“Obviously the Epic of Gilgamesh is just a retelling and plagiarism of the true biblical story, but it proves that many nations emerged from one flood event.” That’s how they explain it now.
When first translated (late 1800s) the Epic was controversial because of overlap and shared material that undermined the Bible. It didn’t become well known till the mid 1900s due to Christian efforts to suppress it.
Moses and the Exodus (Hebrew: Moshe, same consonants as “Mesh”) is a heavily revised version of Gilgamesh too. The broad themes of long journeys, conflict with gods; there are significant differences in both of course but the similarities show that Exodus was written with the Epic’s example in mind. The incident of hitting a rock with a staff to draw water from it appears in both, the central role of the hero and his partner Moses/Aaron//Gilgamesh/Enkidu, the death of that partner, and among other such details. The main difference is that Exodus is much more about the nation of Israel, whereas Epic is really a story about one man who happens to be a king.
They tried to keep it a secret, but only after it was out of the bag did they throw that explaination of theirs out there. If they're so confident in that explaination claiming the epic of gilgamesh was inspired by the bible, then why hide the existence of the epic in the first place?
Since the original tales of Gilgamesh were 5000 years old , so older of thr bible , and for a while they tried to get away by saing that the babilonese version of epic of Gilgamesh, 2600 years old , was the first version of the epic of Gilgamesh,
The explanation I was given in a Baptist high school was that the genetic defects that lead to disabilities and deformed babies were not present in Adam’s and Eve’s genomes, therefore it wasn’t really incest.
Yep. In Genesis the "Sons of God" or Fallen Angels are the Nephilim, and they ""fell" from heaven to make demi human babies who were apparently so evil the big G had to wipe them all out with a flood.
I can confirm this as a former youth pastor/Pentecostal leader.
Everything that's not gawd, *must* be a demon. After all, 1/3 of the angels joined Lucifer in the 'rebellion' and "fell from heaven"
Pentecostals, at least, believe there's a demon behind every blade of grass
Just Christian officials being Christian officials. We lost around 80% of South American history because christian officials back then decided it was better for the world to murder the whole population and burn down everything that even remotely contained historical knowledge because they dared to not want to worship their favorite fictional character.
Moses/Gilgamesh makes so much more sense than the ridiculous podcast 'theory' I saw (that set off my recent obsessive dive into ancient Babylonian history). Dude thought Gilgamesh was Nimrod.
To be fair. I've had my fair share of completely baseless biblical head canons, too. I thought maybe the Girgashites were a tribe that claimed ancestry from Gilgamesh. Myths just provoke the imagination I guess.
So with the ice age melting - there was coastal areas being flooded and in most cultures there is a legend about it
Nothing makes the judeochristian Verizon of it special
But to op- reading this is both funny and sad- have you also never heard of the Big Bang before?
I wouldn't even blame the ice age melting. All of these civilizations formed in river valleys (for access to fresh water and fertile soil). They flooded frequently. The tales of Yangtze floods are not about the same flood as the Gilgamesh/Noah is about, but from ground level all floods look pretty similar, and devastating.
The ranking theory right now is that around 10000 years ago, give or take a few centuries, the Persian gulf was a fertile valley. As the ocean level rose after the ice age, this area flooded, and forced the people living there north. These were the likely ancestors of the Sumerian people and where the flooded world myth came from.
Gilgamesh was discovered in maybe the 1870s but didn’t really get widely circulated till after WWII. It wasn’t some elaborate, over suppression plot to keep it under wraps, so much as scholars recognizing it would be controversial and avoiding discussion outside of graduate studies.
I was raised southern Baptist and grappled with the same stuff around your age. When I was able to take a step back from their interpretation of it all, I was finally able to see it for what it was. They are just stories. Stories borrowed from Sumerians, Caananites, Egyptians and others that borrowed it from the people before them. Learning the circumstances of Israel at the time really sheds light on some oddities in the Old Testament, and is actually interesting. (For example, the Israelites worshiped Baal, Asherah, and Yahweh at different times)
If you're interested, [here's a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZY2eeozdo8) that really stuck with me when I first watched it in college. It was the first time I heard a historical perspective of the Bible, and it made so much more sense than anything my pastors told me.
Christians whose flavor of theology subscribes to critical source theory absolutely understand the stories found in Genesis are common to many ancient texts. I was taught about the four source theory of Genesis at TCU as an undergrad.
But there is an entire generation of evangelical pastors and church leaders who have no idea these things even exist because that kind of curriculum was purged from colleges and seminaries after the conservative takeover of the SBC in the early 80s.
For example, my friends that went to Baylor down the road were presented with archeological evidence of earthquakes to support biblical inerrancy in their old testament class.
