Gilgamesh mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls

by Leolaia 20 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  LittleToe

  I wonder if is this the root for those two unusual exclamations "Hey" & "Oi"?
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  nilfun

  ...and ever since reading the opening post last night, Outkast's Hey Ya! has taken on a whole new meaning for me.
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  gumby

  u seem smart but seem hooked on this forum as a person who wants others to perceive her as smart -that undermines the self-presentation as "smart"

  You seem not so smart and seem a little jealous and envious of those who are.

  Gumby
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  Sabine

  Leolalia,

  Thanks for the great post, very interesting info. I read the Epic of Gilgamesh for a school project, and it had a huge impact on my attitude toward the Bible. As JWs we were taught the bible is God's inspired word only shared with his chosen people, the fact is that many of the bible stories come from much older myths. I look forward to:

  I've got a lot of new fantastic stuff, btw, on the primeval traditions of Genesis that I'll try to post sometime in the near future (the Canaanite background of the Garden of Eden story is just amazing)
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  OHappyDay

  Well, our view is that the Bible stories are the purer original that was distorted by retelling in other cultures over time. I don't know which is correct. I wasn't living back then.

  I don't have a shred of evidence to prove it, but I've often wondered if the Garden of Eden story with Adam and Eve being the first humans is really the story of the first ancestors of the Semitic peoples. Abraham sprang from "Ur of the Chaldees" and that is also close to the site of the Garden of Eden. Science presumes an origin for humanity somewhere in Africa, not the Middle East. So maybe the "first humans" in the Bible story were only the first ancestors of Semitic memeory.

  Or not.
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  amac

  Leolalia,

  Please keep up these great posts! I've only skimmed this for now, but it seems interesting. I'll have to print it out and read it away from work when I can concentrate on it a bit more.
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  Leolaia

  Narkissos....There's also the two brothers Shalem and Shahar, the gluttonous "gracious gods" of Ugaritic myth. But re Jacob and Esau, note that Genesis 25:27 reads: "And the boys grew, and Esau was a cunning hunter (sayid), a man of the field (sadeh), and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents". There's some wordplay here between sayid and sadeh, and note that sayid is the root for "Sidon," the Phoenician capital, and sayid is used for fishing as well as hunting in Hebrew (cf. Ecclesiastes 9:12), and according to Justinus, the Phoenicians referred to sidon in "fishing" ("a piscium ubertate, nam piscem Phoenices sidon vocant", Progus Pompeius 18.3.4). The midrash of R. Abbahu on Genesis 25:27 also evokes the name of the city ("seidon sodani", Gen. R. 63:10), and Raba, resident of "the City," or Mahoza, nicknames Papa, who lived in the townlet of Naresh, as sodani (b. Ber. 44b; b. Men 71a, b. Niddah 12a, b). Philo of Byblos mentions two brothers, Sidon and Poseidon who were grandsons of Kronos (= El), and the rhyming pair evokes that of Heyya and Aheyya, and Poseidon, the god of the sea, is likely derived from Sidon, the enoymous ancestor of the port city of Sidon, where fishermen set out. It's hard to say, of course, what the real links are (if any) between the biblical story and that of the Phoenician history (perhaps none at all), but it is interesting noting the coincidences.
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  ese

  hooray - leolaia - the queen !!!
  
  joke - lol
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  Leolaia

  I made this post a long time ago and it is in need of an update. I was not fully aware of the Manichaean version of the Book of Giants that survived in Christian circles for some time and manuscripts of which were discovered in the 19th century. This material thus helps to fill in some of the gaps in the Aramaic text discovered at Qumran. The best analysis of the Manichaean text seems to be Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony: Studies in the Book of Giants Traditions by John Reeves. A comparison of the two versions appears at the following site:

  http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_sd/bgiants_summary.html

  Also, I was not aware of the evidence suggesting that the Book of Giants originally circulated as a part of 1 Enoch as the section that followed the Book of Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36), but was removed when the Book of Parables (which is the latest section of 1 Enoch) was added.

  The most fascinating thing is that Gilgamesh was not the only character from the Epic of Gilgamesh that appears in the Book of Giants. The Hubabish (chwbbsh) of the Aramaic version and the Hobabish of the Manichaean version corresponds to the Humbaba (also Huwawa, both with an /h/ corresponding to Hebrew and Aramaic cheth; the name also may have a reflex in Hummama, the Manichaean spirit of darkness) of the Babylonian myth. The Manichaean version also mentions another individual several times named Atanbish (= Aramaic 'tnbysh tho the Qumran text has only lacunae), which corresponds closely to Utnapishtim ('tnbysh = Utnapishtim). So here we have a Jewish text as late as the third century BC that preserves numerous echoes from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which demonstrates that Jewish traditions indeed reflected distinct Babylonian influence (think also of the Flood myth from the Epic of Gilgamesh that corresponds closely to the OT version). There is also an interesting article in the Journal of the Study of Pseudepigrapha (Bhayro, 2006) that argues that the Shemihazah of the Book of Watchers and the Book of Giants originated in a Syrian epithet for Baal-Zaphon, viz. Shem-Hazzi, which utilizes the Hurrian name for Mount Zaphon (which survives in the Greek name Cassius). A good article that discusses the giant traditions in the OT and in extrabiblical literature (and how it relates to the assumptions underlying the references to demons in the NT) is Loren Struckenbruck's Dead Sea Discoveries paper in 2000, titled "The 'Angels' and the 'Giants' of Genesis 6:1-4 in Second and Third Century BCE Jewish Interpretation".

  Struckenbruck and Ester Eshel also elsewhere show that the Book of Giants is not dependent on Daniel 7 and possibly constitutes a source for the second-century author of Aramaic Daniel.
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  hamsterbait

  Leo -

  Lock your library at night, you obviously have a great collection of books. I want them all. I want them NOW.

  Of course it is information like your post that the WTBTS doesn't want us to read, hence their appalling index and references in the litterachore.

  HB