Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story
Notes:
I was very intrigued by the Flood/Deluge story contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh. This digs a little deeper to see if the god Ea gave a dual message about the flood, one to trick and one to warn.My Thoughts
After reading the Epic of Gilgamesh earlier this year, I became fascinated with the Flood story contained within the epic that has so many similarities to the Noah Flood story found in the Hebrew Bible. The Gilgamesh Flood story would have been written earlier. Did that mean the writer(s) of Genesis copied the story? It got me asking a lot of questions. This book partly delves into that question at the very end but also looks at the god Ea’s message to Uta-Napisti in Gilgamesh to determine if it had a dual meaning, i.e. if it was duplicitous. In that case, some would hear it as a coming blessing and others as a dire warning. The author, Martin Worthington, looks at other Babylonian texts to see if those works contain puns, duplicity, and gods who lie to analyze if the Mesopotamian audience would have picked up on the dual message. This book is a deep dive into just 9 lines of The Epic of Gilgamesh, but an analysis that helps in considering the Epic of Gilgamesh, and specifically the Flood story in more detail. My nerdy self loved it.
