates what the narrator of 6:8f. told us: ‘These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God’ (RSV). Taken together, 6:8f. and 7:1, provide an apologia for Noah’s survival, but without enlightening us as to the content of his righteousness and walk with God. The narrator’s perspective in 6:8f. is God’s perspective. Enlil has no such thoughts about anyone on earth, pious Atrahasis included. At 8:15, the Flood is over and it is time for God to initiate the next phases of human and animal life by giving the disembarkation command, plus the blessing on the animals: ‘that they may breed abundantly on the Earth and be fruitful and multiply upon the Earth’ (v.17b, RSV). Evidently, God modified his wish to destroy everything, the Earth included. 24 CHAPTER 3 A MEMORABLE WEEK in MESOPOTAMIA At the very first glimmer of brightening dawn, 97 there rose on the horizon a dark cloud of black, and bellowing within it was Adad the Storm God. The gods Shullat and Hanish were going before him, 100 bearing his throne over mountain and land. The god Errakal was uprooting the mooring-poles, Ninurta, passing by, made the weirs overflow. The Anunnaki gods carried torches of fire, scorching the country with brilliant flashes. 105 The stillness of the Storm God passed over the sky, and all that was bright then turned into darkness. [He] charged the land like a bull [on the rampage,] he smashed [it] in pieces [like a vessel of clay.] 109 ***** For six days and [seven] nights, 127 there blew the wind, the downpour, the gale, the Deluge, it flattened the land. But the seventh day when it came, 130 the gale relented, the Deluge ended. The ocean grew calm, that had thrashed like a woman in labour, the tempest grew still, the Deluge ended. “I looked at the weather, it was quiet and still” 135 A.R. George, Gilgamesh, 2003 edition, p.93, lines 97–109 and 127–135. Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, 2000, p.113. 1. Storm force weather. It would never cross our minds to pray to the moon or to worship the sun, so great is the impact of science on our understanding of the natural forces that operate in our world. Of course, understanding these forces scientifically does not exclude us being their terrified by their power. Take tsunamis, for instance. The tsunami of 2004 cost the lives of over 250,000 people as it battered its way ashore at Aceh, Indonesia. Tsunamis seem to come from nowhere and then sweep onshore with unstoppable force, carrying boats and cars along with them, drowning people and flattening weaker structures. Plate tectonics provides a convincing framework of comprehension when we understand that 25 the solid ground of continents that we walk on are actually floating crusts in collision at their edges, pushing and grinding the edge of one beneath the other. The earthquakes that result displace huge volumes of water. The bumps and buckling of inter-continental collisions has made mountains ranges like the Himalayas. The explanation takes a couple of sentences, but the effects of what they capture are devastating. In the Flood story, the forces unleashed to produce the storm are understood as gods at work. Several are named in Gilg.XI. They have counterparts in Atrahasis. Collectively and individually these are the participants: • Adad, thundering line 99 • Shullat and Hanish, with Adad line 100 • Errakal, uprooting moorings line 102 • Ninurta, overflowing weirs line 103 • Anunnaki, carrying torches of fire line 104 2. An animated Big Black Cloud. We will focus first on the terms for natural elements. Day breaks with ‘anything of morning at (its) visibility’ (mimmu šēri ina nāmari), to translate literalistically. Nothing mythical there. This is a time indicator, no deity cited in this natural process and this wording. The ‘black cloud’ of line 98 above is portentous of the storm that brings darkness. Again, a weather phenomenon only. But, No! In the following line we learn that it is emphatically not a black cloud only. It harbours and conceals the storm deity dAdad.26 This black cloud will be reminiscent for Bible readers of the small black cloud that rose over the Mediterranean sea in response to Elijah’s prayer on Carmel after his contest with the prophets of the Canaanite storm deity Baʿalu (1 Kgs 18:41–45). That cloud heralded a rainstorm, but Yahweh was not in the cloud, just as he was not in the stormwind, earthquake and fire at Horeb in the sequel to the Carmel contest (1 Kgs 19:9ff.). The narrator there repeats ‘but Yhwh was not in…’ for each element’s manifestation. There was a theological reason for making this point repeatedly. It is written against the backdrop of the deification of the forces of nature in the surrounding polytheisms. Then, back in Gilgamesh, we jump ahead to the very brief description of the storm. This uses weather words without deities. We have the 3 +1 accumulation of words for the raging elements: ‘wind’, ‘downpour’, ‘gale’ and the ‘Flood’ itself (abūbu). Andrew George’s ‘Deluge’ marks the Babylonian word abūbu as a distinctive flood with its capital letter D. The Deluge is the mother of all floods. In Akkadian, abūbu seems to be preferentially attached to this single cosmic Flood event.27 This is another indicator of how deeply and emotionally etched is this Flood story that was incorporated into the Gilgamesh epic. The word abūbu occurs frequently in Gilg. XI,28 as well as in the antecedent Atrahasis myth. Here, at Gilg. XI, it comes, aptly, as the culminating fourth word after the wind, downpour and gale. 26 Adad is written in Gilg.XI with the Sumerian logogram iškur. godIškur was the storm god worshipped by the Sumerians—the cuneiform script itself demonstrates the religious continuity between the Sumerian and the Semitic occupants of Mesopotamia. 27 See CAD A1, abūbu 77ff. There are numerous metaphorical statements about Flood as a weapon, featuring gods like Marduk and Ishtar, being like the Flood or wielding it. Even Assyrian kings in their war annals compare themselves and their armies with the power of the Flood. 28 Wasserman’s monograph (2020) cites Tablet XI, lines 14, 110, 114, 129, 133, 170, 184, 188, 190, 192, 194. 26 The three lines of the Flood’s onset are matched by four more for its reversal: wind–downpour– gale–Flood … gale–ocean– tempest–Flood (lines 2–3/4–6 ), again with abūbu as the last word. Then the winds and the water of the Flood slacken off to a calm. What a week! Had these lines 97–101 stood in the text alone, they would have conveyed to us what we wanted to know, namely what was the Flood storm like? And, How did it get going? But that was not what the narrator wanted us to know. There is more to his plot. He is well aware that all the gods of the Divine Assembly have agreed on oath to the Flood for annihilating humanity. So where the Flood comes from is from the Divine Assembly, by decree of the Divine Assembly to overwhelm the world. Its origin does not lie with plate tectonics, or with the Tigris and Euphrates in flood, or with melting ice-caps in Armenia and at the poles. This is a supernatural divine intervention, a theologically triggered Flood. The Mesopotamians had no other explanation for it. They read the world differently from us with our daily and long-term weather forecasts on TV and our mobile phone apps. They naturally read events with major effects as the doings of gods. We naturally read events naturally. Unlike Maradonna attributing his goal to ‘the hand of God’. 3. The God-elements. There are multiple deities behind the Flood. The Anunnaki/Igigi as a collective group are carrying their lighted torches aloft (Gilg. XI, line 104). We must imagine flaming torches with the potential to set things on fire. The verb (ḫamāṭu) means ‘to burn up’29—as a besieging army would do upon breaching their enemy’s city walls. There may be an implied simile for an invading army behind the torch-bearing Anunnaki. The Flood is certainly pictured elsewhere as an invasion, onslaught and military attack. For instance, in line 111: ‘like a battle (kīma qabli) [the cataclysm] advanced over the people. Again, in the aftermath, we read how the Mother goddess expresses her remorse, asking herself how on earth she could have assented (‘I spoke evil’ aqbu lemutta, line 120) in the Divine Assembly. The Assembly decree amounted to war, gods versus human beings: ‘to the destruction of my people, war I declared’ ana ḫulluq nišīya qabla aqbî , line 122. Taken prosaically, the dazzling brightness of the torches spreads terror, with the torches acting like military flares so the other gods can see to enact their destruction. Two other named gods wreck havoc on land and sea. The fearsome warrior Ninurta is also behind the welcome spring flood, but now he is breaching the water-system and so ruining agriculture, while Errakal30 disrupts the trade craft moored at their quays. The familiar life-support systems of Mesopotamia, food and trade, are wiped out. In other recensions of Atrahasis, there is an additional god, the dreaded Anzu bird-monster. It tears the heavens to pieces with its talons— presumably to release the store of water from above the lower sky.31 Meanwhile, overhead Adad thunders on, roaring like the bellowing of a bull as his escort out- riders, Shullat and Hanish, go before him across mountain and land—we must think of ‘the land’ as the flat plain of Iraq, walled with towering mountains to its east and north-east. George sees these two minor gods as personifications of the gale (98–101). dAdad is the main protagonist of the approaching storm that causes the Flood. We see this clearly because lines 106ff. take up Adad’s role in the sky again. His spreading dark cloud obscures everything. There is such deep darkness that it prevents one person from recognising another. Retaining the 29 CDA, 104 ḫamāṭu II – ‘to burn (up)’ with mātum – ‘the land’ as object using dipārāti – ‘torches’. 30 God lists equate godErrakal with the Hurrian and Hittite armed storm deities, Teshub and Tarhunta. 31 Restored, the line reads: ‘(An)Zu with his talons tore the heavens’ Zû ina ṣuprišu usarrit šamê (L&M, 92f. and 124f.; Tablet 3, iii:7 with Assyrian recension U, rev.16). Anzu/Sum. Imdugud is thought to be a variety of weather force, such as a sandstorm. It features in early Sumerian myths and iconography. 27 bull image and its association with Adad, his flood tramples the country, smashing it to pieces like a clay pot.32 Sound and fury accompany the destruction. When we read the lines from Atrahasis together with the bellowing bull Adad of Gilgamesh, we have two powerful metaphors, roaring bull and war chariot, two visual images based in the phenomena of thunder storms well-known to Mesopotamians, but interpreted by them as manifestations of terrifying divine power. Adad acts as the authorised executive of the Divine Assembly, but the power of the storm frightens the very gods themselves: ‘even the gods took fright at the Deluge’ (Gilg. XI, line 114; George, 92; George 2, 710f.). It is notable that Adad speaks no lines in the description of the Flood. Apparently, there are lively characters enough involved in the drama at this point, namely, Enlil, Enki and Nintu who are full of words of confrontation. Yet in the Atrahasis myth generally, Adad is given an important role, even a cosmic role in a later Babylonian tablet.33 He is, indeed, person as well as natural element. The narrator can choose how he presents the force of the storm. We can generalise on the Fertile Crescent’s understanding of storm because storm deities span the region. Adad has avatars as Haddu and Hadad. The Semitic storm god/gods appears in many sources from Mesopotamia to Syria and Palestine, on cylinder seals to offering lists, from literary pieces to stele, as the deity part of personal names. He is spoken of in the Semitic languages of Assyrians, Babylonians, Amorites, Syrians at Ugarit and Arameans. The cities of Aleppo and Damascus, both in Syria, especially honoured him. Baal as Baʿalu is Haddu in Ugaritic myths. We know this from poetic lines with characteristic parallelism, calling the Storm god Haddu in one line and Bacalu in its parallel line. In graphic representation, the dynamic element of the Storm god’s power is symbolised by depiction of war weapons—the battle-axe, mace, lance and sword, while the totem bull is ever a favourite as his animal pedestal, a symbol of strength. In Gilgamesh, the thunderous noise made by godAdad is conveyed by the verb ramāmu – ‘to roar, growl’ in its continuous action form (Gtn: irtanmama, eliding to irtammama), meaning ‘he kept on roaring’ which Andrew George has aligned with the bull imagery ‘did bellow continually’ (line 99; George 2, 708f.). Atrahasis uses a different verb (šagāmu) for the roaring of Adad, but keeps the divine noise linked with the Flood-trigger of human noise (rigmu).34 So we have the following lines at the onset of the Flood: 48. The day changed its face 49. Adad kept on roaring in the clouds ištagna dAdad ina erpetī šagāmu – ‘to roar’ Gtn 50. As soon as he (Atrahasis) heard his (Adad’s) noise (rigimšu) 51. Pitch was brought, he (Atrahasis) sealed his door 52. After he closed his door 53. Adad was roaring in the clouds d Adad išaggum ina erpetī šagāmu – ‘to roar’ (Atr. Tablet 3, ii:48–50 and 53; L&M, 92f. modified) 32 We have the support of Atrahasis, (Tablet 3, iii:15 with Gilg. XI:108) even in its broken state: ‘[the Floo]d like a wild ox shattered the land’ [a-b-b]u kīma lî išappu, where the Flood as ‘wild ox’(lû) ‘shatters’ the land (ḫepû – ‘to break, shatter’; iḫ-p[i-ša ̣ ̱ ]). 33 BE 390099 (x). See L&M, 116ff.̣ where Adad is appointed to ‘guard the upper regions’ along with god Sky (dAnu)—see rev. i:8, ii:2, 9, 16. 34 d Nintu says it was her own irresponsible assent that led to her remorse: ‘Over me I listened to their noise (rigimšina)’ (Atr. 3, iii: 43). ‘Their noise’ seems to refer to the noise of her offspring, perhaps in crying out to her before drowning—thus the interpretation offered by Dalley (p.32): ‘I heard their cry levelled at me’. 28 Now the interesting thing about this graphic description of storm clouds gathering is the way that Adad is in the dark cloud but is not the cloud. He is heard—but not seen. He thunders— but his ‘voice’ is wordless. He does not speak. In these lines, Adad remains closer to a force of nature, an element. The narrator does not give him a fully developed character with personality like Enlil, Enki and Nintu the Mother goddess who all have important lines to speak in the confrontation. Instead, it is the power of Adad demonstrated by his control of meteorology— not his voice as words—that is essential for the Flood to happen. This power is presented through another image associated with Adad’s action—the image of the charioteer. In the Assyrian recension of Atrahasis, the lines mentioning Ninurta, Errakal and Anzu are preceded by lines describing Adad’s work: 5 Adad rode on the four winds, [his] onagers 6 The south wind, the north wind, the east wind, the west wind. 12 […] the chariot of the gods… […] 13 [It] sweeps forward, it kills, it threshes […] (Atr. U, rev. 5–6 and 11–12; L&M, 122f.; Wasserman, 95f.) Line 5 is well preserved and the imagery is transparent. Its sense is confirmed by the wording of line 12. The four winds are named as the four points of the compass, as we would state it, but to Mesopotamians who had no compasses with pointing needle, ina šar erbetti refers simply ‘to the 4 winds’. The major directional winds have their characteristic names. For instance, the wind from the west is amurru. The Amorites, the people of amurrû (mar.tu), lived there in Syria, westwards of Assyria. Indeed, they blew in from there to take over Babylonia in the early 2nd millennium, founding the 1st Dynasty of Babylon that included Hammurabi. Adad rides the winds as his battle force chariot. He is not astride the winds like riding a horse. We must picture him standing in the chariot, holding the reins and driving the onagers forwards into ‘battle’ against the land. Adad is charioteer—a personalised metaphor. The giveaway to the metaphor lies in the final word of line 5, namely, parû I – ‘a mule’, but, in context, perhaps a feral version of the horse~donkey cross, known as ‘the onager’, the team animals seen drawing the wooden-wheeled war chariots on 3rd millennium artefacts. ‘The chariot of the gods’ rukub ilāni (line 12) indicates that this is a Ferrari-class machine. Gods, being celestial, like to drive quality sky equipment. The winds are exactly that. They generate power and speed. The strong wind brings the approaching storm clouds. The thunder of Adad’s roar heralds the downpour. The Flood comes on with ‘destructive wind’ (imḫullu).35 4. Drivers of the Storm.36 The imagining of the Storm god Adad in the cloud as the driving force behind storm winds and tempest is a poetic dynamic employed for other deities going into action, notably, Ba’al in the Ugaritic myths. Baal is described as rkb ‘rpt, read with supplied vowels (rākib/rōkeb ʿarapāti) as ‘rider of clouds, cloud rider’. The personal name Bin-ra-kub-Baʿal translates as ‘son of- Rider(rākub)-Bacal’. This also puts Baal in the driving seat. 35 Sum. im.ḫul borrowed into Akk. imḫullu (Gilg. XI, line 133; CDA, 128). The Sumerian Flood story (CBS 10673) features the destructive winds (im-ḫul-im-ḫul): ‘All the destructive winds and gales were present’ (line 201; L&M, 142f.) plus line 205: ‘And the destructive wind (im-ḫul) had rocked the huge boat in the high water’. dIškur, Adad’s Sumerian equivalent, is not mentioned in the preserved lines, but god Sun (dUtu) features as a person worshipped by Ziusudra (‘king Z. prostrated himself before Udu’, and as a natural element: ‘And godSun (dUtu) with his rays entered the huge boat’ (lines 210 and 208; L&M, 144f., cf. ‘godSun (dUtu) came out, illuminating the Earth and the Sky’, line 206). 36 ‘Baal’, in conventional translation, masks the rough breathing consonant in the script (bcl = Bacalu). 29 Indeed, I say to you, O Prince Baal I repeat, O Charioteer of the Clouds37 (KTU 1.1 Baal and Yam, 1.2 iv; Wyatt, 65) This title ‘Charioteer of the Clouds’ is frequent in the text called Baal’s Palace (KTU 1.3–1.4) where senior El is urged to authorise the building of a palace for Baal: And now the season of his rains may Baal indeed appoint the season of his storm-chariot And the sound of his voice from the clouds his hurling to the earth lightning flashes. (Wyatt,101; Pardee, 260)38 Baal’s palace is completed with a ‘window’ and Baal gives voice from it: Baal opens up the rift in the clouds Baal emits his holy voice Baal makes thunder roll over and over again. His [holy] voice [causes] the earth [to tremble] [at his thunder] the mountains shake with fear. (Pardee, CTA 4, 262; Wyatt, 109) Of course, this imagery of a celestial cloud-rider and his voice from concealing clouds is not strange in the ears of one who reads biblical poetry, for Yhwh himself is depicted using the range of imagery from thunder storms. He bowed the heavens and came down thick darkness was under his feet He rode on a kerūb (yirkab ʿāl-kerūb )ירכב על־כרב39 and flew he came swiftly on the wings of the wind He made darkness his covering around him his canopy thick clouds dark with water Out of the brightness before him there broke through his clouds hailstones and coals of fire Yhwh thundered in the heavens and Elyon uttered his voice (Psa 18:9–13, NRSV modified) Ezekiel’s visions (Chaps.1 and 10) and the frightening voice of thunder from within the enveloping cloud at Sinai (Exod 19:13b, 16, 19; 20:18f.) round out this imagery of storm theophany attending the God of Israel. Psa 29 rejoices in the power of the ‘voice of Yhwh’ when ‘the God of glory thunders’ (29:3) and it resounds ‘over the mighty waters’. 37 In agreement with Wyatt’s footnote 136 that ‘the chariot itself would be the clouds’. 38 With Wyatt’s footnotes 136 and 138, and his summary comment: ‘The phenomena of the storm are Baal’s theophany’. 39 The Hebrew cognate root rkb, as in Ugaritic and Babylonian, is combined with the celestial throne- bearer, the kerūb. The English ‘cherub’ is totally misleading. To help us out, we need the Babylonian d kurību – ‘an ethereal spirit’ (CDA, 168). This points us in the right direction to the celestially winged palace guardians, bulls with human heads, such as those on display in the British Museum. Ezek 10 is the best clue for linking these Assyrian entrance statues with the hybrid throne bearers (see Ezek 10:2, 5, 7, 9, 14ff., 20; cf. 1:4ff. and the ‘living creatures’ linked with Chap.10). 30 5. Natural element/personal presence. In Atrahasis, the Assembly decides on using famine as the weapon of mass destruction after god Plague (Namtar) has let them down badly. So ‘his rain godAdad should withhold’ (zunnišu d Adad lišaqqil, Atr.,Tablet 2, i:11; L&M, 72f.). On secret advice, the people respond by building Adad a temple, ‘seeking his door’, and making prayers and offerings exclusively to him (ii:11ff.). Adad was pleased, shamed, ‘and lifted his hand’ (ii:27f.). So here we find godAdad ‘in the city’ in ‘his house (bissu = bītu + šu)’ (ii:20). The Storm god lives among the people and is approachable in ritual offerings and prayers. Elsewhere, Adad is the benign canal-inspector whose rains keep the irrigation agriculture going. Many Mesopotamian gods, notably Marduk and Ishtar, have two sides to them. They can be benevolent, supportive and solicitous—or wrathful and destructive. This is no surprise and is thoroughly consistent with the opposing qualities of elements such as fire, rainstorm and spring flood. As for Ishtar, she is a complex character, but libido and war are her chief domains. She would have joined in peace marches carrying a banner reading ‘Make Love AND War’. This double-take on godAdad as natural element above the Earth and divine person in his city temple says it all for Mesopotamian theology. Their Storm deity could be on the rampage in the skies, or living benignly among his worshipers in the city, just as godSun was in the sky receiving Ziusudra’s prostrate worship and as sunlight was entering into Ziusudra’s boat. Likewise, in Hammurabi’s Code, the river Euphrates is both plain nāru – ‘river’, a waterway to boat on, but the Euphrates is also the Sumerian dingirÍD (godRiver). When you throw in suspects, godRiver will give his verdict by drowning them—or they emerge innocent. If a wife is accused of adultery without witnesses, she should go voluntarily, but unbound, and jump into the Euphrates in order to clear her name and for the sake of her husband: ana mutiša dingirÍD išalli ‘for her husband she shall throw herself into godRiver’. god River is a handy judicial resource, if there are no human witnesses and the judge cannot decide the case. If the couple are actually caught in the act of adultery, and so plainly guilty, god River will administer the penalty: ‘they shall tie them up and throw them into water (ina mê)’ to drown. If a man is accused of sorcery, that man ‘shall go to godID and throw himself in’ (§2). Then there are two possibilities: ‘If godRiver overpowers him… but if godRiver cleanses him…’. So if he drowned, he was clearly guilty. On the other hand, if ‘he goes away restored’—then his accuser ‘is killed’.40 We might categorise this as trial-by-ordeal, but Mesopotamians would see it as verdict-by-deity. The Euphrates is ‘river’, god, water and Judge. A literary piece, given the name King of Justice because it vaunts the monarch as epitome of justice, carries a report of two men taken off to the River ordeal to resolve an accusation of murder. Under guard ‘above Sippar on the banks of the Euphrates’, they appear before Ea/Enki, ‘king of the Apsu’. godEa brings the innocent one safely out of the river. The other man disappeared under water for hours. Finally… ‘his corpse rose up from the river’, all sounding quite natural (rev. iv:17 šalamtuš ultu nāri ilamma with šalamtu – ‘corpse’ and elû – ‘to go up, arise’). But… that is not all: When high noon came his corpse rose up from the river. He had been struck on the head. Blood was running from the mouth, ears and nostrils. The top of his head was burned, as if with fire, his body was covered with blisters.41 40 See CH §132 šalû – ‘to leap’. Likewise, for one accused of witchcraft in §2. §129 nadû – ‘to throw’. See Richardson, Hammurabi’s Laws. 41 W.G. Lambert, Iraq 27 (1965) 1–11 ‘Nebuchadnezzar, King of Justice’ and BM.45690 in a revised translation (Foster, Muses3, 870–874). As Lambert pointed out, ‘river’(ÍD = nāru) and ‘godRiver’ (dÍD) are are both used by the writer in his cuneiform. 31 In this case, godEa is the Judge and the Euphrates is the executioner, inflicting a terrifying and supernatural punishment with underwater fire. This distinguishes an accidental drowning in the Euphrates river from a trial by ordeal in a judicially defined framework. god At one with this theology of Euphrates and Ea is the theology of a prayer to River that invokes River as a judge and purifier: 1. You! River! creatress of everything 2. when the great gods dug you enūma iḫrūki ilāni rabūti (with ḫerû II – ‘to dig, excavate’) 3. They placed divine favour at your side 4. Within you, Ea, king of the Apsû, built his dwelling 5. He gave you fierceness, terror and dread 6. The ‘irresistable flood’(abūb la maḫar) he called your name 7. The wisdom (nēmeqi) of Ea and Asullahi he gave you 8. You judge the judgment of humankind dīn tenēšētum tadinni42 (with dânu – ‘to judge, pass judgement on’) The River, presumably the Euphrates, is a geographical feature of the Mesopotamian landscape, then inhabited by godEa/Enki who is known as ruler of the freshwater deeps (Apsû > Eng. ‘abyss’). Yet River herself has personal traits, especially ‘wisdom’ that she exercises in judgment—presumably of the kind we meet in the river ordeal. River also carries away curses from sorcery, as well as the supplicant’s own sins: ‘receive from me the evil of sorcery/ Let your channel receive all my sins’ (Muses3, 726). Given this kind of theological thinking, it is easy to see how godAdad could be ‘in’ the storm cloud, instigating the Flood judgment of the Divine Assembly. Mesopotamians lived with three or four or five tiers for their ‘theological’ discourse. The lowest level is the everyday experience of sunlight, rain, fire, storm and river water. If they drank fresh water from a spring, or brown water from the Euprates, they would not likely to be thinking that they were drinking the god, of and in the water. Behind a more powerful experience of water, such as the spring flood or a torrential downpour with lightning and thunder, they might have attributed its source and energy to a personal agency, such as Ninurta or Adad. In a judicial context such as an ordeal judgment or the implementation of a curse on an enemy, they would have hoped for a divine agency on their side such as godMoon (Sum dsu.en; Akk. dSîn) to strike the miscreant with leprosy. In cases involving a suspicion of witchcraft, the setting of an evil curse, they would seek the counteractive magic of ritual by invoking an appropriate deity to return the curse to the witch. In the case of a death, they might say ‘she/he has gone to their fate’ where ‘fate’ šimtu is at a meta-level and not equated with the agency a specific deity. Of course, in the biblical Flood story, water is water, rain is rain and the ‘mountains of Urartu’ are geological landmarks and not deified. We only realise how remarkable this pre-science naturalism is in Genesis when we enter the cites of Mesopotamia to visit their cult centres, or watch their gods carried in procession at festivals, or contemplate their artwork, cylinder seals and palace decorations or read their omen texts and counter-witchcraft literature such as the many lines of the collections known as Maqlû and Šurpû.43 42 Transliteration, translation and brief discussion in Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths, 396–398. Translation in Foster, Muses3, 726. 43 Foster, Muses3, has a whole sectiond devoted to Incantations in which figurines are burned in fire. These invoke the fire god dGirra, ‘the firstborn of Anu/ You are the one to render judgment’ (660ff.) 32 CHAPTER 4 THE GREAT CALM But the seventh day when it came 130 the gale relented, the Deluge ended. The ocean grew calm, that had thrashed like a woman in labour the tempest grew still, the Deluge ended. I looked at the weather, it was quiet and still 135 A.R. George, Gilgamesh, 2003 edition, p.93, lines 130–135. Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, 2000, p.113. 1. The Flood—all over in 8 lines. There is a remarkable and unmistakable difference between the 8 lines above and the presentation of the Flood in Genesis. In fact, a year’s difference. The biblical account lingers on the destruction wrecked by the Flood where Gilgamesh summarises its result and focuses on the Flood hero’s reaction. The Genesis Flood is told in prose, the lines above are Babylonian poetry. In this section, we will look at the content and the literary effects achieved by the narrators as they handle this Mesopotamian Flood tradition. But what are these literary effects, and do these devices enhance the telling for us in our culture at a remote distance from the Old Babylonian period of 1700 BC and of the Standard Babylonian Version in its 7th century library editions? 2. Literary devices: a summary. (lines 127–134) What literary devices can we identify in the brief compass of these 13 lines of Gilgamesh in English translation that deserve our appreciation? The following literary effects come through, even in translation: • telling word repetition: · sonorous repeats of abūbu – ‘the Deluge’. · storm elements: word clusters with variation • contrasting dualities: storm and stillness; darkness and sunlight. • reportage to eyewitness speech: objective report ramped up to personal account. • seven symbolism: total days and finale day. • striking similes: woman in labour; land ‘flattened’. From these few lines alone, we can say a good deal about the difference in style and theology between the Flood in Gilgamesh and the Flood in Genesis. 33 The Gilgamesh tradition, in its written form, reaches back to the Atrahasis myth44 and the so- called Ark Tablet,45 both sources coming to us in tablet copies from around 1700 BC. The early copies and versions of the Flood myths thus originate from a period long before the tablet copies that were collected in Ashurbanipal’s library of the 7th century in Assyria to which we owe the majority of the preserved lines of the Gilgamesh epic published by Andrew George in 1999 and updated subsequently by him with fresh pieces as they were identified. The Atrahasis version of the Flood is evident in what Gilgamesh presupposes as background information—for instance, the role of Nintu, the Ladylord of the gods, forming human beings from a base of clay. Gilgamesh is reworking the Atrahasis myth for inclusion of a section of it. The narrator of Gilgamesh prefers his own honorific nickname for the hero—Ūta-napišti = ‘I found life’—but also refers to him as ‘Atrahasis’ in lines 49 and 197. The reworking of traditions for new purposes and audiences, by the incorporating of fresh literary motifs and imagery, is a phenomenon of both biblical and extra-biblical Ancient Near Eastern literacy. Indeed, this recycling process applies to the Apocalypse of John that closes the Christian canon. John reworks motifs from Daniel and Ezekiel, among others. 3. A week passes. The 7th Day of the Flood in Gilgamesh brings with it a climax of revelation—the aftermath of destruction. In seven succinct lines of poetry (lines 127–134), we move rapidly from the Flood’s terrifying onset into a deadly silence. The stepped ‘six days and seven nights’ (line 127) is more poetic than a plain ‘after seven days’. This time elapse framework of a week-long Flood culminates in ‘the 7th day, in its arrival…’ (7 mū ina kašādi, line 129). There is a lot packed into a week here compared with the biblical year-long Flood that is fixated on dates—at a guess for their before~after symmetry46 and their connections with a form of weekly cultic calendar or with New Year. The 7th day is no surprise. Babylonians and Israelites liked numbers that developed an association. Common to Creation and Flood stories in both cultures, and other Semitic cultures as well, such as that of Ugarit, is the number 7 as special. It is no surprise, then, that we hear of 2 x 7 = 14, as places intruding above the waterline (line 141), nor that the 7th day of line 147 marks the end of one section of the Gilgamesh Flood plot and begins the next, namely the Bird episode. 4. Flood as onslaught. In brief compass, the Tablet XI narrator piles up the words in lines 127–134 to convey the force of the elements before their subsidence. The effect of this unleashed elemental energy is summed up in a terse two words: isappan mātu ‘it flattened the land’, using the verb sapānu. The semantic range of sapānu fits the effects of this Flood well since it can be used for agricultural land work like plowing the surface, but also metaphorically for an invading army’s onslaught, laying waste. This overwhelming seems to envisage the flat plain of Iraq under water. Sundried mudbrick and kiln-fired mudbrick were used for constructing walls in the Mesopotamian cities, so the image of the Flood laying everything flat would be expressive and credible to its audience. The idea of Flood as weapon and attack is a favoured metaphor. In self-recrimination the Mother goddess says: “How could I speak evil in the gods’ assembly/ and declare a war (qablu) 44 Published by W.G. Lambert & A.R. Millard (L&M) in 1969. 45 Published by Irving Finkel in 2014. 46 Gordon Wenham offers a perceptive discussion in his commentary, Gen 1–15, WBC 1, 1989. 34 to destroy my people?” (line 121f.) The overwhelming Flood is an onslaught: ‘like a battle (qablu) [the cataclysm] passed over the people’ (line 111). Compare too the Atrahasis wording: ‘upon the people came kāšūšu’ (Tablet 3, 3:12). The kāšūšu is a weapon of a god or king: ‘the Flood…[] the land…[]… the kāšūšu-weapon went against the people like an army’ (Dalley, 31 and 33; Atr. Tablet 3, 3:12). Compare ‘gathered the people to catastrophe (karāšu)’ (Atr. Tablet 3, 5:43). In the Cuthean Legend of Naram-Sin, the writer wants to describe a military invasion. He uses the simile of the Flood for its impact: It (the invasion) laid low cities, hamlets, and holy places, It has levelled everything completely! Like that Deluge of water (abūb mê) that arose, [ ] among the ancient peoples (nišī maḫriāti) of [the land]47 (Foster, Muses, 345, lines 6–9, referring to the devastated area around Sargon’s capital, Agade, ‘the land of [Akk]ad’). 5. Local/global/cosmic? The word mātu ‘land’ is used regularly for where the people in Mesopotamia are living. There are other Babylonian words and phrases for remoter regions that the author did not choose, words such as: ‘district, region’(nagû), the ‘inhabited world’ (dadmū) and ‘the four world regions’ (kibrātu – ‘world, edges’ to describe ‘the edges of the world’, its remote regions.) Certainly, the Atrahasis myth is focused on the obliteration of this local Mesopotamian human occupation, yet it sets the scene in its tripartite universe, with Upper deck the domain of godAnu (the Sky = Heavens); middle Earth where godEnlil lives in his shrine the Ekur in Nippur; and the Apsû, the watery deep beneath where godEa/Enki resides. At the beginning of the Atrahasis myth, the major male deities Anu, Enlil and Ea cast lots and divide the cosmos among themselves into three tiers of Sky, Earth and Abyss. godSky (Anu) above is where all the frightened deities flee—‘to the heavens of godAnu’ (ana šamê ša dAnum, line 114). The sky is demythologized in the biblical narrative, and forms the binary duality of Heavens~Earth as the scene of judgment. As Gen 6 puts it: ‘a flood of waters on the Earth to destroy from-under-the Heavens (mittaḥat haššāmāyim )מתחת השׁמיםall flesh in which is the breath of life’ (Gen 6:17). The Hebrew word for ‘sky, heavens’ šāmāyim occurs in the masculine plural form, but without an assignment of layers within it to different celestial powers. When the duality of Heavens~Earth is foregrounded, we are justified in writing ‘Earth’ with a capital letter. For instance, Gen 1 has God creating ‘the Heavens and the Earth’. This is not about ‘the ʾereṣ ארץof Israel’, i.e. ‘the land of Israel’, a local region. It is Sky above and Earth beneath at Gen 1:1. In the biblical Flood story too, there is an Earth and Heavens perspective. The scope of the destruction in the biblical Flood narrative underlines this global connotation. The Yahweh Elohim telling of Genesis has the waters released from the sky rather than from Yahweh’s immediate celestial presence: ‘the windows of the skies/heavens were opened’ (ʾarūbōt haššāmāyim niptāḥū )ארבת השׁמים נפתחו. The terms ‘windows’ and ‘fountains’ of Gen 7:11 are very obviously not what we would call meteorological and geological language. Instead, they are an effective use of picture language applied to the physical world. The ‘rain’(gešem )גשׁםand the ‘water’(māyim )מיםthat result are familiar natural elements (7:12a and 17). 