Epic Heroes and the Timidity of the Garden of Eden Myth

Gilgamesh, Gnosticism, and the fear of human progress

AI-generated image by DeepAI

The Garden of Eden story in Genesis is an odd Rorschach test in that the story’s simplicity and universal themes have lent themselves to endless interpretations.

But the myth isn’t as subjective and poetically inspired as it might seem, since that story is rather a censored, highly condensed, and reworked version of the much older Epic of Gilgamesh, which goes back to Sumer in 2100 BCE.

Rather than being so open to varied interpretations, then, like an ordinary inkblot test, revealing the interpreter’s preoccupations, the intertextual relationship between the two narratives means that the Genesis story seems profound mainly because its censored form keeps as secret the lessons that are made plain and plentiful in the Gilgamesh epic.

In other words, the epic of humankind’s domestication and a hero’s journey to defeat death became a myth that’s supposed to explain our mortality as a punishment for our sins. The switch of genres makes for a disguise of the Gilgamesh epic’s moral in the later, priestly rewrite. Judaism redeems itself, though, for Genesis’s ham-fisted adaptation by its incorporation of the epic’s proto-humanism in Ecclesiastes, which quotes freely from the Epic of Gilgamesh and captures more of the epic’s spirit.

There are, then, two interpretive challenges when dealing with the Eden narrative in the first few chapters of Genesis. First, there’s what the authors intended by their implicit critique of the Gilgamesh epic, and there’s the humanism that sneaks through the biblical narrative’s prudish patriarchal conservatism. Second, there’s how we who live millennia later should best interpret the Eden narrative, leaving aside the historical context and confronting the text solely as a mythic poem.

The deflated humanism of the Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh is about a semi-divine king whose arrogance and aggression provoke an ordinary mortal to beg the gods to create an equally heroic man to challenge him. In response, a god creates Enkidu, a wild, hairy man who has the strength and speed of an animal because he lives among the animals in the hills. Uncivilized Enkidu plainly represents prehistoric humankind; he’s a protohuman who intimidates domesticated folk, much as the heroic Gilgamesh does.

Gilgamesh is the alpha male, Enkidu the omega outsider, and the ordinary humans who plead for the gods or Gilgamesh to help them against these threats to their domesticity are the subdued betas. The scheme that the king and one of his subjects — a trapper of animals — conceive to tame Enkidu is to send a nude woman named Shamhat to tempt him and teach him civility.

As the section on the coming of Enkidu says, ‘The trapper spoke to her: “There he is. Now, woman, make your breasts bare, have no shame, do not delay but welcome his love. Let him see you naked, let him possess your body. When he comes near uncover yourself and lie with him; teach him, the savage man, your woman’s art, for when he murmurs love to you the wild beasts that shared his life in the hills will reject him.”’

She does so and teaches him for six days and seven nights (a curious parallel to God’s labours in creating the universe in Genesis 1). Afterward, he tries to reunite with the animals, but

when the gazelle saw him, they bolted away; when the wild creatures saw him they fled. Enkidu would have followed, but his body was bound as though with a cord, his knees gave way when he started to run, his swiftness was gone. And now the wild creatures had all fled away; Enkidu was grown weak, for wisdom was in him, and the thoughts of a man were in his heart. So he returned and sat down at the woman’s feet, and listened intently to what she said. “You are wise, Enkidu, and now you have become like a god. Why do you want to run wild with the beasts in the hills? Come with me. I will take you to strong-walled Uruk, to the blessed temple of Ishtar and of Anu, of love and of heaven there Gilgamesh lives, who is very strong, and like a wild bull he lords it over men.”

Eventually, Enkidu and Gilgamesh become best friends, entering what we’d call a “bromance.” Theirs is the camaraderie of brothers in battle. But Enkidu dies after Gilgamesh spurns the advances of the goddess Ishtar. On his deathbed, Enkidu curses Shamhat for having civilized him: “Let you be stripped of your purple dyes,” he says, “for I too once in the wilderness with my wife had all the treasure I wished.”

But the goddess Shamash answers Enkidu, defending civility and human progress: “Enkidu, why are you cursing the woman, the mistress who taught you to eat bread fit for gods and drink wine of kings? She who put upon you a magnificent garment, did she not give you glorious Gilgamesh for your companion, and has not Gilgamesh, your own brother, made you rest on a royal bed and recline on a couch at his left hand? He has made the princes of the earth kiss your feet, and now all the people of Uruk lament and wail over you. When you are dead he will let his hair grow long for your sake, he will wear a lion’s pelt and wander through the desert.”

After Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh is heartbroken, and he vows to become immortal so he won’t have to suffer the same end as his brother-in-arms. He embarks on a quest to find his ancestor Utnapishtim, as he says, “for men say he has entered the assembly of the gods, and has found everlasting life: I have a desire to question him, concerning the living and the dead.”

After a series of adventures, Gilgamesh finds him and begs him to tell him the secret of immortality:

My friend, my younger brother who seized and killed the Bull of Heaven and overthrew Humbaba in the cedar forest, my friend who was very dear to me and endured dangers beside me, Enkidu, my brother whom I loved, the end of mortality has overtaken him. I wept for him seven days and nights till the worm fastened on him. Because of my brother I am afraid of death; because of my brother I stray through the wilderness…Oh, father Utnapishtim, you who have entered the assembly of the gods, I wish to question you concerning the living and the dead, how shall I find the life for which I am searching?

Utnapishtim’s disappointing answer, though, is a forerunner of Buddhist and Ecclesiastical wisdom:

There is no permanence. Do we build a house to stand for ever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time? Do brothers divide an inheritance to keep for ever, does the flood-time of rivers endure? It is only the nymph of the dragon-fly who sheds her larva and sees the sun in his glory. From the days of old there is no permanence. The sleeping and the dead, how alike they are, they are like a painted death. What is there between the master and the servant when both have fulfilled their doom? When the Anunnaki, the judges, come together, and Mammetun the mother of destinies, together they decree the fates of men. Life and death they allot but the day of death they do not disclose.

Utnapishtim tells him the secret of his past, which is that he survived the Babylonian flood, making him the source of the biblical Noah. And he taunts Gilgamesh, telling him, “As for you, Gilgamesh, who will assemble the gods for your sake, so that you may find that life for which you are searching? But if you wish, come and put into the test: only prevail against sleep for six days and seven nights.”

Gilgamesh fails to stay awake for so long, but Utnapishtim offers him an alternative, at least, to recover his youth: “Gilgamesh, you came here a man wearied out, you have worn yourself out; what shall I give you to carry you back to your own country? Gilgamesh, I shall reveal a secret thing, it is a mystery of the gods that I am telling you. There is a plant that grows under the water, it has a prickle like a thorn, like a rose; it will wound your hands, but if you succeed in taking it, then your hands will hold that which restores his lost youth to a man.”

Gilgamesh finds it, finally succeeding, and says, ‘Come here, and see this marvellous plant. By its virtue a man may win back all his former strength. I will take it to Uruk of the strong walls; there I will give it to the old men to eat. Its name shall be “The Old Men Are Young Again”; and at last I shall eat it myself and have back all my lost youth.’

The hero and his boatman “returned by the gate through which he had come, Gilgamesh and Urshanabi went together. They travelled their twenty leagues and then they broke their fast; after thirty leagues they stopped for the night.” Alas, “Gilgamesh saw a well of cool water and he went down and bathed; but deep in the pool there was lying a serpent, and the serpent sensed the sweetness of the flower. It rose out of the water and snatched it away, and immediately it sloughed its skin and returned to the well. Then Gilgamesh sat down and wept, the tears ran down his face.”

So, Gilgamesh fails in his quest, the serpent having robbed him of his victory by apparent chance, and the king, too, dies like Enkidu after finally accepting his tragic mortal nature.

That, then, is the backdrop that the authors and compilers of Genesis likely had before them, or at least that’s the early Mesopotamian culture of epic heroism with which they had to contend. If humanism is the confidence in our independent, natural abilities to solve our problems and progress through history, making theistic religion superfluous, the Epic of Gilgamesh displays a deflated form of humanism.

On the one hand, the epic celebrates agriculture and civilization as set against our prehistoric, more primitive, nomadic condition, and presents Enkidu and Gilgamesh as heroes relishing their strength and boldness. On the other, Enkidu suffers tragically because of the reckless expression of that heroic freedom, and Gilgamesh fails in his quest for immortality. The epic could amount to a polytheistic critique of humanism: natural cycles and the unreliable gods are still in control of our fate, our abilities are limited, and our wisest course is to accept our role in the larger scheme.

Our preordained progress in Genesis 1

The parallels and transvaluations between the epic and the biblical account, though, are plain. What the Garden myth does mainly is moralize our mortality in a more one-sided fashion, even as the myth opens itself to a subversive, Gnostic, humanistic reading.