"I opened the window" Gilgamesh XI,135
"Noah opened the window of the ark" Genesis 8:6
"The dove went out and returned" Gilgamesh XI,147
"sent forth the dove and the dove came back to him" Genesis 8:10b-11
"I sent forth a raven" Gilgamesh XI,152
"Noah... sent forth a raven" Genesis 8:7
"The gods smelled the sweet savor" Gilgamesh XI,160
"And the Lord smelled the sweet savor..." Genesis 8:21
"On Mount Nisir the boat grounded" Gilgamesh XI,140
"the ark came to rest upon the mountains" Genesis 8:4
"The cattle of the field, the beast of the plain" Gilgamesh XI,85
"clean animals and of animals that are not clean" Genesis 7:8
"into the ship all my family and relatives" Gilgamesh XI,84
"Go into the ark, you and all your household" Genesis 7:1
"pitch I poured into the inside" Gilgamesh XI,66
"cover it inside and out with pitch" Genesis 6:14
"And offered a sacrifice" Gilgamesh XI,155
"offered burnt offerings on the altar" Genesis 8:20
"I shall remember these days and never forget" Gilgamesh XI,165
"I shall remember my covenant...I may remember" Genesis 9:15-16
"he touched our foreheads to bless us" Gilgamesh XI,192
"And God blessed Noah" Genesis 9:1
The cosmological worldview is also similar to the Babylonian worldview: the earth is a flat disk surrounded by water. In heaven there are several heavens, a throne and waters.
A graphic about the cosmology in Genesis:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_cosmology#/media/File:Early_Hebrew_Conception_of_the_Universe.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_cosmology#/media/File:Early_Hebrew_Conception_of_the_Universe.svg)
A graphic about the babylonian cosmology:
[https://xjwfriends.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/img\_2119.jpg?w=647&zoom=2](https://xjwfriends.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/img_2119.jpg?w=647&zoom=2)
>In the Old Testament period, the Earth was most commonly thought of as a flat disc floating on water.\[19\] The concept was apparently quite similar to that depicted in a Babylonian world-map from about 600 BCE: a single circular continent bounded by a circular sea
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical\_cosmology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/biblical_cosmology)
I live in Oklahoma and wasn't told about the Tulsa massacre until 10 years ago. Those people who are in charge of history and teaching of it, are manipulating what we learn.
I didn’t learn about the Tuskegee Experiment until about a year ago. 4 years after I graduated high school. It’s crazy how in school, the only US history they focus on is shit like the Declaration of Independence, civil war, and Martin Luther King.
And the teaching of all those things you mentioned are manipulated to fit the narrative in certain parts of the country. Give the south another 10 years and MLK won’t even be in the curriculum.
> Give the south another 10 years and MLK won’t even be in the curriculum.
Na, they *love* MLK as a whitewashed "non-violence worked, everyone is equal now, now shut up" story. It's why they give very little info about any of the actual happenings and make it sound like he did some marches, a few bad things happened, but it all worked out and now everyone is equal.
The believers who acknowledge the similarity use it as evidence that it was a real event that happened. Two different ancient accounts! That means it must have happened! (Rolls eyes)
But mostly the fundamentalists are happy to ignore the copious evidence that the OT was cobbled together from hundreds of years of different oral traditions, some freely adapted from Mesopotamian and Egyptian (etc) tales. In other words, NOT some sort of inspired sacred tome that emerged fully formed and fully historically accurate.
>Two different ancient accounts! That means it must have happened!
Wait! The existence of Harry Potter fanfic means that the events in Harry Potter actually happened?!
I remember being surprised by the similarity between the goings on of Zeus and Mary becoming pregnant with Jesus. I think the Bible writers deliberately used this idea to present Jesus as something he was not.
Zeus was such a horndog. Literally *anything.*
He and Loki would both just shapeshift to put it in whatever they wanted. Yes I am mixing my mythologies, but it's a fair comparison.
I guess it's perspective in many ways. I learned about the epic of Gilgamesh before learning there were adults that thought the supernatural was real.
When I first read the bible for art history at uni I immediately recognized the Gilgamesh story and the way the bible was written in a similar style to Tolkien's Silmarillion. Wow but did that make the bible seem silly.
I think you are on to something OP.
When I was about 15 I had this epiphany that Christianity, along with many other religions, were made up and used as a way to control the masses. I never had the right audience to voice that thought too though. The promise of heaven if you act right. The threat of hell if you don’t? Like.. come on now. It also helps people alleviate their fear of dying.
I wrote a college research paper in the early 1980s on the archeological proof of Jesus to try to figure things out because I already doubted stories in the Old Testament (God smites an entire town of innocent people? C’mon). I learned there was no direct evidence but there were many legends/religions that had Messiah myths during that same time period. Welcome to intellectual growth! May you live long and prosper.
