Unsucky Gilgamesh 1: On Dangerous Questions

There’s a new Good Book in town—with seniority.

There’s a new Good Book in town—with seniority.

Good-faith listening to the long-silenced “Whore of Babylon” finally telling her own story is indeed ‘dangerous’ - but not unhealthily so.

Before following this long interpretive project, please note:

1. These lectures were originally published in 2008 and went viral.
   This first installment, re-published below, attracted 70,000 visits within 24 hours of publishing - mostly due to high school and college students sharing it on social media.
   
   I had to abort the project, unfinished, later that year when the Global Financial Crisis ended my “writer’s holiday / sabbatical” and sent me scurrying back to gainful employment.

2. The original intended audience for this series was smart-but-academically-bored high school and college students.
   Thus the admittedly questionable “Unsucky Lectures” promise of the titles.¹ At least you understand the motivation behind it now.

3. Adults - including devout ones - liked the series too. Why?
   Because I didn’t dumb things down for the young target audience. Quite the opposite, I tried to take things higher by going places teachers 1) won’t go, for fear of getting fired, or 2) can’t go, due to their own religious wiring.
   
   Now, 16 years later, as I edit and re-post, my mellower self is sometimes uncomfortable with certain rhetorical and stylistic choices aimed to engage that teen and college audience. I’ve made an effort to mitigate those choices without, at the same time, betraying the original ideas.

4. The ideas and commentaries here are often provocative, and should be.
   The discovery of this lost epic in the ruins of an ancient Assyrian royal library in the mid-1800s created a revolution in Bible Criticism and theology. In Gilgamesh, “the Whore of Babylon,” made infamous in the Bible, now spoke for herself, for the first time in over 2,500 years, and her words upended traditional certainties in Judaism and Christianity.
   
   Within a few decades of this discovery, the world, with its short attention span and resistance to unsettling new information, moved on. I found that unfair and tragic. Gilgamesh went from “revolutionary” in the 19th century to “another boring old classroom classic” in the 20th.
   
   So I tried to revive that revolution in these posts. In the original series, this led to immensely rich and beautifully respectful - but often heated - dialogues in the comment section with readers who disagreed. I hope to see the same from dissenting readers here. I’ll listen to you in good faith and reply substantively.

5. My “new audience” conundrum.
   Importantly, my old 2008 blog had earned more than 1500 subscribers long before starting this series. Those subscribers’ long familiarity with my “unschooly” voice and ideas - not everybody’s cup of tea, which was fine with me - gave me the freedom to simply be me in this series.
   
   But on this new Substack, I don’t have that pre-established trust with long-time readers. All I can say is, make your decision whether to stay or go after giving the first four posts a chance. (Personally, I think #2 and 3, a true story from the classroom, achieved my goals of providing both laughs and startling interpretive insights of Chapter 1. But from #4 forward, the posts permanently return to essay form.)

6. Yes, I’m aware of criticisms of Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh translation.²

7. This series is a granular interpretive stroll through Gilgamesh, chapter by chapter. At the time of this update, six posts covering the first four of 11 chapters have been posted, with more to come. See links to all posts on the Table of Contents page.

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The sin of schooliness

It’s sad, how schools for generations have poisoned the appetite for literature, for history, for the Humanities.

A case in point: mention to the average, educated person the name of the oldest story ever told (or at least that survives in written form), the first epic in the history of our species—I’m talking about Gilgamesh—and from all but the rarest people you will get a response showing disinterest at best, and at worst a disdain not only for the subject, but also for you for thinking it was interesting enough to bring up for conversation.

Because you’ve triggered them to relive their traumatic boredom when forced to endure it in a high school or college course.

It’s worse than sad. It’s tragic.

Gilgamesh—the earth's oldest surviving epic—in Stephen Mitchell's brilliant 2004 translation.