Oddly, there are two biblical stories of the creation of humankind. According to the cosmic perspective of the first chapter of Genesis, we’re just a footnote or the subject of “the sixth day.” “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

That’s a case of monotheistic censorship that was done at the cost of the myth’s integrity. If humans were created in God’s image as having male and female genders, where’s the female deity? The Hebrew “Elohim” may be plural, but the female side of God is suppressed in the narrative, whereas the polytheistic Epic of Gilgamesh has no problem highlighting explicitly female deities such as Shamash.

Indeed, the epic says that the goddess Aruru creates both Gilgamesh and Enkidu. When the high god Anu ‘had heard their lamentation the gods cried to Aruru, the goddess of creation, “You made him, O Aruru; now create his equal; let it be as like him as his own reflection, his second self.” Thus

the goddess conceived an image in her mind, and it was of the stuff of Anu of the firmament. She dipped her hands in water and pinched off clay, she let it fall in the wilderness, and noble Enkidu was created. There was virtue in him of the god of war, of Ninurta himself. His body was rough, he had long hair like a woman’s; it waved like the hair of Nisaba, the goddess of corn. His body was covered with matted hair like Samugan’s, the god of cattle. He was innocent of mankind; he knew nothing of the cultivated land.

In any case, Genesis’ briefer account, at the end of the first chapter, emphasizes God’s blessing of humankind:

And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.

Notice the lack of any mention of the tree, of knowledge or life, or the forbidden fruit. On the contrary, God says he’s given humankind dominion over all the plants and animals. And he judges that dominion “very good.”

In the epic there’s some nostalgia for Enkidu, who dies tragically because of his association with Gilgamesh’s kingdom. The epic lands on praising the honour of our species’ progressive journey, from primitive Enkidu to the brotherly love of civilized folk, to Gilgamesh’s lamentations and his futile attempt to transcend his nature, to his wise acceptance of the good and the bad in human life. But in the Bible’s first Creation narrative, there’s a blanket divine commandment for humans to rule over all of nature.

The ambiguous morality tale of Genesis 2 and 3

In the more expansive second and third chapters, though, we see that our historic progress wasn’t so straightforward after all. The narrative zooms in on the sixth day of Creation and tells the more familiar story of how ‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”’

Now humans are created just as God’s helpers, to till the garden, not to have dominion over all living things, having been made in God’s image in the first Creation account, but not in the second. On the contrary, in the second account, “the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground,” and he made woman from man’s rib. And the second chapter ends with a patriarchal, heterosexual etiology: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.”

The so-called original sin or fall of humankind is told in Genesis 3. Remember that in the epic, the “fall” — which is to say the progress of civilization, as viewed from the epic’s melancholy humanistic perspective (shared by Ecclesiastes) — is represented as a woman’s temptation of Enkidu. There’s no tricky serpent at that point; the idea is rather the romantic one of the music that tames the wild beast. As the guardians of the homestead while the heroic men were off galivanting in wars or hunts, women were symbols of civility, as distinct from what we presume was our primitive state as hunter-gatherers. So, a woman directly enculturates Enkidu — mainly with sex, but also, the story implies, with more general teachings.

In the Bible, women are indirectly the source of our downfall/progress. A serpent tempts Eve to disobey God and eat the fruit from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Again, in Genesis 1, we’re created in God’s image, which ought to have included not just the stated double genders, but God’s knowledge and immortality. How else could we have deserved or been able to rule over all terrestrial plants and animals? Thus, Genesis 1 implies that our eating at least from the Tree of Knowledge was part of God’s plan.

But in Genesis 3, this is presented as a test: God puts Adam and Eve in the garden with the forbidden trees and the satanic serpent, the tempter of our loyalty towards God. In failing the test and succumbing to the temptation, our ancestors still only fulfilled God’s plan. Thus, we have no right to complain about our hardships in life; indeed, they’re merited as part of God’s curse on us.

The Bible presents God as being befuddled by our disobedience. After Eve eats the fruit and brings it to Adam to eat, “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.” They hid in the trees. ‘But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”’

Thus, as the Bible describes it, God can’t find them in the trees and is oblivious to the danger posed by the serpent’s presence in the Garden. This suggests the epic’s hint of humanism seeping through the priestly moralism of Genesis. Rather than being wholly to blame for what Christians would later call this alleged “original sin,” God is obviously at fault too. God made us innocent, and he created an environment that was bound to lead us in this direction of civilized, secular progress. Rather than being just a sin, human wisdom is our potential for epic heroism. That’s the humanistic optimism that’s mixed with polytheistic resignation in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and that’s pushed to a more pessimistic, philosophical conclusion in Ecclesiastes.