47 Compare ‘like the Flood waters’ (kīma abūb mê) ‘among the peoples of olden time’ (ina nišī maḫriāti) cited in CAD, A.1, 77 from an Old Babylonian era copy. 35 6. Where it all begins. In all the tellings of the Flood story, there has to be a local start. The vessel that carries the survivors has to be built first and that means built somewhere specific. No boat, no float. The plot demands a local embarkation and launch site. In the lead up to the Flood ‘solution’ in Atrahasis, the people build a temple for the plague god Namtar who, as a result, stops his plague. Next, they build a temple for the rain god Adad to buy him off from implementing the second attempt at a wipe out of humanity: ‘in the city they built his house’ (ša dAdad ina āli ibnû bissu ; Atr. Tablet 2, Col.ii:20; L&M, 74f.). The temple for Adad gives the telling a focus in the land of the Flood hero. Likewise, for Gilg. XI, there is a local start, because Utnapishtim, the Flood hero, lived locally in Shuruppak ‘on the banks of the Euphrates’ where ‘the gods once were in it’ (Gilg. XI, lines 11ff.; George, 88). In Atrahasis, the junior gods were at work ‘digging the river (narā)… the life of the land (mātu)… the Euphrates (puranata)’.48 This leaves us in no doubt as to where the Babylonian, Assyrian and Sumerian versions of the Flood story located the event, and where the tablet from Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast in Syria followed on from their lead. The start of the Flood was in Babylonia, southern Iraq. The vessel in Gilgamesh is enormous. Its construction demands a workforce. They assemble at ‘the gate of Atrahasis’ for an early start. At the very first glimmer of brightening dawn at the gate of Atrahasis assembled the land the carpenter carrying [his] hatchet the reed-worker carrying [his] stone. (lines 48–51; George, 90) These lines tell us three things: (a) the author of Tablet XI knows the name of the hero of the Atrahasis myth, and follows on in this tradition, (b) that Atrahasis’s front door is where the narrator locates the assembling of the building squad, (c) and that he uses ‘the land’ (mātu) locally, and that this is where the story begins, in the city of Shuruppak, in what we would call the region of southern Iraq. It is there, to his gate, that Atrahasis calls the city elders and spins his cover story ahead of embarking. He has set his water-clock for the ‘coming of the Flood on night 7’ (bâ’iā abūbu 7 mūši, Atr. 3, 1:37) and then he ‘assembled the elders to his gate’ (šibūti upaḫḫir ana bābišu, line 39) to address them (saqāru ana– ‘to speak to’, line 41ff.).49 The tension between a locally placed Flood and a cosmic theological setting is apparent in the Mesopotamian tradition. After all, Sky is cosmic even if Shuruppak is local. godSky (Anu) is up above, as the mythologized feature of nature, and that is where all the frightened deities flee— ‘to the heavens of godAnu’ (ana šamê ša dAnum, line 114). In Mesopotamian theology, there is only one set of deities, the ones worshiped in the temples of ancient Iraq that were the ‘bond of heaven and earth’. There is only one Divine Assembly that comes to a decision to send the Flood. The cities of ancient Iraq, were what they thought of as the centre of the human world. Was Nippur not where godEnlil lived? Was Uruk not the ancient site of Anu and Inanna’s shrines? Did godEnki/Ea not have his shrine at Eridu? The authors of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh had no inkling that human beings had emigrated to Australia around 40,000 years ago to join the giant wombats living there. They thought of their cities, especially Babylon later on, as the centre of the world, linking Earth with Heaven. The known world of the 3rd and 2nd millennial political scene and epics centred on Mesopotamia, but of course also included conquered territories reached by their armies, enabling their kings 48 L&M, 43 sigla S, Assyrian Recension, lines 5–7. 49 Atr.Tablet 3, 39–41; L&M, 90f.; Dalley, 30. 36 to boast, quite falsely as we might read it, that they had conquered ‘the four quarters of the world’ (arbâtti kibrāti). 7. The Story floats. The biblical story, by way of contrast, anchors its Ark building nowhere. Its repeated phrases used before, during and after the Flood carry the global sense of ארצʾereṣ as ‘Earth’, in keeping with its motif of a total wipe out of human and animal life. Already, in the ‘sons of God’ and the Nephilim prelude, we note at 6:1 ‘on the surface of the ground’, together with 6:4 ‘on the Earth in those days’. In the Flood story proper, from 6:5 onwards until 8:3, the story floats along unanchored until ‘the Ark came to rest upon the mountains of Urartu’ (8:4). In between prelude and launch, Yhwh/Elohim inspects the state of universal violence that has set in among all humanity and declares his intentions. These are fulfilled with repeated references to the Earth in variant phrases. If we are hearing the voices of two Israelite narrators blended in our canonical story, as seems probable, then both share this global perspective and both use the term ‘Earth’ (ʾereṣ )ארץin their sentences to keep this global perspective before their audience. At Gen 6:11, we hear this statement, a metonomy, with the Earth as subject of the reflexive verb: ‘the Earth had corrupted itself before God’ (tiššāḥēt hāʾāreṣ lipenēy hāʾelōhīm). This is reiterated with ‘the Earth was filled with violence’, plus ‘God saw the Earth…’ complemented by ‘all flesh had corrupted their way upon the Earth’ (6:11ab, 12ab). God communicates this universal perspective to Noah in direct speech mentioning ‘all flesh’, ‘the Earth’ and the destruction of humanity ‘together with the Earth’ (6:13). This sets the scene, unequivocally, as worldwide. After this preview, the Genesis telling makes frequent references to the scope of the wipe out, using the prepositions locating the Flood on Earth, and once under the heavens above: ‘upon’(ʿal) frequently, ‘from beneath’ (mittaḥat), ‘in’(be), ‘upon the face of’ (ʿal penēy kol), ‘from upon the face of’ (mēʿal penēy), ‘from’ (min). Thus we hear ‘Earth’(ʾereṣ )ארץ repetitively (6:7, 6:11,12, 13b, 17abc; 7:4, 6, 10,14b, 17ab, 19, 21ab, 23ab; 8:1, 3). In this string of references, each mention is non-specific but intentionally global. The local/universal tension—evident in Atrahasis—is only exacerbated by Yahweh monotheism. Yahweh alone was both Creator and Judge, deciding to send the Flood (mabbūl )מבל. Yhwh it is who observed both the human behaviour and the heart: ‘the wickedness of humankind’ (rāʿat hāʾādām רעת האדם, Gen 6:5), using the collective sense of ‘the man’ (hāʾādām )האדםfor humanity as a whole at 6:5 and 6, and in v.7, the Creator is referring back to his creation of human beings: ‘I will destroy humanity (hāʾādām) which I created (ʾašer- bārāʾtīy ’)אשׁר־בראתי. In the narrator’s perspective, this destruction plainly includes all human beings, the Ark riders excluded. We should remind ourselves, as we did for the Mesopotamian narrators, that the biblical authors as a whole had no conception of the emergence of our genus Homo. The genus Homo itself appeared long after bipedal walking by primates like Ardipithecus ramidus and the Australopithecines between 4 million years ago and 2 million years ago. This upright walking then took our species out of Africa and across into India, Asia and China. Eventually, across the Baring Straights and down into North America and then South America. This process of global distribution had been completed thousands of years before cities like Uruk, Ur and Eridu appear on the map, or the pre-pottery Neolithic inhabitation of Jericho around 8,000 years ago, in a rift valley area 864 feet below sea level that is without any evidence of a Flood layer.50 50 The Clovis stone tool assemblage of c.13,000 years ago has long been taken as benchmark evidence for our specie’s migration into North America. The city of Uruk is dated around 4,000 BC. Bipedalism 37 8. Noise at Nippur. It was the noise that people were making that motivates godEnlil to convene the Divine Assembly and get their agreement to wipe out humanity. The people, before this, had been created to take over the wearisome agricultural work done by the junior gods who went on strike. As Atrahasis describes the problem: Twelve hundred years had not yet passed When the land (mātu) extended and the peoples (nīšu) multiplied51 The land (mātu) was bellowing like a bull The god got disturbed by their uproar (ḫubūru). Enlil heard their noise (rigmu) and addressed the great gods. The noise of mankind (rigim awīlūti) has become too intense for me with their uproar (ḫubūru) I am deprived of sleep. (Atr. 2, lines 1–8; Lambert & Millard, 72f.) The ‘noise of humankind’ in line 7 uses the collective noun awīlūtum – ‘humanity’,52 built from awīlu meaning ‘a man, a human being, a person, a free citizen’. The ‘god’ of line 5 above is Enlil. So these clamorous ones are living in the cities of Mesopotamia where Enlil’s temple, the É.kur, was located at Nippur. The temple, the E.kur, is mentioned by name in Atrahasis when it is surrounded in the middle of the night by the angry mob of gods who are on strike: ‘The temple (bītu ‘house’) was surrounded, but the god did not know’, ‘É.kur was surrounded, but Enlil did not know’ (Atr. 1, 2:71 and 73; Dalley, 10) So here we have another locally fixed point—the sacred city of Nippur with the residence of the locally living god, Enlil, who chairs the Divine Assembly and decrees the Flood. This underlines how different is Yahweh who, officially, is not contained in a local temple in Jerusalem according to canonical Yahwistic theology (1 Kgs 8:27), and who does not slumber or sleep (Psa. 121:4), and who decides on the Flood without consultation or confrontation. emerges at 4 million years ago. Our species Homo sapiens sapiens is identifiable around 200,000 years ago. 51 ‘the country became too wide, the people too numerous’ (Dalley, 20). 52 CDA, 31. 38 CHAPTER 5 CLAY and TEARS “I looked at the weather, it was quiet and still, 135 but all the people had turned to clay. The flood plain was flat like the roof of a house. I opened a vent, on my cheeks fell the sunlight. Down sat I, I knelt there weeping, down my cheeks the tears were coursing.” 140 A.R. George, Gilgamesh, 2003 edition, p.93, lines 127–140. Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, 2000, p.113. • implicit analogy: storm and emotional turmoil; water and tears. • contrasting sequence: storm ends, tears begin. • allusion resonance: clay before creation of human beings and at their dissolution. 1. When Sunlight brings tears. We noted the literary effect of contrasting dualities of storm and stillness, with the implicit analogy between the inner storm of Utanapishtim’s emotion and the raging turmoil of the Flood. The sequence flows on now from report to eyewitness experience. This is signaled by the prominent ‘I’ and ‘my’ of the personal action and reaction. These lines connect the dualities of storm~stillness, tempestuous waves~flat calm, living survival~return to clay, dark interior~sunlight illumination. We need to illuminate the artistry of these lines with their backdrop in the tradition, and to explore the characterization of Utanapishtim and his emotion and compare this with what we find the biblical Flood telling. Emotions are what bring a character to life as they elicit our empathy. They become a mechanism that draws us into the narrative. Here, Utanapishtim wept. When the noise of the people is over that disturbed Enlil, and the storm weather too has subsided, there is a great silence: ‘it was quiet and still’ (line 134). This contrasts with the vigorous metaphor of a woman thrashing in her labour pains: ‘the ocean grew calm, that had thrashed like a woman in labour’ (line 132).53 This graphic figure of speech with labour pains is 53 Now the word for ‘ocean’ in Babylonian is tiāmtum, tâmtu and this is personified into the goddess Tiamat, the opponent of Marduk, in the battle of Enuma elish. Perhaps this feminine noun and female 39 totally unlike the descriptive style of the Genesis version. Similes are missing there. The rising water of the Genesis version is distinctly different from the dramatic onslaught of an array of gods in releasing destruction, described in the lines of Gilgamesh (lines 98–105), an elemental eruption that frightens the gods themselves. The gods take flight, seeking respite in the uppermost sky, the realm of godAnu where they ‘cower like dogs’ (lines 114–116). There the Mother goddess, Nintu, Ladylord-of-the gods (bēlet ilī) ‘cries out like a woman in childbirth’ (George, 92; line 117, kīma allitti : noun wālittu ‘one giving birth’; verb walādu – ‘to give birth’), forming a nice resonance with the turbulence of the Flood. By assenting in the Divine Assembly to the Flood edict mooted by Enlil, Nintu has given birth to the mechanism for destroying her own offspring. Hence, her cry of grief seizes her. It is wrenched from her depths by grief-pain as intense as the physical pains of childbirth. At the creation of human beings, Nintu ‘gave birth’ to them, metaphorically speaking, by working the clay along with the birth goddesses. Now Nintu bewails their death passionately. Her regret is expressed with full emotional colouring. Now we see what Utanapistim sees: ‘all the people had turned to clay’ (kullat tenešēti itūra ṭiṭṭi, line 135). The verb târu means ‘to turn, return, turn again’, hence in this context, to ‘revert to clay’. The Flood has reverted the entire human population to its original substance, the clay from which it had been moulded by the Mother goddess. We have access to this background in the Atrahasis myth where clay features prominently in the creation process (ṭiṭṭu Atr.1:203, 213, 226, 231, 234, 252). Nintu, the creatress, uses the 14 pieces, the pinched off lumps of clay, ‘seven and seven’ that were the start-up for male and female humans (Atr. 256–258 karṣu ‘piece’ from verb karāṣu – ‘to pinch off, break off’). In Gilgamesh XI, the Mother goddess looks back to those ‘olden days’ with remorse. She weeps over her drowned offspring that she created at the beginning: “It is I who give birth, these people are mine!”, she says (line 123). Indeed, “the olden times have turned to clay” (line 119). This is an ellipsis. She says ‘those distant days’ (ūmū ullū), the long ago, have reverted to clay in referring to the present reality of the Flood with its aftermath of clay which is a return to the beginning when clay existed but not people. She was present back then and is now. Her people once were not and now, again, are not. In Gen 6, God likewise refers back to his creating of human beings—but unlike Nintu, he now regrets this creative act bitterly. It grieves him ‘to his heart’: ‘So Yhwh said (to himself): “I am going to destroy humanity that I created from off the surface of the ground…” (Gen 6:7). The verb bārāʾ ‘ – בראto create’ combines with a play on words between ‘humanity’ hāʾādām and ‘ground’ hāʾadāmāh, both with the definite article hā-. This resonates with Gen 2:7 where ‘Yhwh God formed the man hāʾādām (with/from) dust from the ground’. At Gen 2:7, ‘the man’ is the individual, Adam, as we might call him, whereas at 6:7 it is the collective use ‘mankind, humanity’, the whole lot. In both the Gilgamesh telling and the biblical story, we have expressions of intense emotion experienced by deities, by Yahweh and by the Mother goddess, Nintu. However, the differences are as great as the polarity of genders. Yahweh feels regret before the destruction, but none afterwards. Nintu suffers regret afterwards, together with self-recrimination. In both Gilgamesh and the biblical Flood story, the stated and intended outcome is a total wipe out of humanity. It may sound like that in Gen 6:7—and yet God plans the Ark. He plans for survival. There is no leak of the Celestial Court’s decision in the monotheistic story, and no personal god to whisper the plan and a work-around solution to Noah. There are no tears shed goddess stimulated the image of the thrashing (maḫāṣu – ‘to beat against, strike’) of the woman in labour (kīma ḫayyaltu –‘like a woman-in-labour’; verb ḫiālu – ‘be in labour’). 40 in the biblical story. Noah himself is silent and there is no godNintu in Genesis to weep over drowned humanity or to recriminate herself for her compliance, or to round on Yahweh as the Mother goddess rounds on godEnlil. Yhwh plans for survivors and knows about the Ark resting on dry land. The two versions, biblical and Mesopotamian, are poles apart in their tellings precisely because an unswerving Yahweh-only theology is radically different from Mesopotamia’s entertaining Divine Assembly. 2. Clay, flesh and dust—beginnings to endings. We noted that the Mother goddess and Yahweh both refer back to the time of the creation of human beings. Thus the Flood, in both the biblical and Mesopotamian traditions, is set over against the creation as the un-Creation of life on Earth. We have access to this creation background in the Atrahasis myth where clay features prominently in the creation process (ṭiṭṭu– ‘clay’; Atr.I:203, 213, 226, 231, 234, 252): After she had finished her incantation (šiptu – ‘incantation, spell’) She nipped off fourteen pieces (of clay) kirṣi 14 uktariṣ Seven she put on the right Seven on the left. (lines 255–258; karṣu ‘piece’ from verb karāṣu – ‘to pinch off, break off’). The creation of humans in Genesis is very different. Not just the absence of a goddess in the process, and the absence of a magical spell, but the difference between clay and dust (ʿāpār )עפרfor the man, and the rib from the man for his woman. “Since you are dust to dust you shall return,” God pronounces (Gen 3:19c). The idea of reverting to dust has the verb ‘to turn, return’ (šūb )שׁוב, used twice, and supported by the preceding phrases ‘until your return (šūb )שׁובto the ground (ʾadāmāh )אדמהfrom which you were taken…’. Death is an un-creation here in the Eden story. Hence death, on a massive scale in the Flood story, is an even more impressive reversion: ‘You shall certainly die’(mōt tāmōt מות תמותGen 2:17); ‘all… died (mētū …)מתוonly Noah was left’ (Gen 7:21–23). One of the biblical terms for the victims of the Flood is the all-inclusive term ‘flesh’ (bāśār שׂרָ )ָבּat Gen 6:12,13,16,19 and at 7:15, 21. The narrator applies ‘flesh’ to both humans and animals. Sometimes he works with the two-box binary of ‘from humanity to…’ (mēʾādām ʿad )מאדם עד, naming humans over against the various categories of animals, domesticated and wild, walking, creeping and flying. This expiry of ‘all flesh’ resonates with the previous story of ‘breath’ in ‘nostrils’ (Gen 2:7) in which the breath is ‘the breath of life’ (nišmat ḥayyīm נשׁמת )חיים. We find this wording from Gen 2 appearing in the wording of the biblical Flood at 7:22b (nišmat ruaḥ ḥayyīm beʿappāyw ‘breath-of spirit-of life in his nostrils’). Death stamps its reversal on all forms of life on Earth. This return to clay in Gilgamesh and the expiry of the breath of life in Genesis both identify the effect of the Flood as an act of un-Creation. Of course, this is an analogy. Planet Earth was covered in water before Dry Land emerged at creation. It is covered again in the Flood—and then the Earth dries out. But the sun, moon and stars are not un-created. After the Flood the animals are not newly created—they simply emerge from the Ark to carry on breeding. Nor are humans re-designed—they too carry on multiplying as the offspring of Shem, Ham, Japheth and their wives. The un-Creation is typology, not de-Creationist literalism. 3. At first sight. When Utnapishtim gets the window opened on the post-Flood scene, he sees a vista that is flat from horizon to horizon: ‘the flood plain (ušallu) was flat like the roof of a house’ (line 136). The flatness of the ‘roof’ (ūru) of a Mesopotamian house compares with the ušallu-flats, the 41 surface left by still water and sediment. Perhaps the writer had observed a claybed, a layer formed by silt settling in still water to make clay. Perhaps at the bottom of a cistern. The archaeologist Leonard Wooley certainly had seen an impressive silt layer, empty of pottery, in his excavation of Pit F at Ur. Other layers of silt-laid clay appear at other dates and at other Mesopotamian cities.54 None of these floods in the Early Dynastic period in Iraq from 2,900 BC downwards interrupted the human occupation and cultural record of Mesopotamia. What is remarkable in the Gilgamesh retelling is the author’s imagination in letting us see the scene through the eyes of his protagonist. We enter his skin: ‘I opened a vent, on my cheeks fell the sunlight’ (line 137). The ‘light’ (urru) on his cheeks was followed by his tears: ‘Down sat I, I knelt and I wept / down my cheeks the tears were coursing’ (lines 138–139). The repetition of ‘cheeks’ comes with the contrast of effects. The Flood had brought darkness: ‘all that was bright then turned to darkness’ (eṭû – ‘to become dark’, line 106). The opening up let in contrasting and welcome light—but only to bring grief. We will find nothing like this in the Genesis version, neither the light/darkness imagery nor the grief. When Noah removes the cover of the Ark, this happens: ‘he looked, and behold the surface of the ground was dry’ (Gen 8:13b). There are no rotting corpses on view. The writer allows Noah no expression of emotion. Not here, nor in the entire account. The following verse is more interested in supplying the readers with a date: ‘day 27 of the 2nd month’ (v.14). Nor does Noah take any initiative after looking at the dry ground. God tells him to disembark (v.15). God shut him into the Ark and God tells him now to exit it (8:15 with 7:16b ‘and Yhwh shut him in’). 4. Same outcome, different responses. These two ways of retelling the Mesopotamian Flood story are radically different, even at the point where the plot demands that there is some statement in each to get the named character off the vessel and back onto terra firma. Where the narration in Genesis really reverberates and the narrator is perhaps intending to shock his readers, if not Noah, who cannot see out of the Ark, is in the lines describing the external effect of the Flood. There are solemn repetitions—of the death of every living thing. We see no floating corpses the way that the Mother goddess sees her offspring’s corpses. We just hear— with horror—that the intended outcome has happened: ‘all flesh died…w, x, y, z and all humanity (‘all the-man’, collective use of the definite article form ‘the man’: kol hāʾādām כל ;)האדםeverything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground, man and animals, and creeping things and birds of the air. They were blotted out from the Earth (NRSV modified, 7:21–23b). The root ‘to wipe out’ māḥāh recurs—from the intention of God expressed in Gen 6:7 that includes human beings, beasts, creeping things and birds to its fulfilment in 7:23 where they are all ‘wiped out’. This story is emphatically not a children’s story! God had made them all in the back-then, and regretted it (Gen 6:7b). To us, the creatures seem innocent, innocent of the offence of spreading the violence that emanates from the heart and wickedness of Man (raʿat hāʾādām, 6:5). They die anyway. The background to the violence of the destruction is the violence perpetrated by humans who ‘corrupted’ the Earth, filling it with ‘violence’ (ḥāmās חמסat v.11b and 13) before God steps in 54 Kitchen, a conservative scholar with in-depth Ancient Near East expertise, explains the clay and the myths as folk memory leaving its traces: Presumably, because, in folk memory, there had been a particularly massive one [flood], far more fatal than most, and the memory stuck ever after, until finally it entered the written tradition. (On the Reliability of the Old Testament, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003, 426) 42 to ‘corrupt’ it in judgment. The writer uses the same verb, šāḥat שׁחתin permutations (6:11, 12, 13) to describe what humans have done and what God will finish—English translations tend to obscure this play on words by using different words, ‘corrupt’ and ‘destroy’. One might look around for a violence that scales up the individual murders of the early narrative, namely, those perpetrated by Cain and then Lamech. So what is it that fills the Earth with violence? The slaughter of warfare would fit the bill. Warfare in organised and equipped army form goes back as far as the 3rd millennium in Mesopotamian inter-city wars that necessitated their massive defensive walls. Already in the Early Dynastic period around 2,400 BC, in Sumerian times, Lagash set up a boundary pillar after war with Umma, while the Stele of Vultures, so-called, gives us graphic pictures of serried ranks, chariots, weaponry and corpses.55 Sargon the Great’s empire reached to the Mediterranean coast. Later on, the Assyrians perfected organised warfare and brutality. Under the latter-day Sargonids, they even marched into far-afield Egypt in their south-west, and into the mountain kingdom of Urartu to their north- east. Warfare is thus characteristic of organised human life, arriving with the cities of Mesopotamia and leading on to imperial ventures known only too well to the Israelites, invaded north and south and deported into exile by the Assyrians and Babylonians of the 7th and 6th centuries BC. Indeed, warfare is the experience of many generations. It appears in the Genesis narrative itself fairly soon with a coalition for invasion in the time of Abraham (Gen 14). War leaves its footprints across Exodus with its hot pursuit by war chariots (‘Yhwh is a Warrior/man of warfare’ ʾīš milḥāmāh אישׁ מלחמהExod 15:3 the Song of the Sea), and way beyond that, including the Amalekite desert attack (Exod 16) that gets Israelites involved in fighting before the wars, offensive and defensive, within the land of Israel down the centuries. 5. The Genesis Flood as pre-Apocalyptic. In fact, the wording of the Flood has it that God intends to ‘destroy them [i.e. ‘all flesh’] along with the Earth’ (mašḥītām ʾet-hāʾāreṣ משׁחתם את־הארץ, Gen 6:13b). This is startling, not only in its comprehensive reference to living beings, but to the planet itself. Is this destruction of the Earth metonymy—the kettle itself doesn’t boil, the water does, so for ‘water’ read ‘with (the inhabitants of) the Earth’? Or is it really the Earth itself that is included for destruction?56 Not that it was, or no Ark-riders would have survived it. So is this ‘along with the Earth’ destruction a literary device, a hyperbole, a deliberate over- the-top statement that can function to underline the un-Creation motif? As readers, we current survivors attest that the biblical writers themselves could not have written the annihilation of planet Earth into their story! So does the writer imagine a temporary obliteration by water, or a destruction analogous with the ‘destruction’ of a city that has been besieged, breached, looted and set alight. The remains of war are broken down walls, the city left desolate, defunct and uninhabitable. Or, since rhetoric and rhetorical effects are written into the speeches of God in the biblical story, perhaps ‘with the Earth’ is simply the employment of hyperbole, an intentional exaggeration for effect. When we look at the judgment in the biblical Flood narrative, it is apocalyptic-like before 55 Irving Finkel of the British Museum deciphered this in 2018. The Stele of the Vultures is in the Louvre. 56 The translation ‘with the Earth’ takes the consonantal text את־as the ʾet- of the preposition ֵאתʾēt = ‘with’, but with the short e vowel when bound to the noun ‘Earth’ plus definite article hā- as the Massoretic text reads: ʾet-hāʾāreṣ ֶאת־הארץ. Other interpreters want to get rid of an Earth destruction. 43 Apocalyptic. It is the precursor of Remnant Theology. In its turbulence in the skies and elements, and its global perspective on inevitable and irresistible judgment, it connects with the book of Revelation. In Genesis, we read ‘on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of heaven were opened’ (7:11b). This is the lower and upper worlds converging and intermingling on middle earth. The phrase ‘on that day’ (bayyōm hazzeh) of the Flood’s onset will become the ‘on that day’(bayyōm hahūʾ ) of eschatology. What God set in place for human benefit—sun, moon and stars to lighten and regulate days, months, seasons and years—are confounded in Apocalyptic. The sun will turn dark and the moon to blood (Amos 8:9 with Joel 2:28ff. with Acts 2:17–21). The Flood survivors of the story silently proclaim a Remnant Theology before the prophets of the Exile say this about the end times. In the Flood’s turbulence in the skies and elements, and its global perspective on inevitable and irresistible judgment, this global judgment scenario links with Isa 24 and with the book of Revelation. In Isa 24, we read: The Earth mourns and withers the World languishes and withers the Heavens languish together with the Earth. The Earth lies polluted under its inhabitants. For they have transgressed the laws violated the statutes broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the Earth and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt therefore the inhabitants of the Earth are scorched and few men are left. (vv. 3–6) For the windows of Heaven are opened and the foundations of the Earth tremble. The Earth is utterly broken the Earth is rent asunder the Earth is violently shaken The Earth staggers like a drunken man it sways like a hut its transgression is upon it and it falls and will not rise again. On that day, Yhwh will punish the host of heaven in Heaven and the kings of the Earth on the Earth. They will be gathered together as prisoners in a pit they will be shut up in prison and after many days they will be punished. Then the moon will be confounded and the sun ashamed for Yahweh of hosts will reign on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem and before his elders he will manifest his glory. (vv.18b–23) The phrase ‘windows (ʾarubbōt )ארבותof heaven’ seems to be a stock metaphor linked with their opening (pātaḥ )פתחfor rainfall (Mal 3:10). However, when linked with an Earth-shaking turbulence and God’s global judgment, how much further can Apocalyptic language go in 44 describing what the Flood describes as total devastation? (Gen 7:11 and 8:2 of the before/after). In 2 Peter’s envisioning of the future, and a judgment that extends to the angels held in prison (2 Peter 2:4 and Jude v.6 with Isa 24: 22), the heavens and the Earth are incinerated in the end times. This he deliberately contrasts with Noah’s day as far exceeding it: ‘the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished but by the same word the Heavens and the Earth that now exist have been stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men… Heavens pass away with a loud noise… the elements kindled, dissolved with fire, Earth and works upon it… burned up.’ (2 Pet 3:6b–7 with verse 10 and 12; Isa 34:6 and Rev 6:14). The imagination that inspires the literary writing of the early 2nd millennium and of the Genesis story is now, in the 1st century AD, inspiring the vision of the end times at the end of the canon. 45 CHAPTER 6 ffA MEMORABLE WEEK A MOUNTAIN in TOP EXPERIENCE MESOPOTAMIA in URARTU “I scanned the horizons, the edge of the ocean, 140 in fourteen places there rose an island. On the mountain of Nimush the boat ran aground Mount Nimush held the boat fast, allowed it no motion. One day and a second, Mount Nimush held the boat fast, allowed it no motion a fifth day and a sixth, Mount Nimush held the boat fast allowed it no motion. The seventh day, when it came, 147 I brought out a dove, I let it loose: off went the dove but then it returned, there was no place to land, so back it came to me. 150 off went the swallow but then it returned, there was no place to land, so back it came to me. I brought out a raven, I let it loose: off went the raven, it saw the waters receding, 155 finding food, bowing and bobbing, it did not come back to me.” A.R. George, Gilgamesh, 2003 edition, p.93f., lines 140–156. Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, 2000, p.113f. The Grounding Experience 1. Background. When it comes to telling a Flood story, there has to be water arriving and water departing, a vessel to hold the survivors of the old world, and a touchdown on firm ground as the water recedes. Then there has to be an emergence from the vessel for human and animal life to continue life on the other side of the catastrophe. In other words, there are the givens of the plot that constrain any writer who is retelling the Flood tradition. The flipside of this coin is that a writer can shape the story in the way that he tells it. What he includes and what he leaves out. The space he gives for details and what he mentions only in passing. These selection choices include how he populates the plot and its scenes with characters, and what moods, motivations and reactions he gives to the characters. It includes 46 who he casts as the lead character and which are their foils. It includes who he names and who are unnamed and remain in the background without speaking parts. How will he build tension in the plot and release it? How will he play the outcome and the aftermath? Then there are the literary effects that he has at his disposal, such as striking imagery, repetition, and surprise. Importantly for all the Ancient Near Easter versions, biblical and otherwise, is how the world of human beings interacts with the divine realm. All these options are at the stylus or pen of the writer and what he is trying to achieve with his contribution. 2. Stuck fast … then! One cannot miss the rhythm of these lines that carry the story forward. The repetition has the audience murmuring along with the poet as they get into the feel of it: ‘Mt.Nimush held the boat fast…’. Or the line about the bird flight ‘…so back it came’. That is all very well, but… the boat is stuck. The verb ṣabātu is an active one— ‘to seize, take hold of, hold captive’. The good news is that the vessel won’t get carried away. The bad news is that there’s still water everywhere, stretching to the far horizon. They must wait before disembarking. We feel the tension. Once again, the author lets us see what the protagonist sees. We are inside the boat with him, now looking out. Our eyes run to the horizon with a sense of space. There is a vista instead of a barrier wall. After Lockdown with the Covid-19 virus, we all know what confinement means and the longing to get out. “I looked…”—1st person speech. We are listening to the eyewitness testimony of Utanapishtim.57 It is riveting. Two words express the distance: ‘the edges of the boundary’ (kibrāti paṭṭu). We could render this as ‘to the absolute edge, the furthest horizon, the extremities of the world’. All that is showing are a dozen or more isolated areas of land rising above the waterline. With a bump the vessel has grounded and sticks there. Mt.Nimush is a bit of an enigma. This reading of the cuneiform syllable, adopted by George and Dalley, replaces the older name kurni- ṣir, with a second syllable reading of muš-. We can assume that the mountain named Nimush resonated with the original listeners to Gilgamesh, just as the word ‘Everest’ resonates with us. Unless it is entirely legendary, this peak must have stood out visually among the mountains to the east and north-east of Assyria. We might draw on an earlier episode of Gilgamesh for orientating ourselves to the author’s geographical perspectives. The Cedar forest episode that involves the slaying of the mythical monster Huwawa is based on real geography, namely, the mountains of Lebanon. It is here that the highly prized cedar trees grew that Huwawa guarded. By analogy, Mt.Nimush could feasibly be a name for a renowned mountain peak—of which there are not a few to the north-east of Assyria.58 A locally visible or well-known high peak would work for an Assyrian audience, but for an Israelite audience nothing less will do than a Flood that covers (using כסהkāsāh) the highest mountains imaginable: ‘and the waters swelled much much (meʾōd meʾōd )מאד מאדupon the Earth so that they covered all the exalted mountains (kol-hehārīm haggebōahīm )כל־ההרים הגבהיםwhich are beneath all the heavens… fifteen cubits did the waters strengthen so that the mountains were covered’ (7:19b). The high mountains of Urartu rise to 5000m above sea level. Cubits to feet or metres is maths, but to float safely clear of the mountains the height and weight of the Ark needed including. 57 See George, Vol.1, 152ff. The Sumerian hero Zi-u-sudra ‘life of-days-distant’ (zi + ud + sudra, where Sum. sudra = Akk. rūqu ‘far-away, distant’. This pre-Flood hero’s name, Ziusudra, gave rise to the name in Semitic Babylonian, Ūta-napišti, with verb watāʾum, (w)atû – ‘to find’ with the noun for ‘life’—‘I found life’, or in some 1st millennium copies with long -ī, ‘I found my life’ (napištī). 58 Dalley, 133 note 135 mentions a peak Pir Omar Gudrun to the n-e of Kirkuk and north of Suleimaniyah. 47 There is no figure for the weight and no mathematical formula for a calculation. The Ark is 30 cubits high (6:15). The narrator is apparently thinking that the water rises to at least 15 cubits (c. 7 metres) above the mountain tops for the bottom of the Ark’s hull to clear them. Whether this works in terms of water displacement, the Ark’s draft, is one thing, but, more importantly, we can see that the mind of the biblical narrator is alert to the vast amount of water required for his Flood story. He wants his readers to visualise his Flood on a global scale. Whether they knew of the snow-capped mountains of Armenia or not is taken care of by his phrasing ‘all the high/exalted mountains…beneath all the heavens’. Perhaps Mt.Hermon to the north of Palestine would provide some kind of benchmark for the readers’ imaginations to work with. The narrator is very evidently extrapolating ‘rationally’ from within his frame of reference, but mainly providing visual cues for his audience/readers and working consistently with the scale of the Flood’s wipe out of life on Earth. The water has gone global, to use our term. Unlike Gilg. XI, the biblical Flood avoids naming an individual mountain peak where the Ark grounded. It does not need to do this in the narrator’s judgment. The biblical narrator follows up the rising waters with the resulting total wipe out of all life, adding phrase to phrase and lavishing 43 words to the deaths, before closing the Watery Death episode of vv.17–23, with just 6 words for recording the survival of Noah and company (7:23b). This leaves no wriggle room outside the Ark for the survival of life on Earth—which is true to the stated intention of God that sets the Flood in motion (6:7 with 6:13). Of course, this rules out any thought of reducing this Flood to what has left the layers of clay in places on the flat plain of Iraq. Neither the Mesopotamian versions nor the Genesis Flood are told as an exceptional regional flood in an area subject to severe flooding now and then. 3. Fly now, emerge later. There are only two things that Noah does without an explicit divine instruction: (a) sending out the birds which is written into the common tradition, and (b) offering sacrifice that is also written into the tradition. Sacrifice is what king Ziusudra does in the Sumerian tablet and what Utanapishtim does in Gilgamesh. This is a significant window into the strength of the tradition and how the biblical telling made use of it. These ways of retelling the Mesopotamian Flood story are radically different, even at the point where the plot demands that there is some narration in each, namely, to get the named character off the vessel and back onto terra firma. Birds are optional. It is a fact that you cannot write a Flood story without water. But you can write one without birds. This makes it remarkable that we meet with feathered friends launched from the vessel as scouts in both the biblical and extra-biblical Flood versions. These birds are produced like a rabbit from a conjuror’s hat in Gilgamesh, either as a lapse in the telling by the narrator forgetting to mention them previously, or as an intended special effect. Previously, we have heard that ‘living creatures’, ‘beasts of the field’ and ‘creatures of the wild’ (lines 84–86) embarked on Utanapishtim’s boat—but with no specific mention of birds. This is unlike the biblical version that is very keen on birds. The birds head the animal embarkation listing at Gen 6:20. In Chap. 7, ‘the bird of the heavens’ (ʿōp haššāmāyim) have a whole verse to themselves (7:3) ‘to keep their kind alive upon the face of all the Earth’, and whatsmore there are seven pairs of the ‘clean ones’—carrion feeders need not apply for inclusion among the ‘clean’(ṭāhōr )טהר. Flesh-eaters feature prominently in the list of unclean, detestable birds of Lev 11. In the description of the embarkation, of 7:14b, the birds get a doubled mention with different wording: ‘every bird (ʿōp) according to its kind, every bird (ṣippor) and every wing (kānāp)’. This sounds fulsome and is tricky to translate—so the LXX chose to omit this phrase. 