The return of the repressed: “The Whore of Babylon” finally speaks for herself

Simply put, Gilgamesh is one of the most fascinating books you’ll ever read.  It comes from one of the earliest cities, literally, on Earth—but it’s so alien to everything we (conscious or unconscious) Judeo-Christian-Islamic descendants have been conditioned to think of as “good and evil,” “right and wrong,” that it seems a work of science fiction or fantasy more than anything else.

Until very recently, we mostly knew of Gilgamesh’s Sumero-Babylonian civilization from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. The apocalyptic Christian “Book of Revelation” branding this culture as “the Whore of Babylon” sums up the tenor of that second-hand “knowledge.” We had no ancient texts from that culture to learn otherwise.

Then, in the mid-1800s, history exploded. Digging in the sands of today’s Iraq, a British archaeologist discovered the ruins of an ancient Assyrian royal library. It contained baked-clay tablets stretching back thousands of years before the times of Abraham and Moses. Among them was this lost Neo-Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh. For the first time in over 2,500 years, this much-maligned Babylonian “whore” could now speak for herself. And as we’ll see, her words upended traditional certainties in Judaism and Christianity, creating a revolution in Bible Criticism and theology.

In the (much earlier) beginning

Gilgamesh is the story of a Sumerian king who seems to have actually lived and ruled around 2,700 BCE. That’s almost 5,000 years ago. The city itself was a thousand years old when the story was written, so we’re talking a story from a civilization 6,000 years ago.

Stop and let that sink in. The Bible is only half that old, with the Hebrew Bible / Tanakh (what Christians call the “Old Testament”) written roughly between 1000 - 300 BCE, and the “official Roman” form of the Christian “New Testament” between roughly 50 - 330 CE (or A.D., if you insist).  So the Gilgamesh story, set in an archaeologically-confirmed city in 4000 BCE and reaching its final form around 600 BCE, is more than twice as old as the Bible.

One scholar of “Assyriology,” the discipline that studies this pre-Abrahamic Sumero-Babylonian civilization, calls this period “the first half of recorded history.” And these texts, from before the time of Jesus to only 170 years ago, were unknown and unread, buried all that time beneath silent Iraqi sands.

The Bible is young compared to this story, and as I’ll argue in this and subsequent posts, often less wise, in many deep and fundamental ways, than this Sumero-Babylonian book as well.

Moving on:  The king’s city, Uruk, was such a walled and templed and terraced wonder that the citizens themselves were blown away by it.  Since the story is from an age close to the agricultural revolution, when we stopped wandering around as nomads and living more like herd animals than humans, we get a sense, when we read this story, that the people who wrote it are totally aware of what a cool thing they’ve accomplished by making one of the world’s first grand cities – first, do you hear?

Looking out from Uruk’s walls across the sandy plains of what is today Iraq (Uruk was not far from later Babylon and today’s Baghdad³ ), you would have seen no other cities.  Cities, to repeat, were new, and Uruk was one of the first.  When you read this story, it’s like the story-teller remembers the days before the city was invented, the days of wearing animal skins and being goat-herders or hunter-gatherers.  And you can clearly tell he loves his city all the more for the different kind of life it makes possible – the civilized life.

It’s a story, then, of humanity basically crowing its pride over creating civilization by creating that Most Needful Thing for civilization to exist at all: a city.  If someone were to have written a blurb on the back of the book back then (which he couldn’t have done because the “pages” were actually baked clay tablets stacked like tiles in the library, all covered in reed-imprinted cuneiform), he would have written something like,

Unlike our neighbors in every direction, we aren’t hunter-gatherers, goat-herding nomads, or farmers in country villages.  We’re civilized. We built a city.  And we’re damned proud of that.

Luckily, since Uruk was civilized, it had court poets instead of flag-waving idiots to tell the story a bit more gracefully, and to tweak it and revise it over a couple thousand years to make it just so.

On Sex, Good and Bad

I have to be careful about sex here, because the story itself is.

