Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the world's oldest surviving work of literature and one of the most important texts for biblical scholarship. Composed in Akkadian — the language of ancient Babylonia and Assyria — and surviving in multiple versions across three thousand years, the Standard Babylonian version compiled by the scholar Sin-leqi-unninni around 1200 BCE is the most complete. The epic tells the story of Gilgamesh, the legendary king of the Sumerian city-state Uruk, who is two-thirds divine and one-third human, and his journey from arrogant tyranny through friendship, grief, and the failed quest for immortality to the wisdom that comes from accepting human mortality.

The epic opens with Gilgamesh as an oppressive king who exhausts his people with forced labor and asserts droit du seigneur over brides. The gods respond by creating Enkidu, a wild man of the wilderness equal to Gilgamesh in strength, to be a companion and counterweight. After a wrestling match, Enkidu and Gilgamesh become inseparable friends — the first great friendship in world literature. Together they journey to the Cedar Forest to slay the monster Humbaba, defying divine authority. When the goddess Ishtar proposes marriage to Gilgamesh and is rejected with a devastating insult cataloguing her mistreatment of former lovers, she sends the Bull of Heaven to destroy Uruk. Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay it, but the gods decree that one of them must die for this affront to Ishtar. Enkidu falls ill and dies.

Gilgamesh's grief over Enkidu's death drives the epic's second half. For the first time, the great king confronts his own mortality. He sets out across the world to find the immortal flood survivor Utnapishtim — the only human ever granted eternal life — to discover the secret of escaping death. The journey requires crossing the Waters of Death. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that immortality is impossible for humans; the gods kept death for humanity when they created life. The plant of rejuvenation Gilgamesh finally retrieves is stolen by a serpent. He returns to Uruk empty-handed but, the text implies, with wisdom: the walls of the city he built, the beauty of civilization, the good life shared with his people — these are his immortality.

• Genesis 6-9 (flood narrative — parallel structure and theological contrast)
• Genesis 2-3 (tree of life, serpent depriving humanity of immortality)
• Ecclesiastes 2:24 and 9:7-9 (Siduri's counsel to enjoy present life)
• Job (human mortality, divine capriciousness, and protest against injustice)
• Psalm 90 (the brevity of human life before God)
• 1 Samuel 18 (David and Jonathan as parallel great friendship)

George Smith, the self-taught Assyriologist who translated the Flood Tablet in 1872, reportedly became so excited upon reading the parallel to Noah's flood that he ran around the room undressing. His discovery caused such a sensation that the London Daily Telegraph funded an expedition to Nineveh specifically to find more of the tablet — and Smith actually found additional fragments on his first day of digging.