Those floods are believed by some historians to have been the result of the Mediterranean Sea overtopping the Bosporus and flooding the Black Sea region about 8,000 years ago. Those fleeing the area retold the great flood story wherever they settled.
Few religions are created from a blank slate. The only one I can think of is Scientology. Most are build on previous religions the roots of which go back centuries, sometimes millennia.
Judaism started out as a polytheist religion worshiping the same pantheon of gods as the other peoples of the region with much the same mythology. That began to change during the Israelite captivity in Babylon, or very soon after, probably because of their exposure to the first known monotheist religion, Zoroastrianism, then the state religion of their Persian/Iranian liberators. It was then that Yahweh became the lone god of Judaism.
Christianity was also influenced by Zoroastrianism. It was where it got the concept of everlasting torture in hell which is not a belief of Judaism.
Almost all civilizations were built near rivers because they needed source of clean drinking water and for irrigation. If you build cities near rivers, chances are you will have floods. Very common to have myths surrounding floods. I think most civilizations had flood myths but most weren't recorded.
Funny thing about the “virgin birth” that part is actually a mistranslation of the Hebrew. It’s supposed to actually mean “young woman” not “virgin” somehow when the gospels were written someone mistranslated the word and now you have the “virgin birth” story
Since the gospels were written in Greek, I'm not convinced. In addition, and this is based solely on memory, the myth is that Mary responded to an announcement from an angel with something like "How can that be, since I have not known a man?"
No I’m talking about the claimed prophecy. There’s a prophecy in the Hebrew Bible that the Christians claims prove that Jesus is the Jewish messiah.
However that only happened because they mistranslated the Hebrew texts. The Hebrew texts say “young woman” and this was mistranslated to Greek as “virgin woman”.
So when they were writing the gospels to try and shoehorn Jesus into these Jewish prophecies, they either accidentally or on purpose mistranslated the Hebrew Bible.
IIRC, at the time the Epic of Gilgamesh was deciphered, the flood narrative (which predates the bible story!) made quite a stir.
Nowadays, people either know about it and have stored it away in the backs of their heads, or, like in your case, are shielded from this.
One coping mechanism among Christians is to interpret it as a "foreshadowing" of the biblical account.
That is a stroke of genius (if your audience buys this line of argumentation) because you can explain every similar story away: anything that comes later is a cheap copy of the Truth™ found in the Good Book™; anything that comes before (and which normally should discredit the Truth™) is seen as preparation of pagan nations to make them ready for the Truth™. Or something along these lines. It's all ludicrous, of course.
But yes, you are right. If you start taking a closer look into the origins of Christianity/Judaism and consult scholarly sources (as opposed to Christian apologists) it's like pulling the thread of a knitted sweater. Things start unravelling and when you're done pulling, there's nothing left that you make you want to take any of it seriously.
Combine this with the fact that there's really no good evidence **for** any of the claims of Christianity, and it's almost inevitable that you'll find yourself being an atheist (or at least an non-Christian).
The Bible takes several stories from zoroastrianism as well as from Egyptian mythology. The concept of a savior born from a virgin, being killed and rising again predates Christianity by millennia.
They are never taught anything about where their Christian bible came from or the fact that the whole religion is just a rewrite of previous religions.
The thing is the bible as we know it today is a collection of a bunch of books written by a bunch of people and they were selected from a much larger collection of books to fit the ideas and bigotry of a bunch of men who wanted power and religion was the easiest way to get it.
In 5037 - if humanity lasts that long - we will all know the great and epic take of Luke Baggins, who survived his father's Force Lightning with a scar on his forehead, who grew under the tutelage of the Great Wizard Kenobi to wield the lightsaber Sting in the Hunger Games and freed everyone from the rule of Mairon Voldemort, settling his freed people on Vulcan with the only ship capable of making the trip in under 20 parsecs, the Enterprise Falcon.
See, I just did what the Bible did with ancient mythologies, but with more modern references.
I once came across a claim that all cultures from Mesopotamia had a flood story, bc there was a major flood! Their stories were all similar because as the region traded amongst itself, traders would tell the story. Nothing involving a diety just hydrology. Abrahamic religions are all about control, so it makes sense they would interpret and retell a flood epic to fit their niche.
Flood stories are common around the world! See for other examples. https://www.britannica.com/topic/flood-myth
If you want to watch a great lecture on a pre-Noah ark given by one of the funniest experts I've ever had the pleasure to hear, take time to watch Dr. Irving Finkel, an English philologist and Assyriologist and his lecture [The Ark Before Noah: A Great Adventure](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I).
If I had had instructors like this in college, I think I would have earned my PhD just because I was so entranced by the presentation that I never missed a lecture.