48 Of course, there were also birds that the story tellers did not name as they did do for the dove, the swallow, the raven, and the kumû-bird. There are some very impressive birds in the story of Earth that many people today will not know about. Take the carnivorous 2.2m tall Gastornis variety. It went extinct around 41 million years ago. Not to mention the mega penguins of New Zealand 60 million years ago that stood at 1.77m and weighed in at 100kg. This left the Phorusrhacos as the last big bird standing, at 3m tall, and running around South America at 70kph until it too went extinct as recently as 400,000 years ago, or possibly much less. So along with the ancient narrators, we need not imagine pairs of these particular birds waddling or rampaging up the gangplank to board the Ark. But the boarding by birds is but part one of bird showcasing. Unfortunately for them, the majority of birds perish since it is a case of representatives only on board, so birds are specifically listed among the dead of ‘all flesh’ (7:21, with 23 ‘and including the (category) bird of the heavens’ ועד־עוף השׁמיםweʿad-ʿōp haššāmayim). However, a selection of those chosen to be on board have a most important role. 5. Birdly variants. In Gilgamesh, those important birds are the dove/pigeon,59 swallow and raven (summatu, sinuntu, āribu, lines 148, 151, 154). For named scouting birds in the Atrahasis myth, we await a legible clay tablet containing this episode, but we can be optimistic, given the scouting birds in Gilgamesh, in Genesis and in a Middle Babylonian tablet from Ugarit,60 plus the fact that birds were definitely taken on board in Atrahasis itself (Tablet 3, 2:34f. ‘[the birds] fliers in the heavens’ mupparšū šamê).61 The phrases associating birds with the sky/heavens is common to the idiom of Babylonian and Hebrew (šamê / šāmayim) This is scarcely surprising since the vast majority of birds known to Israelites, Babylonians and Assyrians of the Fertile Crescent would be seen flying in the sky, with the exception of the ostrich. On a badly broken Middle Babylonian tablet, the wording ‘bird of the heavens’ (iṣṣur šamê) survives. This is for assembling the bird category along with ‘wild creature of the steppe’ for loading into The Lifesaver. This tablet names the boat: ‘let it be a marqurqurrum-boat with the name, The Life Saver’ (nāṣirat napištim ‘the keeper/guarder of life’).62 Wasserman has revived tablet K.1520 from the Nineveh library as a possible excerpt from a Flood story version. It lists dimensions (of a boat?), followed by a listing of animals and birds. Five birds precede line 15 that ends its list with ‘dove, swallow, raven’ (summatu sinūntu arību) that are the high fliers in Gilgamesh. They also appear in that order, which seems more than a coincidence. This is intriguing, if somewhat inconclusive.63 What we do have on a Middle Babylonian tablet retrieved at Ugarit is godEa/Enki’s instruction about releasing the dove: “Take a wooden spade and a copper axe, and make a window at the top. Release bird, let it find for you a shore!” I heeded the words of Ea, my great lord and advisor. I released a dove (summata) strong-of-wings. She went forth and came back, exhausted her wings. I did this again and released a crane. (RS 94.2953, lines 3–14; Wasserman, 87ff.) 59 Biblical Hebrew lacks precise definitions of birds. In a given area there may be several varieties of a type—for instance of corvids, eagles, owls, vultures and swallows. Ornithologically, doves and pigeons belong together. To avoid confusion or an association with trained homing pigeons creeping in, we will stick with ‘dove’ for Heb. yōnāh יונהhere. For reasons not given, Wenham talks about a ‘white’ dove. 60 RS 94.2953, Ms.I2 (Ugarit) with text and translation in Wasserman, 87ff. 61 Dalley, 31; L&M, 92f.; Wasserman, 33. 62 CBS 13532, rev.8; L&M, 126f. The vessel is of the makūru class, but is not effectively identifiable. 63 Wasserman, 147ff. K is the British Museum sigla for texts from the Kuyunyijk mound excavations. 49 The biblical version selects just two species for its scouting operation—the raven that is released first but does not return (Gen 8:7), followed by the dove. Both doves and pigeons are strong fliers and, if trained—as homing pigeons are—can certainly cover many miles, but this yōnāh on her first excursion finds ‘no resting-place for the sole of her foot’ (8:9 מנוח לכף־רגלה mā’nōaḥ lekap-raglāh). She seemingly makes three trips with weekly interludes before she opts for the free-flying lifestyle (8:8–12). We assume that it is the same bird each time, without thinking about it. If rightly so, then it gets lucky because doves/pigeons are ‘clean birds’ and so she could have participated in the last mention of on-board birds at 8:20. This is when Noah ‘built an altar to Yahweh, and took of every clean animal and from every clean bird (ūmikkol hāʿōp haṭṭōrāh ()העוף הטרה, and offered burnt offerings on the altar’. So birds, collectively, abound in the Flood versions on clay tablets lodged from East to West of the Middle East, plus the Israelite scroll wherever originally penned in ink. This bird link alone is convincing evidence that the versions are re-tellings from a common flow of Flood tradition in the Fertile Crescent area. The variants in the bird life are scarcely surprising, though we cannot be sure of explaining this. For a start, we note that Gilgamesh and Genesis share the most significant role player, the dove. This anchors the plot. The Genesis telling lingers over the dove (hayyōnāh )היונה. It lets us watch her alight on Noah’s hand, and we see her arrive with an olive sprig and the writer’s exclamation: ‘and, Behold!…’ (wehinnēh) (‘and lo, in her mouth, a freshly plucked olive leaf’, 8:11 RSV). That is good news—and enough for this image to pass into contemporary culture, for instance, into the International World Peace Day logo. It is indeed a telling visual. It is also the only human action and human touch in the characterisation of Noah when he reaches out and takes the dove back into the sanctuary of the Ark. This imaginative visual touch catches our attention and engenders our curiosity. Did olive groves flourish in the mountains of Urartu? Or has she flown further despite no exercise for 12 months? Or was it that this account was composed in Palestine where olive groves still flourish as well as doves? Of course, the text will provide us with no answers on this point. The first bird to fly from the Ark was a corvid—crows, ravens and varieties of these species are readily distinguished by birders, but not by the less bird-minded. However, the main asset of this corvid is—by implication only, but with common knowledge—its ability to fend for itself by feeding on roadkill, namely, in this context, the corpses of drowned fellow birds, animals and humans if they were exposed, bobbing on the surface—after a year according to Genesis, or more plausibly after seven days in Gilgamesh. In Genesis, we are not invited to view the corpses lying washed up against the exposed bits of the mountains. The biblical editor does not want to take us there, so he gives us no visual image. The raven flies around. Perpetually—if we take the wording literalistically—until the water has abated and the land has dried up (8:7). Raven fasts as the narrator tells it—and perhaps prays a corvid prayer—as we learn about in Psa 147:9; Job 38:41. Or else a restraining veil is cast over his meals, unlike the narration of the proverb where: The eye that mocks a father and scorns to obey a mother will be picked out by the ravens of the valley and eaten by the vultures (Prov 30:17). We recall God’s use of the corvid (ʿōrēb )ערבfor the food drop to Elijah in the time of famine (1 Kgs 17). So ‘unclean’ status (Lev 11:15; Deut 14:14) does not mean disapproved of by God, except cultically. 50 Gilg.XI does not hold back. The raven is alert to the main chance—‘it saw the waters receding’ (Gilg. 155; George, 94) and finds food (line 156), with the food bobbing on the water and the raven, riding along, pecking away at it—or so it might be if we could translate the wording assuredly that is rendered tentatively by George as ‘bowing and bobbing’. To sum up, we note the Genesis~Gilgamesh agreement on two bird agents, the raven and the dove, between the story in Hebrew form and the story in Babylonian/Assyrian. Add to this the dove from Ugarit, and the geographically widespread traditions match rather well. The differences are that Gilgamesh uses three species, dove–swallow–corvid, in that order of release. What lies behind this choice, we can only guess at. Here is a guess… The dove leads off because it is a strong flier but will be very likely to return to the boat. The swallow is known to fly great distances and to feed on the wing. It also returns to a single place frequently to build its mud nest. Mud would be a good sign, but mud is not there to step out onto—the mountain tops are rocky. As for the corvid, it is less likely to return to the boat but very likely to find carrion to feed on. In which case, this could be a sign of the water level dropping leaving stranded corpses exposed. Gilgamesh (SBV) is reflecting a tradition from the 13th–11th century and the stylus of Sin-liqe-unninni.64 Since he was an exorcist, he might have taken an interest in the flight of birds if he had bird omen tablets to consult. Perhaps, not seeing the black raven again was a good omen. It is easy to speculate! Be warned. The actual rationale for the three birds of Gilgamesh is not extant. Genesis uses two types of bird, corvid and dove, while the Ugarit tablet likewise opts for two only, but chooses dove and crane where ‘crane’ is a guess translation, though it is apparently an equivalent of the corvid (Wasserman, 89f.). But we and the Assyriologists are at sea, translation wise, when it comes to the kumû-bird of Ugarit It might be a crane, but it may not be. Is it long-legged, a flesh-eating stork like the African marabou stork of sub-Saharan Africa? Or another of the stork family? Or one of the heron species? Or is it a paddler like the pelican that scoops up fish? The Ugarit writer is out on a limb, along with his translators. As usual, we need far more tablets in good condition to turn up in multiple archaeological digs from different sites at different time periods until we can track the detail of how the bird tradition travelled, where and when, with assurance. This said, the tradition is remarkably stable in retaining dove and raven in re-tellings as distant as Assyria, the Mediterranean coast of Syria, and Palestine, perhaps even a librarian’s house in Jerusalem. Another indicator of the tenacity of the bird motif is its survival into Greek traditions. These start with the work of Berossus, a priest in Babylon, who was trying to impress Greek thinkers with all things Babylonian. Berossus set up a school on the island of Cos in the Mediterranean. This was in the 3rd century BC—he dedicates his Babyloniaka to Antiochus I (292–261 BC). We glean from Berossus’s work only via a series of quotations by learned non-Semitic scholars. Alexander Polyhistor, a 1st century BC Greek, is one who quoted from Berossus’s work. Muddy birds appear in the references of the erudite Christian, Eusebius, who quotes from his predecessors. The newly mentioned ‘muddy feet’ sound like an imaginative addition. For the purposes of this study, the tradition loses interest for us when it leaves the Fertile Crescent and the Semitic culture in which it originated and flourished. So Berossus is our last port of call for birds. Berossus/Polyhistor has preserved the Sumerian name of the Flood hero, slightly mangled into Xisuthros, that attaches his account way back to the late Old Babylonian era of tablet CBS 10673 from Nippur.65 Here is a Berossus’ quote, in English from Greek: 64 See George’s Introduction, xxiv. 65 ‘In view of the large number of artificial grammatical forms and lexical peculiarities in CBS 10673, it was very likely composed at a later date’ than the Sumerian King List and the Isin Dynasty (M.Civil in L&M, 139). This places it around 1600 BC, according to Finkel, The Ark Before Noah, 90. 51 Xisuthros (= Sum. Zi-u-sudra) let out some of the birds which, finding no food or place to rest, came back to the vessel. After a few days Xi. again let out the birds, and they again returned to the ship, this time with their feet covered in mud. When they were let out for the third time they failed to return to the boat, and Xi. inferred that land had appeared. (L&M, 135f.; see too Finkel, The Ark Before, 99ff.) Here the birds fly as a group and are anonymous, but the three attempts at gaining useful information has stuck in this summary, demonstrating a strong continuity. 52 CHAPTER 7 A MEMORABLE WEEK FIRST THINGS in FIRST MESOPOTAMIA I brought out an offering, to the four winds made sacrifice, 157 incense (surqinnu) I placed on the peak of the mountain. Seven flasks and seven I set in position, reed, cedar and myrtle I piled beneath them. 160 The gods did smell the savour, the gods did smell the savour sweet, the gods gathered like flies around the man making sacrifice. Then at once Belet-ili arrived, she lifted the flies of lapis lazuli that Anu made for their courtship: 165 “O gods, let these great beads in this necklace of mine make me remember these days, and never forget them! All the gods shall come to the incense, but to the incense let Enlil not come, because he lacked counsel and brought on the Deluge, 170 and delivered my people into destruction.” A.R. George, Gilgamesh, 2003 edition, p.93f., lines 157–171. Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, 2000, p.113f. 1. The Lifesaver left empty. There is a very abrupt jump from line 156 to 157 in the Gilgamesh telling, from the raven feasting—on rotten flesh we must assume—to Utanapishtim sacrificing on ‘the mountain peak’, the ‘ziqqurat of the mountain’ (ziqqurat šadî ), and providing a feast for the gods in doing so. This jump keeps the action-packed narrative flowing, but omits any reference to the disembarkation. 53 Is the mountain itself66 being likened to a Mesopotamian temple? This seems plausible since sacrifices would normally be offered within temple precincts. No temple was available. This is perforce an open air sacrifice. That facilitates the rising of the savour to the gods who arrive rapidly. If this is a deliberate use of metaphor, we should retain ‘ziqqurat’ in our translation. A metaphor would not be a total surprise given the narrator’s use of similes such as ‘like a woman in labour’(line 132) and ‘like a flat roof’(line 136) and his command of other literary devices. The biblical account differs from this telling considerably. It slows everything down after the Ark grounds against the mountains in keeping with its duration for the drying of the Earth. 2. Disembarkation by divine command. The drying of the Earth has preoccupied the biblical writer in an almost leisurely way after the hinge of the palistrophe at 8:1 ‘God remembered Noah…’. It was not God remembering just Noah. God explicitly remembers the animals on board as well. What opens/closes are the ‘windows of heaven’ and ‘fountains of the deep’. The waters retreat. The Ark rests on ‘the mountains of Ararat (= Urartu)’. Dates and intervals follow, with bird scouting spliced in-between. Then the Earth/ground was dry, dry, dry (3x notification, vv.13, 14). Only when this is thoroughly established does God speak again to Noah. This time with the disembarkation command: “Go forth from the Ark…” the lot of you (list included), ‘to breed abundantly on the Earth’ and ‘be fruitful and multiply’. So “Go forth…” is the 3rd commandment, and repopulating is the 4th Commandment of the Flood story (6:13, 7:1, 8:15ff.). If we elide “Go forth… multiply”, then God repeats it again as a blessing and a command with a linking repeat between 9:1l and 9:7. The disembarkation, meanwhile, is listed fully: wife, sons, daughters-in-law, then animals by category, all twice for good measure, also recording at 8:18 that it happened: ‘“Go forth from the Ark…” …out of the Ark they emerged’ (ṣēʾ min-hattēbāh and yāṣ’ū min-hattēbāh, vv.16 and 19). None of the human passengers are mentioned by name in God’s command to disembark. 3. Who disembarked at Mt.Nimush? Despite no lines about the disembarkation in Gilg.XI, we know, roughly speaking, who comprised the landing party in the Gilgamesh story, though we may have forgotten. Leading them out is ‘the man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu’ (line 23). For ‘man’ read ‘king’. Then there are what we may justifiably call the minor characters, plotwise, encouraged by the blanket stock phrase ‘kith and kin’ in English (George, 91; line 85 kala kimtija u salātija), in other words Utanapishtim’s entire extended but nameless family, plus ‘members of every skill and craft’ (mārī ummâni kališunu ‘sons of specialist craftsmen, the lot of them’). The listing in Gilgamesh compares with a text of Atrahasis in which Atrahasis’ backer, god Ea/Enki, instructs him to take aboard wife, kith and kin, skilled craftsmen, and wild creatures. How will he manage to get the animals on board? “I will send them along to you,” says godEa, “and they will stand guard at your gate (inaṣṣarū ina bābka).”67 66 Line 158 reads: aškun surqinnu ina muḫḫi (UGU) ziq-qur-at šadî (KUR) ‘I strewed incense on the peak of the mountain’ (George 2, 712). George notes that this is not a literal use of ziqquratu (713 note 37; compare CDA, 448). Compare Wasserman’s notes (p.128: ‘the mountain is the ziqqurat’). 67 With ašaparrakum from root šapāru – to send’ in the Neo-Assyrian fragment W (L&M,128f.) line 10: [a-šap]pa-rak-kum-ma ‘[I] will send to you’. The būl ṣēri ‘steppe creature’ of line 9 are specified as vegetarian with the added clarifying phrase ‘everything that eats vegetation’ as their diet, using urqīti – ‘greenery, vegetation’. The verb naṣāru normally means ‘to guard, protect, keep’ rather than simply standing around at the gate with L&M, 129. Wasserman does not use W from uncertainty that it belongs to Atrahasis. 54 Perhaps someone in the previous audience had asked how the Flood riders would arrive, notably the ‘steppe animal’, meaning the wild animals of the open country (ṣēru), the uncultivated fringes away from the cities, in this specific case the huge expanse of Iraq north-westwards from Shuruppak. They will be under divine instructions and guidance is the god’s answer to Atrahasis on the fragmentary piece from Ashurbanipal’s library.68 If we were to guess about vegetarian steppe dwellers, they would be the likes of gazelles and onagers, that are most unlikely to assemble themselves voluntarily at anyone’s gate in a city. What plains creatures made of ‘the mountains of Urartu’ after they disembarked is anyone’s guess. I can imagine they expereinced some serious disorientation and food anxiety. 3. Who did not disembark at Mt.Nimush? Foregrounded by Mesopotamian versions are those who do not appear on the passenger list, namely, the citizens of Shuruppak. That includes the elders, and most of those who had lent a hand as a workforce in building the boat—young men, old men, children, rich and poor, carpenters and reed-workers who have been carting the enormous quantities of bitumen, rope, rods, punting poles and other tackle (lines 49ff., George 90; Dalley, 111). Their reward was this- worldly and pre-Floodly—choice meat and liquor daily: For my workmen I butchered oxen and lambs I slaughtered daily. Beer and ale, oil and wine like water from a river [I gave my] workforce So they enjoyed a feast like the days of New Year. (lines 71ff.) The feast like a New Year celebration sounds like a sick joke to us, since it is a cover up to match the cover story spun to the assembled elders. Before launch, Utanapishtim had made sure that they had loaded aboard ‘all the silver I owned, and all the gold I owned’. He says ‘I loaded…’ the three times. Of course, we must understand this as ‘at my direction I had the loading of xxx done’ because the work was obviously done by the wharfies, not the king of Shuruppak. The same goes for the butchering for the braaivleis meat: ‘I butchered… I slaughtered’ (Lines 71–72 roots ṭabāḫu and šagāšu)—literalism is seldom a way to read royal narration, whether that is war annals, building projects or Flood reports. This workforce is, of course, a group, a collective foil over against the main character. But there is the one exception, an individual who is named. It is Puzur-dKUR.GAL. Who is he? He is none other than the expert who did the final sealing of the boat, around its door: ‘To the one who sealed the boat, Puzur-Enlil, the shipwright I gave my palace with all its goods’ (lines 95f.; George, 91). The boat-sealer, Puzur-Enlil (KUR.GAL ‘godGreat Mountain’=Enlil), is overlooked by lines from Atrahasis. It is odd that a named character pops into the storyline and immediately disappears from it. Perhaps Puzur-Enlil had a larger role in another telling that we have not recovered so far. Still, there is artistic skill in giving him a name and a role then killing him off as a left-behind, deceived and betrayed by the gift of Utanapishtim’s palace. Assuming that he seals the door from the outside. The extraordinary gift of the ‘palace’ (ekallu) was to ensure his gratitude and skilled co-operation. It was a palace with its gold and silver removed and soon to be flooded. The sealing of the door is an explicit command of godShamash, the Sun god (piḫî bābika ‘seal your door’, line 88). Shamash also indicates the appointed onset time, the adannu, the right moment. Shamash is well-known for omen consultation, and he promises an omen here—the shower of food as a sign. The touch at Gen 6:16b ‘Yhwh shut him in’ is the biblical theologian’s unique innovation. 68 L&M, 128f. DT 42 (W) lines 8–10 with šapāru – ‘to send’ and naṣāru – ‘to stand guard’. 55 The appearance of the weather changed god Adad roared in the clouds. As soon as he heard his noise (rigimšu) (rigmu is also the word for the human noise) Bitumen (kupru) was brought, he sealed his door (ipeḫḫi bābšu). After he had bolted his door (edēlu – ‘to shut, bolt’, used of a city gate) Adad was roaring in the clouds. (Atr. 3, ii:48–53 after L&M, 92f.; Dalley, 31) The Ark Tablet ends at lines 59–60 with the sealing of the door as the command of Atrahasīs: “When I myself have entered in seal the opening of its door.” enūma anāku erūba piḫî pīt bābiša (after Finkel, 384) This statement in the Ark Tablet appears to give the instruction to someone who is on the outside to action it. That means abandoning the sealer of the door as a left-behind. If so, it assists with the Gilg. XI version. Puzur-Enlil gets the palace as reward, but not Flood survival or eternal life—if we stay with George’s translation: I went into the boat and sealed my hatch To the one who sealed the boat, Puzur-Enlil the shipwright I gave my palace with all its goods. (Gilg. XI, lines 94–96; George, 91; Dalley, 112)69 This rewarding of the boat-builder is ironic. It accords with the characterisation of Atrahasis. He necessarily, plotwise, conceals the information of the coming Flood with his cover story of a fall out between his personal god Ea/Enki and Enlil, the CEO of the Divine Assembly. Atrahasis is leaving in his boat to travel to and live with Ea/Enki, god of the Apsû deeps. ‘He assembled the elders to his gate…’ and fed them fake news. (Dalley, 30; Atr. 3, i:38ff.; L&M, 90f.) The biblical telling maintains a strict silence on the boat-builders and the left-behinds before they are all reported, anonymously and collectively, as dead. The biblical narrator does not invite us to imagine such details, whether those left behind result from a cover story deception—or from their own failure to respond to Noah’s preaching. There is, of course, no mention of Noah doing any preaching in the biblical Flood story. 4. A Boat to float. There is nothing in the Genesis account that enlightens us about constructing the Ark, except its dimensions and compartments. The workforce and the construction experts are totally missing. Yet, despite the manpower gap in the telling, there is the instruction “Make yourself an ark of gopher-wood” (8:14). “This is how you are to make it…” (v.15). Unfortunately, this is about its structure, not about a workforce team or the tools required to get the job done. Tools are not mentioned. Perhaps the biblical narrator wanted the account to float in the past without any tie to a specific culture and its technology. Nails of iron would have tied it to the Iron age—rather late in the day in the Fertile Crescent. The neo-Assyrian kings of the 7th century make sure to mention their iron daggers in their war annals. We read that in Palestine in Saul’s day, the Philistines 69 Dalley takes the ‘palace’ (ekallu) as a metaphor for the vessel itself, handed over into the care of the shipwright who is on board. However, boat-builders are not necessarily boat owners, pilots or navigators, so we may stay with George. Note in passing, ‘I sealed…’ in 1st person in the adjacent line with having it done as the next line tells us. The Ark Tablet also has Atrahasis, narrating in the 1st person, using short- hand for having it done. 56 monopolised the prestigious iron: “…lest the Hebrews make themselves swords or spears” but every one of the Israelites went down to the Philistines to sharpen his plowshare, his pick, his axe or his sickle’ (1 Sam 13:19ff.). Only king Saul and his son Jonathan have the royal metal, iron, as weaponry. Had the Genesis version spoken of tools used for constructing the Ark, the Flood would be tied to bronze (neḥōšet) or iron (barzel) tools. These metals are linked in Gen 4:22 where Tubal- Cain is credited as the ‘sharpener of all instruments of bronze and iron’.70 So what tools might the narrator have imagined would be needed to complete such a project involving cutting and fitting together the gopher-wood into a 300 cubit/135m vessel? Axes,71 saws, adzes? We hit a blank. Perhaps the narrator was an élite scribe in Jerusalem who knew nothing about sea-going ship building in the gulf of Aqaba or on the coast of the Mediterranean. There is information in both the Gilgamesh and Atrahasis tellings about the workforce and tools. The lúNAGAR = naggāru is a ‘maker of furniture, doors and boats’, combined in nagar pāši it is ‘the adze-worker’ (CDA, 231; Gilg.XI, line 51). Those who turned out to start work on the Lifesaver bore the tools for the job. At the very first light of dawn the population began assembling at Atrahasis’ gate. The carpenter was carrying his axe (pāšu) (naggāru nāši pāssu, line 50) the reedworker was carrying his stone [… was carrying his] agasilliku-axe (George 2, 706f.; George, 90 line 52 ‘his heavyweight axe’; cf. Atr. 3:ii:10ff. broken text) Perhaps the omission/exclusion of workforce and tools in the biblical narration has some significance, other than to avoid tying it down to Iron Age Palestine, but if so, we are left guessing. We might compare what Atrahasis says about the agricultural tools used by the junior gods who picket Enlil’s shrine. The spades they set alight suggest a wooden handle, with a metal end. The gods heeded his word They set fire to their tools (nēpešu – ‘tool, implement’) Fire to their spades they put (marru – ‘shovel, spade’) and flame to their hods. (šupsikku – ‘earth-carrying basket; hod’) (Atr. Col 1, ii:64–66; L&M, 46f.; Dalley, 10) What we can say about the Ark building in Genesis is that there is no thought expressed that the Ark construction was a supernatural or miraculous event. Did the narrator not want to add additional characters to the plot? Or did he want to leave the deep antiquity of before-the-Flood behind its cloud of mystique? To the contrary, the Ark Tablet published by Finkel lavishes lines 6–33 out of the total of 60 lines on the implementation of the project and its needed materials, including lard and bitumen for water-proofing, and the thick rope fibre of a length ‘from London to Edinburgh’ to build the scaled-up quffa, the Euphrates river coracle, now commissioned for Flood survival. The narrator supplements this with lines 53f., the loading on of beer and fodder supplies. The final two lines focus on the sealing of the door without mention of who performed this. These 27 70 Wenham (p.113), agreeing with Westermann, thinks that metal-working in general is intended, and that specifically iron-made tools would be anachronistic in early times. The verb is lāṭaš ‘ – לטשׁto sharpen’. 71 In Elisha and the floating axe head of 2 Kgs 6, the word used for both axe and axe-head is barzel ברזל. 57 lines are singularly lacking in human interest. We are encountering a very powerful narrator effect here. Was this cuneiform scribe a palace quarter-master, devoted to recording quantities of goods as his day job? Finkel provides the photos of normal sized river coracles on the Euphrates to assist our imagination if the measurements cited by the text are altogether too confusing—see his Chap. 8 ‘Building the Arks’, pp.157–183. 5. Anonymous Women. After the Flood, there are key roles for the women. Not one of these women is named in the Mesopotamian or the Genesis tellings—neither Noah’s wife, nor his three daughters-in-law. Yet these are the wombs of the future to fulfil the repopulation command/blessing. This ‘forgetfulness’ on the part of the narrator displays his cultural conditioning. The omission contrasts with the naming of the sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth in repeats—before, inside and beyond the Flood story (5:32, 7:13, 9:18). This anonymity of women was the narrator’s cultural ‘normal’. The world of the biblical writer is patriarchal, that is, male dominated. So too is the theological phrasing of the pre-Flood promise: ‘you, your sons, your wife and your sons’ wives’ (6:18) where Noah’s sons are listed before Noah’s wife, as they do at 7:7 for the boarding, and as they do at 8:18 for disembarkation. The one exception ‘you and your wife’(8:16) highlights the rule. The summary statement of continuity has no need for mentioning women at all: ‘The sons of Noah who went forth from the Ark were X, Y and Z…these three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole Earth was peopled’(9:18). One cannot help noticing how different this is from the Eden story and the narrator honouring Eve as ‘the mother of all living’(3:20), who conceives a child ‘with Yhwh’ (4:1). There the narrator speaks of the man as leaving his father and mother to ‘cling to his wife’ (Gen 2:23f.).72 In Eden, the woman is specially made as a counterpart, given a role alongside her man, who receives her with poetry, names her honorifically, and sleeps with her, while she herself acknowledges her childbearing as accomplished in synergy with her Creator. The narrator has stepped forward with his perspective—the man and woman, married, should be understood as pair-bonded (‘and they become one flesh’ wehāyū bāśār ʾeḥād )בשׂר אחד. This Eden tone is so different from the androcentricity of the Flood story, even as the Flood story repeatedly picks up the ‘be fruitful and multiply’ motif (8:17, 9:1, 9:7). It is glaringly obvious at 9:1, and ironical that ‘God blessed Noah and his sons’ with the encouragement of ‘fruitful and multiply’ without a mention of their wives who are the obvious key to success. 6. Females—human and goddess. The Flood telling in Gilgamesh is much the same in its androcentricity, at first glance. In part, this is because it is diametrically different from the narration of the biblical version in being a 1st person telling by Utanapishtim, and, as such, it is his eyewitness account of what he heard, he did and he said. However, at second glance, the polytheism has the effect of making Nintu, the Mother goddess, into a lead character at the offering. She not only speaks but weeps and confronts the president of the Divine Assembly. Her speeches are front and centre stage. Furthermore, the androcentricty is modified quite radically when Gilgamesh meets the tavern- keeper, Shiduri, on his journey to Utanapishtim in his quest for eternal life. She speaks words of profound wisdom, realism and counsel—worthy of Existential therapy practice, including 72 Gen 2:23f. with dābaq ‘ – דבקto cling to, cleave to’, used of Ruth to Naomi, and urged on Israel as exclusive loyalty to Yhwh in Deuteronomy. 58 asking the open question: ‘When you reach the Waters of death, what will you do?’(Gilg. 10, line 78ff.; George, 78; Dalley, 102). Then she gives information about Urshanabi, the ferryman, but sums up: ‘if it is possible, cross with him; if it is impossible, retreat back.’ In other words, she plants the seeds of reality in his mind. He will have to come to terms with his mortality, later or sooner. Her eloquent and memorable lines speak of an attitude of positive acceptance and of celebrating life, including the lines: ‘Gaze on the child who holds your hand, Let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace! (OBV X, iii; George, 124; Dalley, 150). She brings wife and child into focus for him, whereas Gilgamesh had been into womanising, wrestling Enkidu, male bonding, taking on the Bull of heaven and killing it, insulting the goddess Ishtar, going off on an adventure to the Cedar Forest, beating up its guardian Huwawa and leaving him dead, and now taking off on a wild quest for eternal life. Unfortunately for him, Gilgamesh is not ready to change. His male narrator depicts him as the ultimate testosteroned ‘hero’ type. In Tablet XI of the Standard Babylonian Version (SBV), Utanapishtim’s wife is mentioned repeatedly, has speaking lines, and is integral to the plot (see lines 212f., 219, 273). She bakes the cakes required as proof for Gilgamesh’s failure to stay awake for a week. She prods her husband to impart some worthwhile gift to the departing Gilgamesh who now knows that he will not find eternal life with the gods like the Flood hero Utanapishtim and his wife. Said his wife to him, to Uta-napishti the Distant: “Gilgamesh came here by toil and by travail, what have you given him for his homeward journey?” (George, 98; SBV, lines 273–275) This wifely prompting of Utanapishtim to do better by his guest leads to him telling Gilgamesh the secret of the plant of rejuvenation. So Utanapishtim’s wife furthers the unfolding of the plot, just as Eve furthers the story through her conception, her theological exclamation and giving birth to the next generation. 