The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (5 page)

Enkidu, like all who die, has gone down to Kur, a dark, dreary, pleasureless place on the far side of a river where a ferryman—just like Charon in the later Greek myth of
Hades—transports the naked and enervated souls of the dead to their final haunt, where “vermin eat [them] like an old blanket,” where one “sits in a crevice full of dust.” (The picture is not unlike the one that medieval artists will paint of
hell.) Gilgamesh resolves to avoid the common human fate by obtaining the secret of immortality. But only one mortal man has been granted immortality: Ut-napishtim. This figure of Sumerian mythology, the model for Noah in the later biblical narrative, was found virtuous enough to be given the divine guidance to save his family and a remnant of all living things by building an ark in the primordial time of the universal flood, when the gods decided to destroy the human race.

After horrifying adventures among the Scorpion-men, “whose aura is frightful and whose glance is death,” great Gilgamesh succeeds in reaching an alewife who can give him directions to the paradise of Dilmun, where “Ut-napishtim and his woman are as gods,” living forever. But in one especially well-preserved version, the alewife has her own sage advice to give:

After battling “the things of stone,” Gilgamesh finally reaches Ut-napishtim “the far-distant”; and this Sumerian Noah has even blunter advice:

On these sober words, which appear to constitute the main lesson of the
Epic
, we take our leave of Gilgamesh, but not without drawing some conclusions from what we have read. Though the casual reader may easily identify certain
Sumerian qualities—such as love of invention and admiration of those who are unabashedly competitive—as qualities that are valued in our own society, one misses much if one fails to notice how differently these qualities play in the ancient context. Inventions are the property of the gods—as are human beings, who have been created to be servants of the gods and to offer them assuaging sacrifices. The aggression of the great warrior lords, like Gilgamesh, and the strong bonds of solidarity between warriors are supremely necessary to the city-states of Sumer, which, though they belong to a single, unified culture, war with one another constantly, as will the later city-states of Greece, always jockeying for some advantage one over the other. But there can be no permanent victory, for either city or warrior. Even the gods are often at odds with one another; and Gilgamesh survives despite the wishes of outraged Ishtar probably because he has the protection of two gods, the wise wild cow who is his mother and the now-deified Lugalbanda, his father. But who can say when a human being will trespass against one of the many gods and incur doom? And even if one should escape such a fate, Death, the end of happiness, is inescapable.

There are faint echoes in the
Epic of Gilgamesh
of notes that will sound more forcefully and coherently in the Epic of Israel, the early books of the Hebrew Bible, which, though they will be written down in a later time and in a somewhat different place, grow out of this time and place. The strongest of these is the theme of the primordial flood and the
ark, which saves from destruction the just remnant of the living.
⁵
Ut-napishtim and his wife, who have become “as gods” in the garden paradise of Dilmun, may also remind us of
Adam and Eve, whose desire to become “as gods” precipitates their exile from a garden called “
Eden”—a name which may itself be a borrowing from the Sumerian. And Shamhat’s reassurance to Enkidu that his humanization has made him more “like a god” reminds us of the assertion in the Book of Genesis that humans are created, unlike animals, “in the image of God.” And Enkidu was created, like the creation in Genesis, by the word of the father god and, like Adam, was molded from clay.

Among the fainter echoes of our Bible that we may discern in these most ancient records is the language of love that Ishtar employs, not unlike the language of the
Song of Songs. The “Council of Heaven” reminds us of many biblical phrases in which God seems to take counsel with other divine beings or with angels and in which heaven is envisioned as a royal court. The descriptions of the realm of the dead are reminiscent not only of the Greek
Hades but of the Jewish
Sheol. The waters of the flood are described as rising up from the primordial Chaos that surrounds the Heaven-Earth, the universe laid out by the gods, in a manner very like the Chaos that surrounds God’s emerging creation at the outset of Genesis. And the worldly-wise advice of Ut-napishtim and the alewife
must prompt us to think of the Bible’s Wisdom books, especially Ecclesiastes with its cynical, world-weary tone.

One theme that belongs to Gilgamesh but is nowhere to be found among the books of the Bible is fertility—or, rather, its timbre is so different as to make it unrecognizable. The temple of Ishtar, awesomely dominating the heights of Uruk, scene of sacred sexual rites involving orders of prostitutes both male and female, harks back to a world even older than Uruk, a world in which human copulation was seen as the localized expression of the cosmic Heaven-Earth, the great fertility machine created by the gods, who were themselves the archetypal—and highly sexed—engenderers of all that is.

W
e have looked on Uruk, this city of baked brick rising from the banks of the Euphrates in the intense heat of the Mesopotamian sun, we have imagined its society and listened to some of the many-told tales that were the staple of its entertainment. Now let’s delve into the deepest level of the Sumerian psyche—to the ultimate beliefs that held this society together, to the spiritual matrix that created the Sumerian worldview. In order to delve deeper we must, paradoxically, climb higher. For we must ascend the lofty stair and enter the great temple overlooking the heights of another Sumerian city—the
Temple of the Moon, acropolis of the city of Ur, ancient imperial capital of Sumer. As we make our way to the center of mystery, we need to ask some basic questions about this place.