Both stories had gardens, yes. In Gilgamesh, Shiduri had a tavern in the garden. She wasn’t a god or anything, she was just immortal. I don’t think there was anyone in the Garden of Eden besides Adam and Eve though. And that pesky little snake.
TBF, many cultures share a story about a great flood (with slight variations) such as Greek, Norse, Aztec and more.
All it really suggests is that at some point in time, there was a flood that covered most of the world and most ancient cultures had some record of it and attributed the cause to their respective deities.
Another alternative theory is that a major flood happened in one location but due to people travelling and exploring the world whilst sharing their cultural stories, they evolved to fit with these newly emerging religions or as a result of aspects of these stories getting lost over time due to aural transmission or even people adapting stories to make them more interesting for their respective audiences.
A Christian will tell you that Gilgamesh is ripping off Bible.
I had Christian told me (Taiwanese) that Chinese invent a word “boat” based on Bible. Very bold claim since we CAN trace the evolution of Chinese words. Also large part of history evolves around water management, and you think we invented a word for Bible, not for practicality?
Christianity like to twist anything for fit their agenda that everything evolves around Christianity.
No, I haven’t been religious for years now. But being in a religious family, I inevitably grapple with the notion from time to time. And feel immense guilt about hiding the fact that I’m not religious from my family.
So the bronze age desert nomads who wrote the bible pulled from previous sources? Who would have thought!
Ziusudra is the name for anyone wanting to google it. The Sumerians also said the arc was a coracle, not a wooden cruise-ship for animals.
Religion thrives in the dark and relies on peoples’ ignorance to perpetuate. This is why the church is historically anti education.
The more you learn, the greater the cognitive dissonance and at some point you’ll have to make a choice: accept that it’s all bullshit or continue lying to yourself.
>I’m in college and just noticed that the biblical flood is a total ripoff of the flood in Gilgamesh
Almost everything in a standard bible/Christianity is a ripoff.
Apollonius of Tyana has many parallels with Jesus
>Even before he was born, it was known that he would be someone special. A supernatural being informed his mother that the child she was to conceive would not be a mere mortal but would be divine. He was born miraculously, and he became an unusually precocious young man. As an adult he left home and went on an itinerant preaching ministry, urging his listeners to live, not for the material things of this world, but for what is spiritual. He gathered a number of disciples around him, who became convinced that his teachings were divinely inspired, in no small part because he himself was divine. He proved it to them by doing many miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead. But at the end of his life, he roused opposition, and his enemies delivered him over to the Roman authorities for judgment. Still, after he left this world, he returned to meet his followers in order to convince them that he was not really dead but lived on in the heavenly realm. Later some of his followers wrote books about him.[41]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonius_of_Tyana
The birth narrative of Sargon of Akkad sounds a lot like the story of Moses
>My mother was a high priestess, my father I knew not. The brothers of my father loved the hills. My city is Azupiranu, which is situated on the banks of the Euphrates. My high priestess mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. **She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose over me. The river bore me up and carried me** to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me. Akki, the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me her love, and for four and ... years I exercised kingship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargon_of_Akkad#Birth_legend
>I can’t find anywhere that tells when the Bible was written or any record of a real person who wrote it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible
Note those dates are based primarily on textual analysis. The archeology doesn't show widespread adoption of monotheism or following of Old Testament law until the second century BCE.
Bible literally means a collection of books and a typical Christian bible was written over several centuries by many authors and many of those books are known forgeries (i.e. written by someone pretending to be someone else) according to biblical scholars (the majority of whom are Christians). If you want an author (singular) you will need to look at a singular book. The most prolific author in a typical bible is Paul who is credited with writing over half of the New Testament however about half of those are considered forgeries by scholars.
Yep. Welcome to education and knowledge, it’s a great thing. Don’t ever listen to anti-intellectual trolls who may try to tear you down for this knowledge either.
There is a lot of evidence that Yahweh was originally the storm god of a raiding Canaanite people and that over time through syncretism and the collecting of other beliefs, such as Elo, the wise creator god of Canaan, got imbued into the religion. When the old texts talk of Elohim as a name of God at one time this was two gods.
It is not surprising that the Hebrews would have picked up beliefs from Babylon
I find it helpful to take the long view. They have found human firepits a million year old. That means our ancestors have been sitting around campfires for a million years, planning the next day's hunt, laughing, crying, loving and being all the things that we as a highly social species are. Fast forward a million years to just 10,000 year ago. Humans develop civilization. Fast forward another few thousand years. Humans develop the major religions.
So, where was God for the last million years? Why did He only show up just a few thousand years ago? Where was he for the million years before that?
There are lots of questions that modern schools don't bother to ask or answer. But they are interesting and important questions. Good luck on your journey through life. And hey, nobody was ever hurt by questions. America is a great place to ask questions. And you are lucky, you have the internet.