Ziggurat in the city of Ur, modern-day Iraq. Photo by حسن on Unsplash

On the one hand, the city had temples (like the ziggurat in Iraq pictured above) dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, the goddess of love, fertility, procreation, and—strangely—war. (Aphrodite is basically the Greek version of the much older Ishtar, and Venus the Roman version. You knew that.)

We’re so blind today to the seeming magic through which sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy, and pregnancy to the creation of life from the womb of woman, that it takes a bit of imagination-work for us to appreciate how much sense it would make to pre-civilized and first-civilized humans to consider sex, pregnancy and birth, and above all women, as magical, sacred things.

That the Sumerians did consider sex sacred is clearly shown by this fact:  the temples of Ishtar were staffed with priestesses whose role was to have sex there, in the temple—whether only with the king or other elites, or with everyone, I don’t know.  These temple prostitutes were not “sinners,” were not “immoral”; they were respected every bit as much as Pastor Teds and Imam Abdullahs in churches and mosques around the world today.

By the way, not only female, but also male, prostitution is heavily attested in the cuneiform tablets, and today’s recent culture wars over gender diversity and fluidity would seem to strike this culture as odd in the extreme.⁴

And sex was not a “sin.”  It was a holy thing.  Check out “heiros gamos” on Wikipedia for the juicy (but deep) details.  (And stay tuned for my own theory, when we get to the Bible one of these days in this series, of how Ishtar and the Sumerian-descended Babylonians influenced the Jewish priests who wrote the Bible’s Genesis to make Eve such a bad character in the story, and sex—everybody’s favorite hobby, to riff off Woody Allen—such an, um, controversial act.)

So in Uruk, it may have been your duty as a good, gods-fearing citizen to go to “church” occasionally to have sex with a temple prostitute.

In classrooms, this point would get giggles from the immature or freak-outs from the ever-present class prudes, and the following idea would never sink in – which is sad, because it could lead to possibly deep and beautiful ideas such as this:

Think of how different it must have been, as a young person entering puberty, not to be shamed for suddenly discovering sexuality, but to instead, I imagine, be congratulated by family and society, maybe brought to “church” – Ishtar’s temple – to have that sexual awakening honored and instructed through some religious initiation.  To be welcomed into this magical new stage, rather than met with the awkward silence that puberty is usually met with in our own culture.  “Abstinence-only” sex education would be laughed at in Sumer, and priests, parents, and schools would be comfortable with this natural thing.  There were far fewer locked doors, hidden materials, and guilt-burdened consciences for boys and girls back then, I suspect.

But it could also lead to less “beautiful” but still “deep” questions like this: For the “prostitute,” how was “temple prostitution” then different from prostitution now? Since sex wasn’t shameful then, was prostitution also not shameful?  Were the temple prostitutes abused and frowned upon the way many prostitutes are today?⁵ Or were they protected from abuse by the temple, and by the reverent treatment of those they served there – treated less like today’s “whores,” in other words, than like today’s preachers?   Since they surely thought of sex differently than we in the West do in the Judeo-Christian framework – and we inherited much of that framework whether we’re religious or not – it’s not an easy question to answer.⁵

(Do you see the “science fiction” side yet?)

But on the other hand, there was such a thing as “bad sex” in this story – and it’s what gets the plot rolling.

King Gilgamesh was a bit of a jerk when it came to sex.  Because he was king, and thus above the law, he had more choices than his wives or the temple prostitutes.  And the choice he made struck everyone involved—even the gods, who looked on from above—as really, really wrong: Gilgamesh chose to treat himself to the bed of every new bride on her wedding day, before her husband did.

So the people of the kingdom get understandably offended by this cocky king, and their complaints finally make it to the ears of the gods: the big-daddy god in particular, Anu (think Zeus and you’re close enough).

And here’s another place I think it gets deep and beautiful—but first let me take a detour to mention a couple of important things that connect to the beliefs of Jews and Christians and Muslims today.  The “deep and beautiful” stuff won’t work unless you know this.