7. The Fragrance rising. If the release of birds was a telling detail that speaks of a stream of tradition that flowed out from Mesopotamia and into the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures through the minds of devout Yahwists, then mountain-top sacrifice is another telling detail where the stories kiss… but part. In Gilgamesh, we note the numeral symbolism of ‘7 and 7’ once again and the detail of materials used. For rituals in Mesopotamia, the details count, as they do in biblical rituals. When it comes to fragrant smells with incense, for instance, the ingredients and procedures are spelled out in the Torah in detail (Exod 30:34) and a prohibition is added against Israelites copying this mix for personal use, with the threat: ‘Whoever makes any like it to use as perfume shall be cut off from the people’(v.38). That is serious copyright prohibition. The wording of Gilg. 157–158 needs disentangling. The four winds, like most features of nature, were thought of as powers and were depicted as winged figures on cylinder seals, but here ‘the 4 winds’ (4 šārī ) are intended to represent directions—‘to the four points of the compass’ as we might say, the numeral 4 being significant in English, as well as in Semitic languages. The wording of the verb šakānu – ‘to establish’ with surqinnu (surqēnum) makes for a strewn presentation, just as one might ‘spread about, strew, scatter, pour’ (sarāqu) flour or liquid. This prepares the ground, the ritual space, for the offering (niqû) itself. This is contained in the 14 libation-vessels (adagurra) that seem to be heated by the reeds and aromatically scented by the cedar and myrtle mix beneath them. They do the trick and the fragrance reaches the gods who presumably are still safely up in ‘the 59 heavens of godSky’ where they fled the Flood storm. The gods smell the ‘fragrance’, the ‘good fragrance’ (erīšu ṭāb). The parallel couplet of lines 161f. emphasises the point rhythmically. This comes really close to the Yahwistic statement, so close that we could hardly miss it: ‘and when Yhwh smelled the pleasing odour, Yhwh said in his heart…’ (8:21). This is one of the boldest anthropomorphisms of the biblical telling, it is so physiological. Yhwh ‘smelled the smell’ (wayyāraḥ rīaḥ )וירח רחstands in the Hebrew, but it requires something more tasteful from an English translator lest it jar our sensibilities. Jarring our sensibilities is not the intention of the Israelite narrator and theologian. He is no doubt familiar with burnt offerings as part of his cultic worship. Yet the reality is that what Yhwh smells is burnt flesh and charred bones. Noah has built an altar and killed a selection of ‘clean’ animals and birds to serve as whole burnt offerings (ʿōlōt )עלתon his altar. If we pause to think about this scene—and many Bible readers will not take this step—then cognitively we will register that the (not mentioned) smoke rises into the (not mentioned) sky to God in the heavens above, as the (not mentioned) wood burns and the (not mentioned) flames lick up around the carcasses. The ‘burnt offering’ means exactly what it says in English. This is not a barbecue. It is an incineration. So however appetising the smell of roast meat might be to begin with, it becomes the odour of blackened and charred remains of muscle, tendons and bones that would not strike us as ‘a fragrance’. The translators introduce the fragrance. It is simply not there in the wording of the Hebrew text. Why? Because at this point theology takes over the narrative. The only qualifier the Hebrew has is a profoundly theological one that is wrapped as an anthropomorphism: Yhwh ‘smelled the smell, the soothing one’ (ʾet-rīaḥ hannīaḥ). In what way is the odour of charred carcasses ‘soothing’? Not to an olfactory system. What is soothed is Yhwh’s righteous anger that lies behind his determination wipe out everything for spoiling his creation—recall that repeat of the Hebrew verb šāhat שׁחתfor God’s destruction matching the human destruction. 7. Liturgical soothing. The idioms found in Babylonian prayers, laments and incantation rituals cluster around the idea of calming down the raging heart of the offended god who has brought distressing happenings into the life of the supplicant who often has no idea of how they have offended their deity. There may be something of an old Mesopotamian literary style lying behind this idea of soothing the deity. In fact, we already have a 3rd millennium Sumerian appeal to the goddess’s angry heart in The Exaltation of Inanna (nin.me.šár.ra) expressed in Sumerian and credited to Enheduanna, Sargon the Great’s daughter, installed by him as the high priestess of Inanna/Ishtar at Ur: ‘Your holy heart is lofty, may it be assuaged on my behalf!’ (line 110) with ‘your rage is increased, your heart is unassuaged’ (line 142). But finally, we read of its resolution with ‘Inanna’s heart has been restored’ (line 145).73 In the later Babylonian lament prayers to the deities, the supplicant asks for the angry heart of the deity addressed to calm down: aggu libbaka linūḫḫa ‘may your angry heart calm down’ with the precative plea form of nûḫu – ‘to rest, be at rest, quieten, calm down’. The word aggu ‘furious’ is often paired with ‘heart’ libbu in describing fury. The supplicant assumes that his/her misfortunes must result from angering the god/goddess and hopes to appease this anger. The Akkadian nûḫu is the Semitic cognate of the Hebrew verb nḥ נוחthat lies behind ‘the soothing’ of the sacrificial smell (8:21). We can cite three samples. In the Shuilla-prayer (Lifting of-the hands) to Nergal, the god of death, and in The Great Prayer to Ishtar, and in the Incantation rite and prayer, the supplicant speaks as follows: 73 W.W. Hallo, The Exaltation of Inanna, New Haven/London: Yale Univ. Press, 1968. 60 I, xxx, your servant: The anger of god and goddess has beset me so that… a,b,c…(bad things that happened) Favorably look upon me and hear my supplication May your furious heart become calm toward me (lines 11–12 with 19–20; Lenzi, 348) (Ishtar) aggressive lion, let your heart calm down! labbu nadru libbaki linūḫa (Lenzi, 270, line 51, Shuilla: Ishtar 2)74 Enough, my god! Let your heart rest (libbaka linûha). May the goddess who was angry fully subside. Release the pent-up wrath of your heart.75 Of course, a literary affinity with Mesopotamian idiom does not bring with it into Yahwism an identical theology of sin, divine anger, curse and ritual. The Yhwh anthropomorphisms and the Yhwh theology cohere in the telling, while, at this very point of ‘calming’, the wording is shaped by the narrator’s own literary skill in Hebrew. He sets up a resonance between Noah~smell~soothing that we miss completely when reading in English. In Hebrew, the three words resonate together: nōaḥ~rīaḥ~nīaḥ נח רח נח, as you can see at a glance without knowing Hebrew. We should not misread Noah’s burnt offering by questioning his standing with Yhwh at this point as though, on embarkation, he should immediately and fearfully appease Yhwh for safety’s sake. The narrator emphasises throughout that God chooses Noah as a survivor for his righteousness, and God promises the establishing of a long-term covenant before Noah has embarked (6:18), let alone emerged from the Ark. Noah apparently sacrifices as a mediator for a future humanity that will remain sinful (8:21), while Yhwh, smelling the sacrifice, responds to it explicitly, not only by finding it soothing, but with his decisive words of ‘never again…’.76 The narrator has shaped this divine speech, in context, as a radical change of divine policy, as radical as the decision to wipe out humanity had been. The Babylonian cult in Gilgamesh is not identical with the Levitical covenant code in Torah. The biblical Flood narrator takes over the tradition of a post-Flood offering to the gods with a bold confidence. He knows that Yhwh is not famished with hunger and longing for beer to quench his thirst as the Gilgamesh writer so freely describes his gods during the Flood. As to unpriested Noah officiating at the sacrifice, this is no surprise. Abraham and Job both offered sacrifice. It is a patriarchal touch. We have no need to interview the narrator of the Genesis Flood. His theology is contextualized within the framework of the senior male, not to say the outrightly ancient male—at 601 years in Noah’s case. It is male headship in all things legal, ritual and priestly. Not much has changed about that in some communities of faith 74 Further examples of calming down the anger or angry heart of a deity are cited in CAD N1 nâḫu, nuāḫu, 143ff. This calming of the heart indicates the reversal of divine anger, an idiom used in ‘Lifting of the Hands’ penitential prayers (šuilla-prayers) through Old Babylonian times in early 2nd millennium to Neo- Assyrian times. 75 Lambert, JNES 33 (1974) 267–322 ‘DINGIR.ŠÀ.DIB.BA Incantations’, 282f. lines 150–152. The verb nâḫu – ‘to be at rest, calm down’ of line 150 is joined in the following line with pašāru – ‘to release, dissipate’, and with paṭāru – ‘to loosen, release’ in line 152. Anger is a dangerous pressure effect that needs to be released before it explodes destructively. Prayers of penitence and plea and ritual combine towards this end.. 76 In Wenham’s words, 189: ‘“Soothing” ( )ניחחsacrifices have a restful ()נוחח, soothing, pacifying effect on God…(italics mine) … It can hardly be denied that it was God’s appreciation of the sacrifice’s “soothing aroma” that prompted the promises of v.22’. 61 today—except the lifespans. 8. Irreverent theology? As we read on beyond line 162 of Gilgamesh, a shock factor confronts us. If we have started from a base of familiarity in the biblical story, we are jolted by the myth’s simile—the gods are pictured so graphically—‘the gods like flies’(ilū kīma zumbē) swarming around the man on the mountain. They ‘gathered to the offering-master’ (eli bēl niqî upaḫhḫerū) who is, of course, Utanapishtim, now telling his story. The scene is buzzing. Since in Gilgamesh, Utanapishtim is the 1st person narrator of the Flood event, we might have expected ‘they gathered…around me’. Sometimes this switch between 1st and 3rd person simply seems tolerable in ancient texts but jars with us. Or perhaps this is a lapse that indicates that the Gilgamesh story-teller is following on from Atrahasis that is a 3rd person telling about Atrahasis, not by Atrahasis. In Tablet XI of Gilgamesh, Utanapishtim disappears behind the confrontational dialogues between Enlil, Ea and Nintu, only to emerge again as the narrator talking to Gilgamesh at line 199f. Previously, these gods ‘took fright’, took flight and ‘cowered/curled up like dogs’ (lines 114– 116). Now they are likened to bluebottles buzzing around. We expect food to be mentioned since the gods are ravenous with the self-enforced week of fasting during the Flood that results from the annihilation of the humans who fed them. All daily offerings have ceased. That was what the gods regularly consumed in their temples. They miss their beer as well, as the ampler lines of Atrahasis inform us with a nice touch of irony. Nintu is grief-full and beer-empty: Nintu… was surfeited with grief and thirsted for beer… (ṣamû – ‘be thirsty’; šikriš – ‘beerwise’) Their lips were feverishly athirst They were suffering cramp from hunger (ina bubūti – ‘due to hunger’) (L&M, 96f. Atr. 3, 4:16, 21–22; Dalley, 33) The Atrahasis myth also adds a telling detail that Gilgamesh only implies, namely, that the gods of Mesopotamia need to eat food supplied by human beings—a reality in the plot sequence of Atrahasis with the junior gods burning their agricultural tools and picketing Enlil’s house. This food scarcity problem is solved by transferring food production to the novel invention of Nintu/Mami with Enki’s instruction, namely, transferred to us human beings. Hence, using the same Babylonian terms as Gilgamesh for the offering (niqû) and the smell (erēšu), we hear in Atrahasis: [The gods sniffed] the smell (erēša) They gathered [like flies] over the offering (niqû) [After] they had eaten the offering (ikulū niqâm, with akālu – ‘to eat’) Nintu arose to complain against all of them (Atr. 3, 5:34–37; L&M 98f.; Dalley, 33) For us, of course, this is a literary anthropomorphism that has gone over-the-top theologically. Does it indicate an entertainment factor to the genre and for the intended audience? The Sumerian story from the Old Babylonian era has its own more dignified version of the sacrifice featuring king Ziusudra and the Sun god: god Sun (dUtu) came out, illuminating the earth and the sky Ziusudra made an opening in the huge boat (gišmá-gur4-gur4) And the Sun (dUtu) with its rays entered the huge boat The king (lu-gal) Ziusudra 62 Prostrated himself before the Sun-god (dUtu) The king (lugal) slaughtered a large number of bulls and sheep. (CBS 10673, vi:206–211) [followed by text missing on this tablet] This ‘large number of bulls and sheep’ seems to be something more substantial for the gods to get their teeth into than what we hear about in Gilgamesh, namely, the 14 flasks of brew. We also notice the darkness/light imagery, and the way that the Sumerian prefixes dingir = ‘god’, giving godSun at the point where the sun with ‘its rays’ and functionality ‘enters’ the dark interior of the boat after an opening has been cut. There is the physical sunlight and there is our hot star in the sky, who back then is also a deity to worship. King Ziusudra does so in reverential prostration before him. The Sumerian deities and temple sites were inherited by the Semitic Assyrians and Babylonians who called this senior male deity, ‘Shamash’, that was also, of course, their male gendered word for ‘the sun’ (šamšu). This reverential attitude displayed by king Ziusudra and by Utanapishtim is belied by the theriomorphism of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh. The gods are likened to hungry sheep (kīma immerim) crowding a sheep-trough. ‘Dogs’, ‘flies’ and ‘sheep’—these strike us in our culture as inappropriately disrespectful terms to use when speaking of the ruling powers of the Cosmos. One would like to interview the writer of Gilgamesh at some length to find out how he could rip off the gods so brazenly—apparently for entertainment—and yet participate in the system of temple ritual, honouring, placating and staying on the right side of irascible Enlil, cunning Ea/Enki and foolhardy Nintu. We can assume that he knows his audience and expects them to respond to his lines appreciatively. Is this a signal of an emerging critique of the ancient ways? Or is the narrator as much a heretic as the author of Enūma eliš, with its aberrant theology of Marduk crowned king of the gods—so ably discussed by Wilfred Lambert in his posthumous Babylonian Creation Myths. We can only guess, not being able to interview our author. 63 CHAPTER 8 GRIEF WRATH CONFRONTATION 1. Nintu, Enlil and Enki. The post-Flood sacrifice draws in three major dynamic characters, the Mother goddess, the instigator of the Flood, and the personal god of the Flood hero, Utanapishtim. The narrator is on top form in his portrayal of these three. Each of them enters filled with emotion. Each has a key speech. Each is essential to the plot as it unfolds towards its dénouement. The other gods have not entirely disappeared from the scene. They function like an array of extras in a film. They do not speak. The two collective terms for the gods—the Anunnaki and the Igigi—seem to be used interchangeably in Gilg. XI, whereas they are differentiated into Underworld gods and celestial gods elsewhere. The Anunnaki carried the torches of fire (line 104f.) across country scorching the land, but subsequently they weep and suffer with Nintu (lines 125–127) ‘The gods’ (ilī, 3 x in lines 161–163), called the Igigi here (see line 174), savour the sacrificial smell and gather like flies to eat at the sacrifice. So the gods are active participants collectively in this sequence but are otherwise not distinguished. We are watching the narrator with his cast. He is in role as stage manager as he implements soliloquy and dialogue, the expression of intense grief and of intense anger. 2. The Ladylord who weeps her heart out. The gods, including Nintu, are too famished to speak before they have eaten. But then… After they had eaten the offering Nintu arose to complain against all of them (Atr. 3, v:36–37; L&M 98f.; Dalley, 33) There are two verbs for ‘standing’ in the seond line above. The first verb signals movement as Nintu stands up to be seen and to speak (tebû – ‘to arise’). It is supported by the second verb (izzuzzum – ‘to stand, take up a stance’). This indicates that she is taking up an adversarial stance. She is confronting the whole array (napḫar) of gods. Mesopotamian theology peppers the epic with major male deities such as Shamash, Anu, Enki, Enlil, Adad and Ninurta. But our ‘Ladylord of the gods’ (dBēlet-ilī, Nintu, Mami) is not in the least cowed by the massed deities who voted for the Flood. Humans are her offspring, not theirs. She will speak for them. They cannot. They have drowned. The narrator has foregrounded Nintu’s expression of self-recrimination and grief (Atr. 3, iii:32– 39) before she vents her anger on her fellow gods, and specifically against the top gods, Anu and Enlil. Neither of the two is present to hear her outburst that blames them outright because they have leadership status.77 Nintu is fully aware of their absence, but addresses all present. 77 Atr. iii:39, Enlil; iii:51–54 Anu, and v:39–41 Anu and Enlil. This pairing of Anu and Enlil is found in the Sumerian version as well (L&M, 142–145; vi:252, 255 cf. iii:144 and iv:159). It drops out of Gilg. 64 As she confronts those assembled, she has questions.78 “Where has Anu gone, the master of forethought?79 And Enlil? Has he (dared) to approach the incense? Those who did not think it through but ordained the Flood consigned the people to destruction! (Atr. 3, v:39–43; cf. L&M, 98f., Wasserman, 35) Nintu is angry and bitter towards these two senior gods. She is holding them personally responsible because Anu as president and Enlil as chairman of the Divine Assembly should have exhibited greater wisdom and regard for the consequences of their decision, out of divine self-interest, if not from the compassion that she herself feels so deeply. The Anunna, the so-called ‘great gods’ collectively, have been reduced to staying thirsty and hungry (lines 31–32// Gilg. XI:127) while the narrator has satirised them for fleeing to Anu’s heaven and hunkering down there like dogs during the storm. Anu, father of these gods, is himself discombobulated by the storm, surrounded by his cowering sons.80 In Atrahasis, Nintu’s grief, self-recrimination and anger with Anu and Enlil occupy the scene immediately after the Flood. She sees, she weeps (Atr. 3, iii: 28–iv:18) until her grief is spent (Atr. 3, iii: 28–iv:18): “I have seen, and over them I have wept I have come to the end of my wailing over them.” She wept and calmed her heart down Nintu wailed, her emotion she vented. (Atr. 3, iv: 12–13) Here the narrator writes down her lines of speech and then adds his own summary statement. He is signalling the transition from Nintu’s intense outburst to a collective pause. Nintu sits down: ‘She, where she sat, // in mourning, they sat’ (starting at iv:18).81 Gilg.XI retains this collective weeping: ilū šūt Anunnaki bakū ittiša ‘the gods, those Anunakki, were weeping with her’ (line 125). There is a solidarity in regret. This will prove significant when Enlil appears. Nintu and the gods sit there together, feverishly thirsty and hungry—‘they were unceasingly convulsed from hunger’ in Wasserman’s rendering. Hunger spasms accompanied waves of grief. The narrator is painting us a graphic picture, that he completes the couplet with. It is a visual simile for their wait—‘like sheep, they crowded the water channel’( line 20). In a hot country, that must have been a familiar sight. XI, evidently to highlight Enlil, especially at the sacrifice, discovery and blessing scenes. The existence of Anu is retained only in connection with Nintu’s necklace (XI:165). 78 With tebû – ‘to arise’, as one might stand up in a lawcourt to speak, and with izzuzzum – ‘to take up (her) stand against’ ‘the whole lot of them’(napḫaršunu). 79 L&M, 98f. translate bēl ṭēmi as a designation of office, ‘the president’. Certainly, Anu was the ancient senior deity, but in this context surely Nintu is being sarcastic rather than respectful. The semantic range of ṭēmu includes ‘forethought, planning’ (CDA, 414) which fits well. The wisdom of Anu, the ‘master planner’ has failed him. This gels with la imtalkū ‘they did not ponder/weigh things/consider’ (malāku) of line 42 before they consigned human beings to annihilation. 80 Atr.3. iii: 26 ́ has ‘his sons were thrown down before him’, where the ‘before him’(maḫrišu) more likely refers back to Anu, with Wasserman’s restoration in the broken space (C1, iii, 23 –́ 27 ,́ p.34) than to Enki (as in L&M, 94f.). The Akkadian idiom is šanû ṭēmu ‘to change thoughts’, that is, move away from normal equilibrium into disconcerted confusion. 81 Atr. iv:18 ši ašar ušbu // ina bikiti ušbūma illustrates perfectly the half-line break. It has the repeat verb wašābu – ‘to sit, dwell’ in each half of its 3 + 3 words, adding the new information with ina bikiti (‘in mourning’) ušbū-ma. The line after completes the couplet with its 2 + 2 wording: kīma immerī // imlūnim rāṭam ‘like sheep // they filled the water channel’. 65 3. Enter Enlil. After the intial emotions of the Mother goddess, the narrator prepares us for the arrival of Enlil. For this speech, we can return from Atrahasis to Gilg. XI as Nintu takes a vow of rememberance when she arrives at the food of the sacrifice, adding a denunciation of Enlil: Then at once Belet-ili arrived, she lifted the flies of lapis lazuli that Anu made for their courtship: “O gods, let these great beads in this necklace of mine make me remember these days, and never forget them! All the gods shall come to the incense, but to the incense let Enlil not come, because he lacked counsel and brought on the Deluge, and delivered my people into destruction.” From the moment of his arrival as Enlil saw the boat, he flared up, inwardly filled (with rage) at the Igigi gods: “How has life escaped? Not a human being was to be alive after the destruction!” ā ibluṭ amēlu ina karāši (Gilg. XI: 164–176; after George 2, 714f.) The narrator’s technique in these lines is: report~speech A~report~speech B, where A is Nintu speaking, and B is her bête noir, Enlil, speaking. Enlil’s anger matches Nintu’s. There is irony in Nintu’s unfulfilled pronouncement banning Enlil. After her ban, he immediately appears. However, this allows for face-to-face confrontation when Ea/Enki takes up the cudgels. Yet in these lines about Enlil’s fury, we see clearly that the rug has been pulled out from under the CEO. He may rage against the pantheon, the Igigi gods, but that does not alter the fact that his plans have failed. He must now face that he does not run the Universe alone, nor chair the Divine Assembly without a hitch, nor can he be aware of all that is going on. We might think: “And how could he miss that gigantic boat? Or, seeing all the building activity reach completion and not ask himself what its purpose was?” It is true, of course, that Enlil’s Ekur shrine/house is in Nippur, while the boat is being built in Shuruppak, but for a cosmic god who decides fate for the land/Earth, animals and humanity, surely he needs to be better informed? It is one of those narrative gaps that we are not invited to fill in. Theologically, we do witness the narrator’s freedom to depict his gods at furious loggerheads with one another. This is a striking display of the narrator’s anthropomorphic boldness. Enlil’s policy, motion, oath-taking, and decree of destruction (karāšu) has failed. The denunciation of Enlil by Belet-ili and his confrontation by Ea/Enki ends with an outright challenge to Enlil. Polytheism and pantheons have their sovereignty problems because of the potential for conflicting wills. So too will inter-testamental Judaism when the Satan figure of Job mutates into Belial, and within 1st century Judaism in Palestine is called Beelzebul ‘the ruler of the demons’ according to the Pharisees as reported in Matt 12:24, and is termed ‘the god of this Age’ by Paul. This ousted celestial opposes the Creator of the universe.82 82 Key documents from Dead Sea scrolls composed before the Christian era include the Damascus Document, the Community Rule and the War Scroll. These all refer explicitly to Belial as an evil spiritual force opposing Israel, Michael and the sons of light. See conveniantly Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, Penguin Classics, rev.ed. 2004. At 2 Cor 4:4, Paul calls this evil opponent ‘the god of this Age’. See too Mk 3:22, Lk 11:15 and Matt 10:25. 66 However, what happens next, that moves the plot on immediately after line 176, is Ninurta’s intervention. Ninurta, son of Enlil, steps forward in response to Enlil’s horrifying post-Flood discovery of the boat and its tell-tale meaning. Ninurta fills the role of the clever snitch. We know from the lines about the onset of the Flood that Ninurta was behind the flooding of the dykes (line 103), so he was complicit in the mass destruction, and as responsible as any. Now he points an accusing finger at Enki for thwarting Enlil’s plan. However, rather than making a head-on accusation, he asks a question. It is a rhetorical question. Ninurta is well aware of Ea/Enki’s reputation for ingenious schemes, such as creating human beings to take the load of food production off the gods. Ninurta has worked out who could have planned Utanapishtim’s escape. So he says to Enlil: “Who, if not Ea, could cause such a thing? Ea alone knows how all things are done.”83 (George 2, lines 179f.) This is a left-handed compliment full of insinuation. If our narrator was aware of the exact wording of his precursor text, Atrahasis, at this point, then he likely has a theological reason to lay the exposé of Enki at Ninurta’s door, rather than at Anu’s. Yet Ninurta has only a cameo role in the story. He is the narrator’s foil to Ea/Enki who has a lot more to say to Enlil than these two lines by Ninurta, and in the next lines he says it. Enlil’s explosion of anger expresses his frustration, as anger often does when it flares up at a goal thwarted (line 76). From the boat, the gigantic roadblock to his planned future, Enlil shifts to who drew its blueprint. We know—from a late Assyrian fragment of Atrahasis—that Ea/Enki drew its design for Atrahasis on the ground after he protested: “I have never built a boat… draw the design (eṣir uṣurtu) on the ground/ that I may see [the design] and [build] the boat.”84 Before Ninurta’s broad hint, Enlil had first targeted the Igigi. Enlil deduces that someone among the oath-takers to the Flood decision must have broken his oath, leaked the plan before the event, and betrayed him. But who? Now, after Ninurta has asked his question, fingering Enki, how will this ingenious god fare? The audience must have been on the edge of their seats. If they knew their myths, then they would recall that there had been a prior instance of insubordination within the pantheon—the strike by the junior gods, throwing down their tools and setting them alight as they picketed Enlil’s house (Atr., 1, ii:57ff.; L&M, 46ff.). Anu and Enki had assisted Enlil in determining a course of action in that case. The solution? As proposed by Enki: ‘Summon one god and have him done to death!’ (Atr.1, iv:173 nadû tāmtu – ‘to impose destruction’; L&M, 52f.). Enki’s proposal was accepted: “Let one god be slaughtered (ṭabāḫu) ……… d Ilu-wela who had intelligence (ṭēmu) in their Assembly, they slaughtered. (ṭabāḫu) (Atr., 1, ii:208 and 223f.; Dalley,15) How ironical it is then, that it is Enki himself who might be put to death now. Gods were immortal, but they could be violently murdered or excuted. How will Enki escape this fate? 83 Gilg. (SBV) has changed the name of the snitch to Ninurta, whereas Atrahasis makes the senior god Anu (godSky) the speaker who exposes Enki: mannu annitam ša lā Enki ippuš “Who did this if not Enki?” (L&M, 100f. = Wasserman, 36 C1 vi:13). 84 L&M, 128f. = Wasserman, 91f., MS. DT42 = W, Atr. 13 –́ 15 ́. 67 4. Enki’s truth. It may sound too much like the Postmodern to talk about Enki’s truth versus Enlil’s truth. Of course, had Enlil been all-knowing, the boat—that is objectively present in this scene—would have been something that he observed and had drawn conclusions from before this scene. The conflict of perspective between Enlil’s Flood plan and Enki’s rescue perspective could not have remained hidden up to the point where Nintu, Enlil and Enki take the stage here—had Enlil’s informants done their job. Enki is not lost for words after Ninurta’s thinly veiled accusation. In fact, the narrator of Gilgamesh gives him 15 lines of uninterrupted speech for making his defence (Gilg. XI, lines 183–198). The first 12 of these are a rebuke to Enlil for a disproportionate use of destruction when he could have used lions, wolves, famine or plague to decimate the numbers of human beings and so reduce their noise. Enki’s defence is an attack. This he follows with a denial: As for me, I did not reveal the secret of the great gods Atrahasis I caused to see a dream,85 and (in it) he learned of the secret of the gods. Now discuss the decision about him! (XI: 196f.) Enki denies or steers around his telling of the gods’ secret (pirištu) directly to the Flood survivor. A ‘secret’ in Babylonian paralance could be ‘guarded’(naṣāru) or ‘opened’ (petû), that is ‘disclosed’. Now, there are dream omens that require interpretation because they are not literal previews of a future. The role of the intermediary expert interpreter is crucial, just as Daniel has to interpret Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams. The noun bārû is widely used for the person in this interpretative role—the verb bâru III in Š-causative form ‘to cause to appear’ is used by Enki in line 197. Glaringly, Enki omits altogether his intentional whispering through the wall of Utanapishtim’s house, giving his verbal instruction to build a boat. Instead, Enki refers here to the dream-vision, seemingly offloading some responsibility for the breach of security onto the workings of the survivor’s brain. 5. The omitted Tip-off. Quite how a tip-off via a dream-vision and via words in whispers—and in the later Assyrian fragment W actually drawing the boat’s design on the ground—are qualitatively different from revealing the gods’ secret when these actions have the same objective… remains obscure. Perhaps we are meant to notice that. But Enki moves his denial deftly on. Instead, we will pause here to back track for a moment to the disclosure incident itself that left its indelible mark on the tradition. The memorable wording of the tip-off occurs in all four major versions of the Flood story. Gilg. XI: 21–22 uses 4 words (2 + 2) in line 21, matched by 4 words (2 + 2) in the next line. The two imperatives “Listen!” (šemû – ‘to hear’) and “Pay heed!” (ḫasāsu – ‘be conscious, aware, think about)’ sit in parallel, adding emphasis and urgency to the exhortation: 21. kikkiš kikkiš igāru igāru 22. kikkišu šimēma igāru ḫissas 21. Reed fence, reed fence! Brick wall, brick wall! 22. Listen, O reed fence! Pay heed, O brick wall! (Translation 2: George 2, academic, 704f.) 85 In line 197, the verb is bâru I – ‘to see, look at’ in the Š-causative ‘to cause to see, make appear’. The noun bārû is a word for the ‘diviner’ as someone who discerns and discloses things. The medium for this disclosure is a ‘dream’ (šuttum, šunata) that Enki sends Atrahasis. There are dream omens that require interpretation but this seems to be a preview, a precognition of the Flood event. 68 The next lines of instruction, lines 23–27, are some of the most memorable lines of Akkadian literature. 23. “O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu 24. Demolish (u-qur) the house, and build a boat! (naqāru – ‘to demolish, dismantle’) 25. Abandon wealth, and seek survival! 26. Spurn property, save life! 27. Take on board the boat all living things’ seed! 25. muššir mešram-ma še’î napšāti 26. makkuru zêr-ma napišti bulliṭ (Gilg. XI, 23–27; George, 89 and 705f.) The lines 24–26 have a punch to them, each line starting with an imperative and adding a second to it. The negatively nuanced actions are the first step (‘demolish, abandon, spurn’). This contrasts with the positives (‘build, seek, save’). Line 27 adds another imperative (‘cause to go up’), and then echoes line 25’s napšāti – ‘life’, adding ‘all’, and using a sound echo with ‘seed’ (zēr – ‘seed’, line 27) playing off against ‘scorn, spurn’ (zêr) in the previous line. The lines do not quite say it, but may imply this, namely, that there is a transformation from house to boat, what is demolished being reutilised for building the boat. Certainly ‘reeds’ have crept into the picture,86 even if we follow George in making the wall (igāru) a ‘ wall of brick!’ (line 21).87 The word ‘brick’ leaps out. It is an interpretation based on the very large number of citation times in Akkadian when igāru is a solid wall, even a stone one. For my further discussion of the five possibilities that George (x2), Dalley (x2) and Wasserman (1) offer, see Appendix 4: Notes on Boats and Walls. 6. Enlil’s truth. Enki is guilty, as we, the audience, know very well. But in his oratory in lines 196f., he is clearly putting things back onto Enlil. Since malāku II means both ‘to discuss’ and ‘to advise’ and milku is both ‘advice’ and ‘decision’, there is perhaps some intentional ambivalence. ‘His decision’ (milikšu), we can take as the decision about Atrahasis/Utanapishtim that must be made by Enlil, with or without discussion. Enki is putting Enlil on the spot instead of himself. The Mother goddess has already moved the Anunna/Igigi ranks of gods to weep with her: ilū šūt Annnaki bakū ittiša, ‘the gods, those Anunnaki, were weeping with her’, (XI:125). Enki has publicly and head-on rebuked Enlil, citing the principle of proportionality and stating alternative tactics overlooked by him. After this ethical rebuke, does Enlil now dare to order Enki to be put to death for acting in role as Utanapishtim’s personal god when Utanapishtim is known to be a devout devotee? Enki faces Enlil with the accomplished fact of survival, relying on the back-up of Nintu and the won-over Anunnaki gods who had experienced the awful thirst and hunger. This dearth was good reason for not eliminating all human providers. Enlil should review his misguided policy in the light of reason and experience. He, in fact, has much to thank Enki for. 86 Compare Gen 6:14 קנםqānīm, where ‘reeds’ seem more likely than vowels yielding the word as ‘nests’. 87 A glance at CAD i/j under igāru shows that the most frequent use of the word is for a solid wall, even a stone wall of a fortified city. Utanapishtim, son of Ubar-Tutu, is king of Shuruppak city. He would be living in a solid structure, brick at the least, perhaps kiln-baked rather than sun dried. 69 How much of this should we infer, attributing to the narrator what he has not actually written into the speech? To speculate is an enjoyable engagement and an entering into the story.88 Perhaps we are not the first? Perhaps audiences had argued about this after the performance. How much does the narrator trust his audience to remember from what he has previously written? Surely the whispering to the wall urging Utanapishtim to abandon house and embrace ship. Surely the audience has not forgotten that? The audience knows how cunning Enki is and how he may speak the truth—but not the whole truth—in the interests of ‘reasonableness’ at this point. But the narrator does not hang Enlil out to dry like the fate of Ishtar with her corpse hung on a peg in the Underworld for crossing its threshold. The narrator has more to offer in his characterisation of Enlil than public disgrace for his ill-considered plan to destroy humanity. We shall see. 88 Wasserman likewise indulges in analytical imagination. He postulates that Enlil must have cunningly kept a reserve of food for himself and wanted to humiliate the other gods. This was why he had not immediately rushed to the sacrifice like the other gods buzzing around it. The other cities were destroyed, but not Nippur and the E.kur. In fairness, Wasserman says that his analysis is based in inference. See Wasserman, 150ff. 70 CHAPTER 9 A MEMORABLE WEEK in OUTCOMES MESOPOTAMIA “O Gilgamesh, where are you wandering? You cannot find the life that you seek: when the gods created mankind for mankind they established death life they kept for themselves. You, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full kep enjoying yourself, day and by night! Every day make merry dance and play day and night! Let your clothes be clean! Let your head be washed, may you be bathed in water! Gaze on the little one who holds your hand Let a wife enjoy your repeated embrace! For such is the destiny [of mortal men] that the one who lives [……………….]’ (OBV iii:1–15) George 2, 278f.) (Dalley, Myths, 2000,150) How will it all end? The lines above are from the Gilgamesh epic in the Old Babylonian version, but they do not come from Tablet XI that contains the Flood story. They come from Tablet X many scenes previous to where the plot draws to a close. The words are spoken by the tavern-keeper lady, Shiduri. This is one point in the story that might have been the turning point, a turning point for home. That is her advice in a nutshell. I paraphrase: “Go home, Gilgamesh! And make it a home, your home.” For many lines, the readers of a great story will be wondering: “What happens next?” But there comes a point when they begin to change this question to: “How will this all end?” The plot has sustained the tensions through twists and turns that the reader cannot anticipate, but then this tensioned build up demands a release in the dénouement, preferably with a twist in the tail. In our discussion that follows, we will recap on some of those twists and turns of the story line, but after that we will focus our Resource analysis on outcomes. 71 Gilgamesh has travelled many miles from home by the time he reaches the tavern-keeper at the shore of the ocean. He is travel-worn but still determined in his quest for eternal life. Her wise words do not lead to the dénouement. The narrator has more up his sleeve. He is not stopping the story at the impassable Ocean of Death. Gilgamesh is unable to internalize her wisdom. He still fights against the fate of all mortals becoming his fate too. For a fuller version of the dialogue between Shiduri and Gilgamesh we need to jump back to the beginning of Tablet X in the library editions collected by Ashurbanipal in the 7th century BC. In Tablet X, the SBV version, Shiduri sees a man approaching. He is in a disheveled and sorry state and even in the distance he seems like a wild man. She wisely bars her gate and takes to the roof. She is not wrong. There still lurks a violence within Gilgamesh and he threatens to smash down the door. Instead, they talk. She tells him no one has crossed the ocean except the Sun god, Shamash, for midway across, there are the Waters of Death. What will he choose to do, even with the assistance of Ur-Shanabi, the ferryman? As we know because we have been studying Tablet XI and not reading sequentially from Tablet X forwards, the two of them, Gilgamesh and Sursunabu/Urshanabi do reach Utanapishtim who has gained eternal life at the end of the Flood. Gilgamesh has achieved part of his quest. He hears the story of the Flood. But then? Has the narrator run out of ideas? We still want to know. So after Gilgamesh listens to the Flood story, then what happens? We have an urge to know. Does he die as the ending of the story? Where? On the way home? Has it all been in vain? 1. For Gilgamesh, no rainbow. After all the dangers and challenges that Gilgamesh overcomes in his quest, he fails at the last. He fails Utanapishtim’s challenge that seems simple enough to him. Just stay awake for a week: “Come on!