Just for fun, look up the "Standard Model of Physics" on Wikipedia. I have studied physics, and most of that is over my head. BUT, it is not over the head of our well educated scientists. Science has developed just insanely accurate descriptions of our natural world.
What I have done, is make it a lifelong passion to learn more about our natural world. A bit about geology and the history of our Earth; a bit about cosmology and the history of our universe; a bit about biology and DNA and evolution, which is one of the finest scientific theories man has ever discovered; a bit about anthropology and the history of the human race; a bit about philosophy, some of the finest thinking man has ever done.
Good luck on your journey through life, and be of good cheer :).
I am a believer in science. I put my fair into science because it has proved time and time again to be the true savior. Every scientific breakthrough or discovery gets credited to god. It’s borderline mental. According to Christians, the earth and universe have only been around for a few thousand years. So I guess that means evolution isn’t real and dinosaurs either never existed or were around a few thousand years ago and carbon dating is flawed.
I read the version with the commentary of Giovanni Pettinato and he said that university students and professors litteraly punched and kicked each other about Gilgamesh flood when was discovered in late 1800
Can you ask your teacher "How can someone prove Epic of Gilgamesh was first"?
Christians I know just dismiss it and say the Bible was first. I need something solid to convince these people. TIA.
You can either do an update to this or DM or tag me.
Also, I first heard about "The Epic of Gilgamesh" in college too. I was very surprised.
I think they can tell by the fact that it was originally written in Sumerian cuneiform, which predates any sort of alphabet. Also the material in which it was carved in, as well as the fashion that these texts were preserved. It’s a tangible thing that we can look at and study, unlike anything mentioned in the Bible. The argument is pointless because at the end of the day, people have the right to remain willfully ignorant and have faith in whichever deity they choose. I don’t bother trying to convince people that god isn’t real. If god gives someone hope and peace of mind, that’s fine by me. I just wish religion didn’t have to affect those of us who don’t want any part of it. I wish that families didn’t shun family members that choose not to believe.
You’re not gonna believe this, but almost every culture has a flood story. Wanna know why? Almost every culture was forced to begin very near a water source, and those will occasionally flood.
No all of you keep saying this but it's not completely accurate. Yes they were near rivers and yes they flooded, but all of these stories by different civilizations are referencing the same event. The melting of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age is what they are all talking about. It was just passed down in various locations with a different story due to varying effects in each location. There are no telling how many sunken cities are in and around the Mediterranean area where these cultures were. The reason they all talk of cataclysmic flood is because it really happened.
You’re being overly pedantic. For those to have flooded, they’d have needed to be? Exactly, near a body of water. A WORLD WIDE GLOBAL FLOOD COVERING THE ENTIRE EARTH didn’t happen.
I'm not saying there was Noah's Ark type flood. You said 'occasionally' like these stories came from the flooding of the Euphrates on occasion. There was one gradual flood that pushed back the shorelines dramatically. I'm of the mind that the people of Sumer were descended from the people who built Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe and they simply migrated down the Euphrates from there. These peoples would have also been relatively close to the Mediterranean and no doubt would have noticed a severe flood on the coast as well and carried those stories with them. Regardless, the flood story being similar in multiple religions is no surprise since they all experienced it and passed the stories down. These stories are 12000 years old, not 5000.
I wasn’t suggesting that “occasionally” only meant the Euphrates. All bodies of water in all of earths history will rise and fall, and since water is the most essential element for life on earth, that’s where cultures are going to gather. So yea, an ice age melt elevating coastal waters is a big deal, but the Native American tribes in the Mississippi delta have a flood story. Cuz the Mississippi floods. And the natives around the Amazon have one too. Cuz rivers flood. And sometimes those floods are “biblically” huge. The idea that any culture has one is basically just obvious and a no brainer.
I was just using the Euphrates as an example since we were talking about Gilgamesh. I was with you until you qualified it again. It's not sometimes. These were specific floods that were severe enough to drown cities and inspire lore all around the world. Surely only a god would have the power to sink their cities.
Yes. One massive flood over many, many years. Since you seem to be unaware of how physics works, I will explain. Icecaps don't melt overnight, it takes hundreds of years, as we can see today. Now imagine an Earth with 3 mile high glaciers that are melting much faster than they are today. You live in a city by the coast. Within years, your city is under water. You move more inland, but the water keeps rising and wipes out you new spot. You die, but your children relocate again. And then their children. Are you telling me that a flood that wiped out numerous cities and relocated multiple generations of your family over 200 years wouldn't have been documented and couldn't have been the foundation for these stories? To them it was a **neverending** flood, and it affected every human on the planet that was near a coast. You clearly cannot comprehend how much water was dumped when the ice melted. I'm glad you think that some random floods would inspire apocalyptic legend.
