Some notes cut from a larger project.
The story of the first books, as Stephen Mitchell explains in the introduction to his recent translation of the poem, is a story of civilizing. The entire poem is framed by references to the city of Uruk, but the city moves from a state of semi-civilized tyranny to a state of civilized justice as the poem progresses. At the beginning, Gilgamesh is an admirable and mighty hero, but also a tyrant, who practices his ius primae noctis with some relish and whose people cry out for relief to Anu. Enkidu is constructed as a foil for Gilgamesh, a beast-man who will balance the arrogance of Gilgamesh. After Enkidu is formed from the ground, Shamhat tames him sexually and then he becomes Gilgamesh’s best friend after a city-shattering battle.
At a number of points in this narrative, as Mitchell notes, the epic links with the stories of the origin of man and civilization in Genesis. When Anu hears the cry of the people of Urku, he sends the goddess Aruru to “create / a double for Gilgamesh, his second self / a man who equals his strength and courage, / a man who equals his stormy heart.” The two will “balance each other / perfectly, so that Uruk has peace.” Aruru’s method is reminiscent of Yahweh’s in Genesis 2:
She moistened her hands, she pinched off some clay,
she threw it into the wilderness,
kneaded it, shaped it to her idea,
and fashiong a man, a warrior, a hero:
Enkidu the brave, as powerful and fierce
Mitchell describes Enkidu as a “second Adam” and “a help meet for him.”
Mitchell brings up the biblical account in connection with Shamhat’s seduction as well:
“It is a deeply moving episode, especially if we have in the back of our minds the Genesis myth of the loss of human innocence. Here Shamhat plays the role of Eve, but she is a benign seductress, leading Enkidu not into knowledge of a polarized good and evil, but into the glories of sexuality, the intimate understanding of what a woman is, and self-awareness as a human being. There is no serpent in this garden, no anxious deity announcing prohibitions and punishments. ” Through his sexual experience, Enkidu is not removed from paradise, but enters “another kind of paradise: civilization, the city where every day is a festival.” For Mitchell, it is all to the good that there is no anxious deity, and that there is no fall.
At this level, the Gilgamesh epic seems to be the polar opposite of the Genesis account, but more subtle connections can be noticed. It is striking, as Mitchell puts it, that the “helper suitable to” Gilgamesh is not a woman, with whom he will enjoy sexual pleasure and procreate, but a man whom he first fights and then joins in fighting the monster Humbaba. Shamhat’s seduction prepares Enkidu for his friendship with Gilgamesh, but after that, she disappears from the scene. Civilization is the work of men, not of men and women together. Further, the Gilgamesh epic depicts a world, and a cosmology, where violence (male) is the creative force, rather than the biblical world where the world comes into being by the peaceful word of Yahweh.
Shamhat’s role points to a similarity between the biblical view and that of the epic. Before meeting her, Enkidu is hardly human, or male:
Hair covered his body,
hair grew thick on his head and hung
down to his waist, like a woman’s hair.
He roamed all over the wilderness,
naked, far from the cities of men,
ate grass with Gazelles, and when he was thirsty
he drank clear water from the waterholes,
kneeling beside the antelope and deer.
He comes to humanity and maturity, and enters the city of civilization, only after he has gone through a creation-week of sex with Shamhat. From her, he learns not only what a woman is, but what a man is.
This seems far from the biblical picture, but there is profound continuity with between Gilgamesh and Scripture. The sexual ethics of the two are quite at odds. Shamhet is a temple prostitute, of the kind that the prophets inveighed against. But the notion that wisdom comes through knowledge of women, that men are civilized as they learn the arts of love and the reality of their sexuality and sexual difference, is a theme that appears not only in Genesis 2, but in the Song of Song – which is, we must not forget – wisdom literature and in the figure of Lady Wisdom, Sophia, the woman of Proverbs 1-9.