(gana) For six days and seven nights do without slumber!” (line 209). When Gilgamesh wakes, he is confronted with the equivalent of a row of folded newspapers displaying the headlines of a complete week’s news. What he finds is a row of loaves against marks on the wall above him. The last is oven-fresh, the first stale as stale can be. The evidence of his week-long sleep is incontrovertible. He is distraught. Death is the robber (ekkēmu) who gains entry to the safest place, even if he gets home to his very royal bedchamber (mayyaltu, ma’’lu), Death will settle in (wašābu – to dwell), lurking there. On the way back home, there is no rainbow over the Ocean of Death. Instead, Gilgamesh is outwitted by a thieving snake: ‘of the plant’s fragrance a snake caught scent… and carried off the plant’ (line 305f.). The snake sheds its skin. This proves that the magic plant, ‘Old Man Grown Young’(line 299), would have worked—if only Gilgamesh had had the chance to get the plant home and use it. At this point, the bitter truth of his last chance vanishes with the tip of the snake’s tail. We follow Gilgamesh and his ferryman back to Uruk, his royal city where we started from. The epic has a circular shape to it, in Uruk, from Uruk, back to Uruk, a look around Uruk. 2. Enlil’s last stand/best moment. The endings of the Flood story tellings are fascinating. In the case of Gilgamesh, we have a double ending in Tablet XI. After the snake episode, Gilgamesh carries on to Uruk. Before that, there is the ending of the Flood story itself. How does that end? We still have Enlil’s last stand to explore. How indeed did Utanapishtim survive the wrath of Enlil when he discovered that there were survivors of his master plan for the total destruction of humanity? 72 There is much artistry in the Mesopotamian tellings. The eruptions of emotion in the aftermath of the Flood are intense. What we want to highlight now is Enlil’s change of heart. Plotwise, this matches Yhwh’s change of heart after savouring Noah’s offering. The intention to destroy humanity is Enlil’s from the start. The intention to start over with survivors is Yhwh/Elohim’s from the beginning. We find that Enlil, like the Mother goddess, is drawn as a complex character. Apparently, there resides within Enlil, as he is drawn by the narrator, an element of openness to reason, and even a generosity, because on-the-spot, after hearing Enki’s reasoning, he reverses his total annihilation policy to make an exception to his decree with this survivor couple, Utanapishtim and his wife. The ‘kith and kin’ have disappeared from the narrative at this point. They are loose ends, but as readers we fill the gap by assuming that they will live on and die naturally as they would have done without the Flood experience. We recall that in her anger and grief, Belet-ili had tried to ban Enlil from attending the sacrifice. However, no sooner than Belet-ili’s words have left her lips than Enlil arrives on the scene, and flies into a rage with the Igigi. This is comical from the perspective of monotheism, but for a Mesopotamian, it surely portrays the need to play the god on your side off against any others coming your way with angry intentions. Neither Belet-ili, the Ladylord of the gods, nor Enlil, seem to be all-powerful. Perhaps Enlil realizes that he no longer has the Divine Assembly in agreement with him. So he goes on board the stationary boat. Now we hear the story being told by Utanapishtim in the 1st person once again. Enlil came up into the boat he took hold of my hands and brought me out He brought out my woman, he made her kneel at my side he touched our foreheads, standing between us to bless us: 89 “In the past Uta-napishti was (one of) mankind but now Uta-napishti and his woman shall be like us gods! (kīma ilī nâšima) Uta-napishti shall dwell far away, at the mouth of the rivers!”90 (XI: lines 199–205) Enlil boards the boat, apparently to see inside it for himself. Or perhaps because Utanapishtim was cowering inside as he caught the tones of the angry gods. Next, Enlil brings out the lead couple from on board and presents them to the crowd of gods, the Igigi, who will witness his change of mind, expressed by conferring on them his blessing. Notice the narrator’s focus. We hear nothing about the ‘kith and kin’. Only the man and wife, male and female, become survivor heroes. They are centre stage with the CEO of the Divine Assembly. This is appropriate theatrically. The camera zooms in on this pair as they kneel together. The tablets of the Atrahasis myth are unfortunately missing lines at this point and only preserve the ‘solution’ to the runaway multiplication of human beings in the future. This ‘solution’ to Enlil’s insomnia that resulted from the clamour (rigmu ‘noise’) of the human population takes the form of birth limitations, via barren women—not sterile men! It includes the activity of the child-snatching demon Pashittu. As we would see it, Pashittu’s malice arises from a pre- scientific misinterpretation of infant mortality rates. In addition, there will be three types of taboo women, like the celibates of today’s religious orders (Atr.3, 7:1–8; L&M, 102f.; Dalley, 35). 89 The Akk. karābu has its counterpart in the Heb. bārak, used in the Piel., familiar to us Tanak and in Jewish prayer in the phrase in bārūk ʾattāh ‘blessed are you’. Pronouncing blessing, both human and divine, is a leading motif in the Genesis stories and elsewhere in the O.T. 90 George 2, 717. This translation makes more sense of the in–out sequence by rendering the causative Š-form of the verb elû ‘to go up’ as ‘to get out (from storage)’, ‘to bring forward (witnesses)’. 73 Of course, the Flood writer of Atrahasis is drawing on his experience of these contemporary phenomena in his community and projecting them back to ancient times of the Flood and the decisions of the gods. There is no infant mortality demon in canonical Yahwistic theology. No demon snatcher operating behind a miscarriage, or behind a death-in-childbirth like Rachael’s (Gen 35:16ff.). The portrait of Enlil at this end-point of the Flood is extraordinary. He is father-like, leading his ‘children’ Utanapishtim and his wife by the hand and laying on his hand in blessing as though wishing them our “Night, night!” to children, but instead conferring being alive for ever and living far away beyond where the rivers—presumably the Tigris and Euphrates—debouch into the Persian Gulf. 3. Dilmun—the end of the line. The exact location for eternal life floats free in the Ziusudra myth as we have it, though this location seems be modelled on an island off Bahrain, termed Dilmun elsewhere: The king Ziusudra Prostrated himself before An (and) Enlil91 Who gave him life, like a god. At that time, the king Ziusudra Who protected the seed of mankind at the time of destruction They settled in an overseas country in the orient, in Dilmun. (L&M, 145; lines 6:254–260) In this Sumerian tablet’s account, there is no mention of king Ziusudra’s wife when he leaves the boat, nor here where he receives eternal life. Gilg. XI highlights the couple kneeling together before Enlil for this blessing. This is so different in vision and tone. Instead, in the Sumerian telling, we have three pointers to where the lucky couple resided—away from Mesopotamia in Dilmun, theoretically beyond interview. The location in Gilgamesh epic comes with an emphasis on how hazardous it is to attempt a visit there, given the Waters of Death. The Sumerian ending on tablet CBS 10673 is missing. The lines of the tablet peter out at the mention of Dilmun. 4. Missing women? Variants and resonances. We have been noting how details change between tellings, and why these at times seem due to artistic skill exercising choice. Resource Analysis may highlight the after-Flood differences between Gilg.XI and the Sumerian tablet CBS 10673 (Ziusudra), yet centrally in Mesopotamia first and then beyond, there is a clear flowing stream of tradition. For instance, the name ‘Atra- hasis’ survives into Gilgamesh as an occasional alternative for Uta-napishtim and alerts us to a source for Gilgamesh (SBV), while the name Ziusudra survives from Sumerian into its Greekized form as ‘Xisuthros’. This appears in Greek literary references that derive from the retelling by the Babylonian priest Berossus who lived in the 3rd century BC. So we can demonstrate a Flood story continuity in Mesopotamia, from 1700 BC to Berossus, and extending beyond, in the Akkadian, Sumerian and Greek language sources. The Hebrew retelling will fit somewhere between the Middle Babylonian work of Sin-leqi-uninni and the Assyrian library copies, and before Berossus. 91 In the Sumerian version, there is a striking theological difference—Enlil does not act alone. The Sumerian godSky—and at points also the Mother goddess, Ninhursag—are co-agents with godEnlil. Thus An, Enlil and Ninhursag ‘created the black-headed people’ (l.48). An, Enlil and Ninhursag are the ‘gods of the universe’. The oath the gods swear is in ‘the names of An and Enlil’ (lines 143f.). An and Enlil both appear (line 252) to Ziusudra to confer eternal life on him. 74 Together with this continuity, there are also significant differences of emphasis, focus, purpose, style and tone in the tellings. All these differences we must lay at the individual narrator’s door. Probably, there are many, many narrators of the story both before written sources and in parallel with them. These performances from memory to live audiences no doubt elaborated or skipped over detail as they performed, and did not rely on reading or owning a tablet copy. Ziusudra, the king, in the lines quoted above, has no queen alongside him. Indeed, no named family. He is accompanied with the ‘seed’ for repopulating the Earth. This is the chosen and narrowed perspective of the narrator, though we allow that this damaged version with lines missing reads more like a very abbreviated version even where its lines are preserved legibly. It remains true that king Ziusudra is presented front and centre stage. It is the style of this telling. Gilgamesh is quite different. Although it does not name the hero’s wife, it gives her a dignified role in the Flood story. She speaks her own thoughts. She is alongside Utanapishtim at the end of his Flood telling. In Utanapishtim’s own words, together they kneel and receive the blessing: ‘our foreheads’, ‘between us’ , ‘to bless us’. She is included in Enlil’s reported words too: ‘he and his woman (MUNUS-ša = sinništa-ša ‘his woman’) shall become like us gods’. Noah’s wife is nowhere honoured in the biblical version, nor is she addressed by God. She remains in Noah’s shadow, and at times is invisible there. The speeches that God makes in the course of the narration demonstrate this. They are easy to identify and like the speeches of Nintu, the Yahweh/Elohim’s speeches carry a significant freight of meaning within the whole. As quoted previously, but now highlighting the maleness, we read: • God said to Noah 6:13 • Yhwh said to Noah 7:1 • Then God said to Noah 8:15 • God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them 9:1 • Then God said to Noah and his sons with him 9:8 • God said to Noah 9:17 So this is a male thing, mainly a God~Noah series of encounters (4x). The extended and explicit mention of the next generation, ‘his sons with him’, does not include their wives any more than it mentions Noah’s wife. The two mentions of his sons associated with Noah occur at key theological and literary junctures. The biblical Flood telling is, as one might expect, androcentric. Today, Jewish lineage is traced through the mother. This makes biological sense. 5. Names change and live on. Gilgamesh goes in for significant naming and characterizing. Its Flood hero carries a ‘nickname’— Ūta-napišti ‘I found–life’ that marks his honorific status as the receiver of eternal life at Enlil’s bestowal. The Sumerian tablet likewise with its Zi–u–sudra (‘life-days-distant’). while Atra-hasīs is ‘the exceedingly–wise one’ who is hand-in-glove with his personal god Ea/Enki and visits his temple. He is the ‘righteous’ one, so to speak, the ‘Noah’ of his generation. The name Noah (nōaḥ )נחworks with its own play on words. This birthname ‘Rest’ expresses Lamech’s hopes for amelioration of weed-work. We might choose to see this ‘rest’ appearing ironically in Noah’s passing out completely after imbibing too much wine and lying prostrate in his tent (Gen 9:20f.)—but we should not. More to the point, within the Flood telling, the grounding of the boat echoes this hope of rest: ‘the Ark came to rest’ (wattānaḥ hattēbāh ׃verb נוח, Qal. nāḥāh )נחהon the mountains of Urartu (Gen 8:4b). 75 Significantly, as we noted, there is the sound play on words nōaḥ~rīaḥ~nīaḥ נח רח נח: ‘rest’~‘smell’~‘soothing’ (Gen 8:20f.), as the narrator presents us with his theologically worked understanding of this rest, namely, as respite from God’s anger with humanity. That effect of Noah’s sacrifice and God’s reception of it is far more serious than relief from weeds in the crops. After all, weeds continue, as the narrator must know only too well. God’s policy of destruction does not continue. It is replaced with covenant. The aroma of incense drawn into his nostrils by God at Noah’s post-Flood sacrifice soothes God’s anger with sinful humanity that has ruined his creation. This offering of incense, along with sacrifice, then retains a permanent function in prayer that rises to heaven as incense and the whole burnt offerings in Israel’s cultic worship system—a feature no doubt familiar to the Israelite tellers of the Flood story and the writers who penned and edited our canonical version. Plays on words, mingled with dramatic anthropomorphism, are tools of the trade for theologians with literary skills. 6. Outcome as Reward? The Flood story of Tablet XI is worked into the epic of king Gilgamesh. So Gilgamesh has two outcomes, (a) one for the Flood survivor/hero Utanapishtim, and another (b) for the listener to the eye-witness’s testimony, Gilgamesh himself. The anonymous narrator/editors of the biblical Flood telling have no equivalent to Gilgamesh and no ideology of kingship lowered from heaven to recount. Despite this absence, there is certainly an awareness of things Mesopotamian that lies behind Gen 1–11. The named cities and the city with the Tower of Babel are obvious examples, as too are the Tigris and Euphrates rivers of the Eden setting (Gen 2:14). As for divergence from the ethos of Shuruppak, and Uruk, cities which very likely had their own versions of the Flood story in writing, the difference with Noah as ‘hero’ is radical. Noah is commoner, not king. He neither tells his own survivor story like Utanapishtim, nor does he rule a city like Gilgamesh back at Uruk. Noah has but one attribute in the biblical narration: ‘Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him’ (Gen 6:22, compare 7:16). This tag line was likely intended, in the ears of Israelite listeners, to provoke their contemporary reflection about carrying out God’s commandments in order to emulate Noah who ‘walked with God’ (6:9b). Noah is a layman. He may offer sacrifice, as Abraham does, or Cain and Abel do at the first, but Noah is not a priest after the order of Melkizedeq, Aaron or anyone else, as Atrahasis seems to be. In the 1st Person version from Ugarit, we read: “I am Atrahasis. I lived in the temple of Ea, my lord”. The ‘house (bītu) of godEa/Enki’ is, of course, not the fresh water Abyss (Apsû), but is on land in the city, and must refer godEa’s temple É-engurra at Eridu.92 Nor is Noah, with the knowledge acquired in his 600 pre-Flood years, a pre-Flood sage (apkallu) bearing ancient knowledge for a post-Flood re-civilisation of the world. Noah lives for another 350 years after the Flood, but that is nowhere near longer than the 601 years that he had already enjoyed, though a total of 950 years should satisfy anyone, if eternal life is not on offer. Yet the outcome for Noah as Flood-survivor is no more, really, than what he had already achieved in fathering Shem, Ham and Japheth. They were all born 100 years before the Flood. So what is Noah’s legacy? Is it only biological continuity—as a human species we are stakeholders in that enterprise. No, the biblical narrator has stripped Noah of all the Mesopotamian accoutrements—leaving only that Noah was ‘righteous’, and to judge by the telling, this is proven in following God’s commandments to the letter regarding the Ark and its occupants. We should look to Noah’s sacrifice and its ‘results’ for his legacy. God’s promises 92 RS.22.412 as translated by L&M, 132f. 76 is how the Genesis telling ends. Contrast with Noah the way that Gilgamesh himself is written up, even before his adventure, as superhuman: Gilgamesh was his name from the day he was born two-thirds of him god but a third of him human (amelūtu) šittinšu (dingir)ilum-ma šullultašu amelūtu93 (lines 47f.) In the Prologue, Gilgamesh is voted as ‘surpassing all other kings’ (line 29). There is no eulogy added by the Genesis narrator like this for Noah as there is in the opener of the Gilgamesh epic. Just that Noah ‘walked with God’ (Gen 6:9). King Gilgamesh of Uruk ‘brought back a message from the antediluvian age’ (line 8). Noah is not credited with transmitting anything culturally—unless it is his wine-making. Nor does Noah’s experience set him up as ‘he who saw the deep (naqbû)… with the totality of wisdom about everything… who set down on a stele all his labours’ (lines 6–10). In the biblical tradition, Noah does nothing to elevate his name after the Flood, nor is he venerated thereafter in exotic terms, nor is he honoured in a cultic festival. Noah dies. That he does share with Gilgamesh. Yet Noah does not become a judge in the Underworld as Gilgamesh does in subsequent tradition. ‘All the days of Noah were 950 years; and he died’ (Gen 9:29). There is no ‘to this day’ for Noah, referring to a burial site or memorial stone—as there is for the ancestress, Rachel (Gen 35:20), for instance. In literary terms, Noah is about as flat a character as one could find in a role like his where he is mentioned frequently as the main human actor. One gains the impression that the Israelite story-tellers of Gen 1–11 are deconstructing the legendary qualities of Mesopotamia’s heroes, whether these be kings, sages or demi-gods. The Israelite narrators resist any tendency to make heroes of Israel’s remote ancestors. With the exception of Enoch, all that the biblical ancestors seem to retain from the Mesopotamian tradition is a longevity. Even that longevity is exceedingly modest measured against the reigns before and after the Flood of Mesopotamia’s kings. These kings are recorded in the Weld-Blundell prism WB444, now sitting in the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. Here we have the mention of Gilgamesh’s father, Ubar-Tutu, who reigns for 18,600 years: (Sippar’s) kingship was brought to Shuruppak (in) Shuruppak Ubar-Tutu became king and ruled for 18,600 years. One king ruled it for 18,600 years. –––––––––––––––––– The Flood swept over ––––––––––––––––––– After the flood had swept over kingship was lowered (again) from heaven. Kingship was in Kish. (after ANET, 265) There may be affinities between the longevity of Ubar-Tutu and the longevity of Noah at 930 years, but the ethos of this Mesopotamian recording is city life, temple life and palace life. The excerpt above demonstrates this foregrounding of Shuruppak~Kish in tandem with its ideology 93 Lines 47–48 are an excellent example of the Babylonian poetic couplet. Even in English translation we can detect the flow. In the Babylonian of line 48, we have 2 words + 2 words (šittinšu ilum-ma + šullultašu amelūtu) with repeat sounds of sh- and m. The epic unfolds the implications of 1/3rd human. 77 of kingship. Genesis may speak of city-building (Gen 4:17), attaching it to Cain and Enoch, but it displays no interest in cities after that until it names Uruk, Agade and Babylon (10:10) in the south of Iraq, and then Nineveh, Rehobothir, Calah and Resen (10:11) in Assyria. In Gen 11, there is the lampooning of the tower builders at Babel. As for the Genesis Flood story, it is singularly void of any city, or any king, or any famous temple such as Enlil has at Nippur, or Enki has at Eridu, or Anu and Ishtar have at Uruk. As Israel’s ancestors in Genesis go, it is open air worship and outdoor altar building, like Noah and Utanapishtim after landing in the mountains. 7. Endings count, especially a re-Creation. The outcome for Noah is not eternal life but the outcome of the Flood account itself is a kind of re-Creation after the un-Creation of the destructive Flood. The animals emerge from the Ark as well as the human beings. They receive special mention at this point, as they do not in Gilgamesh. But why see the biblical aftermath as a re-Creation? An obvious motif in the telling, necessary plotwise but also deliberately highlighted, appears at 9:1 and is repeated at 9:7. God’s speech carries the resonant ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth’ (compare Gen 1:22 and 28). Unfortunately for the animals of creation, they are now a designated food source, the whole lot of them: ‘Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything’(kol-remeś ʾašer hūʾ-ḥay 9:3). This echoes the vegetarian Creation rubric of Gen 1:30—but radically modifies it. Quite how this divine edict of omnivorousness could remain standing in these terms in an account that highlights the difference between ‘clean’ and ritually unclean animals is puzzling—unless we think of interwoven Israelite narratives making up the Flood story. The categories of ‘alive movers’ is comprehensively listed in v.2 as the inhabitants of land, air and sea. It even includes the ‘creepers on the ground’. The result, at a reading of Gen 1–9, is a dietary sequence. The diet that starts out vegetarian but ends up as omnivore. This is not the ideal, but it is allowed—with the prohibition against consuming blood. The concept of ‘clean’ animals pops out from nowhere into the Flood narration where it is distinctive. All contributing hands to the canonical telling are, we can assume, working in an Israelite context of clean/unclean distinctions, in dietary and cultic dimensions, such as we find in Lev. 11. This dietary and cultic classification is deeply embedded in Torah and tradition. Jesus, as a radical in his times, strikes a line through this dietary distinction in his ruling on what defiles and what does not. Mark makes sure his readers do not miss this point by adding his own extrapolating comment: ‘thus he (Jesus) declared all foods clean’ (Mk 7:19). This Gen 1 to Gen 9 dietary link aside, the reference to human beings as made ‘in the image of God’ (beṣelemʾelōhīm )בצלם אלהיםpins down this emergence from the Ark as an intentional and typological re-Creation (kīy beṣelem ʾelōhīm ʿāśāh ʾet-hāʾādām, Gen 9:8b) in the narrator’s telling. 78 CHAPTER 10 COVENANT [not] ETERNAL LIFE Then God spoke to Noah along with his sons as follows: 8 “Look, for my part, I am establishing my covenant 9 with all of you and you-all’s offspring after you-all and with every living being with you-all 10 with bird and beast and with all life on Earth along with you-all with all the disembarkees from the Ark to all life on Earth For I have established my covenant with you-all 11 to not ever cut off all flesh by Flood water for there will not be ever again a Flood to destroy the Earth.” God said: 12 “This is the covenant sign which I myself am appointing between me and you-all’s sons and between every living being that is with you-all down the generations in perpetuity My bow I have set in the cloud 13 so that it can be a covenant sign between me and the Earth. So that in my clouding over the Earth 14 the bow will show itself in the cloud Then I will remember my covenant that is between me and you-all 15 and with every living being that there will never ever again be Flood waters to destroy all flesh When the bow is in the cloud 16 then I will see it for remembering covenant in perpetuity between God and every living being and all flesh that is upon Earth.” So God said to Noah: 17 79 “This is the covenant sign that I have established between me and all flesh that is upon Earth.” (Gen 9:8–17) There are much smoother translations than the one that I have offered above because idiomatic Hebrew ways of saying things differ from idiomatic English. This translation uses ‘you-all’ to indicate that God is including Noah’s sons as adressees, whereas English has abandoned its archaic ‘ye’ for the plural pronoun that the Hebrew uses freely here. The ‘bow’ is indeed the ‘rainbow’ as we can deduce from the context—though whether the narrator intended a subtle allusion to God ceasing his war on humanity could be debated. Just as jarring to our minds is the repeat phrase ‘all flesh’ (kol-bāśār )כל־בשׂר. The word ‘flesh’ (שׂר ָ )ָבּis ‘accurate’ as a translation since the Hebrew word is used for both human and animal meat,94 but it is not idiomatic English! We would do better to abandon the literal rendering in favour of the narrator’s intentional blanket coverage of life forms on Earth. Without doubt, the narrator’s horizon did not encompass the life forms that he could not observe or did not know about. He lived in the pre-scientific world of visible phenomena. Sponges, corals and sea cucumbers were unlikely to feature in his experience, but with certainty we can say that he was unaware of the prolific microscopic single-celled organisms such as amoeba, paramecium and bacteria that we may have observed in water droplets or spreading on agar cultures as part of school biology. So we take on board the comprehensive sweep of the Hebrew idiom ‘all flesh’, even as we recognise the pre-scientific world of the narrator. As ever, as readers, we must try to enter into the world of the narrator and what we sense he is wanting to convey. That sensitivity is very much part of entering into the world of the story. 1. Eternal covenant, not eternal life. At 9:8, we have the first mention of covenant in the Bible. This pops into view, as surprisingly as do the clean animals: “And, as for me, see, I am establishing my covenant with you all(pl.)…” (waʾanīy hinnenīy mēqīm ʾet-berītīy ʾittekem). The reason for this, as we must infer for both, is that the narrator who contributes Gen 9:8–17 is writing from within Israel’s long experience of covenant and extrapolating back from this key relational term to primeval times because he is convinced that the God of Israel is also the Creator of the world. Hence the monotheism of the Genesis Flood story, expressed outside that story as: “You shall have no other gods alongside me” (Top Commandment, Exod 20:3). I assume that the narrators of the Flood story in Israel also knew of the tradition about Enoch who ‘walked with God then was no more because God took him’ (Gen 5:24). This must be a deliberate import into the repetitious and received ‘and he died’ of the genealogy that straddles Enoch’s ancestry at 5:20 and 27. Hence, Noah who also ‘walked with God’ (Gen 6:9b) might just as well have been rewarded with rapture into eternal life. The Genesis Flood story follows neither the Enoch tradition in this, nor the Mesopotamian tradition for the senior survivor pair. This is notable. Instead, by means of intense repetition, the narrator waves a rainbow flag for covenant in his audience’s face. There is a firmness to the tone of the wording about covenant being established. This is 94 Goliath dares young David to mortal combat with the encourgagement: “Come here! I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field!” (1 Sam 17:44). David’s flesh is currently living tissue, but will not be so after Goliath has dealt with him—so ‘flesh’ covers the meat of bodies, alive or dead. 80 something that God has set himself to do. Hence, the additional 1st Person pronoun ‘I’(ʾanīy )אני followed by the participle ‘am establishing, setting in place’ (the causative Hif. form of the verb qûm ‘ – קוםto arise, stand up; Hi. to cause to stand in place, establish’). It complements the participle of 9:12 ‘the covenant I, in person, am appointing/giving’(ʾanīy nōtēn )אני נתןof 9:12 that focuses on the ‘sign of the covenant’, namely, the rainbow. The seven repeats of ‘covenant’ (berīt )בריתin 9:9–17 drive home this firm establishment of the covenant relationship that is ‘a covenant in perpetuity’ (berīt ʿōlām )ברית עולם. I prefer to use ‘in perpetuity’ as the translation for ʿōlām because this captures the sense of down-the- generations and the legal background of covenant ratification better than a ‘forever’ that floats loose. Within vv.9–17, there is a high degree of repetition, and repetition with variation. For instance, the ʿōlām is added to ‘generations’ as well. The ‘establish’ verb (qûm )קוםshifts from active Participle to the 1st Person form twice—‘I have established’ (vv.11, 17). The prepositions ‘with’ and ‘between’ are used severally of the covenant parties. The (rain)‘bow’ (qešet )קשׁת and ‘cloud’ (ʿānān )ענןrecur three and four times. The catch-all phrase ‘all flesh’ (kol bāśār כל —)בשׂרthat numbered the dead previously—is embraced five times by the covenant. The relational term ‘covenant’(berīt )בריתand its associated ideas are central to Israel’s story from Genesis to Nehemiah and into Daniel in the Writings collection of Tanak where Daniel’s confessional prayer is a historical overview of Israel’s breaking of covenant. Daniel characterizes God in these lines as follows: I prayed to Yhwh my God and made confession, saying: “Ah, Lord, great and awesome God keeping covenant and steadfast love šōmēr hab-berīt wehaḥesed שׁמר הברית והחסד with those who love you and keep your commandments…” Dan 9:4, NRSV; compare 12:1c ‘everyone found written in the scroll’ kātūb bas-sēper כתוב בספר 2. Exit Gilgamesh. What is left to Gilgamesh at the end of his epic quest? Not covenant in perpetuity, or eternal life. Contrasted with these two options, and not even a divinely guaranteed dynasty at Uruk, Gilgamesh seems to be a loser. The gods had reserved life for themselves, as the tavern-keeper by the shore had told him. At that point, he was holding out for his last desperate option for attaining it—namely, to get to Utanapishtim and learn the secret of his eternal life. Finally, when Gilgamesh hears it from a man, rather than from a tavern-keeper woman, and understands the decree of the gods as recounted by the eyewitness participant, then Gilgamesh accepts that he must return to his city Uruk to eventually die as his vitality departs, like his friend Enkidu. Apparently, he invites his ferryman Ur-Shanabi to accompany him back to Uruk, for on arrival he remarks: “Go up, Ur-shanabi, onto the wall of Uruk and walk around Survey the foundation platform, inspect the brickwork! (See) if its brickwork is not kiln-fired brick and if the Seven sages (7 muntalkī)95 did not lay its foundations!” (lines 232–326, George 2) The adviser figures, the 7-Sages, are legendary experts, like the 7 apkallu who are linked with legendary kings. When we get to the Enuma elish myth, the gods themselves build Babylon in gratitude to Marduk for taking on Tiamat in battle and winning. In the Ancient Near East, 95 The noun muntalku derives from the verb malāku II – ‘to advise’. 81 antiquity was closer to the origins of everything, and hence was not primitive, as we might think, but closer to the superhuman—like Gilgamesh himself. For instance, the gods once lived in Shuruppak, home of the Flood hero, we are told. Now the city of Uruk certainly had a claim to antiquity. It has pottery levels dating back to the 4th millennium, and visual art like the famous stoneware Uruk vase,96 with carved scenes that feature the goddess Inanna/Ishtar. Uruk’s continuity in terms of temples runs across millennia starting from before 4000 BC. It has cuneiform texts that run from the earliest specimens before 3000 BC to the latest around 200 BC. Uruk has left its trace on Genesis with its name Erech (Gen 10:10 ʾerek )ארךappearing alongside Babylon and Agade—further evidence of the canonical writers drawing on their awareness of Mesopotamia. Theologically, the polytheism of Anu, Enlil, Nintu and Ea/Enki lasted for two millennia, while the story of Gilgamesh has been staged in London, translated and published in Penguin Classics and by Oxford Books, and studied in the Old Testament Theology module of the Master’s program of London School of Theology into the third decade of the 3rd millennium of our era. Gilgamesh has been the subject of podcasts and lectures on the internet by Andrew George, its Assyriologist. This is as near as Gilgamesh could get to immortality on Earth. It is an impressive run that we readers of the epic will not emulate. However, in this Anthropocene era within the lifework of the presenter David Attenborough, now in his 90s at this time of this writing,97 Noah and his cargo are current again in the debates about whether human beings will ruin their planet Earth irrevocably, once again, as Genesis tells us they did with violence (Gen 6:12). This underlines the outcome of the Flood as significant for all who take the God of covenant seriously. Or who appreciate the story—in both its Mesopotamian versions and as embraced in Genesis—as core to being human and embodying core values. This is why we need to focus on who is included in the very first mention of covenant relationship in Tanak and the rest of the Bible. 3. Earth and its Animals. There is no controverting of the fact that ‘covenant’ (berīt )בריתis a fundamentally relational term. It defines a relationship between two parties that changes or consolidates their previous dynamic. In the political version of covenant, that is, in treaty relations, the change may be from hostility to peace between equals, or from resistance or rebellion to subservience and loyalty sworn to by an imposed oath, backed by curses for rebellion. In the biblical Flood story, there is this extraordinry extension of the covenant metaphor, borrowed from political treaty-making. Here covenant/treaty (berīt )בריתnot only shifts from the sphere of human political relations to the divine~human sphere, but expands now in Gen 9 to include planet Earth, an inanimate though essential component for human life. The animals, most of whom are not domesticated by human beings, are covenant partners too. The bi-partite nature of the Flood covenant is thus Yhwh as the one Suzerain partner and the cluster of humans~animals~planet Earth as the other partner. There are more covenants in Israel’s story—national, priestly and royal dynastic—but none like this one. Canonically, it has a setting in the Genesis scroll where it predates Israel, and is thus innocent of any charge of nationalism. Apart from that, it includes parties who have no voice. This contrasts with what follows Gen 6–9 in the Torah. 96 For ‘Uruk vase’ see the excellent photos at Google:images. 97 Written mainly in 2020, the year of Covid-19 and Lockdown levels, with tweaks in early 2021 in time for the virus variants to emerge in South Africa and elsewhere and the international scramble for vaccines. 