Why were all early temples and sacred places built at the highest point available to the builders? Because this is the place nearest the sky. And why is the most sacred space nearest the sky? Because the sky is the divine opposite of life on earth, home of all that is eternal in contrast to the mortal life of earth. When primitive man looked up at the heavens, he saw a vast cavalcade of divine figures regularly passing before his eyes—the cosmic drama, breathtaking in its eternal order and predictability. Here are the eternal prototypes and models for mortal life; but a great gulf yawns between the two spheres, for the life of the heavens, the life of the gods, is immortal and everlasting, while life in the earthly sphere is mortal, ending in death. For the earliest human beings—the first creatures to look upon the drama of the heavens with comprehension—these insights required little reasoning and no discussion; they were immediate and obvious, self-evident truths. This meditation on the heavens was the aboriginal religious experience. In the words of the preeminent modern scholar of religion Mircea Eliade: “The phrase ‘contemplating the vault of heaven’ really means something when it is applied to primitive man, receptive to the miracles of every day to an extent we find it hard to imagine. Such contemplation is the same as a revelation. The sky shows itself as it really is: infinite, transcendent. The vault of heaven is, more than anything else, ‘something quite apart’ from the tiny thing that is man and his span of life. The symbolism of its transcendence derives from the simple realization of its infinite height. ‘Most high’ becomes quite naturally an attribute of the divinity. The regions above
man’s reach, the starry places, are invested with the divine majesty of the transcendent, of absolute reality, of everlastingness. Such places are the dwellings of the gods; certain privileged people [like Lugalbanda] go there as a result of rites effecting their ascension into heaven.… The ‘high’ is something inaccessible to man as such; it belongs by right to superhuman powers and beings; when a man ceremonially ascends the steps of a sanctuary, or the ritual ladder leading to the sky, he ceases to be a man.”

As we continue to climb to the sanctuary, the primeval worldview of the people who built the steps we tread becomes ever more evident. The
cosmology of the Sumerians was based on perceptions of societies, now irretrievably ancient, that had preceded them; and, with a few adjustments, it would be received as truth by almost all societies that followed the Sumerians, right down to the threshold of modern times. Earth was a flat circle, attached at its perimeter to the dome of Heaven. Between Earth and Heaven was the element of Air, in which, high up, hung the astral bodies passing before the eyes of Earth-dwellers, pictorial projections of the drama of Heaven, which was also of course predictive of life on Earth, itself a kind of weak imitation of the heavenly drama. Just beneath the circle of Earth was the realm of Death—
Hades, Sheol, the shadowy
hell to which the dead were consigned—a sort of basement of the Sea of Chaos that surrounded the Earth-Heaven on all sides, whence rain fell and flood rose. Each of these great elements was a god: Heaven was father; Earth was mother; Air, which contained the eternal but ever-revolving pictures of the cosmic
drama and clues (for the insightful interpreter) to our life on Earth, was mediator between Heaven and Earth and therefore the most important god in the Sumerian pantheon; and the Sea was necessarily an unpredictable and troubling ally, to be treated with caution.

But let us approach the sacred precincts of the Moon, the apparition in the night sky that, more than any other, fascinated ancient peoples. Even today, a policeman in any city on earth will tell you that crime increases under the full moon and that “lunatics”—those who are made demented by the moon
(luna
in Latin)—are then much more active and troublesome. Midwives and veterinarians are convinced that the full moon induces labor, and, even in the most secular of cities, hospital labor rooms are as overwhelmed with females toiling to bring their young to birth on the night of a full moon as are barns in rural hamlets. Nor can anyone deny the awesome power of attraction that the moon exercises over the tides of ocean and sea, as the great body in the night sky beams its ethereal light on the roiling waters.

We climb the last steps to the entrance, passing sculptured serpents with glowing eyes of lapis lazuli. We pass the pillared facade of the vestibule and enter the inner courtyard, where we can see dimly, through a series of archways, the distant image of the Moon god, flickering in the lights of hundreds of votive flames. The walls of the courtyard are decorated with cones of red, black, and tan, which create precise geometric patterns—triangles, lozenges, zigzags, and spirals. At last we enter the sanctuary of Nanna-Sin, Moon god of the Sumerians, whose impassive statue now looms
above us, rigid and enormous-eyed, its polychrome pupils emptily burning. Behind the statue a monumental moon is frescoed on the wall, surrounded by a slithering snake. Within the orb of the moon a gigantic black spider spreads its spindly legs. As our nostrils take in the pungent clouds of incense, our ears detect a hissing sound: around the feet of Nanna-Sin, pythons, brightly marked with black and orange lozenge patterns, coil and uncoil their scaly bodies in slow motion. We are distracted from Sin’s unyielding visage by a buzz of movement just in front of us, where on a modest waist-high altar of baked brick, surrounded by a swarm of flies, the largest python is devouring the fetus of a donkey, whose blood runs down in rivulets along neatly scooped-out gutters to collection bowls at the altar’s base. Involuntarily, we take a step backward, as the smell of warm blood and entrails combines with the suffocating incense. Gasping for air, we retreat to the courtyard.