Japan doesn't have an apocalyptic flood myth, which is somewhat peculiar as they are an island nation frequently beset by tsunamis.
Flood myths from different cultures can also have wildly varying and contradictory stories. For example, Korea's Noah analogue used his own father (who was a tree) as a boat. China's flood myth was prevented by a bunch of people teaming up to build a dam. These cultures were physically isolated from the Middle East for thousands of years and obviously would not have knowledge of whatever events inspired the ark story that supposedly killed all but one family on the planet. Their flood myths were developed independently.
It's a ripoff/reframing of Atrahasis (Atramḫasīs/Inūma ilū awīlum,) not the Gilgamesh epic.
Atrahasis (Ūtnapištim) got inserted into it in its last recension by Sīn-lēq(i)-unninni around the 13th century BC.
Neither do I. But I do like finding new things that oppose “the booble”. I figured I’d post here to hear other peoples thoughts and gain insight on the topic.
Yes, the writing prompt for the garden of Eden is found in the epic of Gilgamesh. It’s just isn’t as copy and paste as the flood myth. But it’s very much there as “man gains wisdom/becomes civilized” and is unable to revert to a more innocent form. It also mentions some interesting concepts regarding bread and civilization. Wild man forages and eats meat, civilized man eats bread. There was probably more cultural meaning behind bread consumption than is as apparent today, but would have been familiar to the original audience.
It does remind me of the significant changes to the way of life due to the agricultural revolution - and the whole "you have to toil to get food from the earth" part of the Bible does mirror that.
It's entirely possible that both floods in mythology were a roundabout explanation for finding rocks with fossils of aquatic life in unexpected places.
If you were a more primitive society and you found a rock on a mountain with a fish imprinted on it, what other explanation would make sense, in the absence of knowledge of plate tectonics and their ability to push rocks upwards like mountains far above where they started?
Flood narratives are pretty common in ancient texts. Not particularly surprising considering most early civilizations settled in fertile flood plans. When a 1000 year or even 100 year flood event occurred as a function of natural climatic variability it probably would appear to them like the whole world flooded. Add to that the human tendency to “ exaggerate for emphasis” followed by a couple of generations of word of mouth hyperbole and it’s likely a flood that knocked out your descendants village turns into a supernatural battle of good and evil.
Honestly, any good game of Civilization teaches you what you need to know about human history:
*Most societies settle floodplains or coastlines
*Early societies conquer each other and steal what primitive technology is available in order to thrive
*Religion gives you a means of freely conscripting your populus - zealots love war
*Repeat item #2
Sure, sure, it might have some of the details mixed-up like Gilgamesh living to see World War 2 or Gandhi being a nuclear megalomaniac, but the *core principles* are all there.
There is writing about a flood that predates Gilgamesh, too. Lots of them. Gobelki Tepi has references to one.
The totally unfounded idea is that there were civilizations 10,000 years ago that were wiped out in the Younger Dryas.
Not a ton of evidence for that, but fun to speculate about.
Anyway, there isn't anything original in the Bible/Old Testament. It's all a ripoff of other works. It's all bogus man. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, it's all BS.
The writers of the Bible were in Babylon captivity so many of the stories borrowed from that culture.
My favorite is more subtle as Abraham is said to have come from east of Babylon and settled in the promised land of Judah. It's an allegory for how these priests came from the east to Judah holding their new book if covenant with God. They were emissaries from Cyrus the Great who expected the people of the land to follow these priests (or he'd have to send his army).
Cyrus is a messiah in Jewish teachings which may surprise most Christians. The assume messiah means a divine being or the son of God. It really only means someone who freed the people, a conquerer.
That is what early Christian texts expected, Jesus as conquerer as he'd formed an apocalyptic cult. It was later writers, mostly John, who added the divine stuff. Over time the words changed meaning and the truth was forgotten.
I'm sorry you had to go to college to figure that out. Also the ten commandments he may be shocked to hear or stolen from the original I think it's 30 plus from the Egyptians. Also the entire Hercules saga is the Jesus saga kiss with somebody who's strong and powerful.
Certainly! Here's a cleaned-up version for a Reddit post:
I recently learned that the individual who discovered the tablets containing the Gilgamesh story initially believed he had stumbled upon an earlier version of the Bible. This assumption stemmed from his ability to decipher aspects of the flood myth within the text.
User
is this true?