82 Israel at Sinai had a voice. In the canonical narrative, Israel’s voice is prominent and necessary. So Moses came and called the elders of the people, and set before them all these words which Yhwh had commanded them. And all the people answered together and said: “All that Yhwh has spoken we will do.” (Exod 19:7–8) In the Exodus tradition, this oath of agreement and compliance is repeated ‘with one voice’ at crucial points in the ritual (Exod 24:3 with 24:7 ‘we will be obedient’). This oath accompanies the reading out of the commandments and the sprinkling of the blood. Just as humans and animals entered into the Ark and emerged from the Ark in the aftermath of the Flood, so do the living creatures continue on in life on the planet. This is a life that is, in some sense, a life together, all the animals together and all the humans and animals together. How that works out in our future is a story that remains to be told. Yet the promise of God is expressed in words and an accompanying sign that underwrite a commitment from God’s side: When the bow is in the clouds I will look upon it and remember the covenant-in-perpetuity (berīt ʿōlām) between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the Earth. (bēn kol-nepeš hayyāh bekol-bāśār ʾašer ʿal-hāʾāreṣ) God said to Noah: “This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the Earth.” (Gen 9:16–17) 4. Signboard Writing. We have been observing the literary skills of the Gilgamesh XI and the Genesis Flood versions. Besides the use of startling anthropomorphism at the sacrifice, of the repetition of key terms in the Flood aftermath, of a patterning motif of Creation~unCreation~Re-creation, and of an innovative and unique expansion of the covenant concept in the biblical telling to include animals and Earth, there is one more startling feature of the biblical Flood aftermath that draws our attention. The gods who send the Flood in the two theologies, Mesopotamian and Israelite, each recant. This involves the reversal of godEnlil’s anger at survivors of his destruction plan after he is confronted. The continuity of life is symbolized in its epitome by Utanapishtim and wife gaining life for ever through Enlil’s blessing decree. The animals simply fade out of the picture in Gilgamesh. They are not mentioned after the Birds scene, not even for them to disembark. The gods at the sacrifice fill the stage. Then comes Enlil’s arrival on the scene, his confrontation with the gods, and Enki/Ea’s confrontation with him. The outcome is Enlil’s policy reversal and eternal life for Utanapishtim and his wife. No other human beings are mentioned in Gilg. XI. The future of the rest of the boat embarkees is their human biology no different from what it was before they went aboard. The dynamic equivalent of Enlil’s reversal of policy is, in the canonical telling, Yhwh’s repeating of the problem of human sinfulness that led him to his decision to wipe out humanity and with them the animals in the first place, with a coda added. Once we notice this dramatic 83 before~after contrasting parallel of statements by Yhwh, it stands out in the telling as absolutely unmissable on another reading. Indeed, the narrator has set up two signboards where readers should stop and ponder. They are crucial to grasping the narrative’s Yahwistic theology of covenant, so prominent in the outcome. Besides the palistrophe reversal of direction of matching before~after features with its hinge statement at ‘God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the Ark’ (Gen 8:1), there is another outstanding anthropomorphism in the reflection soliloquy of Gen 6:5ff. and in God’s speech to Noah after his sacrifice of Gen 8:21ff. God reverses his policy, just as a king or prime minister might do. Whereas Yhwh’s first statement is ‘private’, a self-addressed reflection and decision by him, the second statement is a ‘public’ utterance and decision that explicitly reverses the prior one. The narrator has access to Yhwh’s inner deliberations before the Flood and he shapes them to resonate with how he will craft God’s speech after the Flood when God announces his new policy. Instead of destruction, the policy is for continuity of humanity, animals and planet Earth itself. The regularity of its seasons will enable food production from agriculture and the climate stability will yield food for the wild animals, herbivores and their predators. The plot moves from problem to ‘solution’. We need to put ‘solution’ in scare-quote marks because the Flood wipe out is no more a solution in the biblical version than it is in Gilgamesh or in its antecedent Atrahasis myth. In fact, it is less of a solution in Genesis than it is in Mesopotamia for the very reason that Genesis is grappling with a theological conundrum that will run and run through the twists and turns of the mega-story. That problem is how an ethical and holy God—that is the bottom line as far as Israel’s theologians go—can tolerate human sinfulness. Even temporarily. The sinfulness of the human heart is highlighted in the before and the after utterances. That datum flashes out on both signboards. Nothing changes in this feature of life on Earth. What God has to say gels perfectly with how Utanapishtim characterized human beings: “Being deceitful, mankind will deceive you!” (XI: 220 raggat amēlūti iraggigki, George 2, 716f.) Human sinfulness poses the problem of how God and the creatures that he has made in his image as his representatives on Earth can be in communion. The Torah may ‘solve’ this problem cultically by strict rules of exclusion that regulate both access and distance. However, the curses of broken covenant come into play in Israel’s historical experience. The sin of breaking the terms of covenant-oath—think the 10 Commandments, in a nutshell—results in Israel’s radical and devastating loss of land, with north and south of the divided kingdom both going into foreign exile under Yhwh’s judgment, as this is spelled out by Yhwh’s spokesmen, the prophets. This underlines the difference between the Atrahasis myth’s ending and the Genesis Flood ending. In Atrahasis, limitation measures on human reproduction are set in place ingeniously. They involve infertility, the infant mortality demon, and religious celibacy taboos. In contrast, Genesis emphatically reiterates human fertility as a given of God’s encouragement and a blessing from page 1 to Flood aftermath. Of course, for Yahwistic theology, this multiplication means that sinners will abound and repopulate the Earth, if grace abounds—both pagan polytheist sinners among the nations, and polytheist sinners among the Israelites. Even devout and loyal Yahwists who are not polytheists will carry within them an uncircumcision of heart. This without a breaking of the first commandment to worship Yhwh alone and not other gods alongside him. Jeremiah and Ezekiel hope for a radical change of heart as the key to spiritual renewal for the nation. A glance at a later Jewish writer (1 Jn 1:8 and 10) indicates that sin—the problem of the Flood story—persists 84 into the era of the New Covenant as well.98 5. Advertising a policy reversal. So important is this policy reversal to the biblical narrator’s telling that he uses a special literary device of sound~echo, note~resonance. Or, as we term it here, Signboard A~Signboard B. Signboard A Signboard B Yhwh was sorry Yhwh said in his heart: that he had made man “I will never again curse the ground on the Earth because of man and it grieved him for the imagination of man’s heart to his heart is evil from his youth. So Yhwh said Neither will I ever again “I will blot out man destroy every living creature whom I have created as I have done. from the face of the ground While the Earth remains man and wild animals seedtime and harvest and creeping things cold and heat and birds of the air summer and winter for I am sorry day and night that I have made them.” shall not cease.” (Gen 6:6–7) (Gen 8:21b–22) In the antecedent decision of Gen 6 and Signboard A, there is use of repetition with variation. First, the narrator reports Yhwh’s regret: ‘Yhwh was sorry…’. Then he rounds off with Yhwh himself declaring his regret: “I am sorry…”. The English accurately reflects the repetition of the Hebrew verbs ‘sorry’ and ‘made’ (nḥm נחםand ʿśh )עשה. The reserved term ‘created’(bārāʾ )בראappears in Signpost A opposite another use of ʿāśāh עשׂהin ‘done’ in Signpost B. The policy reversal, an opening/closing of the door on the divine decision-making with the 3rd Person/1st Person variation used here, gives a double emphasis to the shocking Creation~unCreation motif. Destruction by Flood is radical. We cannot miss the allusion back to the creative acts that are supported by both verbs—‘to make’ (ʿāśāh) and ‘to create’(bārāʾ )ברא, verbs that alternate in Gen 1. The word ‘man’ in the RSV’s wording above is hāʾādām. This use embraces both genders, as is obvious from the Flood context, as well as embracing the collective total of human beings. So ‘humanity’ would be an apt translation of hāʾādām here. The wordplay of ‘man/ground’ (ʾādām/ʾadāmāh) resonates with the first man’s creation in Gen 2, as does the animal life ‘listing style’ with ground walkers, creepers and fliers. Besides the opening and closing ‘sorry’, there is the intensive of ‘grieved him to his heart’. This is the deepest expression of regret. Yhwh feels the pain deep within and hurtfully so. The verb ‘to hurt’ (ʿāṣab )עצבis used in self-reference and intensive form. How far this Hebrew narrative style departs from a ‘correct theology’ of God! ‘Correct’ in its endeavours to protect his divine status as immutable and dispassionate. The Israelite narrators have no such preservative ambitions or any inhibitions about using this freely anthropomorphic language. When we move to the aftermath decision of Gen 8, the narrator starts with reporting—‘and said 98 See already Walter Moberley, At the Mountain of God: Story and Theology in Exodus 32–34, JSOTS 22, Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1983 for a discussion of paradox in theological discourse relating to Exod 34:9 and Gen 8:21, Excursus 2: Gen 8:21, 113–115—‘that the kīy כיclause is of deep theological significance is made likely by the fact that it is in one of the divine soliloquies in Genesis, the divine soliloquies in Genesis being consistently revealing of the Yahwist’s theological understanding’ (114). 85 Yhwh…’(8:21), but paradoxically he is reporting what God is deciding within himself: ‘Yhwh said to his heart’ (wayyʾōmer YHWH ʾel-libbō). This is narrator’s story-telling omniscience in play, to see into the secret counsels of God’s mind. We remind ourselves that nowhere in the biblical Flood story does God consult with any other celestial beings, nor does he send a messenger to report his words and decisions to human beings. Contrast, for example, the temple vision of Isa 6, or Jeremiah’s participation in the Divine Council (Jer 33) and relaying messages to Jerusalem from there of tearing down and building up. The Yhwh-alone of the Genesis Flood telling is also diametrically opposed to the raft of Ancient Near Eastern Flood tellings. In the wording of Signboard B, there is a contrast between the heart/mind of Yhwh and the human heart that is characterised ominously. The future on planet Earth is not rosey if it is true that ‘the inclination of the human heart is evil from its youth’. The Hebrew yēṣer יצרcaptures the idea of something fundamental that we might term ‘motivation, driving force, bent towards, urge, orientation’. Its direction towards and its outcome is raʿ רע, meaning bad stuff. Together, the whole phrase says that the inner disposition of human beings manifests itself in what is bad, harmful, destructive. Given the relationship between the before~after of the telling, we can hardly separate this divine summing up in Signboard B from the previous summary that ‘the Earth was filled with violence’ (ḥāmās )חמסof 6:11b. Violence is a manifestation of the destructive, of evil. We know this only too well. We live with the reality of wars, genocides, assassinations, acts of terrorism and violence against women by men. A moment’s reflection on the unfolding of human history on planet Earth tends to confirm the fact that weaponry and warfare may lie behind the ‘violence’ of the Flood telling. We noted previously the scenes of wooden-wheeled war chariots and marching ranks with helmets and spears from Mesopotamia’s inter-city wars of the 3rd millennium. Since then, violence has taken a ‘giant leap for mankind’ with our present weapons of mass destruction, and consistently so with every invention and added capacity. Arrows travel further than spear-throwers, wheels move war chariots faster than infantry, iron betters bronze for daggers and swords as well as plough tips, explosives are not confined to mining, and nuclear power enhances missiles and bombs as well as keeping the lights on. Each creative invention and mastery has, as a matter of history, been turned to evil purpose with increasing efficiency. Criminologists will confirm the phrase ‘from his youth’ (minneḥūrāyw )מננעריו. Prisons, like Pollsmoor in Cape Town, are filled with young males, convicted for crimes of assault, stabbings and rape, armed robberies, murders, paid hits, and drug-related gang shoot outs. The violence self-perpetuates generation by generation as fathers beget sons and do not father them. Yet the finality of Yhwh’s policy reversal despite human inclinations is underlined by the reiterated English phrase ‘not ever again’(8:21b and c).99 6. Positive outcomes guaranteed. The positives of Yhwh/Elohim’s policy reversal go far beyond the human sphere. They commence immediately after the soothing sacrifice. We can list these features in the sequence in which they appear, each one announced in direct speech by God: 99 The Hebrew says ‘I will not add ever…’ using ʿōd ‘ עודever’ together with the ‘add’ verb (lōʾ לוא ‘not’ + ʾāsap ‘ אסףto add to’). The ‘ever’ and ‘add’ reinforce each other. Interpreters may divide over the innocence of ‘while the Earth remains’. In awareness of mass extinctions in the geological past and of asteroid hits, they might read into it the implication that the Earth has a limited if presently indefinite existence. However, the Israelite narrators knew nothing about these deep time events. A hermeneutic of suspicion might seize on the alternate modes available to Yhwh for destroying the heavens and the earth. Indeed, 2 Pet 3:7 envisages a fiery cataclysm. A hidden apocalyptic outcome was most unlikely to be in the Flood narrator’s mind in composing his Signboard B. 86 • no more cursing of the ground (Gen 8:21a) • no more destruction of every living creature (Gen 8:21b) • climate stability that allows for food production (Gen 8:22) • no catastrophic Flood ever again (Gen 9:11 and 15b) • covenant with humans, animals and the Earth (Gen 9:9–17) This is an impressive list. There is nothing as strongly stated in the Mesopotamian re-tellings that we have to hand, though there is one feature as regards a Flood on the abūbu scale worth commenting on. It comes from the lips of Enki/Ea as part of his confrontation with Enlil. In other words, this is before Enlil has reversed his policy of total destruction. Enki asserts these statements. Whether his word will carry with Enlil lies in the narrator’s hands. Enki says to Enlil: "You, the sage of the gods, the hero, how could you lack counsel and bring on the deluge? ‘"On him who transgresses, inflict his crime! On him who does wrong, inflict his wrong-doing! ‘Slack off, lest it snap! Pull tight, lest it [slacken!]’ ‘"Instead of your causing the Deluge, a lion could have risen, and diminished the people! Instead of your causing the Deluge, a wolf could have risen, and diminished the people! ‘"Instead of your causing the Deluge, a famine could have happened, and slaughtered the land! Instead of your causing the Deluge, the Plague God could have risen, and slaughtered the land! (George 2, 714f.) The poet has done Enki proud with this oratory. First, there is the deep irony of calling Enlil by the titles ‘sage of the gods, hero’ (apkal ilī qurādu) when, in Enki’s view, Enlil is guilty of gross injustice and maladministration. Then there is the fourfold repetition of his ‘instead of the Flood’ with the ‘you brought about’ (šakānu – ‘to cause, establish’) that gives the lines a rhythmical cadence and momentum. It pins the real crime on Enlil. Enki each time adds an ‘instead of (ammaku)…the Flood’. As a master of ingenuity, Enki declares judicious alternatives for a proportional judgment—lion, wolf, famine, plague. None of these would have destroyed humanity in toto. In a late manuscript, Enki also puts forward a summary statement along the ‘never ever again’ lines. Enki’s motion is that humanity should last perpetually and no more Flood should be visited upon it. “Make the criminal bear his crime! make the evil-doer bear his wrong-doing! From now on, let no Flood be brought about! ā iššakun abūbu verily let the people last for ever and ever!” u [nišī lū] darā ana dariš (z v: 11’–14’ Wasserman, 100f.)100 100 George 2 (527) mentions ‘a Late Babylonian fragment now in New York’ (MMA 86.11.378A = MS. z in Wasserman, 99ff. section 2.3.9 Late Babylonian or Achaemenid, Museum of Modern Art). Both scholars are acknowledging Lambert’s work in 2005. Restorations and translations differ slightly, but not significantly, from Wasserman’s. George has ‘From this day no Deluge shall take place, and the human race [shall] endure for ever!’ 87 Gilg. XI, lines 185–186 preserve the nub of Enki’s analysis of Enlil’s judicial error. They are echoed in the late manuscript above (lines 11’–12’). Gilg. XI uses different wording—for instance, ‘his sin’(ḫīṭašu). This noun and the verb (ḫaṭû) have cognates for ‘sin’ in Hebrew (ḥāṭāʾ ‘ – חטאto sin’). Wasserman (p.102) points to Ezek 14:12–23 for a matching statement of individual accountability. Then, in this late manuscript fragment, Enki adds his assertions of ‘no more Flood’ and ‘human beings always’. George comments: ‘This belief, famously articulated in the Hebrew bible as God’s covenant with Noah in Gen 9:8–17, can now be seen to stem from Babylonia, like the Flood myth that provides its context’ (George 2, 527). There is no problem in principle with identifying a link between Enki’s assertion of no more destructive Flood and the ‘never again’ of Gen 9:11b and 15b, any more than there is in identifying Mesopotamian tradition in the post-Flood sacrifice and aroma link, or the scouting raven and dove link. I see the same phenomenom operating here as previously—an intentionally radical theological re-write in Genesis of a commonly received tradition. There is no ‘covenant’ in the Mesopotamian tellings, just as there is no rainbow. There is no equivalent of planet Earth and every living creature in a covenant of preservation as there is so forcefully stated in Genesis. Moreover, the t’s and i’s are not dotted in the Mesopotamian manuscripts. In his comments, George leads in with ‘The gods had promised that there would be no more Deluges…’. Actually, in Gilg. XI (SBV), there is no such promise, only Enki’s assertion that this should be so, plus the self-recriminations of the Mother goddess and her refusal to countenance or agree to a destruction of her offspring again. Certainly, the gods were said to weep with her ‘wet-faced with sorrow’ (XI: 126), yet they were also being sorry for themselves ‘parched and stricken with fever’ from their self-inflicted fast during the Flood. So it is one of the loose ends of the Mesopotamian tellings that there is no after-Flood convocation scene of the Divine Assembly in which Enlil admits his error and the Assembly decides to accept Enki’s assertion as future policy. Acceptance of Enki’s assertion is perhaps implied but does not round off the Flood story the way that God’s speech in Gen 9:8–17 so patently and intentionally does. This is not a Bible-as-Scripture issue, but a routine Resource analysis process. Perhaps more recovered fragments may alter the picture, but Enki’s speech in itself as we have it seems to be a highlight of this Mesopotamian telling and essential to his characterisation, expanding Enki’s viewpoint, from acting towards Utanapishtim as his protegée to a wider concern for the people as a whole. The Israelite God’s concern is expressed by the narrator in the widest possible of terms—for ‘all flesh’ and ‘the Earth’. 7. Covenant—in addition to ‘never ever again’. Beyond the Signboards A and B is the expansion of Yhwh’s policy reversal. The Flood story does not end with Signboard B. That is a policy change summary of continuity and re-Creation. There is more to follow that takes the biblical Flood story further away from its Mesopotamian roots. From 9:1 onwards God is speaking, introduced very briefly by the narrator’s ‘And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them…’, a narrator intro that recurs with 9:8, 12 and 17 as God discloses dimensions to his intentions regarding the future. The positives contribute to and round out the re-Creation motif. Just as the Flood is told as a world-wide Earth event, so too the covenant is far-flung in its compass—‘between me and all flesh that is upon the Earth’ (9:17). Where the biblical account runs in parallel with Gilgamesh in highlighting the policy reversals of godEnlil and Yhwh, equally it departs from the Mesopotamian script in its extension of grace 88 to humanity, and specifically, to human beings as sinful as they were before the Flood. Covenant moves beyond the promise of no more destructive Flood. If the Ark comes to rest on the mountains of Urartu next to Mesopotamia north-eastwards, the canonical theology comes to rest far away from Mesopotamia’s worship of Sun and Moon and its deification of other features and forces of nature. We have traversed the literary terrain from Mesopotamia westwards to Israel in this Resource analysis. Now we will need, like Gilgamesh himself, to return to our Uruks. The mudbrick cities of Mesopotamia are the domain of the archaeologist. The literature is the domain of both faith communities and humanists. Our global present is the domain of science, documentary film makers, and protesters. As we return to our present and to our Uruks, we cannot but recall the Chernobyl of David Attenborough’s documentation of planet Earth in his lifetime. All great literature inspires reflection on the human condition. The Flood stories are no exception. Given the on-going sinfulness of humanity, as the biblical telling asserts it, will human greed, folly, exploitation and violence dominate the history of planet Earth in the Anthropocene? This is the question that lingers on from the Flood stories. This question spans the trajectory from the back-then of Mesopotamia, to the scroll collection of Tanak, and then forwards to the future of our humanity in the Anthropocene. ***** So far as the theology and its recontextualization go, we might end here. But this monograph is seeking to highlight story, reading the biblical Flood telling as story, entering into story as the ideal mode of reading the texts, and appreciating all the tellings as they flow from the creativity of their narrators. Hence, we need to pay attention now how imagination and creativity operate in the creation of literature and the reading of literary texts. We will look at the narrator’s role as narrator, and then at the creative brain generating images in the minds of the writers and then in the visualing of scenes in their readers. 89 CHAPTER 11 NARRATOR and CREATIVE PROCESS We turn now to offer an apologia for reading story as story. This may sound like a tautology, but in reality it is simply pointing to the way that our minds work, or need to, if we are to appreciate and enjoy the story-telling to the full. We are paying homage to the writers as they ply their trade and exercise their writerly skills of communication. 1. Narrator as Director. We have already noted how a Flood story telling is not simply a relaying of facts. It is not a chronicle. That is an entirely different genre and one well represented among the surviving clay tablets of Mesopotamia. The Flood is the telling of a story enhanced by a variety of literary devices, many of which we have drawn attention to. In order to be a story teller, the narrator needs more than an ideology or a theology. Those lead to conceptual formulations. They are cognitive in nature. Story-telling is imaginative. It also needs at least a plot, characters, action, suspense and some form of crafted ending. The scenes are animated imaginatively so that they play out on the screen of the listener’s or reader’s mind. We can start with thinking of the Gilg. XI story-teller as likened to a film director in his visual imagination and his choice of movements from scene to scene, his handling of time passing and the angles of the takes—what is in the field of view, what is background and what is in sharp focus. The camera can move its lens anywhere within the scene, from one face to another, from near to far, from full-length body shot to only a hand. The writer as a film director must already have conceived of how he will sequence and tell his story, chosen his cast for each scene and decided how many lines to allocate to each speaker. ***** Recall taking your seat in a cinema, waiting expectantly for the lights to extinguish and the movie to roll. Within a few minutes—and provided no late comer pushes past you to their seat—you are living in the world of the story. Life beyond the dark interior, outside the cinema building, has disappeared completely as you follow the words, the action, the scenes and the shifts between the present and a flashback. The musical track adds its own tonal clues. The film director is not sitting next you. And yet… he or she is controlling your consciousness and mind with every phrase, expression, angle of take, inclusion/exclusion of shot, focus/blur, wideangle/close-up. You are absorbed into the story—as this director has conceived that it should be played out. If you are old enough, you may be watching a re-make of an original that you viewed years ago. The re-make is not attempting to be that original. There is new technology for one thing. If the old originals were in black&white, the remake will be in colour. Most of all, there is another mind planning the presentation of the re-make, including its castings. This works as an analogy for the remakes of the Flood story. The narrator of the Flood story of 90 Gilgamesh XI in its SBV re-make is not the narrator of Atrahasis, nor of any other Flood version, including the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic itself. For a start, the SBV remake has a new opening,101 and we have already noted how godSky (Anu, ‘father of the gods’) is written out of the encounters by the grounded boat. That is by narrator’s choice as director. We will select some scenes now from Gilgamesh XI only and from the Genesis Flood story for a filmly style of analysis. 2. Where are we? When Tablet XI of Gilgamesh opens, there is no doubt where we are. We are sitting in on an intimate conversation at the home of Utanapishtim and his wife. We are not sure exactly where, inside or out, but instinctively we imagine the two men sitting together at a house made of mudbrick. Later on, we might revise our view to picture them sitting outside for reasons that will become clear. The initial audience would have imagined them in the clothes of the times, of course. Not in denims, T-shirts and baseball caps. They are Mesopotamians, after all. But here is the thing. While Gilgamesh listened to Utanapishtim’s story, there was someone else standing there, leaning against the wall, off screen, listening to Utanapishti’s telling of the Flood and his survival. Who was it? We only find out in line 243! It is not Utanapishtim’s wife. It is none other than the ferryman Urshanabi. He has been silent for a long time, but he it was who had brought Gilgamesh across the deadly waters to the home of Utanapishtim, the distant one, and his wife. The wife may have been present too as her husband told their joint story— or perhaps she was making a meal in the cooking area, including the fresh bread that she used to bake each day. Now beyond line 250, we find out something else that we did not know. Gilgamesh is filthy. Perhaps the men were sitting outside after all since he may have smelled as bad as he looks, in dirty pelts and matted hair, and badly needing a scrub up. Urshanabi gets the job. After all, he has annoyed Utanapishti for bringing the man: “You who used to walk this shore, be banished from it now! (line 249). “May the quayside [reject] you, Urshanabi, and the ferry scorn you!”. “Take him, Urshanabi, lead him to the washtub have him wash his matted locks as clean as can be! Let him cast off his pelts, and the sea bear them off Let his body be soaked till fair!” (Gilg. XI: lines 253–256; George, 97; Dalley, 117) The literary pattern, characteristic of the Ugaritic myths and epics as well, is instructions given (“take him…lead him to the washtub…”, lines 253ff.), then instructions carried out (lines 262– 267), repeating the phrases. The camera moves off from the home scene to follow Gilgamesh and Urshanabi to the washtub. The focus now is on Gilgamesh’s transformation. On Utanapishtim’s instructions, Gilgamesh is clothed when he emerges, all cleaned up. He is dressed in royal clothes as befits the king of Uruk. We, the audience, do a double-take at this visual transformation. The narrator has reminded us of the identity of his lead character in the epic. He is also priming us for his character’s development—another writerly concern. Gilgamesh must become who he is. He is not to be the wild man who terrifies Shiduri as he approaches her tavern and, arrived, casually mentions to her that he was contemplating violence. This violence inside him he has carried with him from his early days of wrecking havoc among the young men and women of Uruk. Now he meets Utanapishtim himself, and with a shock we hear that he planned to extract his secret of eternal life by force: “I was fully 101 Gilg. OBV is re-purposed by its new introduction in its SBV incarnation attributed to Sin-leqi- unninni—see the discussion by Andrew R. George ‘The Mayfly on the River: Individual and Collective Destiny in the Epic of Gilgamesh’ KASKAL 9 (2012) 227–242. 91 intent on making you fight,” he tells his host (line 5). So the re-clothing is part of a psychological restoration from manic and wild to orderly. Gilgamesh, the exhausted and failed seeker for eternal life, is taking up his dignified social role again: ‘he wore royal robes, the dress fitting his dignity’ (line 267). The filthy pelts of folly are discarded for the resumption of a matured responsibility. By holding back the information about Gilgamesh’s outer state, the narrator has let us concentrate on Gilgamesh’s shock at seeing that Utanapishtim looks exactly like him, no different, just human (lines 1–4). This only-human appearance of Utanapishtim makes it all the more urgent for Gilgamesh to learn how on earth this man in front of him came to be living on for ever. We view these crafted scene-switches as the plot is about to take a turn for home, to Uruk. • a two man conversation, getting acquainted—we are included. • a long and intriguing story—we sit there with Gilgamesh, listening in. • another character that we had forgotten about is there—we switch our attention to him. • as Utanapishtim confronts Urshanabi—we are wide-eyed. • suddenly the focus is back on Gilgamesh—we’re shocked at how dirty he’s got. • the jacuzzi scene—we imagine the splashing water, the dirty skins disposed of. • the royal robes—that is a surprise! • Where did they come from? From Shuruppak, packed on board? Surely not! However, all this new look outcome skips over a prior dialogue between the wife of Utanapishtim and her husband to which we must return in order to learn about their mini-plot within the middle of the major plot. The camera switches to the baking of bread and the markings on the wall. We see the wall. We see the loaves in a row. We see the slumped figure of the epic’s hero. He is sound asleep. Sound asleep as the days pass, and day-by-day he gets another black mark on the wall above his head, made in charcoal. At line 207, Utanapishtim has finished his retelling of the Flood. The Flood story, entertaining as it is, has been skilfully woven into the epic. As an interlude. A major one. The epic has its own plot and characterisations to fulfil and continues on to end at line 328. The narrator has this overarching conception of how he will dovetail the Flood story into the epic’s engagement with human mortality, with Death. He has also imagined the meeting between Gilgamesh and Utanapishtim before he writes the scene. Gilgamesh’s question to the Flood survivor sparks questions fired back at him in return. They are rhetorical questions: “But as for you, Gilgamesh, who’s going to get the gods back, seated in their Assembly to pass a decree awarding you this everlasting life? Get real! Live for ever? Why, you can’t even stay awake for a week!” (lines, 207ff., my paraphrase). Thus, this sample with shifting scenes, dialogue, plot within plot, suspense, and graphic visual close-ups demonstrates how we are drawn into this re-telling of the Flood story by a creative writer. We will now track the biblical narration as it uses angles and distance to good effect. 3. With God, looking down. (Gen 6–9) We are not looking at God. We are looking with God. “Yahweh saw … the Earth… human wickedness” (6:5). This is a panoramic, from altitude. The narrator wants us to take God’s perspective on things for this story. So he opens the action this way. Then shockingly, we are not looking at God but into God’s very heart and thoughts. This is ‘narrator omniscience’ in play—the narrator imagines how God himself feels before he inks words on the scroll. 92 We don’t need to be told anything visual about God—unlike, for example, visionary scenes such as we find in Isa 6, Ezek 3 or Dan 7. For this narrator, the visionary would be a distraction from what he intends us to register. This god, the Creator himself, is at a point of regret and decision. He is not sitting enthroned with myriad myriads surrounding him with praise. He is alone with the tensions that he must resolve within himself. It costs him. He feels things deeply in the process of coming to a decision. If we were to ask if we ever come across this style of writing again within the canon, we might point to the poetry of Isa 49:15f., or the pain expressed at Ephraim’s unfaithfulness (Hos 11). Or the picture of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem as he foresees its destruction and uses the metaphor of a mother hen gathering her chicks protectively under her wings—a gathering that is offered but refused in that narrative (Lk 19:41–44). This said, the re-make of the Flood story in Genesis retains its shock factor. Divine sovereignty has not been expressed like these lines from the Flood narrator. Not in the many tomes of theology devoted to explaining divine sovereignty cognitively. The narrator shocks us to make his point. Now we are registering it and trying to absorb, digest, take in what we have been told. We resonate with the turmoil within God’s own heart and mind as he contemplates a different use of his sovereign powers. Then the camera turns back to Earth and zooms into the figure of one person amidst the many, in fact among a whole generation. We have been told that God reads human nature. From this fact, we must go along with the narrator’s comment: ‘But Noah found favour in the eyes of Yahweh (beʿēnēy Yhwh ( ’)בעני־יהוהv.8). ‘The eyes of’ is a metaphor, of course, but, equally, it is not. God has noticed Noah. He was looking around all the time for a solution, for a survival factor and a restart. This, of course, is the opposite of Enlil’s vengeful intention and might qualify the biblical narrator as a writer of anti-polytheistic polemic that disdains even a mention of the very gods that his story eliminates—unlike the prophets who do so (e.g. Isa 44, 46:1ff.; Jer 10; cf. Pss 115, 135). An editorial snippet of background information is inserted before we resume looking at the Earth through God’s eyes in v.11: ‘now the Earth was corrupt before God’. ‘In God’s sight’ (v.11a, RSV) is not a bad translation, but there is no verb or noun of ‘seeing’ in the text at this point. Rather, there stands the simple, single word preposition ‘before’ (lipenēy )לפני. The Earth lies open before God. The human heart likewise. The next verse continues the seeing: ‘and God saw (rʾh )ראהthe Earth, and “Look!” (wehinnēh )והנה, it was corrupted’ (v.12b). We too look down on the Earth and fully realise now that something momentous is coming. ‘And God said to Noah…’ (v.13). All we glean from this important first speech within the Noah events of the story is the narrator’s lead in and the content of what God had to say. We are told nothing of how Noah was told. There is certainly no intermediary messenger, whether prophet or celestial being. It is as portentous a moment for the rest of history as Israel’s was at Sinai. But here, there are no pyrotechnics, no loud voice, no cloud, no fire, no earth tremor. It is a plain one-on-one information update. The narrator is content with reporting the content. We imagine its delivery how we choose, or do not imagine it at all. We are not distracted by visuals, and therefore are likely to pass on without even raising the question of how God communicated. This is the way the narrator will choose for all God’s speeches to Noah. He tells us nothing about the encounter, even at the points of “Go into the Ark…” (7:1), “Go forth from the Ark…” (8:15) and “God blessed Noah…” (9:1), or “Behold, I establish my covenant…” (9:9). The one-on-one telling is there, but not with a scene set before us. All is pared down to an announcement~fulfilment pattern. God instructs, Noah carries out the instructions. On the other hand, we definitely are standing on the mountain side with Noah after the disembarkation. We are watching him build the altar, kill the animals and birds, [light the wood] and see the smoke rising into the heavens where God is located for this scene and where the 93 soothing odour reaches him for him to smell it and respond (8:20–21a). So the narrator has had us both looking down and looking up without us noticing it. Nevertheless, he has been prodding our imaginations, if we have any left as grown-ups. Of course, the narrator had to imagine everything, to bring his words to mind, words that fitted into the scene that he was writing. We follow along in the narrator’s line of sight. When Noah released the birds, we watched them fly away. The raven went out of sight out of shot. The dove returned. On its second return, the narrator–director opted for the close-up shot. The mountain backdrop is out of focus, the Ark is but a looming edge. What we see is Noah’s forearm and hand stretched out as the dove approaches and alights on it with the leafy sprig in its beak. This is the sharp close-up. The image of bird, beak and olive sprig stays with us as the bird is drawn back out of sight within the Ark. Where were we as we witnessed this? We were likely outside the Ark. Somewhere off the ground on a level with the opening in the Ark. Did we know that? Perhaps not consciously, but nevertheless we were taken there. Unless we stop to think about these shifts of angle, distance/closeness and inner reactions, unless we become aware of our imaginative participation in them, then we could pass over this feature of the story telling entirely unawares. Why is that? Perhaps because we have become dulled, habituated to the wording of familiar texts for a start, and secondly, because we watch films made with ever more visual sophistication, whether that is in a car chase, a battle scene, a fight, a towering inferno or in space riding along at warp speeds. It requires no imagination, only a temporary suspense of disbelief. Now think about times before this visual smorgasboard of the 3rd millennium AD, and when story-telling—at a palace, or at night in a circle around a fire—story was delivered without anything more than the animation of voice, facial expression and gestures. Perhaps back then we would have used our imaginations more actively. Perhaps we have lost our childhood imagination when we got lost in a story and had to be called for the meal several times over. The giveaway that suggests there might be something to this thought is fairly obvious. The younger we are, the more illustrations there are in the book. The older we are, the more we are deprived of such ‘props’ and are left with print only to create scenes in our mind as we read. We can do this—but instead we buy Bible atlases and dictionaries that are well illustrated. We use Google Earth to locate Mt. Ararat and discover to our surprise that it comprises two volcanic cones, both snow-capped. We look up Paul’s journeys in the maps at the back of our Bible to orientate ourselves because we have never been to these places in the Mediterranean, let alone to Iraq, and so we have no visual image to dredge up from experience that satisfies our need for ‘realism’ and for hard information. We use the work-arounds. We tap into the visual databases online. We feel our need for ‘facts’ rather than lingering inside the story imaginatively. This is where Source Criticism fails us disastrously. It is so busy dismantling the film set in order to scrutinise each painted piece that it cannot live inside the story. It is focusing on the stage and who comes on stage when, prompted by whom. Resource analysis, as I have been attempting, is making the effort to live inside each story for its full enjoyment. This means listening in and looking, first of all. Then appreciating the differences in the tellings. This is different from compiling a table of specs for each, the way that DP Review compiles detailed specs for different models of camera that show features present or missing across each horizontal of the adapted spreadsheet format. We are not wanting to buy the Ark Tablet, or Atrahasis or Gilg. Tablet XI. We are wanting to enjoy their stories. 