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Epic Of Gilgamesh And Genesis Essay

765 Words4 Pages

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception (Carl Sargon)”. According to The Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis, unprecedented floods occurred in the stories. The exception fell on the kind men, Utnapishtim and Noah: they survived the powerful event of destruction. However, in the same theme of the stories, there are sources of similarity and differences. Even though both The Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis are similar in that they all used the floods for the destruction, both the stories are different from each other in distributing roles within the Gods and a way to warn the extermination from the Gods.

First, the similarity between The Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis is the relevance with the floods that were used to exterminate the human. To prove the occurrence of the flood, chapter 5 of The Epic of Gilgamesh includes, “For six days and six nights the winds blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world, tempest and flood raged together like warring hosts (line 62-63, p. 21)”. Also, in Genesis, the text “The waters flooded the earth for a …show more content…

The Epic of Gilgamesh had the Gods who are Anu, Enlil, Ninurta, Ennugi, and Ea (line 2-3, p.20). In contrast to The Epic of Gilgamesh, Genesis had the only God according to the whole story. As the omniscient God existed over the world, the God in Genesis naturally controls every field of the world without distributing roles. On the other hand, a number of the Gods in The Epic of Gilgamesh can split the roles into parts. For example, Anu is the lord of the firmament, warrior Enlil is the counselor of the city Shurrupak, Ninurta is the helper, Ennugi is the watcher over canals, and Ea is the God of wisdom (line 2-3, p.20). After all, the only God affects every part in Genesis, but lots of the Gods in The Epic of Gilgamesh perform separate

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From the ancient Near East there are three Mesopotamian flood myths and one Judaic flood story. The oldest is the Eridu Genesis, shown a the left and written in 2300BC, then the Epic of Gilgamesh, pictured in the middle and dated to 2150BC, next is the Epic of Atrahasis, on the right and written around 1650BC, and then the Old Testament, written between 538 to 330BC. All four accounts of the flood begin the same way as result of the overpopulation of mankind or mankind is too noisy, mankind is to violent and corrupt or God become dissatisfied with mankind and decide that with the exception of their favorite mortal on Earth the rest of mankind should be eliminated by a flood.

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In “The Epic of Gilgamesh” there are multiple gods and the leader of the gods decides to slaughter the human race because “The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible by reason of babel.” (Gilgamesh 146) There is only one god in “Noah and the Flood” and his reasoning behind killing the human race is because he “regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened.” (Noah 171) God warned Noah about the flood because he thought Noah was pure.

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