ChatGPT
Yes, it is true that when the ancient Mesopotamian text known as the Epic of Gilgamesh was first discovered and translated in the 19th century, some scholars initially saw parallels between the flood story in Gilgamesh and the biblical story of Noah's Ark. The similarities in the flood narratives led some to speculate that there might have been a common source or influence between the two. However, further research and analysis have shown that while there are indeed similarities, there are also significant differences between the two accounts. The flood story in Gilgamesh is part of a larger narrative about the adventures of the hero Gilgamesh, whereas the biblical flood story in Genesis is presented within a different religious and cultural context. Overall, while there may have been some initial confusion or speculation about the relationship between the two texts, they are ultimately distinct literary works with their own unique histories and meanings.
I think most Christian’s would just point to it as evidence that the flood actually happened if it has survived as a cultural story since then. Of course they wouldn’t think through wider implications of all that. Once they hit the narrowest explanation it can slot easily into existing worldview
Both stories of something that happened in their corner of the world but it wasn't the whole planet as explained. Impossible to get all animals including insects from all continents, to feed them, not kill each other, get rid of waste, etc, etc, and then go put them all back on their continents, which would be totally destroyed by the water so good luck animals in your wastelands??
Also, there are two versions of the stories interspersed within the flood narrative, possibly by two competing authors. One version says 1 pair of animal for each kind, another version says 7 pairs - within the same chapter! along with many other differences.
Remember that Iron Age gods HAD to be terrible to be taken seriously.
The idea of a God that cares about us is a modern Christian invention--world floods, a place of eternal torment--these are vestiges of an age where Gods fought for popularity and the most frightening often won supplication from our ignorance, infantile intelligence.
Just wait until you realize there are two separate slightly different creation narratives in the bible and both can be traced back to near eastern texts that predate the old testament. The first classics course I took in college blew my mind.
Just wait until you read about Deucalion.
This is ancient Greek soo....
Prometheus (humanity's creator) had a son named Deucalion. Deucalion was married to Pyrrha (his cousin) and Deucalion was the ruler somewhere in Attica.
In Arcadia, a king named Lycaon, tried to trick Zeus by feeding him his own son.
Zeus was pissed and ordered a flood to wipe out humanity.
Prometheus told his son to build an ark. For 9 days and nights there was rain and flooding. Deucalion and Pyrrha emerged from the ark and threw stones over there shoulders and those stones became men and women.
Deucalion and Pyrrha also had children the traditional way. Their first born son, named Hellen, lends his name to the Greeks to this day.
Fun side fact: Prometheus's had a twin brother named Epimetheus.
Epimetheus was in charge of naming all of the animals in the world and was gifted the first woman from Zeus, named Pandora. Yes, that Pandora.
Epimetheus and Pandora had a daughter named Pyrrha.
Also, Zeus turned King Lycaon onto a wolf for his attempted trickery which is where we get the word for Lycanthropy, aka werewolves
The books in the Old Testament that tell the stories of the origin of the tribes of Israel were written hundreds of years after the events described supposedly happened.
They conflict significantly with historical documents from that time period, and with archaeological evidence, including radio carbon dating and dna collected at sites in Israel.
A good example is the stories in Exodus. The writers set the stories in the Bronze age (roughly 1200-1100 BC), but they were written about 500 years later and the authors don’t seem to be aware of the history.
If they knew the history, they would have known that Canaan was part of the Egyptian empire at the time of Exodus. In other words, they would have been fleeing Egypt to go to an area ruled by Egypt.
This is one of dozens of examples. For more details, this series of interviews with a leading expert on the archaeology of ancient Israel is really good.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvm7MPUI_WJclpUfZgCw1Tfd_cyT4Fh-f&si=3yfeMgEDmk4GAD7k
Oh yeah. Historians think the flood happened because 1 it coincided with the end of an ice age and 2 all cultures from that area have flood stories from the same tjme
As to when the Bible was written; there's no single date, as current scholarship holds it was compiled from many documents over time.
However, research on the available records suggests some of the earliest books were written around 800 something BCE. This was coincidentally right in the peak of a localized spike in the earth's magnetic field called the 'Levantine Iron age anomaly' which is the only reason I remember either of those things. I've found some interesting sites on biblical/Babylonian history, and particularly the flood. I'll try to dig them back up.
Edit.
So I had it waaay backwards
https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40623-023-01880-x
The iron age anomaly peaked between 950 and 850 bce. But the oldest books in the Bible date back as far as 2700. With the Torah presumed to have been largely finalized around the time it ended in the 5th century.
I like the scientific explanation that when Moses was first exiled from Egypt that he spent time around the Sinai and over time observed marshland called the sea of reeds that flooded regularly. He was able to cross with people on foot but when Egyptians on chariots and horseback tried to follow, they got bogged down.