4. How does Gilgamesh handle the ending? The narrator, like the film director, has to start the story rolling. That means a decision about when and where. For many stories, the starting point is obvious and marked clearly—for 94 instance, in the Fairy Tale genre, we are familiar with an opening such as: ‘Once upon a time, there was a handsome prince…’. Or, for a joke: ‘A man walked into a bar…’. These are generic openings, but they are narrator’s prompts that alert us to what to expect. The entire Gilgamesh epic has a portentous opening that acts as its summary, without those nine lines giving away that this king of Uruk failed in his quest to achieve life everlasting. 1. He who saw the Deep, the country’s foundation 2. who knew the proper ways, was wise in everything! 3. Gilgamesh, who saw the deep, the country’s foundation 4. who knew the proper ways, was wise in everything! 5. He everywhere explored the seats of power 6. knew everything the sum of wisdom 7. He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden 8. brought back a tale of before the Deluge. 9. He came a far road, was weary but at peace (George, 1; Dalley, 50) These are the lines that preview the ruffian-to-sage motif. This sagacity embraces ‘the proper ways’ of behaving according to role. In his case, a kingly role. It speaks of knowledge gained through experience, even drawing on the ante-deluvian in its scope. Somehow, Gilgamesh has achieved a state of being ‘at peace’.102 At the least, this means not issuing threats of violence, but maybe speaks more of being at peace with himself. Before we leave these opening lines, note how we move from the inner being, Gilgamesh’s wisdom and knowledge straight into the visual. We must inspect Uruk’s wall: “See its wall like a strand of wool, view its parapet than none could copy Climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth Survey its foundations, examine its brickwork (lines 13f. and 18–20) Four imperatives urge us to use our eyes, to look, take note, be impressed. Line 13 adds a stylistic feature, namely, a memorable simile, a wall compared with a strand of wool. Is this a sudden switch of camera angle? Are we looking at Uruk from afar, looking at its encircling walls as they catch the light across the flat land of southern Iraq? Who are we with? We are with king Gilgamesh and his ferryman Urshanabi. How do we know? We know because we are told so by the lines at the end of Tablet XI: “O Urshanabi, climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth! Survey its foundations, examine its brickwork!”103 (lines 323f.) The epic returns to its beginning and stops. That is an artistic coup! 102 Akk. anīḫ u šupšuḫ ‘weary and calmed’ (line 9). The u ‘and’ requires the contrastive nuancing of ‘but’ if this phrase is to convey in English what Gilgamesh achieved. The verb pašāḫu – ‘to calm down, rest’ is in its causative Š-form ‘calmed’. George 2, 539 ‘granted rest’. Dalley’s ‘resigned’ is a nuance intentionally less than ‘contented’ or ‘at peace’. Is Gilgamesh calm compared with his former inner inner violence? Or has he come to terms with his mortality? Perhaps both, in terms of the plot. 103 This is so reminiscent of Psa 48:12f., and also of King Nebuchadnezzar’s disastrous walkabout on his rooftop in Dan 4:28–30. Both passages invite our imagination to follow their wording with visual imagination. 95 5. How does the Genesis Flood get going? Unfortunately, commentators are divided over where the Flood story begins in the text of Genesis. It is not at Gen 5:32 because that is where the ‘record (sēper tōledōt )ספר תלדותof the generations104 of Adam’ ends. Or, perhaps, is a rocker-switch between the preceding generations and the accumulation of disorder and violence in Noah’s day? What we can say from a camera angle perspective is that Genealogical Lists offer little scope to writers. They are not story. Genealogies are a form of list, a different genre. Mesopotamia loved the List genre. But as Gen 5:32 slips back behind in List genre, and fades out, the story picks up with a quickening interest, if not to say something bizarre and even titillating. We are suddenly up in the air with ‘the sons of God’ looking down at ‘the daughters of men’ as they select their women. Of course, this seemingly natural segue is interrupted by a haggle among the commentators off-stage over who these new characters on the scene are. The up– there to down–here film director’s move is the choice for Jewish writers of later eras. They are joined by more recent commentators, after due consideration of all options. How so? On this take, the up-there characters are celestials moving in with down-there earthling women.105 That is the ‘bizarre option’ of interpretation, the aliens-are-among us motif. If the start of the Flood telling in Gen 6 is debatable, then the sky-sign at the end is not. So we will visit that next 6. Now you see it. Look at that! “See what?” “Why, the rainbow! Look!” And this is the point—the re-tellers of the tradition have started from their present, and from common experience. The (rain)bow (qešet )קשׁתwas familiar, but the significance of the sky- sign as a theological display may have only begun in the Israelite writer’s visual imagination in his day. This covenant sign is the final and highly visual scene that the narrator leaves us with. Chap. 9:17 is where the Genesis Flood re-telling ends. It is also the last time that ‘God said to Noah’ in the story. “This is the sign of the covenant (zōʾt ʾōt-habberīt )זאת אות־הברית which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the Earth.” There are 3x ‘God said’ between v.8 and v.17, and the verses are packed with repetition of key terms (‘covenant’, ‘all flesh’, ‘sign’, ‘bow’, ‘the Earth’). Repetition is often deemed to be a key for separating out sources, yet here literary appreciation takes precedence, and all of vv.8–17 is regularly attributed to a single source (P, conventionally), in my terms in Resource analysis, to the ‘narrator-as-film director’. There are also implicit allusional flashbacks with phrases like ‘destroy the earth’ (see v.11b and recall previous occurrences). What we also notice is that a lot of looking is going on and will be, into the future. There is more than the ‘looking, seeing’ anchor words themselves in the text, though they are there alright (vv.14 and 16 with rāʾāh )ראה. Covenant is central, the rainbow is secondary. Hence, the 104 The word sēper cannot mean ‘book’ as the RSV bizarrely and anachronistically rendered it. It is a scribal record, something inscribed, that is, written down (e.g. on a papyrus or vellum scroll). 105 Wenham, 138–141. 96 seeing will be done by both parties to what is newly established, namely, the covenant. Both parties can see the rainbow in the sky when it appears. As we read, in v.14, it is the human beings who look up to the bow in the clouds. In v.16, it is God himself, up there, who takes note of it. In fact, as the narrator presents it through the lines that he has given God to speak, this sky-sign is to remind God himself so that he remembers his own promise. Hence, God says: ‘I will remember my covenant…’ (v.15). This is the narrator’s last anthropomorphism and a striking one it is. It is also another implicit flashback to 8:1 ‘God remembered Noah’. As God mentions ‘clouds’ and remembering, we are looking up at them to see what is there, but then we seem to join God in the skies in v.16 as he speaks of his looking at the clouds. The rainbow as symbol is a deft touch by the narrator. He could scarcely have selected a better visual aid. It has beauty, variety and an intriguing beyond-us mystery. No less when we understand the physics of light refracting at different wavelengths and angles off the back of water droplets to reach our retina from where it zips along optic nerves into our brain’s visual decoder where the electrical and chemical physiology is transformed in consciousness into vibrant colours. 7. Flies and beads. Was the rainbow the narrator’s replacement for Nintu’s necklace? They both share the post- sacrifice location in their stories, they share a curved bow-shape, they are both eye-catching, they are visual objects transformed into symbols of a divine, self-applied vow. This vow relates explicitly to the future of human beings on Earth. The rainbow and what it now means seems a plausible replacement for the necklace, especially given the need to delete the goddess and her impassioned speech in favour of a Yhwh/Elohim re-telling to devout Israelites. It is quite clear in the wording of SBV Gilg. that the ‘flies’ are not living insects but items made out of the precious blue stone, lapis lazuli, mined in Afghanistan, and worked by craftsmen into a fly-shaped form that could be strung together on a necklace. The Mother goddess now holds up this necklace, perhaps slipping it off to hold it aloft above her head at arm’s length so the assembled Igigi could all get a good view of it as the witnesses of her oath: ‘She lifted the flies…’ with našû – ‘to lift up, raise’. In the wording of Gilg.(SBV): Then at once Belet-ili arrived she lifted the flies of lapis lazuli that (godSky) Anu had made for their courtship. “O gods, let these great flybeads in this necklace of mine make me remember these days, and never forget them!” (Gilg. XI:164–167; George, 94 modified; Dalley, 114) The vow is to remember in perpetuity. This is enforced by stating it positively and negatively: ‘these days let me remember unto for ever, not ever will I neglect them’ (ūmī annūti luḫsusamma ana dāriš ā amši). ‘These days’ starts the line prominently. They are the days of grief, the days of seeing her drowned offspring. Those are the days etched on her visual memory. The line ends with four words. First, ‘unto everlastingly’ (dāriš meaning ‘everlastingly, for ever’), the positive vow, followed up by the final two words ‘never’ with the verb ‘will I neglect to’ with the verb mêšu – ‘to disregard, scorn, neglect’. We can hear this line as a powerful and passionate statement, even in English translation. But the narrator~director has not left us with the forceful wording only. He has left us with a powerful visual image of the necklace held aloft. The Igigi, the massed gods, look on and are 97 included in Belet-ili’s wording as eyewitnesses.106 We stand with them, listening too. This scene with the goddess and the necklace in Gilg. XI (SBV), quoted above, is not original with Gilgamesh. Belet-ili has a starring role in the Atrahasis myth too where ‘lapis lazuli’(uqnû), ‘flies’(zubbu, zumbu), ‘neck’ (kišādu) and godAnu all appear in her post-sacrifice scene, albeit in a damaged passage, but certainly enough remains for us to detect the tradition that the Gilgamesh (SBV) reflects. The damaged text of Atrahasis Tablet 3, vi:2–4 has the remembering verb wholly preserved with its asseverative particle lū providing a lead into the self-addressed exhortation to remember. What is and is not in the text of lines 2–4 appears below with square brackets of Assyriology convention indicating missing or defaced syllables in the cuneiform wedges: 2. flies / t[hese] zubbū/ a[n-nu-tum] 3. let / lapis lazuli / neck[my] lū/ uqnī / kišādī[a-a-ma] 4. let me remember / days […] ḫasāsu – ‘to remember, be aware of, think about’ luḫsusma / ūmī […] (for ease of Akkadian-to-English reference, I have added the word dividers / ) The connection of flies and Belet-ili’s jewellery with her human offspring is also original to Atrahasis where we find a striking image. The dead bodies of human beings, the offspring of the Mother goddess, are floating on the surface of the water. In a rendering of the line tightly, we read Nintu’s statement of self-recrimination that includes the ‘like flies’ phrase: “(It is) down to me, (that) like flies, (my) offspring have become!” elēnūya / kima zubbī / īwû / lillidū (“upon me / like flies / have become / offspring”) (Atr.3, iii:44; my translation)107 Then further down in her speech, as Nintu weeps, we hear her describe seeing her offspring floating on the surface of the water: “Like mayflies they filled the river108 (kulīlu I, ‘mayfly’ with George) kīma kulilī imlānim nāram ……… I have seen and wept over them I have ended my lamentation for them.” 106 I take George and Dalley’s translation over Wasserman’s who rendered it: ‘These gods are (indeed) like the lapis lazuli (beads) around my neck’ (Wassserman, 119). The gods (ilū) are present as eyewitnesses. Taken as a vocative with George, the gods are the audience addressed: “O gods…”. This is coherent with the scene of the vow. Granted, the Igigi have been likened to a swarm of flies settling on food at the sacrifice—but that swarm of flies is its own image that fits with food left out in the open air in a hot climate. 107 Unfortunately, this line is a translator’s crux despite the signs being legible. elēnu starts the line with Belet-ili’s self-reference. The meaning ‘besides, apart from’ is attested in the OB period, though the sense of ‘above’ as an up direction is usual. This elēnu stands behind L&M’s ‘cut off from’. Wasserman renders the line: ‘It is my blame that my offspring have become like flies!’ (p. 35, C1 iii 44'–45') with elēnu as a metaphorical ‘above’ = ‘resting upon’, ‘resting upon me as my responsibility’ as we might say. This self-recrimination coheres well with lines 42f. ana ramāniya u pagriya ‘unto my own self’ (= ‘as my own choice’, ‘down to me’) my (very) self (pagru – ‘body, self’). 108 kulīlu I, ‘dragonfly’ (CDA, 165), but rather ‘mayfly’ with George. Mayflies live for 24 hours only. 98 She wept and eased her feelings Nintu wailed and spent her emotion. (Atr.3, iv:6 and 10–13; L&M, 96f.)109 Lines 8–9, not typed above, add another simile involving a raft adrift and bumping into the water’s edge. It is explained well: ‘the dead, like insects, have matted together on surface of the water and then get pushed to the side by the current’(L&M,162f.). The point we are making here is that these images are strongly visual ones, and that they are drawn from sightings familiar to the writer and his contemporary audience. The narrator can make full use of the reader’s recollection of such sights to connect the reader with the story unfolding before his visual imagination. If we are to enter into the story and inhabit it, we need to visualize what the narrator himself has visualized before us. 109 ‘(So that) they could clog the river like dragonflies’ (Dalley, 33; Wasserman, C iv:6, p.34.). 1 99 CHAPTER 12 IMAGINED NARRATED VISUALISED As we wind up this Resource analysis, we will focus on the narrators using their skills of imagination and visualisation before they impress the clay tablets, or ink the scroll. The Mesopotamians choose their words as befits the poetic medium, and leave behind them scenes painted in words, scenes that we readers can easily visualise because their narrators have imagined vividly them before telling them graphically. 1. The Biggest Stage Prop. (c.135 metres) A point that we have been highlighting is that story and its narration depend on literary skills if the reader is to be drawn into the world of the story. The narrator needs imagination plus the words to capture what he sees in his mind’s eye and feels in his emotions. The better imagined, the better described, and the greater chance that the reader will participate in the plot as it unfolds. Imagination combines with articulation and literary skills to produce a good read story. The Genesis narrator might have been captivated by the scene with Nintu’s necklace, and, as a result, have been looking for an equally captivating visual to replace her with in his monotheistic telling. We cannot be sure, but we can look now at another feature of the Flood stories that, unlike Nintu’s necklace, could not be deleted in the biblical telling, namely, a boat to carry the survivors to safety. It would be fair to say, without exaggeration, that this is the largest stage prop of the storyline. Quite literally. It is no wonder that Irving Finkel could not resist the turning of a clay tablet into a television production after naming this hand-sized tablet the Ark Tablet. The front cover of his book The Ark before Noah carries a picture of a replica build of what the Ark Tablet describes, namely, a scaled-up Euphrates coracle of circular plan and two decks. Nor is it any surprise at all that visitors to Williamstown, Kentucky can marvel at a full-size reconstruction of a wooden version of Noah’s Ark, contributing with panache to making America great again.110 Clearly, the Flood story narrators must have imagined the boat that they loaded with people 110 ‘Ark Encounter features a full-size Noah’s Ark, built according to the dimensions given in the Bible. Spanning 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet high, this modern engineering marvel amazes visitors young and old’ (https://arkencounter.com/about/). We can be sure that Noah too would have been amazed at this feat of ‘modern engineering’.’ 100 and animals before and during when they were writing about it. Besides the Genesis and Gilgamesh boats being gigantic physically, compared with familiar river craft, they lend continuity to the telling by featuring before, during and after the Flood storm itself. In fact, one might say that the boat virtually upstages the characters aboard it from when it is being built to when it grounds and they disembark. In support of this thought, we can look at the way that the boat features in the tellings. 2. The Ark focus. Below is a synopsis of the Ark material covered in Gen 6:14–8:19, from dry land to dry Earth, from its first to last explicit mentions. This is clearly a sizeable proportion of the storyline over three chapters. • 6:14–16 command and build details. • 6:18f. and 19 into the Ark; humans, animals, food • 7:7–9 boarding ‘two and two, male and female’ • 7:13–6 boarding details; Yhwh shut him in. • 7:17f. the Ark floats • 7:23 only Noah left and ‘those with him in the Ark’ • 8:1 God remembers Noah, and all animals ‘with him in the Ark’ • 8:4 the Ark comes to rest • 8:6 Noah opens window of the Ark • 8:9 Noah takes dove back into the Ark • 8:10 Noah sends forth dove from the Ark again • 8:13 Noah removes cover from the Ark • 8:16 God commands: “Go forth from the Ark…” • 8:18 Noah and family disembark • 8:19 all creatures, by families, leave the Ark The final mention of the Ark comes in 9:18, but this is only to recap that Shem, Ham and Japheth ‘went forth from the Ark’ to re-people the Earth. So the Ark has reached its final resting place in the mountains of Urartu, if not quite in the allusions to it in the biblical literature (e.g. 1 Pet 3:20). The degree to which the Ark has captured the imagination of some readers of Genesis can also be measured from the numerous expeditions, fly overs and aerial photographs taken in pursuit of its last resting place. The photos feature a geological formation in rock in the Armenian mountains. 3. Berthed alongside. The array of re-tellers of the Flood story have imagined the escape vessel rather clearly and rather differently. We can line up the Flood vessels, at least verbally. The Mesopotamian sources differ among themselves, while the Genesis telling differs from all of them. Below is a list of the six Mesopotamian ‘arks’ that form a small fleet to float away with Noah’s. They are grouped by the date of the copies, below the canonical Genesis story—to which we cannot assign a definite date. 101 • a gopher-wood structure 135m long (300 x 50 x 30 cubits) Judean Monarchy era? utilising reeds and bitumen (Gen 6:14ff.) ------------------------------------------------------ • a scaled-up, circular coracle with fibre rope (Ark Tablet) OB era (Finkel, Wasserman) • a reed house demolished and re-purposed(?) (Atrahasis ) OB era (L&M, 88f.) giš • a huge wooden boat ( má-gur4-gur4) (CBS 10673, Sum.) OB era (Civil, L&M, 144f.) • a giant 6-deck cubed wooden hull structure (Gilg. XI SBV) MB era (George, 89/704f.) • a big wooden boat (gišeleppa rabītam) Atr., CBS 13532, J Nippur MB era (L&M, 126f.) • a wooden boat (Sum. gišMÁ) Atr., DT 42, W (Nineveh) NA era111 (L&M, 128f.) When it comes to the structure of the vessel, the surprise has been the Ark Tablet. Surprise, both in how the tablet ever reached the hands of Irving Finkel in the British Museum, and then, when read and translated by him, the narrative’s devotion to detail regarding the structure, dimensions, building instructions and loadings. The Ark Tablet has close verbal links with both Atrahasis and Gilg, XI, at the same time as offering new and different detail. Finkel tackles how a scaled-up circular, two deck structure changes into a 6-deck titanic cube between the Old Babylonian version and lines 61–63 of Tablet XI Gilgamesh (SBV). If interested, I would point you to Finkel’s Appendix 2 (pp.345– 350) as he fossicks through misunderstandings by copyists to a postulated midrashic theological symbolism that relates the boat to the Marduk ziqqurat in Babylon. Andrew George himself leans this way: The fact that both ziqqurrat (where the king of the gods resided between heaven and earth) and ark (which held representatives of all creation) have in common a dimensional scheme is very likely to be explained in terms of cosmic symbolism, even though the exact significance of number nine in the cosmic pattern cannot yet be determined.112 What is clearer is that bitumen and reeds seem to have survived the tradition’s trip from Mesopotamia westwards. The boat is stationary before it floats, to state the obvious. And, as we have previously noted, the Genesis telling discloses nothing about the building process subsequent to the naked command “Make yourself an ark of gopher-wood…” (Gen 6:14), whereas the boat site is a hive of activity in Gilgamesh from lines 48–94 and the sealing of the hatch and bolting of the door (Atr. Tablet 3, ii:51–52; L&M, 92f.). The narrators of the biblical re-telling have not exercised their imagination at some points, or else the editor of the Genesis scroll in its final version has used his editorial red pen to economise on the detail. 4. The Hero who vomits. Atrahasis nicely avoids the overshadowing of its lead character by the boat when it paints us a portrait of this ultra-wise Flood hero at his worst moment: 111 Text in Wasserman, 90ff.; L&M, 128f. with its references to ‘caulking’ (piḫi), ‘entering’ and ‘closing the door of the boat’ and intriguingly in line 2 the phrase kīma kippati – ‘like a circle’ with kippatu – ‘circumference, circle’ that now links with the Ark Tablet. 112 George 2, 513 acknowledging J-J.Glassner, ‘L’Etemenanki, armature du cosmos’, NABU 2002/32. 102 42. …] he sent his family on board 43. They ate and they drank 44. But he was in and out he could not sit, could not crouch 45. For his heart was broken and he was vomiting gall (Atr. Tablet 3, ii: 42–47; L&M, 92f.) This is a well imagined and described scene, capturing the familiar human emotions of anxiety accompanied by its physiological stress effects. It connects readers immediately with the lead character in his human vulnerability, and demonstrates how the narrator uses what is familiar to him as a baseline in writing a story about the remote past. The same technique informs the write-up of the reactions of the Mother goddess to her drowned offspring and of Enlil’s anger when his plan is frustrated. There is also the deft touch of contrasting Atrahasis’s family members’ ability to sit down to a good meal, normally, with the Flood hero’s inability to partake, and his dry vomiting. What the narrator has imagined, we in turn can readily visualise and identify with, whether that is Atrahasis’ agitation or his nasty taste retching. 5. Imagination. It is really no surprise that a creative writer should work imaginatively. This is how many poems, plays, novels and children’s stories work. Think of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, not to mention the collected fables of Aesop and the Fairy stories of Europe. African animals talk, plant crops, dig wells, steal, trick other animals, and play musical instruments. This animal- morphism is as true for Mesopotamian art and for their Debate genre involving animals.113 The traditional African stories and Mesopotamian art combine familiar human objects with animal actors. The inlay on the soundbox of a harp from Ur that dates to the 3rd millennium, potrays the donkey playing a tall stringed harp, the bear dancing, the jackal shaking a sistrum, while in the panel above, the lion carries in beer with cup and container, and the dog carries a table laden with dismembered meat. Both walk upright on their hind legs, as do the gazelle and the scorpion man in the panel below.114 On a papyrus from Thebes there is a skilfully painted scene of a lion and a gazelle seated on stools opposite one another across a small table, playing a boardgame (senet).115 If we discount imagination in story-tellers, we are denying what it means to be human and to be creative. The only difference in the imagination at play in our day is our ability with computer graphics to create whole worlds and populate them with animals, mutant aliens, and spacecraft instead of river craft. The weapons involved are ludicrously like swords and shields but electrified and magical—as appropriate to the scaled-up powers of the combatants. Even Spiderman starts from a spider bite and uses spider-web, scaled up to take his weight to swing about on. The creativity involved is shared now between the script writer and story-board team and the large array of digital crafts people responsible for the animation. It is no coincidence that when celestials appear in Bible stories they look like us, only different, even as they speak Hebrew or Aramaic, may carry a sword (1 Chron 21:16), and have features that dazzle (Dan 10:5–6). Not only that, but certain celestials defy gravity and can fly, equipped with multiple wings, while the guardians and servient divine throne-bearers of vision are hybrid 113 A sample of these debates appear in Black, The Literature of Ancient Sumer, 215–240 in which the debaters are Sheep and Grain, Bird and Fish, Heron and Turtle. 114 Excavated from the ‘Royal Tombs’ of Ur, Early Dynastic period c.2,500 BC, British Museum/Penn Museum Object Number B17694B. 115 Ramesside period, c. 1250–1150 BC, EA100116,1. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA10016-1 103 human~animal combinations (Ezek 1), like their extraordinary Mesopotamian counterparts. 6. Extrapolation, reasoning and imagination. Besides the imaginative that involves transforming familiar objects and sights in story-telling, there is a type of reasoning that moves from the observed in the present to an origin in the past. This leap backwards is both cognitive and imaginative. The first breath of a baby, plus our need to breathe to stay alive, leads to reflections on the primal first breath—with its source as God himself. God was on the job and supplying the air, but now is the invisible Creator of human physiology and not visible in the labour ward. The importance of blood as a symbol derives from observation of its essentialness for life—spill too much of it and you die. This happens in battles involving lances, javelins and swords, not to mention the decapitation of Goliath. Reflection and imagination ask when did a first spilling of human blood take place that led to death. How did murder enter the world? Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. From the fact that all humans alive in the writer’s present have parents, one male and one female, there is an obvious extrapolation to make back to the first parents of primal times.116 From the observation of breaking the commandments of covenant, an extrapolation reaches back to the first breach of a divine commandment. From the observable phenomenon of sin, especially manifest in a human taking the life of another human, an extrapolation reaches back to a first murder, a brother-on-brother murder—of course it would be brothers, not sisters, since males perpetrate the vast majority of violence and murders. From this breaking of a covenant commandment prohibiting murder, an extrapolation must reach back for an explanation as to where this human propensity to violence comes from. The answer is from a deeply buried inclination towards wrong-doing—and we are back with the Genesis Flood story (Gen 6:5b with Gen 8:21b) after a brief call at the garden in Eden, and overhearing a crafty, talking snake. When watching Cain and Abel preparing their offerings, we hear Cain being warned that sin is lurking nearby—a wonderful literary~theological picture: ‘Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you. But you must subdue it and be its master’ (Gen 4:6b, NLT). All this imaginative, lively story presentation is a far cry from the shelves of seminary libraries with titles including words like ‘Hermeneutics’, and lined with academic monographs in series, and Ph.Ds converted into books, and journals that no ordinary faith community member would care to open, or understand if they did. The point is that story-telling theology is not inferior, unthoughtful or ‘primitive’. In fact, when the art and narrative skills of the story-teller are highlighted, appreciation can only grow for their intelligence and thoughtfulness. This story-telling, whether narrative-historical or narrative-imaginative, or a blend, is of the essence of communication for all people, not the élite few who have toiled uphill on the academic pathway and into the forest of professional jargon. By way of contrast, the telling phrase, the proverbial saying, the colourful metaphor, the poetic couplet embed themselves in the verbal memory, while the scenes, the emotions and the characters’ responses linger in consciousness, outlasting cognitive~conceptual material. Which is exactly why the Epic of Gilgamesh is the in-print title of a paperback published by 116 DNA evidence of hybridising between ‘species’ within the Homo genus, namely Neanderthal~Homo sapiens, as well as mosaics of recent (derived) and remoter features of contemporaries within the genus Homo lead us to speak of the emergence of our own species as more complex than the first this–then that model of yesteryear’s paleoanthropology and classifications of species. Debate over the identity, date and region of the LCA (Last Common Ancestor) for our species and Neanderthals continues with a look at Homo heidelbergensis and Homo antecessor and a dating of around 800 thousands years ago. This was not a lively debate within the ranks of the canonical authors. The data is new. 104 Penguin books, revised and digitized to Kindle for 3rd millennium readers.117 We notice that the paperback interleaves telling ink drawings that reproduce the graphics of Mesopotamian war scenes, monsters and gods with their emblems. The text is supplemented with visual aids as captured or imagined by the ancient craftsmen. 7. Theology? How so? The very word ‘theology’ is alien to the world of Israel’s speech, not because it is Greek (theos + logos), which it is, thinly disguised as English, but because there is no systematisation of Israel’s faith in extended fashion to be found in the Hebrew canon. Think only of prayer. There is an abundance of prayers in the five collections of Psalms, as well as stand alone prayers as a book (Lamentations), and prayers set within stories (Jonah’s sub-acquatic prayer; Hannah’s infertility prayer), but no discussion of prayer that pulls together its many aspects. Instead, there is language spoken to God—so shocking that it is habitually censored out from prayer in contemporary faith communities. Instead of systematised theology, the nearest we get in the Hebrew canon (Tanak) are the ritual and cultic rubrics of Leviticus, for instance. The precise cultic details—of priestly dress, tabernacle, clean/unclean, and sacrifice are probably the least read parts of the Hebrew canon by those who own Bibles. What faith-readers are more inclined to open and dip into are portions from the amassed collection of stories and poetry. The poems contain ‘theology’ but are not theological discourses of the bookly form. Psa 23 proves the point. The Flood story contains the concept of ‘covenant’ as a key term, but expresses this in what happens—God speaks reassuringly to characters about his future policy, his present wishes, making promises and offering a rainbow visual aid. All this is relational, embedded in direct speech within story-telling. Narrative art, imagination and relational dynamic contribute to what Gen 6–9 conveys about Yahweh/Elohim, known as the Creator of humanity and animals in context, but written about as Yahweh of covenant by devout and imaginative Israelite narrators. As for poetry, there is a massive volume of it: Psalms (150 samples), Proverbs (31 chapters), Job (42 chapters bookended with prose bits), Song of Songs, Lamentations, the huge bulk of major and minor Prophets, poems embedded in stories in Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Judges, Samuel, Jonah and Daniel (e.g. in Dan 7). If there is inspired theology in the Hebrew canon, it clothes itself and comes to life in its stories and poetry. 8. Contextually engaged Theology. On the contemporary scene within theological training seminaries, there are different emphases that translate into hours spent, what is read, sung and done, individually and in group work or teams. The syllabus may or may not offer depth in practical training and skills. It may or may not immerse itself in tradition and history. It may or may not offer analyses of contemporary culture and communication. It may or may not develop musicality, and skills for counselling adults and teaching children, or taking funerals. What the seminary is often really proud of is… its Library. The books are in prose, contain few if any pictures, with the majority written by specialised academics, not by journalists, biographers, story-tellers and poets. Israel did its theology by slaughtering the prophets of Baal and defeating its enemies in battle— meanwhile being invaded, conquered and exiled itself. It needed to have an engaged and contextual theology that could survive the wild sociological and political shifts of desert and prosperity, tribalism and monarchy, exile and trickle back. Besides this, there was the issue of what went on in the temple of Jerusalem when that was built. Solomon imported wives and 117 Amazon lists its Kindle edition as June 2016. 105 built temples for their gods in Jerusalem. Other Judean kings went further in cultic importing. The unfolding story before the temple and afterwards indicates in large letters, that many Israelites worshipped other gods as well as Yahweh—at home, in regional shrines, in Jerusalem and its surrounds, on rooftops, and in the very temple precincts. A Yahweh only, 1st Commandment theology, was forced to engage its doorstep rivals—Baal, Molech, Asherah, Milcom, Qaus, Chemosh, Hadad, Dagon— and wider alternatives—Marduk, Nabu, Tammuz. There is an explicit thread of prohibition, satirising and condemnation of ‘foreign’ gods running through the literature of the Hebrew canon. It may be full-on confrontation or an undercurrent of critique by implication. Since this is composed in Hebrew for reading by Israelites, we can be sure that this engagement was vital for the survival of allegiance to one God and one God only within this often-riven tribal community. The Flood story in its canonical form is a Yahweh-only telling. It cannot be plausibly read as written in ignorance of the Mesopotamian tradition, given the whole literary context of Gen 1– 11, and the reality of text tablets from Mesopotamia as near to tribal Israel as Megiddo, and as far flung as Ugarit, Emar and Hattusha (Boghazkoy). Hence, our reading of Gen 6–9 as a deliberate and explicit re-telling of the Flood story from within the framework of a Yahweh- covenant theology. We can list now what is in the biblical Flood version for us to notice—if we read this re-telling as an implicit engagement with its rival tellings: • Noah reduced to silence as a non-heroic but righteous lead male character • Noah as commoner and no king in a palace, or priest of a god • no social differentiation of workers/élite, or mention of gold and silver • all humans reaffirmed as bearers of the divine image • Noah’s righteousness in God’s eyes as his ticket to survival, not wisdom or sacrificing • Noah’s character is key, not a personal god bias within a pantheon of gods • no fake news cover-up and deceit by Noah; no pre-Flood, New Year party • no sealing of the door by local expert, then left behind • no eternal life for Noah and wife as a divine after-Flood blessing • encouragement to reproduce contrasting with Atrahasis’s population controls • no Pashittu child-snatching demon or celibate religious orders • prohibition of murder, with threat of accountability and judgment • no Mami Mother goddess in minor or major role, despite Israelite polytheism • vow with colourful rainbow in the sky; no vow with a bead necklace • no temple on Earth where the CEO of the Divine Assembly slept • the sin of widespread violence rather than an annoying noise as trigger • no forces of nature as personified and deified storm elements like Adad • no eating of the sacrifice meat by Yahweh • Yahweh God not dependent on humans offering him food or drink • no god of the subterranean Deep (Apsû), just subterranean water sources • cultural links are there, but in a non-regional framework • no local city as start point; the ancient and famous cities of Mesopotamia are ignored The Genesis re-telling of the Flood story is nevertheless steeped in its own culture. This includes: • androcentricity—sons are named; women are not named • some animals are cultically ‘clean’ and are sacrificed118 118 It is not clear whether the word ‘clean, pure’ (ellu) that occurs in the context of loading animals aboard the boat in a broken passage of Atrahasis relates conceptually to the ‘clean’ (ṭāhōr )טהורanimals of the Genesis Flood wording that is explained by Leviticus (Gen 7:2 with el-lu-ti i[…] (Atr. 3, ii:32; L&M, 92; C1, ii:32”; Wasserman, 22). 