The Role Of Religion In The Epic Of Gilgamesh

Religion has always played a vital role in human society. As our earliest stories and poems indicate, questions of gods, divinity, immortality, and creation existed in ancient cultures and pervaded many facets of daily life, including literature. In The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Leiden Hymns we see not only this literary preoccupation with questions of divinity, but also stories and attitudes that foreshadow contemporary Abrahamic religions––Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. However, this is not to suggest that religion is so universal that there are not meaningful differences across time and cultures. In observing these differences, we might look particularly at the ways in which the gods are represented in Gilgamesh and The Leiden Hymns in
In Gilgamesh, for example, the importance of the gods is indisputable. As the titular character King Gilgamesh embarks on what is ultimately a fruitless quest to evade death, an extensive cast of gods and goddesses helps drive the plot. However, the gods of Sumer are strikingly different from the monotheistic conceptualization of God with which many readers will be most familiar. With the first account of Gilgamesh appearing around 2100 BCE (Puchner 33), Gilgamesh and society from which the epic arose predates Judaism, and instead featured a polytheistic religion with myriad gods, who bear almost no resemblance to the omnipotent God of the Hebrew Bible. Though readers versed in any of the Abrahamic religions will recognize the story of the great flood as similar to that which appears in the Book of Genesis (or the 71st Sura, Nuh, in the Qur’an). This is, by and large, the end of any resemblance to contemporary monotheistic religions, with the most striking difference being the ways in which the gods are characterized. The Gods in Gilgamesh have decidedly human qualities. They are subject to fear, selfishness, and sexual desire, among other vices. There flaws are such that even though they have immense supernatural power and alone enjoy immortality, the gods in Gilgamesh tend not to strike contemporary readers as being particularly divine, because they are so fundamentally
Gilgamesh, however, spurns her advances, and disparages her, calling her “a flimsy door that keeps out neither wind nor draught . . . [a] weak stone that undermines a wall . . . [a] battering ram that destroys the wall for an enemy.” (63) According to Gilgamesh’s accusations, his contempt for Ishtar is not without justification. Ishtar has taken many lovers, and treated them badly. It can be said, too, that Ishtar’s reaction to Gilgamesh’s insults seem to reaffirm his characterization of her as selfish, greedy, and unreliable. Devastated by Gilgamesh’s rejection, Ishtar supplicates her father, Anu, god of the heavens, to allow her to use the Bull of Heaven to kill Gilgamesh. Even Anu is hesitant to grant the request, and instead reasons with Ishtar by saying, “Well now, did you not provoke the King Gilgamesh.” (64) In fact, he gives Ishtar the bull only after she threatens to “raise up the dead to devour the living.” (64) Clearly, Ishtar is, lustful, self-motivated, and vain. She acts seemingly without regard or foresight for the consequences of her actions, and does, in fact, share some portion of the blame for Enkidu’s death. The text deliberately characterizes her as a deeply flawed, even absurd character, despite her status as a goddess. While Ishtar represents the most extreme example, all the gods seem to share in moral shortcomings, making them far more