Ea's Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story

Martin Worthington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429754500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume opens up new perspectives on Babylonian and Assyrian literature, through the lens of a pivotal passage in the Gilgamesh Flood story. It shows how, using a nine-line message where not all was as it seemed, the god Ea inveigled humans into building the Ark.

The volume argues that Ea used a 'bitextual' message: one which can be understood in different ways that sound the same. His message thus emerges as an ambivalent oracle in the tradition of 'folktale prophecy'. The argument is supported by interlocking investigations of lexicography, divination, diet, figurines, social history, and religion. There are also extended discussions of Babylonian word play and ancient literary interpretation. Besides arguing for Ea's duplicity, the book explores its implications – for narrative sophistication in Gilgamesh, for audiences and performance of the poem, and for the relation of the Gilgamesh Flood story to the versions in Atra-has?s, the Hellenistic historian Berossos, and the Biblical Book of Genesis.

Ea's Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story will interest Assyriologists, Hebrew Bible scholars and Classicists, but also students and researchers in all areas concerned with Gilgamesh, word-play, oracles, and traditions about the Flood.

Part I
Preliminaries

1
Introduction

The deluge is still with us.

Peter Laslett¹¹

11 Laslett, The Cambridge Journal 3/8 (1950) 488.

One fateful dawn, longer ago than can be easily counted, the inhabitants of Šuruppak waited expectantly for bounty to rain from the sky. There were to be birds, fish, cakes, and wheat – a meal for all, fit for the gods. And, indeed, the bounty was to come from the gods, as a reward for the people’s hard work: they had just helped one of their number to build a peculiar cubic boat. The rain of foodstuffs was to be their reward.

The mood must have been euphoric. Beverages and roast oxen had kept the workers cheerful even during the demanding job of building the craft, so that the atmosphere had been that of a festival. Now, with their labours complete, they were going to be rewarded even more generously, this time with a rain of foods from the gods themselves.

But the hoped-for bounty was never to come. Just as dawn began to break, a dark cloud rose menacingly from the horizon, and blackness was pulled across the world. Then, there dropped from the skies neither grain nor fowl, but a rainfall so thick it filled the sky completely, with hardly any space for air. The waters rose and rose until even mountains were submerged. It was the Flood.

The watery cataclysm whipped up forces so gigantic that the gods who had started it curled up like dogs, in abject terror. Puny humans, playthings to the winds and waters, had no chance of survival. Except for the fortunate few sealed in the peculiar cubic boat, humans on earth were drowned en masse. How they must have cursed the gods – both for igniting the horror and, even more, for issuing no warning. Prevented by darkness from seeing each other, they died terrifying, lonely deaths.

So much is what the casual reader gathers from the Flood story in the eleventh Tablet of Gilgameš (‘standard’ version), a Babylonian poem known to us from manuscripts of the first millennium BC. But this book will argue that there is considerably more to the episode than meets the eye.

Namely, the people of Šuruppak¹² did not realise that they had been inveigled by Ea, god of magic and freshwater (see fn. 48), into a scheme of his own designing. It was from him that a message promising foodstuffs had emanated, persuading them to build the boat (the Ark). Alas for them, we shall see that the promise was an ambivalent oracle, in the tradition of many (perhaps apocryphal) from the Graeco–Roman world and elsewhere. The people of Šuruppak only apprehended its positive side, namely the promise of foodstuffs. They did not detect the negative side, which warned of the impending Flood.

12 The geography of the antediluvian world being vague in the Gilgameš Flood story (cf. fn. 1040), throughout this book I leave it open whether ‘the people of Šuruppak’ refers solely to the inhabitants of the city, or also includes those of a wider polity of the same name (and, in the latter case, how large said polity was).

The idea that Ea’s message is ambivalent is not, per se, new. There have been many attempts over the years to detect ambivalence in it, one way or another. But the most audacious attempts have long been discredited, and more recent, tentative ones, are not very persuasive. One of the aims of the present book is to present a new theory of how the ambiguity is constructed. Through close analysis of Ea’s nine-line message, which the Flood hero conveyed to the people of Šuruppak, we will – borrowing a term which Yigal Bronner has applied to the Sanskrit śleṣa tradition (see fn. 18) – argue that it is ‘bitextual’: that it can be read in two ways, phonetically identical but semantically different. The sounds that made up Ea’s message could be understood as a promise of foodstuffs, or as a warning about the Flood.¹³

13 It is an intriguing possibility that the concealment of news of doom under a promise of food has a moral, namely that people are easy to trick when one speaks to their stomach. Cf. Annus in fn. 379.

The argument that Ea’s message is ‘bitextual’ takes up roughly the first half of the book (Parts I and II). Part I offers introductory considerations on context and method. It explores issues such as: can the Gilgameš Flood story withstand close questioning? Would the questions we will ask of it have made sense to ancient audiences? And how can one be confident in identifying things as subtle as word-play? Part II makes the actual argument for bitextuality, analysing Ea’s message line by line and word by word, unpacking the ‘latent’ senses. It concludes with considerations about textual history and performance, and with a recapitulation of the message’s different senses.

A second aim is to explore the implications of Ea’s duplicity. For the ambivalent message gives rise to all sorts of questions which have never been investigated systematically. This is done in the second half of the book, Parts III and IV.

A first set of questions centres on the Gilgameš Flood story. These are questions like: why did Ea give the people of Šuruppak an ambivalent message (why not just lie outright)? How exactly was the message relayed to them? How did they react when they first heard the message? What would have happened, had they realised the ambiguity? Why did the other gods not realise what Ea was doing? Was the Flood hero, whose job it was to relay Ea’s message to his fellow citizens, aware of the double sense? What implications does Ea’s duplicity have for the poem’s treatment of divine morals? And – does the ambivalence stand alone in the Gilgameš Flood story, or are there more examples?

Such questions are investigated in Part III. There it will become apparent that the story is rich in ‘conspicuous silences’: many of the crucial scenes are hidden from us, and we find ourselves in the hands of a narrator – Uta–napišti, the Babylonian Noah – who cannot be trusted to be reliable. The indeterminacy of several crucial junctures in the story means that audiences can reach very different understandings of what happened, and of how the relevant characters should be viewed. Hence the story effectively becomes an engine for facilitating multiple interpretations of itself – a ‘decision matrix’ (a term I owe to Flash Sheridan, pers. comm.) in which one may move at will.

This also means that a lot of the present book will not try to prove the validity of one interpretation of the Gilgameš Flood story over another. Rather, we will map out the possibilities for interpretation, their implications and nuances, and how they interrelate. While abandoning a single line of argument might feel unsatisfying to modern academic readers (particularly those trained in philological analysis), it is probably truer to the range of responses the poem excited in antiquity.

We will therefore run into the inevitable problem that arises when multiple interpretations are admitted: if there can be more than one valid way of reading the poem in the light of Ea’s duplicity, can any interpretation be ‘excluded’, or do they all have equal value? The answer is perhaps that any interpretation has some value, but that this can range from ‘pretty minimal’ to ‘useful for modelling reactions in large segments of ancient audiences’. We will confine ourselves to specimens of (what we will argue to be) t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright credits
• Abbreviations
• Conventions
• PART I Preliminaries
• PART II Dissecting Ea’s message
• PART III Conspicuous silences in the Gilgameš Flood story
• PART IV Other interconnections
• References
• Alphabetical index
• Index locorum