I watched a program yesterday on TLC about Noah's flood. The flood of Gilgamesh is older than Genesis. It is about Utnapishtim, survivor of a great flood sent by the gods. Warned by Enki, the water god, Utnapishtim built a boat and saved his family and friends, along with artisans, animals, and precious metals. How did this get pass Christiandom?
Flood of Gilgamesh
by homme perdu 8 Replies latest watchtower bible
-
-
-
Leolaia
The program was a little too credulous of the Ut-napishtim myth....treating as historical such things as Ut-napishtim living out his life in Bahrein. Dilmun was the abode of the gods, the Sumerian equivalent of the Garden of Eden.
-
VM44
When was Genesis written?
--VM44
-
Narkissos
VM44,
As to the writing of Genesis itself, I would say 6th-4th century BC. Of course some of the stories are much older, but what they could be (whether in oral tradition or in other written documents) before the exile is only a matter of guess.
A lot of introductive material can be found from the texts and links on http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/genesis.html
-
euripides
Flood mythology accounts for one of those unusually near-universal motifs--conspicuously absent from lower African cultures however. Not long ago I did research on this topic and came across a highly recommended collection of essays entitled The Flood Myth ed. by Alan Dundes, U California Press, Berkeley, 1988.
The "rediscovery" of Gilgamesh is one of those exciting parts of modern scholarship which folklorists could have already suspected--like most Bible stories, there are antecedents and corresponding stories throughout the ancient near east and the classical world.
Nice to see the usual friends still around...Narkissos and Leolaia, how are you doing?
Euripides
-
Leolaia
Hey euripedes...great to still see you around!
I'm okay but I'm really slacking off this past week...
-
stillajwexelder
It did not get passed anybody - it is taught at most good university's/colleges - new book out shortly about Gilgamesh
-
euripides
Gilgamesh's "rediscovery" is traced to its first contemporary translation in English in 1872 by English Assyriologist George Smith. The excitement his translation stirred fostered great renewed interest in funding for archaeology in the Middle East by the British, particularly in Nineveh, where many of these tablets pertaining to this epic were found.
In its reception, however, most Christian apologists took the view that it only reinforced the supposed historicity of the Biblical story, quite missing the point of myth motif. So, no, it didn't necessarily get by anybody, but it remains unique in being used to defend a biblical story rather than being roundly dismissed, as so much other mythology is, for being extrabiblical or nonbiblical.
Euripides