The ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh presents a philosophical reflection upon the human condition set in mythical form. This narrative of human friendship describes the devotion of one man for another, emphasizes the ravages of separation caused by death, and ponders the very essence of human nature by asking how animal and divine features underlie humanity: themes that recur in many religious philosophies, not least in Judaism and Christianity.
The princely Gilgamesh, himself two-thirds god and
one-third man, meets the heroic Enkidu, depicted as a man-animal,
coated in hair like the god of the animals. After a fight they
kissed each other and formed a friendship; their bond of attachment
is only strengthened through the adventures and conquests they
achieve together as when they slew the Bull of Heaven and
Humbaba, protector of the great cedar forest. Gilgamesh
experiences and expresses deep emotion in association with these
conquests and receives powerful visions in a 'dream house' built
for him by Enkidu. The gods declare that one of this pair must die
because of the conquests they have made, and Enkidu is chosen. He
learns this in a disturbing dream and, weeping, addresses Gilgamesh
- 'my brother, dear to me is my brother' - asking how he will never
see him again.
After twelve days of sickness Enkidu dies. Then, at the very first glimmer of brightening dawn, Gilgamesh begins to mourn for his lost friend in a deep personal sorrow. Like a hired mournerwoman he weeps and bitterly wails. In a repeated verse Gilgamesh tells how he did not surrender his body for burial until a maggot dropped from his nostril. These terrifyingly descriptive experiences bear upon Gilgamesh, bringing to him a sense of his own mortality; he declares: 'I am afraid of death, so I wander the wild'. He goes in pursuit of those who may provide him with the secret of eternal life. Further adventures take him past the scorpion-man, guardian of the densely dark tunnel under a mountain, and he endures a twenty-four hour journey of darkness into dazzling light. He crosses the waters of death, assisting the ferryman in the process and still rehearsing his grief to all. He learns how eternal life was once granted to his forefather Uta-napishti for having built a great boat and surviving the world-flood. Gilgamesh, too, is rewarded for having conquered the watery deeps by diving to obtain a rejuvenating plant, 'the Plant of Heartbeat', whose name is 'Old Man Grown Young'. Tragically, on his homeward journey, while he stops to bathe in a convenient pool, a serpent steals this source of eternal life. The snake sloughs its skin in a dramatic symbolic expression of renewed life, but Gilgamesh weeps, having lost the hope of such life for himself. Returning to the city of Uruk he can only point out to his boatman the great walls of his city, walls he had, himself, rebuilt and walls that, now, would have to be his only memorial.
This myth could have been written today, so freshly do its ancient themes touch the ongoing problems of love, loss, hope and the realistic acceptance of the way things are. Its urban context leaves us with a hero who has had to come to terms with the fact that his only eternity lies in his patronage of architecture.
Its distinctive realism could easily be taken to validate some forms of today's secular way of life. While Gilgamesh's journey brought him home again a wiser, if more lonely man, the biblical Book of Genesis furnishes an account of death's origin that also begins a journey, but one that would extend beyond the original individuals into a myth and a history of a journeying and multiplying people that still possesses a vibrant echo in today's world of Israel. The Genesis myth of creation begins the biblical account of humanity with death as the outcome of disobedience to divine commands. God tells Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil on the pain of death. It is in and through this divine-human relationship that they disobey and eat. God then drives Adam and Eve out of the delights of the Garden of Eden lest, as the text enigmatically and in an unfinished way puts it, they 'take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever . . .' (Gen 3: 22). To know good and evil is one thing, but to know 'life' 'for ever' seems to be quite another. Adam must now work in sweated labour to wrest a living from the earth while Eve will suffer pain in child-bearing. God makes it clear to them that they have been made from the dust of the earth and that they will return to it in due course: 'you are dust, and to dust you shall return' (Gen 3: 19). As that story unfolds, for in the myth it takes Adam over nine hundred years to die and become dust, the pair set out upon an extensive journey, out from the Garden of Eden into the flawed world of hardship and pain.
Strangely, the death of Adam, as of all his sons, is simply stated in an entirely unproblematic way (Gen 5: 5). There is no grief here. While Gilgamesh deeply loved his friend Enkidu and mourned his death, all as part of his coming to accept his own mortality, the Genesis myth introduces the story of Adam's sons, Cain and Abel, and there is no sign of love between them. Indeed, in answer to God's question as to where Cain might be, Abel provided the world with his infamous, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' (Gen 4: 9). It is in this Cain and Abel episode that death as a tragic problem first enters the Bible, and it intrudes as fratricide. Cain was a farmer and Abel a shepherd. Both brought offerings to God, and God preferred that of the flock to that of the field. The divine preference, one that is simply stated and not explained, prompts anger in Cain who lures his brother into the field and kills him, and his blood 'cries from the ground' to the Lord. Accordingly, Cain is cursed to be a wanderer and fugitive upon the earth and is sent out on his own journey of destiny. Yet, even as God 'dressed' the naked Adam and Eve as he banished them from Eden (Genesis 3: 21), so he now 'marks' Cain for his protection as he sets him on his road to the future.
The offspring of these early fallen heroes engage in many wanderings in hostile environments as they seek the goal of a promised land. God decides to fix their life-span at 120 years before deciding to destroy the earth in a flood, itself a catastrophe of immense proportion involving much human death.
Still, he saves Noah whose ark becomes, as it were, a drifting promised land of safety, albeit for a short period before, finally, God establishes a covenant with what is emerging as his chosen people. It is this covenant of divine-human collaboration, the guarantee of many descendants and the hope of a promised land, that undergirds the sense of destiny and immortality of much of the following Jewish history. When they try to settle around the Tower of Babel, a monument they build on their own initiative to stand as a marker of their hoped-for territory, God destroys it and sends them, once more, on their journeying quest, for there is to be no settlement apart from the divinely apportioned land. It is tempting to ponder the emphasis Genesis places upon bricks, the building material in which the migrants so eagerly sought to invest - 'Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly' (Gen 11: 3) - and to set the frustrated hope vested in them against the way Gilgamesh has to be satisfied with his own city walls. For the Babel migrants it is their offspring and descendants who will, ultimately, reach a destination which, itself, becomes the prime hope rather than some personal paradise after death. Indeed, for the greater part of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament as Christians call it), ideas of individual life after death are shadowy or non-existent.
