Gilgamesh Immortal (Chronicles of the Nephilim) (29 page)

Leviathan swam through the waters of the Abyss toward its destination. Its seven heads pointed in earnest, its body wriggling and twisting in perfect synchronization to maximize its speed. It moved like one colossal muscle of power and destruction. It retained the magic plant in one of its mouths that it had taken from the swimming demigod in the water. It had not eaten the plant. It did not need it. But something else did.

It journeyed up an underwater cavern to a small
lake opening not too far inland from the gulf of the Southern Sea. It knew the exact location and had been waiting for the moment to be able to accomplish its goal.

It
came through an opening into the small lake that was created by breaking through to the water table. It glided along the bottom looking for its object.

And then it found it. A huge skeleton of rotted flesh with skull and teeth sticking out of the rock sediment at the bottom.

Leviathan with its cunning intelligence knew exactly what it had to do. It placed the magic plant into the jaws of the great skeletal carcass and pushed the jaws shut, grinding the plant into its mouth.

Leviathan swam
in slow circles around the skeleton, waiting.

Suddenly, the huge skeleton shuddered
.

It
s flesh began to regenerate, its organs recompose.

It was co
ming back to life from the dead.

As it filled out its musculature with new flesh, it
convulsed in a spasm that broke it free from the sediment, a broken body hanging limp in the water.

But more muscle, and more skin and more armored scales reconstituted on this
enormous creature of the deep. It was larger than Leviathan and more monstrous in its bulk and muscle. Its thorny spines and hardened scales were almost impenetrable.

And finally, its brain and spine connected with functioning and it
shivered as if hit by lightning. It opened its eyes. Its immense jaws yawned with hunger and the creature shook its tail to move.

It was swimming.

It was alive.

It was reborn to chaos.

Up above the small lake, the citizens of Uruk went about their business, unaware of the resurrection that had just taken place in their flooded clay pits.

And they would never know because the two dragons of the deep left through the cavernous hole that led
back down into the Abyss.

And they were free again to rule the waters together. Free to wreak havoc and destruction in the cosmos.

They were Rahab and Leviathan.

Chronicles of the Nephilim
continues with the next book,
Abraham Allegiant
.

Gilgamesh and the Bible

The Biblical fantasy novel
Gilgamesh Immortal
is a retelling of the ancient Babylonian
Epic of Gilgamesh
. This narrative of the heroic journey of its protagonist, is a myth imagined around a supposedly historical figure, King Gilgamesh of Uruk, the fourth king of the first Dynasty of Uruk. His name is mentioned in an ancient
Sumerian King List
as reigning after “the flood swept over” the land, and scholars place him in the third millennium B.C. But the truth is, even this is not sure, and nothing much is known about this great hero except what we have in the epic, which was first uncovered in 1849 by Austen Henry Layard in the library of Ashurbanipal at the excavations at Nineveh in modern Iraq.

Since that time, many other
older fragments have been discovered in other locations around the Middle East that seem to indicate that the epic had been pieced together and rewritten from much earlier unconnected individual Gilgamesh episodes from Sumer. Jeffrey Tigay documented this editorial process from the extant clay tablets in
The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic
.
[1]
Tzvi Abusch concluded that at least three major versions of the epic can be documented as retellings of the story that embody the social, political, and religious concerns of the ever-changing national identity of Babylonia, from the older heroic age of individualistic kings into the more “civilized” existence of the state-governed city.
[2]

Gilgamesh Immortal
was drawn from the various versions of the epic narrative as well as the original Sumerian Gilgamesh episodes now found in several published editions of the poem.
[3]
Upon first blush, some readers may question a novel about a non-Biblical character in a saga of Biblical heroes. But patient reading yields a powerful revelation of interconnectedness of these ancient Near Eastern narratives. When I was researching for the novel, I was amazed at how many elements of the epic fit within the storyline of the
Chronicles of the Nephilim
, so much so that very little was altered in terms of story structure, characters, and plot of the original Gilgamesh story. Of course, the context and meaning is reinterpreted through the Biblical paradigm, but readers of
Gilgamesh Immortal
will nevertheless be introduced to a prose edition of the epic poem that is fairly representative of the original plotline.

The epic is relevant for the primeval history of
Genesis
because it sets the stage for a lost and rebellious Mesopotamian world in which God chooses his lineage to bring about the promised Seed. The time after the Flood before the Tower of Babel seemed to be a time where God was distant from humanity, “giving up” the pagans who did not honor God “over to their lusts,” “foolish hearts,” and “futile thinking,” to “worship and serve the creature instead of the Creator” (Romans 1). What better way to capture that hiddenness of God than to tell a pagan story that embodies the hiddenness?