106 • some birds qualify as ‘clean’ and are sacrificed • the deity has the personal name, Yahweh, who is national Israel’s covenant partner • olive trees, valued for their olive oil product—by Israelites living in Palestine • graphic anthropomorphism, such as we find in Israel’s collected prayers to Yhwh/Elohim • a two-deck duality of Heaven~Earth dominates conceptually; no Underworld city • moral commandments are intrinsic to the experience of God • a possible background of sabbath and New Year lying behind the Flood dates Despite cultural and theological colouring contemporary with the Israelite story-tellers, the story is not told as an ethnic event. Instead, it is of a piece with creation in Gen 1 theologically, which it alludes to explicitly. This said, the re-telling retains features from its Mesopotamian traditional sources. These re-tellings are inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets that Assyriologists literally hold in their hands. Both the cuneiform script and the clay tablets are Mesopotamian inventions. In addition, the language medium for the main exemplars is the Babylonian or Assyrian dialect of the east Semitic language group from Mesopotamia. The Sumerian version also belongs in Mesopotamia. Below are four features that come through directly from the Mesopotamian traditions: a. an ending in mountains to the north-east of Mesopotamia b. birds as scouts, two of which, raven and dove, appear in Mesopotamian tellings c. wood and reeds together in the boat construction d. bitumen as caulking, utilising the Hebrew cognate of the Akk. kupru It is notable that these four items above, that involve physical entities, have no special theological significance. There was no need to censor these out of Gen 6–9. 9. Stating the obvious. The Genesis Flood story is written in Hebrew because it is intended to be heard and read by Israelites. We might read it as a self-contained story, but we should not. It is bound into the story of the nations (Chap. 10), followed by satire on Babylon (Chap.11) set in ‘in the country of Shinar’ (beʾereṣ-šinʿār = בארץ־שׁנערBabylonia). This is the Babylonia that built towering ziqqurats and claimed its capital city as ‘the gateway of gods’ (bāb ilāni), or in another phrase, ‘the bond of Heaven and Earth’. This Babel tower piece turned that claim of direct access to Marduk and his fellow 600 gods from the ‘gateway of the gods’ into a mocking ‘Babble-a-lot’. Then with Gen 12, the story moves off with Abraham and family from Ur of the Kasdim in Mesopotamia to Haran and then on to Canaan. Abraham has moved westwards as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has called him to do. The Flood story, like Abram and family, also took the trip westwards.119 It could have moved ahead of Abraham with the Assyrian merchants who based themselves in Kanesh/Kultantepe, Cappadocia, for all we know. But we don’t. We can only dig up clay tablets, like the 20,000 from these Assyrian merchants. We cannot dig up oral traditions. With a handful of Flood story clay tablets in hand, so to speak, we have been able to read the Genesis re-telling 3- dimensionally. We have noted what it transmits, what it represses and deletes, and what it transforms. Writerly skills are evident in all the Flood sources for us to enjoy. They enhance our 119 Reviews by competent Assyriologists such as Hallo document this westward spread of Mesopotamian literary material. For instance, W.W. Hallo ‘The Expansion of Cuneiform Literature’ presented to the 7th World Congress of Jewish Studies, 1977, pp. 308–322, and ‘The Syrian Contribution to Cuneiform Literature and Learning’, pp. 69–88 in Mark W. Chavalas and John L. Hayes (eds.), New Horizons in the Study of Ancient Syria, Bibliotheca Mesopotamica 25, Malibu: Undena Publications, 1991. 107 appreciation immensely when we become aware of them. If we belong to a community of faith that reads the Israelite Flood story, we are rescued from naivety by observing the literary skills of the tellings. We may feel more inclined to affirm what the theology of the Genesis telling is presenting to us when we grasp both its roots and its uniqueness. If we are anyone, humanist, agnostic, atheist, with or without a faith, reading the Genesis Flood story—or the other tellings, for that matter, we surely cannot miss the common impetus to preserve the animal life of planet Earth and not destroy it. Or destroy our own human habitat on planet Earth by violence, be that by the ecological madness of pollution and greedy exploitation or by nuclear exchange. The Flood stories still speak in terms that we should heed. That is their legacy. 108 APPENDIX 1 A Note on Names. One of the most obvious variants in the Flood traditions is the name of the Flood hero who receives instructions from his god/God and offers sacrifice to his gods/God afterwards. The surprise about variants does not arise from the jumps between languages. Jumps there certainly are in the language department, but in the three roughly contemporary versions from the Old Babylonian era, we have three different names. These three names come in Babylonian and Assyrian dialects of East Semitic, and from Sumerian. Sumerian is unrelated to any Semitic language but contributed its gods to the Mesopotamian pantheon, to worship material such as hymns and to ancient literary collections exhibited in lists, omens and proverbs. Sumerian generated dozens of loanwords into Akkadian. And even into Greek and then English with ab.zu = apsû, abussos, abyss’. In the OB versions of roughly 1700–1600 BC, we have the same lead character referred to as: • Utanapishtim Semitic Ūta-napišti “I found–life” • Atramhasis120 Semitic Atra-ḫasīs “Exceedingly–wise” • Ziusudra Sumerian Zi-u-sudra “Life of–days–distant” Add to these, the later Hebrew and Greek names, and we have: • Utanapishtim Semitic Ūta-napišti “I found–life” • Atramhasis Semitic Atra-ḫasīs “Exceedingly–wise” • Ziusudra Sumerian Zi-u-sudra “Life of–days–distant” • Xisuthros Greek for Ziusudra • Noah Hebrew Nōaḥ נח “Rest” • Utturnapushti Assyrian Uttur-napušti “Well augmented-(as to) life” In the Gilgamesh Epic (SBV Assyrian library 7th century BC exemplars) we have both Utanapishti and Atrahasis represented, but with Utanapishti completely dominating. This persistence and novelty as regards the names demonstrates continuity in the thread of the Flood tradition while it jumps centuries, but also makes adaptations. The usual writing of Ūta-napišti is UD-napišti, that is, Sumerian logogram + Semitic napištu (= ‘life’), but the Ugarit tablet has a syllabic writing ú-tu-ur-na-pu-uš-ti. This means that the scribe took Sum. UD differently. This gives Utanapishtim a different meaning to his name. • UD is replaced with the syllabic ú-tu-ur-na-pu-uš-ti (Middle Assyrian, Ugarit) The verbal root is (w)atāru, Assyrian utāru – ‘to exceed’. This yields the sense of the hero’s name as “Well augmented-(as to) life” ***** Now in addition, we should note that Atra-ḫasis, Uta-napishti and Zi-u-sudra are all honorific titles of the Flood hero. They are ‘named’ in the light of the outcome of their lives. There is a late Gilg. XI fragment that documents this naming process in the after-Flood. Enlil speaks the line. This reads—as contructed in Wasserman’s translation and gap fills—as follows: You are Zisudra, (from now on) let [your name] be Ūt-napištīm at[tam]a mZisudra lū ZI-tim [šum-ka] (z v:17 ̄ ;́ Wasserman, 100f.)121 120 The added ‘m’ of Atram- reflects the use of so-called mimation in Old Babylonian writing. This ‘m’ drops out later on to leave the form Atra-ḫasīs . 121 Tablet MMA 86.11.378A Metropolitan Museum, New York; edition by Lambert in 2005. The words ‘your name’ sum-ka are effaced on the tablet, as indicated by the square brackets, but the restoration fits the context. 109 They indicate a destiny accomplished. The everlasting life, the life to distant days, that they attained defined them because it distinguished them from other mortals. In wearing their names on their chests like medals, they are distinguished from normal names. Normally, parents named their child with a birth name. These birth names may often express a fact or hope, but the fulfilment of the neonate’s given name has still to happen. Thus, with an example of each, of a fact name and a hope/prayer, take the names of two well- known kings who have names given at birth: d god • Sennacherib Sin-aḫḫē-erība Sin(Moon)-the brothers-has increased • Nebuchadnezzar dNabû-kudurru-uṣur god Nabu-the heir-guard! Noah, according to Gen 5:28f., was named to express his father’s hope that he would bring relief/rest from ‘our work and the toil of our hands’. This is futuristic, a destiny hoped for but not achieved. The name Sin-liqe-unninni—traditionally responsible for the Middle Babylonian shaper of Gilgamesh—is also a sentence name and a prayer in itself: • Sin-liqe-unninni dSîn-lēqi-unninnī “O godMoon(Sin)-accept-my prayer” · verb leqû II – ‘to take, take over; receive, accept’ · noun unnīnu, unninnu – ‘prayer, supplication’ (+ -ī = ‘my’) Gilgamesh has two titles characterising him. These both reflect the fact of his quest and his status, but also reflect the fact that his quest did not result in eternal life for him, unlike the man whose story he listened to, Utanapishti. Hence, Gilgamesh is dubbed: • ša naqba īmuru ‘He who saw the Deep’ • šūtur eli šarrī ‘Surpassing as regards to (other) kings’ 110 APPENDIX 2 Gods as Persons/ Forces of nature, and a hermeneutical crux. Employing the method of Resource Analysis, and reading the Flood tellings stereoscopically has many advantages. But it may raise other issues. We offer a translation conundrum below where George, Dalley and Wasserman go separate ways, and explain how this happens. In the lines below, we can compare Atrahasis’s version of the onset of the Flood with their equivalent lines from Gilg. XI (SBV). In both sources, we find ‘neutral’ words for the elements mixed with deities as personal agents. As person, Adad rides the winds as his war chariot in Atrahasis, while in Gilgamesh he is possibly carried along on his mobilised throne. We will now take off after Adad in hot pursuit. 4. The wind (……) and brought the storm 5. Adad rode on the four winds, [his] asses d Adad ina šar erbetti (im.limmu.bar) irtakab parē[šu] 6. The south wind, the north wind, the east wind, the west wind. šūtu iltānu šadu amurru 7. The storm, the gale, the tempest blew for him. siqušu siqsiqu meḫu rādu (aga[r]) 8. The Evil Wind…… the winds arose imḫullu ad ma hu lu tebū šarū 9 The south wind, (……) … arose at his side. urhi-pi-qu-da itba idšu šutu 10. The west wind blew at his side122 [i]ziqu ana idišu amurru We can compare this Atrahasis passage above with lines from SBV Gilgamesh: At the very first glimmer of brightening dawn, there rose on the horizon a dark cloud of black, and bellowing within it was dAdad(iškur). The gods Shullat and Hanish were going before, bearing his throne over mountain and land. The stillness of dAdad(iškur) passed over the sky, and all that was bright then turned into darkness. [He] charged the land like a bull [on the rampage,] he smashed [it] in pieces [like a vessel of clay.] (XI: 97–109; George, 91f.; with George 2, 708–709) The lines quoted above from Atrahasis and Gilg. XI are sufficient to demonstrate that godAdad functions as a personal agent, but also as closely associated with elements of the natural world like the winds. The winds of Atrahasis, lines 1–10 are each identified according to their direction of origin meterologically, but are not given the determinitive sign for deity in the script. Absent is the star cluster sign where the wedges are to be read as the Sumerian word 122 Atrahasis: Assyrian Recension BM 98977 + 99231 = U; L&M, 122–125 with their discussion of the Assyrian recension as a reworking of the OBV version of Ipiq-Aya’s copy from 17th century BC. 111 dingir. We could reflect that prefix sign indicating Adad’s divinity in translation by writing god Adad. Both Atrahasis and Gilg. XI use that determinative Sumerian prefix dingir/god with Adad. Similarly, Adad’s escort and outriders Shullat and Hanish are designated as gods with the Sumerian prefix dingir. They are also given their title as honourable palace functionaries, ‘throne-bearers’, modelled on human courts. So like Adad, his vanguards are personified agents. Of course, godAdad is a major deity in the Atrahasis story line. In Tablet 2, he receives offerings and supplications in his newly built temple. There is no doubt about his agency and person. The comparison of the two texts, Atrahasis and Gilg. XI, also demonstrates how features of high poetic and theological imagery can disappear between tellings, in this case between the Assyrian recension of Atrahasis and the SBV Gilgamesh. The four named winds do not feature in the build-up to the Flood in Gilgamesh. They are not steeds of the Flood storm godAdad there in the Gilg. XI telling. ***** Staying with SBV Gilgamesh, we note a hermeneutical issue that presents itself. This is evidenced by comparison of the translations offered by George (2) and Dalley (2) of lines 100– 101 featuring Shullat and Hanish. The fifth and latest rendering is by Nathan Wasserman. Line 101 begins: illakū guzalû (gu-za-lá)meš ‘they went his throne-bearers’ where the plural verb ‘they went’ (root alāku) precedes its subject, namely, the guzalû ‘throne-bearers’. In the brackets above are the Sumerian syllables that the scribe has impressed on clay. They would be read aloud as Babylonian, that is, pronounced as guzalû(m), kuzzalû(m) – ‘chair-carrier, throne-bearer’. It is obvious—without knowing any Sumerian or Babylonian—that the Sumerian has been borrowed into Babylonian. The last Sumerian syllable -meš is simply the marker of the plural, hence ‘throne-bearers’, referring to both the named gods, Shullat and Hanish, who are personalized as agents. When we look at the five translations of lines 101–102 , as we do below, there seems to be an ambiguity in the minds of the translators as to what the poet was actually visualising when he inscribed these lines. Were Shullat and Hanish carrying the enthroned Adad? Or, as his regular attendant officers, were they simply advancing before him as his vanguard while he followed up as commanding officer? But how did Adad travel? By throne or by chariot? This ambiguity arises because SBV Gilg. does not have a reference here to the Four Winds and their function as Adad’s steeds when he mounts his chariot in the way that he does in the lines from Atrahasis. Below, compare the two translations by Andrew George in his paperback and his scholarly volume, plus the two renderings by Stephanie Dalley: The gods Shullat and Hanish were going before him, [ina miḫri has no ‘him’] bearing his throne over mountain and land. [they carry Adad?] (George 1, 91) Shullat and Hanish were going at the fore, “throne-bearers” travelling over mountain and land. [plural noun, no verb] (George 2, 709) Shullat and Hanish were marching ahead, [ ‘march’ for ‘went’] Marched as chamberlains (over) mountains and country. [‘march’ for ‘went’] (Dalley, 112) (Or, ‘Mountain and Country marched as chamberlains’; Dalley, note 129, p.133) 112 There are two occurrences of the verb illakū, one in each of lines 100 and 101. The freer translation of George’s paperback, ‘bearing his throne’ resolves the ambiguity by eliding the title of the minor gods with the motion. It pictures Shullat and Hanish as actively ‘bearing’ Adad’s throne where the Babylonian only says ‘they went the throne-bearers’. We might prefer ‘they went, (namely), the throne bearers (went)…’. In the hardback for scholarly readers (p.709), George stays closely with the Babylonian and has ‘were going’ and ‘travelling over’ as what the two gods were doing. This leaves their title freestanding and their altitude undetermined. In other words, leaves it open as to whether Shullat and Hanish were in role at this time, or were simply known to be Adad’s attendants in this capacity on ordinary days of the week. Dalley introduces a military image with her ‘march’ for root alāku – ‘to walk, go’. In her note 129, Dalley makes ‘Mountain and Country’ the subject of verb illakū. This might be arguable grammatically, but is odd. Why would the terrain move? It is the Flood storm that is approaching from over the mountains to across the land. Nathan Wasserman’s translation (p.117) reflects the same decision as appears in George’s Vol.1 hardback, but seemingly is committing to an on-the-ground advance by opting for the more down to earth nuance of the root alāku as ‘to walk’ together with his supplied preposition ‘over’ added in: Šullat and Haniš were going in the vanguard, the ‘thronebearers’ walking over mountain and land. The groundwork of ‘walking’ fits with throne-bearing the king. However, godAdad is explicitly in the sky, in the clouds, as he rides the storm of the battle Flood. So this translation would detach the vanguard from the major deity and source of the Flood storm. This exegetical probe might seem finicky—it is!—but it highlights issues of translation that colour the scene in different styles of imagery. With poetry, which Gilgamesh is written in, imagery is important. We will always want to get as close as possible to what was in the mind of an author as he himself visualised the scene he presents to us in his chosen words. We can conclude that scribe and exorcist, Sin-leqi-unninni, the reputed author of SBV Gilgamesh, has missed a trick at this point in his narrative by compressing his account, compared with other tellings. To omit the highly visual and poetic feature of Adad riding the storm-Flood as master of the winds his chariot’s steeds is to lose a powerful and dynamic image. In the process of this compression, he has also left his latter-day devoted Assyriologists at odds over lines 100–101. The aphorism ‘Every translation is also an interpretation’ holds good here. 113 APPENDIX 3 Notes on Boats and Walls. 1. Enki’s Whispers. When four tellings of the Flood story from Mesopotamia retain a distinctive feature so clearly that there is no doubt about it belonging to the same tradition, it is worth taking note of. This feature is also entirely absent from the biblical Flood story of Genesis, and indeed is unthinkable there. It belongs to the plot of the common Mesopotamian source as a fixed topos and episode. We are talking about a god who whispers a tip-off through the wall of the house where the Flood hero lives, no matter whether this king/priest is named as Ziusudra, Atrahasis or Utanapishtim. The Sumerian version reports this incident as follows: 152. Ziusudra hea[rd], standing by its side 153. He stood at the left of the side-wall 154. “Side-wall, I want to talk to you, [hold on]to my word 155. [Pay atten]tion to my instructions (L&M, 142f.; CBS 10673, iv: 152–155 trans. M.Civil) Ziusudra is inside his house. His personal god, Enki, stands outside. Enki calls to the wall, so that Ziusudra overhears his words. The episode corresponds to the versions in Akkadian, but the wording is not phrased as poetically and as memorably as the sources in Babylonian that we will turn to now. 2. Life/new lifestyle. god Enki’s instruction to Atrahasis/Utanapishtim has three features. It is a devious method of keeping while breaking his oath taken in the Divine Assembly. It is a tip-off with practical action to follow. It is a statement of contextual values. We begin to consider the wording where the lines of the Ark Tablet begin: 1. “Wall, wall! Reed fence, reed fence! igar iga[r k]ikkiš kikkiš 2. Atra-ḫasīs, pay attention to my advice, 3. so that you live forever! 4. Destroy123 (your) house, build a boat!(Sum. MÁ = eleppu) 5. Spurn property [and] keep (your) life intact! 6. The boat (MÁ = eleppu) which you will build, 7. I will draw it out (for you) – a circular plan:124 8. Her length and breadth should be equal, 9. her base should be one ikû; her hull125 should be one nindanu (high).” (Ark, lines 1–9; Wasserman, 66ff.; Finkel, 376) The words for ‘wall’(igāru) and ‘reed fence, wall’(kikkišu) are shared with Gilg.XI (line 21f.), as well as appearing in Atrahasis. This indicates how impressive is this phrasing with its 123 Finkel goes with the verbal root abātu I – ‘to destroy’, as do L&M, 88f. at Atr. 3, i:22. The word ubut or upud is clearly an imperative form, a command. The verbal root is disputed. Wasserman takes it as napādu II – ‘to separate, cut off’(CDA, 237), hence ‘separate from your house’, that is ‘depart from’. Others look to abātu II – ‘to flee from, run away’. 124 kippatu – ‘circle, circumference’; eṣērtu – ‘design’, noun from eṣēru –‘to draw, design’ 125 The Akkadian for ‘wall-her’, as plausibly restored by Finkel, reads: i-ga-r[a-tu-ša] from igāru – ‘wall’, the same word that starts line 1. The word ‘hull’ is a boating term, whereas the terms igāru and kikkišu – ‘reed fence’ and ‘wall’ (CDA, 157) in line 1 are more general terms than that. 114 doubled repeats. They cross the three separate tellings in their couplet form. Here is the Atrahasis version: 20. Wall (igāru), listen to me! 21. Reed wall (kikkišu), observe all my words! 22. Destroy (ubut) house, build a boat! 23. Spurn property (makkura zēr-ma) 24. save life (napišta bulliṭ)! 25. The boat ([e]-le-ep-pu) which you build 26. …] be equal [… (Atr. 3, i:20–26; L&M, 88f.) The wording of this instruction comes out in Gilg. XI as: 21. O fence of reed (kikkiš) hear, O wall of brick(igāru) pay attention! 22. Fence of reed, fence of reed, wall, wall. (kikkiš kikkiš igāru igāru) 23. “O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu 24. Demolish (u-qur) the house, and build a boat! (naqāru – ‘to demolish, dismantle’) 25. Abandon wealth, and seek survival! 26. Spurn property, save life! muššir mešram-ma še’î napšāti (25) makkuru zêr-ma napišti bulliṭ (26) 27. Take on board the boat all living things’ seed! (Gilg. XI, 23–27; George, 89 and 705f.) The use of ‘reeds’ seems to have crept into Genesis too at 6:14 ( קנםqānīm, ‘reeds’, where ‘reeds’ seem more likely than ‘nests’). Ea/Enki is speaking to the wall, but actually through it to Atrahasis, as is obvious since only the house owner could demolish the house. Yet the wording does not make it absolutely clear whether the materials of the house become the materials for the boat—in a material sense, rather than metaphorically. The large reed bundle houses of the southern marshes in Iraq are more like meeting halls and quite a wonder of human ingenuity in using abundant materials to hand. So the idea of disassembling one of these and turning it into a boat would fit somewhat with the experience of the southern marshes, ancient or modern, if a leap of imaginative up-scaling were included. However, a brick wall in a wooden boat strains modern credibility, probably even more back- then where huge iron-plated vessels weighing tons, like the Titanic, were unknown. Reeds weighted with foundation bricks would result in a submarine if they were modern bricks. Even more so if the walls were imported stonework for the Flood hero’s palace. If the usual mudbricks were in mind, they would be prone to join the clay that Utanapishtim set eyes on after the Flood. We do not expect engineering science of the story tellers, but we can expect common sense observation—of the kind we have in the tellings that realise the need for water-proofing, and hence for copious supplies of bitumen for caulking, and the sealing of the doorway before the storm broke. This common sense we certainly find present. The newly added Ark Tablet is strong on the up-scaling of a coracle, but fully aware of the water-proofing requirement. If we abandon a literalism, and instead go with a playfully stated contrasting set of values being set forward in these words of Enki—rather than a blueprint for a survival vessel—then all is plain sailing. The former life must be abandoned in the light of life being turned upside down by the Flood. This contrast of values is deeply embedded in the couplets. What value are riches and possessions compared with saving your life? And while saving your own skin, take on board with you what you will need afterwards so that life continues in its familiar fashion. Hence, we have the contrasting and appropriate responses urged upon the main man: ‘destroy… 115 build’, ‘abandon… seek’, ‘spurn… save’. This interpretation resonates with the suspense and urgency of the telling and commends itself. When the Sumerian ideogram gišMÁ is written in the cuneiform text, it does duty for the Akkadian word eleppu – ‘boat’ that is spelled out elsewhere syllabically as e-le-ep-pu (e.g. Atr., line 26 above). The Sumerian word carries the prefixed determinative for wooden objects (giš). The Ark Tablet uses this Sumerian sign (line 6) that suggests a wooden eleppu boat, but then speaks of enormously long fibre coiled ropes with copious amounts of sealing substances, including bitumen. The detail for all this is discussed by Irving Finkel. Perhaps there has been tension in the minds of tellers and copyists that means inconsistencies creep in. After all, there is no way that a circular two-deck coracle design of the Ark Tablet can be squared with the six-deck vessel in Gilgamesh. So the common sense need for space has weighed against the relatively modest imagination of an innovative coracle. Hence the large wooden structures, including the 135m Ark of gopher-wood in Genesis. This biblical boat stands berthed at the end of a line of wooden antecedents and is adjusted for size to match the 1-year long duration of the Flood experience contrasted with the Mesopotamian of only 7-days and 7-nights. The scaled-up coracle design would suggest that the Ark Tablet vessel is the maverick craft among the early tellings of the Old Babylonian period and is not imagining a wooden boat at all but instead a circular fibre coil ‘hull’ plus an extra ‘deck’ where no river coracle had one. The Ark Tablet is full of detail in its descriptions and quite unlike the other OBV tellings of its era in this respect, and yet it also has the punch line commands as its opening (“Wall, wall! Reed wall!”, line 1) and uses the name Atra-hasīs for its Flood hero (mat-ra-ḫa-si-[i]s, line 2). This nicely demonstrates the commonality of the Mesopotamian tradition but with its variations from Old Babylonian times to the copies lodged in the 7th century Neo-Assyrian libraries of Nineveh and other cities. The variants in the vessel also demonstrate the tension between working from the familiar combined with common sense/imagination. This produces a hybrid, a mutant—from outsized coracle to gigantic boat. The Genesis version combines a large Ark capacity for all the animals to save, as well as provisioning them on-board, with the realisation of their need to breed afterwards—hence the pairs of male and female, and their need to eat during the period of a year. Therefore, the specific instruction to load food on board—these animals are not going into a supernatural hibernation state after walking aboard. Moreover, the humans on board and the animals, birds and creepers do not consume a diet of one-food-suits-all: Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten and store it up. And it shall serve as food for you and for them (Gen 6:21) But the rationality of the common sense familiar does not extend to a mention of the need for fresh raw meat for the snakes that consume mice and rats, and for the lions. The psalmist is well aware that ‘the young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God’ (Psa 104:21). He is not thinking that these lions eat grass or have gone conscientiously vegan. 3. Wooden chests, bulrushes and reeds. The Ark in Genesis is termed a ‘chest’ (tēbāh )תבה. Perhaps ‘container’ might capture for us what the narrator intended. If we knew what wood this container involved, this might provide us with a clue to this being an everyday wooden box/container familiar to Israelites, but vastly scaled up to hold all the animals and the eight people on board. Elsewhere in canonical Hebrew, the word tēbāh תבהonly appears as the container in which baby Moses floats (Exod 2:3 and 5). That one was explicitly made from papyrus reeds (gōmeʾ 116 )גמא, an abundant and useful resource growing on the banks of the Nile river. However, the biblical narrator unequivocally uses the word ‘wood’ (ʿēṣ עץGen 6:14) in his phrase ‘wood of- gopher’ (ʿaṣēy-gōper )עצי־גפר. Puzzlingly, the Genesis Ark also includes ‘reeds’—taking qānīm קניםas the more likely reading of the consonants, rather than the same consonants with different vowels that means ‘nests’. The lot, wood and reeds, is stuck together and made waterproof with ‘bitumen’ (kōper )כפר, a word that we can understand from its cognate in Babylonian, namely kupru with identical meaning. This word kupru makes its appearance in the Ark Tablet (lines 18ff.) paired with another term for bitumen, namely iṭṭû. The ‘iṭṭû-bitumen’ (Sum. esir) is the crude bitumen. No less than 28,800 sūtu of kupru-bitumen (Sum. esir.us.da.a) go into the heating kilns (line 21) which Finkel works out to amount to over 240 cubic metres.126 This finds its echo in Gilg. XI (SBV): 54. the old men were bearing rope of palm-fibre 55. The rich man was carrying bitumen (kup-ra) 58. 1-ikû was her circle (kippat-sa, Sum.gúr) 66. 3 šar bitumen (ku-up-ri) I poured into the furnace.127 This is another significant connecting link between the Genesis telling, Gilg. XI (SBV) and their Mesopotamian antecedent in the Ark Tablet of the Old Babylonian period, around 1700 BC. There are further tweaks and twirls to the tradition in the Middle Babylonian era manuscript that actually names the boat with a title. With my indications of the Babylonian words involved, this fragmentary tablet (CBS 13532, J Nippur MB; L&M, 126f.) reads: 6. …] build a big (wooden) boat (gišeleppa rabītam binî-ma) 7. Let its structure be [……] entirely of reeds (qanē gabbi lū binissa) 8. …] let it be a maqurqurrum-boat with the name, ‘The Life Saver’ ši / lū / gišma.gur.gur-ma / šumšu / lū / naṣirat / napištim this one / let / the makurkurru-boat / its name / let be / ‘Guardian of / Life’ What jumps out from this CBS 13532 tablet, beside the name of the vessel, are the qualities and features of the boat. Clearly, the type of craft is familiar to listeners. It is a makurkurru-vessel. The fact that the Assyriologists, W.G Lambert and Alan Millard, have left us with a transcription rather than a translation is significant. The word itself is a loan word from Sumerian gišma.gur.gur into East Semitic Akkadian, appearing in the variants makūru, makurru, makkūru, maqurru. CDA offers ‘(processional) boat’. Statues of the gods were loaded onto boats for festivals and visits to other cities and their gods. This craft was obviously an important boat, no doubt a royal sponsored build. But there seems to be an inconsistency in the wording ‘entirely of reeds’ (gabbu I – ‘the totality, all of’), combined with ‘big’ (rabû, rabiu I – ‘big’), and especially with the giš , that—if we follow the Sumerian practice—we could render accurately as ‘the woodboat’. Perhaps the gifted narrators or copyists were trying to reconcile the received tradition impacting their present, while their visual imagination was stimulated with what was a familiar sight on the Euphrates. 126 Finkel, Ark, 174. 127 The word for circle kippatu stands in line 58 (SBV) as a rather orphaned witness to the text history of Gilg. XI (see Finkel, 131). The word šar = ‘myriads’, an indefinitely large number (CDA, 359), is borrowed from Sum. šár as 60x60 = 3,600 in the base 60 Sumerian maths. Finkel argues for taking this as numerically literal in line 66 (Ark, 164). 117 If we follow Andrew George at Gilg. XI, lines 21–22, then i-gar i-gar (igāru) comes out as “Brick wall, brick wall!” (George 2, 704). Behind the Akkadian word igāru lies its source in Sum. É.gar5, where É stands for bītu ‘house’. City life in Mesopotamia involved building houses with mudbrick—trees did not flourish in ancient Iraq, except the date palm which did not yield timber for carpentry. Only the palace could important hard timber like the cedars of Lebanon. Of course, we know that Ziusudra was a king in the Sumerian version, and so too was Ubar- tutu, the ‘man (= king) of Shurupppak’ (Gilg. XI, line 23), father of Utanapishtim. And so too was Gilgamesh of Uruk, his listener. With all these royals around in the tradition, a mudbrick wall for their house is not likely to be the visualisation of the narrators. Nor would a mudbrick boat be. If they all were thinking ekallu – ‘palace’ for their Flood hero’s house, then the bricks needed to be quality baked bricks at the least. But a boat using sun dried bricks or filn-fired bricks or stones from a palace would surely have seemed as preposterous to the tradition’s narrators back then as it does to us now. So we sail on in a solidly built wooden boat, if not knowingly constructed from teak or mahogany or ebony or cedar. It is just unfortunate that ‘gopher’ in American English has another nuance than timber. 118 Abbreviations • CBS 10673 Sumerian Flood tablet with king Ziusudra, c.1600 BC • RS.22.412 Ras Shamra text; Ugarit, Akkadian. 14th century (L&M, 131ff.) Atr. Atrahasis Gilg. Gilgamesh Epic Sum. Sumerian Heb. Hebrew Akk. Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian dialects of E.Semitic) BM British Museum CAD Chicago Assyrian Dictionary CDA A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian CTA Herdner, Corpus, 1963. ETCSL Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature Harps Th. Jacobsen, The Harps that once… KTU Dietrich, Keilalphabetische Texte aus Ugarit, 1976. LAS The Literature of Ancient Sumer MB Middle Babylonian NA Neo-Assyrian NLT New Living Translation NRSV New Revised Standard Version OB Old Babylonian OBV Old Babylonian Version RSV Revised Standard Version SBV Standard Babylonian Version Myths Dalley, 2000. Ark Tablet Finkel, 2014. George The Epic of Gilgamesh, 1999/2003. George, 2 George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, Vol. 1, 2003. L&M Lambert and Millard, Atrahasis, 1987. Wasserman The Flood, 2020. Wenham Gen 1–15, WBC 1, 1987. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES Jeremy Black A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian (CDA) Andrew George SANTAG 5, 2nd (corrected) printing, Nicholas Postgate Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 2000. Jeremy Black The Literature of Ancient Sumer and colleagues Oxford: OUP, 2004. Stephanie Dalley Myths from Mesopotamia Oxford’s World Classics, 2nd ed., Oxford: OUP, 2000. Irving Finkel The Ark Tablet before Noah Decoding the Story of the Flood London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2014. 119 Benjamin R. Foster Before the Muses An Anthology of Akkadian Literature 3rd ed., Bethesda, Maryland: CDL Press, 2005. Andrew R. George The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation Penguin Classics, London: Penguin Books,1999; rev.ed. 2003. The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic Introduction, critical edition and cuneiform texts, Vol. 1, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003. ‘The Mayfly on the River: Individual and Collective Destiny in the Epic of Gilgamesh’ KASKAL 9 (2012) 227–242. W.W. Hallo The Exaltation of Inanna New Haven/London: Yale Univ. Press, 1968. Th.Jacobsen The Harps That Once…: Sumerian Poetry in Translation New Haven/London: Yale Univ. Press, 1987. Michael R. Johnson Genesis, Geology and Catastrophism A Critique of Creationist Science and Biblical Literalism Paternoster Press, 1988 (out of print). K.A. Kitchen On The Reliability of the Old Testament Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. W.G. Lambert Atra-ḫasīs, The Babylonian Story of the Flood and A.R. Millard with The Sumerian Flood Story by M.Civil, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. D.D. Luckenbill Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylon, Vol. II New York: Greenwood Press, 1927/1968. Alan Lenzi Reading Akkadian Prayers & Hymns: An Introduction Ancient Near East Monographs 3, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), 2011. A Shuilla: Nergal 2, trans.Tzvi Abusch, 339ff. Dennis Pardee translator of The Baclu Myth (1.86), pp. 241ff.in W.W. Hallo (ed.) The Context of Scripture Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World Vol. 1, Leiden: Brill, 1997. M.E.J. Richardson Hammurabi’s Laws: Text, Translation and Glossary Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Nathan Wasserman The Flood: the Akkadian Sources A New Edition, Commentary, and a Literary Discussion. Leuven – Paris – Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2020. Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich, Main Library 2020 digitally accessed via Academia.edu 120 Gordon J. Wenham Genesis 1–15, Word Biblical Commentaries 1 Waco: Texas, 1987. Claus Westermann Genesis 1–11: A Commentary, (1974) English trans. J.A.Scullion, London: SPCK, 1984. N.Wyatt Religious Texts from Ugarit: The Words of Illimilku and his Colleagues The Biblical Seminar 53, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. 121