Indeed, God’s stated blundering ignorance has a comedic role in an implicit Gnostic satire that shines through the “fall” of humankind story and Jewish scriptures more generally. God seems to play the fool only to advance the plot, which the readers take for granted, namely the existence of human civilization and our present dominion over the plants and animals. The biblical task is to explain our historic progress in a way that balances priestly monotheism with the epic framework of secular humanism that’s more explicit in works like the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s Odyssey.

That humanism is denigrated, though, by God’s curse of both the serpent and us for our disobedience:

Because you have done this,
cursed are you above all cattle,
and above all wild animals;
upon your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your seed and her seed;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
To the woman he said,
“I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.”
And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
In the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.

Far from celebrating the wisdom of our domestication and civilization’s dominance over nature, the Bible is saying here that we were supposed to have remained in a childlike state of animality. And rather than blaming himself for the corruption of his creation, God blames us and the serpent. He redeems himself slightly by preserving our dignity with better clothing: “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them.”

But God seems motivated by jealousy or fear when he decides to drive us out of Eden. ‘Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” — therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.’

Again, the authors of Genesis seem internally conflicted about how to present God in his relation to us. The second and third chapters read like a farce compared to the straightforward first one, which gives God all the credit.

Perhaps the first chapter should be understood as written from God’s perspective, whereas the next two are from ours. God knew all along how his created world would play out, so he might as well have allowed us to eat whatever we wanted since he knew we’d do so anyway, despite his warnings. Yet we seem confused by our transition from prehistory to history, from unknowing animality to behavioural modernity. And the authors of the Bible explain away that confusion by producing a morality tale — not the epic one in which Gilgamesh fails in his quixotic quest to defeat death, but that of our failure to obey God, of woman’s seduction by the serpent, and man’s seduction by woman.

Of course, Eve’s seduction of Adam recalls Shamhat’s seduction of Enkidu, and the serpent’s tempting of Eve echoes the serpent’s stealing of the “fountain of youth” from Gilgamesh. The Bible presents the serpent as the instrument of our downfall, but Gnostics and mystics discerned the ambiguity in the tension between the priestly compiler’s sanctimonious monotheism and the epic backdrops of human autonomy and the potential for independent progress.

Transhumanism and the biblical myth

But let’s set aside the historical context and approach the text purely as a poem. There have been at least three major interpretations of the Eden narrative. The Jewish one negotiates the epic’s tension between polytheistic fatalism and humanistic progress, siding at first with the former but ending up agreeing with the latter in Ecclesiastes and Job.

Next, there’s the Christian interpretation, which repudiates humanism. The Christian reads the poem as licensing the doctrines of the original sinfulness of human freedom, pride, and natural wisdom, and looks forward to our salvation purely by God’s grace, not our heroic ingenuity.

Finally, there’s the subversive, Gnostic interpretation that adopts a mystical form of humanism, identifying the God of Genesis as a blundering or tyrannical demiurge. For the Gnostic, the protagonist of the Garden myth is none other than the serpent, who is the equivalent of Prometheus, the Titan who set us on the civilized path by supplying us with the weapon of fire (which he stole from the gods), only to be punished for his interference by Zeus. Still, Gnosticism isn’t purely a case of secular humanism since while Gnostics compete to save themselves with creative spiritual discernments, their enterprise is an occult one, the goal being to bypass the schemes of the evil deities to unite with a transcendent, fully supernatural being.

This indicates the need for a fourth interpretation, one that would naturalize the third. We could think of this as a transhumanist reading. The context would be atheism, in which case the Garden of Eden wouldn’t be a place as much as a set of archetypal fears and nostalgic longings lodged in our subconscious. God isn’t a real person but a fear of growing up and understanding that the world’s godlessness may call precisely for tragically heroic boldness.

Transhumanism is the project of progressing by transcending our natural limitations, becoming a cybernetic species with technological extensions that would empower and fully divinize us. Shamhat says that civility makes Enkidu “like a god” compared to the animals that were formerly his equals, and knowledge opens the eyes of Adam and Eve, while God fears that immortality would make us like him. The question, then, is how godlike we can and should become if God is only a figment, a repressive ideal we imagine that can’t stop our acts of humanizing the alien wilderness.

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