Death and Endings
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It is not surprising that in some of the greatest stories of both Western and Eastern traditions that the world as its inhabitants know it comes to an end. Our own mortality and the impossibility of knowing what lies on the other side of death's door makes us all fascinated with endings, and the fact that most parts of the world are subject to at least one form of natural disaster tends to color the stories that we tell ourselves about death and endings. We imagine the end of the world in at least some part because for each one of us the world will of course end. And we link those imaginings to the sometimes terrible realities of the world - a world in which everything and everyone that we know and love can be in a moment swept away by rising waters, rising winds, rising flames. This paper explores two of the great stories of the ending of an era by flood - the Biblical story of the flood and the story of a similar flood in the epic of Gilgamesh.People from widely diverse cultures have stories of floods, even if they live in places where floods are relatively rare. This suggests - if we are inclined towards psychological and philosophical theories of archetypes - that there is something inherently attractive (in an intellectual and cultural sense) about stories that examine the phenomena of flooding. Floods may occupy such a central place in the human psyche because they epitomize our worst fears about natural disasters: Floods often rise up with little warning and so leave
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Some Biblical scholars believe that the flood that is depicted in Genesis is the same flood that is also described in the epic of the Babylonian King Gilgamesh and his attempts to rule his people justly and wisely - which was written about 2000 BCE. There are a number of similarities in the two stories, some of which might be accounted for by the storyteller's natural desire to spin a good tale: The fact that the flood in both tales is a global one that threatens all of humanity might reflect the fact that there really was such a flood somewhere in the Middle East, but it might well also reflect the fact that a flood that covers the entire world is likely to bring in a better audience around the campfire for a storyteller's offerings.
There are a number of other similarities between the story of the flood in the epic of Gilgamesh and the one in Genesis, however, that suggest that the two stories might be based either on the same event, that one story might be derived from the other, or that both might have a common source. For example, each story includes the release of birds by Noah (a raven and three doves) or Gilgamesh (a dove, a swallow, and a raven) as a way of determining if the floodwaters are receding. This might well in
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1249
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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