On God, His Leadership Style, and His Oldest Ancestors

First, the Gilgamesh epic is from a culture⁶ that spoke a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, and that had dominated the Ancient Near East for thousands of years before Judaism, the religion of the Bible and of Jesus, even existed.

Second, the Hebrews - who first settled Israel over a thousand years after the Gilgamesh story - knew this dominant culture, and included many Sumerian myths in the Bible; two well-known examples are the Six-Days’ Creation and Noah and the Flood in Genesis (the Sumerian Noah, Utnapishtim, will be a major character by this story’s end, by the way—and will tell the original and much older Sumerian version of the Flood later adapted in Genesis). You can read the Sumerian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, yourself to see the similarities.  It’s only a few pages long.

But the differences between the Sumerian and Judeo-Christian gods are even more interesting.

The most interesting difference to me is that the Sumerian religion had male and female gods and, more importantly, that the main Sumerian “god the father” type was, like most fathers, married. It’s always seemed weird to me that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god is alone, unmarried.  Zeus had Hera, the Sumerian Anu had Aruru, but Yahweh, the “God” of the Bible?⁷  No female for him.  You have to wonder why the Hebrews took the female from heaven, who did it, when, and how.  I do, anyway. But I’ll share those thoughts down the road.

The other interesting difference is in the morality—I almost want to say “leadership style”—of the two father gods.

To see this difference, let’s do a thought experiment:  pretend Gilgamesh did his wife-stealing stunt in Jerusalem, that Gilgamesh was a Hebrew, and his god was not Anu but Yahweh, the god of the Jews and, later, Christians and Muslims.

When that God hears that Gilgamesh is deflowering all the wives of all “His people” —“coveting” more than his neighbors’ (and subjects’) “asses” and therefore breaking one of his Ten Commandments—how do you think that God would react?

People will argue with me here, but I don’t see how they can win: that God deals with sinners, rebels, and others who disobey him with this “leadership decision”: punishment.  He’s an “angry God,” as he says himself.⁸ It’s hard to see that God doing much but using angry force to punish Gilgamesh and make him change his ways.  Human obedience is what matters to that God, as I read him; human wisdom comes a distant second.  You want evidence?  God’s instructions for dealing with people who disobey his laws, over and over (in the Hebrew Bible’s Deuteronomy especially), is to simply kill them.⁹ And Adam and Eve received one hell of a punishment because of their disobedience, too: the loss of immortality not just for them, but for all of their descendants, too—including us.¹⁰ And then there’s Noah’s Flood, which that God unleashed to wipe out all life, with the exception of the lucky passengers on the Ark, because He’d decided that they were all—women, children, grandparents, babies—in some unspecified way, “evil.”

No one should take my listing these facts personally, by the way: our religions, like our parents, languages, skin color, passports, birth years, on and on, weren’t our choices. We were “thrown” into them, as I think Heidegger so perfectly puts it, by the lottery of birth, and our life stories largely consist of how we transcend those accidents of birth and transmute our assigned lead into gold. All religious traditions, including and beyond the Abrahamic ones, offer countless beautiful examples of precisely such acts of personal and cultural alchemy within very flawed traditions.

Okay? I’m just giving evidence for my claim so that we can now return to that “deep and beautiful” point I promised about God’s Sumero-Babylonian forefathers. So:

Back to the Story: “What Would Jesus Anu Do?”

That earliest-recorded forefather, the Sumerian god, Anu?  His reaction to Gilgamesh’s adulterous outrage is totally intriguing, and in my view, totally cool.  I like this god.

He doesn’t say “Punish him.”  He doesn’t say “Kill him.”  Instead, he turns to Aruru, the goddess whom the Sumerians believed created humanity from earthly clay, and tells her to do it one more time.

He tells her, more interestingly still, not to create any old human, but instead a special type. “Now go and create,” he says,

a double for Gilgamesh, his second self,
a man who equals his strength and courage,
a man who equals his stormy heart.
Create a new hero, let them balance each other
perfectly, so that Uruk has peace.