The Gilgamesh epic was a national story that embodied the worldview and spirit of Babylonia which would be the ultimate enemy of God’s chosen seedline. As readers of the novel discover, it depicts the origin of a very important character who embodies that rebellion against God which would ultimately lead to the scattering of the nations and their allotment (“giving over”) to the sovereignty of the rebellious Sons of God (Deut. 32:8-9).

Death and the Meaning of Life

The
Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest extant hero story excavated from ancient archaeological mounds in the Middle East, yet it reads like a modern novel or movie in its story structure and hero’s journey. Moderns fancy themselves as more intellectually sophisticated than ancient man, yet they are often ignorant of the fact that their notions of existential angst and individual identity that they think is the erudite offerings of modern existentialist philosophers like Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Nietzsche, were wrestled with millennia before the chaotic narcissistic spasm of the modern period.

Gilgamesh is a ruler
who is two thirds god, one third human, yet that humanity means he is ultimately mortal. He seeks significance and immortality because of the dread of death and its apparent blanket of meaninglessness on a world without a clear vision of the afterlife. He begins as a godlike oppressive king who lives in debauchery of power, only to discover his equal in the tamed “Wild-Born” Enkidu. He makes a friend of this champion and proceeds to pursue acts of heroism in the killing of Humbaba, the ogre guardian of the cedar forest of the mountain of the gods in Lebanon.

With the aid of his loyal Enkidu, he brings back the head of the monster with such hubris that he defies the goddess Ishtar’s proposal of marriage. He spurns her promise of deification because he knows it will only lead to slavery in the Netherworld, not glorious immortality. When he overcomes the Bull of Heaven sent by the vengeful Ishtar, he becomes even more filled with pride, until his mighty equal Enkidu is struck dead with sickness from the gods. This brings him face to face with the fact that no matter how heroic or powerful he becomes
, he too will die like all men. Death is both the great equalizer and the great destroyer of significance and meaning. The age of heroes does not bring lasting glory after all.

So he seeks an audience with Utnapishtim the Faraway (Noah), the survivor of the Flood and the only human granted immortality along with his wife, who are now far removed from normal humans in a distant mystical island. Gilgamesh figures he might wrest from Utnapishtim his secret of eternal life from the gods. But when he discovers that death is intrinsic to human existence and the special gift will never be granted to another human being, he returns to his beloved city of Uruk and finds his final fame in building the mighty walls and city, which will continue after he is long dead. In the end, man can only find lasting glory in being a part of something bigger than himself that continues on when he is gone. For Gilgamesh that something bigger is the city-state.

Gilgamesh’s ruminations of death, meaninglessness, and despair will be familiar to Bible readers in the similar ruminations of another king in the book of Ecclesiastes. Called
Qoheleth
or “the Preacher,” this king of Jerusalem writes about all of life being a vapor because death destroys all human pursuits. He tells of seeking pleasure, wealth, and wisdom, only to conclude that none of it brings lasting meaning because death turns it all upside down. The Preacher speaks of enjoying the simple pleasures of life like a wife, good food, and hard work because the pursuit of power and glory is ultimately worthless and defeating, the equivalent of striving after wind.

A side by side comparison of passages from the
Gilgamesh Epic and the book of Ecclesiastes illustrates a profound congruity between the wisdom writings of the Old Testament and Babylonia.

The natural question that arises is whether or not the Biblical author got his ideas from Babylonia, or the reverse, or whether they both used a common source background. Regardless of which way the influence flows, the Gilgamesh Epic and Ecclesiastes certainly display a striking exchange of ideas. The last verses of Gilgamesh Tablet XI and Ecclesiastes 9:7-10 show a thought for thought progress of thinking that surely suggests a deliberate cultural exchange of ideas.

But the differences are perhaps just as profound and striking as the similarities. First and foremost is of course the polytheism of
Gilgamesh that is dutifully overturned by the monotheism of Ecclesiastes. Jewish ethical monotheism was a hostile unbridgeable chasm between the worldviews of Israel and her surrounding pagan neighbors, a chasm between Abraham’s bosom and Hades.

But an equally profound separation lies in the anthropocentric (human-centered) paganism of Gilgamesh versus the theocentric (God-centered) optimism of Qoheleth. While both affirm a kind of meaningless despair that death brings to the human condition, Gilgamesh concludes with resignation that the best one can do is a substitute immortality of glory in the perpetual life of the state, a rather modern humanistic proposition for an ancient.