Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story

by Martin Worthington

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-hasīs, 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.

522 pages, Hardcover

Published November 12, 2019

Reviews

[Erik Rostad · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading the Epic of Gilgamesh earlier this year, I became fascinated with the Flood story contained within the epic that has so many similarities to the Noah Flood story found in the Hebrew Bible. The Gilgamesh Flood story would have been written earlier. Did that mean the writer(s) of Genesis copied the story? It got me asking a lot of questions. This book partly delves into that question at the very end but also looks at the god Ea's message to Uta-Napisti in Gilgamesh to determine if it had a dual meaning, i.e. if it was duplicitous. In that case, some would hear it as a coming blessing and others as a dire warning. The author, Martin Worthington, looks at other Babylonian texts to see if those works contain puns, duplicity, and gods who lie to analyze if the Mesopotamian audience would have picked up on the dual message. This book is a deep dive into just 9 lines of The Epic of Gilgamesh, but an analysis that helps in considering the Epic of Gilgamesh, and specifically the Flood story in more detail. My nerdy self loved it.