And so she does.

I’m going to stop here for the moment, and just share why I think Anu is a god worthy of the title.  Because by creating a “double” for Gilgamesh instead of simply killing him on the spot, he shows that to him, “sin” is a lack of wisdom.  As you’ll see, he creates this double so that Gilgamesh may have the experiences he needs to grow wiser. 

I also think he’s just plain smooth for not freaking out and throwing a murderous temper tantrum, but instead coolly coming up with this mysterious idea:

“Make a double for him. That should do the trick.”

What a wtf plot twist. Love it. Suspense accomplished.

And it’s a wonderfully optimistic view of man for a God to have: not “fallen” and in need of salvation, not infantile and in need of a list of Commandments to unthinkingly obey, not tainted by any “original sin,” but instead: capable of growing through experience, of learning and finding his own way, of finding “balance” that brings “peace.”

The Sumero-Babylonians, in these respects anyway, did pretty well in history’s lottery.

And that “double” that Aruru created, by the way?  His name is Enkidu—and he’s Gilgamesh’s double in a curious and fascinating way: Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine, one-third human; Enkidu, on the other hand, is—get this—two-thirds animal, one-third human. Gilgamesh is the king of civilization; Enkidu is a wild-man living naked in the wilderness, alone with no human companionship.  But this animal-man is actually innocent and good—shades of some pre-Biblical Darwinian understanding that, hello?, humans are indeed animals in the animal kingdom, and that that bit of natural obviousness is nothing to freak out about?

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Next: We switch to true story-telling mode to immortalize the laughs while at the same time keeping the seriousness beneath them in “Lectures” 2 and 3:

Lecture 2: “The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job”
Lecture 3: “Unsucky Gilgamesh, Book 1: Adam and Eve, Backwards”

Posts will always be free. I’m working class and fixed income, so of course donations are welcome if you’re lucky enough not to be one of the precariat.

1. See more on the history of this series in the “About” page, and on its pedagogical spirit in the "To Students” page.

2. In the middle of writing the first nine of these here-to-be-finished “lectures,” I became aware that my beloved Stephen Mitchell translation was seen by many scholars as perhaps too free an adaptation. So any Ancient Near East scholars are welcome to weigh in on any problematic ideas based on their expertise—I welcome that due to my own hunger to know more about the fascinating Mesopotamian civilization(s). But regardless, the pleasures of swimming in this very fine translation are too deep to regret now.

3. That’s right: the US military was occupying and bombing the world’s earliest civilization when I first wrote this, including Mosul, where the clay tablets holding the Gilgamesh story were uncovered, after two thousand years of sand-buried silence, by a British guy in the late 1800s.

4. See Gwendolyn Leick, Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature (1994).

5. And – are there prostitutes today who aren’t abused or frowned upon, but instead respected, and actually find fulfillment in their profession? 

6. It’s complicated: the earlier Sumerians, whose language was not related to the Semitic Hebrew and Arabic, were overthrown by other races, including the Akkadians and Babylonians, whose languages were both dialects of Semitic Assyrian, and who kept the story alive.

7. Yahweh is a Hebrew name for what English-speaking Jews and Christians call “God.”

8. And boy, I just opened the floodgates to a million evangelists to explain how Jesus marked a change in God’s law, a new covenant, with mercy replacing wrath, et cetera. But I’m going to side with the Jewish people on this one, for the sake of argument, and stick only to their original, non-Christian texts. The Torah above all.  I’m talking about that God as the literary character we read about in Jewish religious literature.

9. And this became newly relevant since Hamas’ October 7, 2024 attack on Israel, which prompted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cite one of those Dueteronomy passages, in which God/Yahweh commands the Israelites to destroy the every man, woman, child, animal, and olive tree of the enemy Amelek tribe, in a way that strongly implies he wants the same done to the Palestinians in Gaza.

10. If that’s news to anyone, they’re overdue a closer reading of the Eden narrative in Genesis. It’s there for you to see.