/christian/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

>>614891

It isn't totally honest to say yes or no; the age of the epic of gilgamesh is unknown, and there may have been a pre-existing work which the epic drew inspiration from. What is more accurate is the Epic, the newly found Ugaritic myths, and the Canaanite Ba'al cycle all have the same general patterns and themes. The mythos of the early Torah is more pan-mesopotamian/levantine than a copy of any one source.

For the real interesting stuff, you might look into the Leviathan [which can be traced to being a Hydra], Canaanite dieties, and the parallels to Greco-Phoenician themes. [eg. Solomon = Midas, Samson = Melquart = Herkales, etc.]

>>614891

>why are the works from the same time and place using similar metaphors and themes!?!?!?!?!

>>614891

When will this meme die?

Saying the Bible is less valid because one of its stories appears with different specifics in another text is bad history.

Instead of invalidating the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh actually validates pieces of it. Think of it this way: In the Bible, one of the central facts that constitutes a huge portion of the foundational narrative of the Hebrew people is the relocation of Abram (Abraham) because God told him to. The place he left was Ur, in Southern Iraq.

The fact that the same story is found in both places partially validates the Biblical claim that Abram was originally in Ur. He could have brought the story with him and passed it down orally. What is in the Epic of Gilgamesh is the written version of the tradition that was passed down orally in that location.

>There's a character in it really similar to Adam, named "Enkidu", who is a wild god-man

Adam wasn't a god-man. Neither was he particularly wild, being a gardener. Gardens are symbolic of both nature and civilization existing in unity. Enkidu begins as a pure wildman archetype. These are different characters. At best you can say both are innocent but that alone seems like a slim basis of comparison.

>and was created from dust by the Sumerian earth goddess Aruru.

The Mesopotamians built their idols from clay. Gods creating humans from clay thus seems like an obvious trope that should be common in stories from that civilization.

>He is tempted by a harlot sent to him from Uruk by Gilgamesh and sleeps with her causing him to become weak.

She doesn't make him become weak. She tames him and shows him the way of civilization. Enkidu retains his strength but is won over to the side of Gilgamesh, which is civilization. Her sleeping with him is a reenactment of the goddess of civilization using her wiles to to steal the idea of civilization from some other god using sex, and giving it to humanity. The Mesopotamians associated prostitutes and transvestites with civilization because these things didn't exist before the first cities, and the idea of them were contained in the idea of civilization that that goddess stole for humans. Sorry my knowledge on this is rusty, but it's the foundation myth of Mesopotamian civilization. The prostitute sleeping with Enkidu is seen as a good thing. In Genesis, Adam isn't tempted by a prostitute, but by his own wife, and it's a bad thing that exiles Adam from both nature and civilization. It would be much easier to cotrast these stories than to compare them.

>There's also a very similar flood story and it's structure is almost exactly the same as the Bible's.

The structure isn't exactly the same. They're similar, but not the same. I wouldn't even say that they're very similar, just similar.

If you're going to compare both flood texts it would be much more conservative to assume that they are both based on a common source text or oral narrative that is now lost rather than Genesis being based directly on Gilgamesh. There's some obvious distance amd other influences at work there.

Calling Genesis a variant narrative of Gilgamesh would be extremely reductive. You'd have to ignore so much of what makes those texts different from one another that you'd be ignoring more than what they have in common.

>>615057

>She doesn't make him become weak. She tames him and shows him the way of civilization. Enkidu retains his strength but is won over to the side of Gilgamesh, which is civilization.

This.

Getting tamed through hookers and booze is a bit different from falling from grace due to pride and apotheotic temptations.

The Epic is still a super awesome and bittersweet text, and Gilgamesh's bromance with Enkidu, and weeping over his loss was so tragic.

The compilers of the bible (the Torah) knew very well creation myths from older civilizations. Including the great deluge. By that time Sumerians were dead and forgotten.

If that's an argument against anything it's sola scriptura.

>>615083

>Scripture can not be trusted

Enjoy your resulting world of moral relativity.

>>615083

Lad i'm sorry to tell you that isn't the objection Catholics and Orthodox have to sola scriptura

>>614891

It is unironically a giant Jewish trick to make Christianity look like other pagan religions. Check embed related out. You ought to know though that there was never a global flood to begin with, as it is in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

>he doesn't into perennialism

',:^)

It's because it actually happened. The tower of babel made there be alight differences. And there are flood stories in the americas. No way they could olagerize them

>>614891

Noetic memory may have led them to write a similar creation story.

Keep in mind that the story isn't supposed to be taken literally even in Genesis, it's a story that makes certain moral points about ex nihilo creation, the Fall, the enemy, and which also makes veiled references to the Trinity. "Adam" has mixed meanings itself, the same word means "mankind," and "day" in hebe is also used to mean a completed task rather than 24 hours, just as "mañana" doesn't always literally mean "tomorrow" as anyone who's lived in south america or dealt with spics knows. There are tons of non-literal references to time measurements in Scripture, many of them in Revelation and some of those use the same word "day."

FWIW a real global flood and the memory of it would have prompted many of the children of Seth and Japheth and Ham to have stories of said flood which were similar but not exactly. Or, alternately, the story is allegorical and moral, and not meant to be literal, just as the Creation story was, and uses the analogy of flooding even today probably 75% of the world's population lives near a river or on the coast to make the moral points of God using nature to destroy sinners, the saving of Godly remnants, and the building of a Covenant which would culminate in the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection.

>>615650

Exactly lel.

I like that the protts enjoy the Bible but the least they could do is THANK US for being the ones who wrote it and compiled it and discarded the bits that heretics and schismatics tried to force into it.

Also, I wish they'd use the whole thing. Going "back" to the actually newer and definitely corrupted talmudic masoretic texts was a yuge mistake.

>>614891

see

>FWIW a real global flood and the memory of it would have prompted many of the children of Seth and Japheth and Ham to have stories of said flood which were similar but not exactly

If we are all descended from Noah there shouldn't be a reason that the flood and the creation out of dust is found in many places.

>>615737

>Le majestic plural

There is no such thing in Hebrew. End this stupid meme.

>>615862

Also, plural verbs and pronouns apply to Elohim not only when it's talking about false gods, but about humans as well (ex Psalm 82 and judges in book of exodus)