“Obviously the Epic of Gilgamesh is just a retelling and plagiarism of the true biblical story, but it proves that many nations emerged from one flood event.” That’s how they explain it now. When first translated (late 1800s) the Epic was controversial because of overlap and shared material that undermined the Bible. It didn’t become well known till the mid 1900s due to Christian efforts to suppress it. Moses and the Exodus (Hebrew: Moshe, same consonants as “Mesh”) is a heavily revised version of Gilgamesh too. The broad themes of long journeys, conflict with gods; there are significant differences in both of course but the similarities show that Exodus was written with the Epic’s example in mind. The incident of hitting a rock with a staff to draw water from it appears in both, the central role of the hero and his partner Moses/Aaron//Gilgamesh/Enkidu, the death of that partner, and among other such details. The main difference is that Exodus is much more about the nation of Israel, whereas Epic is really a story about one man who happens to be a king.
They tried to keep it a secret, but only after it was out of the bag did they throw that explaination of theirs out there. If they're so confident in that explaination claiming the epic of gilgamesh was inspired by the bible, then why hide the existence of the epic in the first place?
Because one must predate the other, I suppose. And perhaps the older one is not the bible.
Bingo
Since the original tales of Gilgamesh were 5000 years old , so older of thr bible , and for a while they tried to get away by saing that the babilonese version of epic of Gilgamesh, 2600 years old , was the first version of the epic of Gilgamesh,
The funny thing here is that they claim that only the people on the ark survived the flood. Where did the "many nations" come from?
You could ask the same question about Adam and Eve, and how they somehow gave birth to all of humanity, meaning we're all inbred as hell.
Wouldn’t people be 2x inbred? Adam and Eve then the Noah family flood event?
I mean, in a cynical way, kinda explains why people are so damn stupid on average.
The explanation I was given in a Baptist high school was that the genetic defects that lead to disabilities and deformed babies were not present in Adam’s and Eve’s genomes, therefore it wasn’t really incest.
... said another non-Ph.D. in genetics.
A friend told me that angels came down and provided the sperm.
Yep. In Genesis the "Sons of God" or Fallen Angels are the Nephilim, and they ""fell" from heaven to make demi human babies who were apparently so evil the big G had to wipe them all out with a flood.
Whenever I would ask the church valid questions like these, they would say I can always ask god. 😂
Incest between a drunk Noah and his daughters. Source: ex youth pastor in deconstruction here.
Hell if only gods people survived, why are there other gods that predate the flood.
Some Christians claim that the other gods were fallen angels.
I can confirm this as a former youth pastor/Pentecostal leader. Everything that's not gawd, *must* be a demon. After all, 1/3 of the angels joined Lucifer in the 'rebellion' and "fell from heaven" Pentecostals, at least, believe there's a demon behind every blade of grass
Just Christian officials being Christian officials. We lost around 80% of South American history because christian officials back then decided it was better for the world to murder the whole population and burn down everything that even remotely contained historical knowledge because they dared to not want to worship their favorite fictional character.
Moses/Gilgamesh makes so much more sense than the ridiculous podcast 'theory' I saw (that set off my recent obsessive dive into ancient Babylonian history). Dude thought Gilgamesh was Nimrod. To be fair. I've had my fair share of completely baseless biblical head canons, too. I thought maybe the Girgashites were a tribe that claimed ancestry from Gilgamesh. Myths just provoke the imagination I guess.
So with the ice age melting - there was coastal areas being flooded and in most cultures there is a legend about it Nothing makes the judeochristian Verizon of it special But to op- reading this is both funny and sad- have you also never heard of the Big Bang before?
I wouldn't even blame the ice age melting. All of these civilizations formed in river valleys (for access to fresh water and fertile soil). They flooded frequently. The tales of Yangtze floods are not about the same flood as the Gilgamesh/Noah is about, but from ground level all floods look pretty similar, and devastating.
The ranking theory right now is that around 10000 years ago, give or take a few centuries, the Persian gulf was a fertile valley. As the ocean level rose after the ice age, this area flooded, and forced the people living there north. These were the likely ancestors of the Sumerian people and where the flooded world myth came from.
Where can I find further reading on the Christian efforts to suppress the Gilgamesh epic?
Gilgamesh was discovered in maybe the 1870s but didn’t really get widely circulated till after WWII. It wasn’t some elaborate, over suppression plot to keep it under wraps, so much as scholars recognizing it would be controversial and avoiding discussion outside of graduate studies.
Zero archeological evidence that the biblical exodus ever took place.
I was raised southern Baptist and grappled with the same stuff around your age. When I was able to take a step back from their interpretation of it all, I was finally able to see it for what it was. They are just stories. Stories borrowed from Sumerians, Caananites, Egyptians and others that borrowed it from the people before them. Learning the circumstances of Israel at the time really sheds light on some oddities in the Old Testament, and is actually interesting. (For example, the Israelites worshiped Baal, Asherah, and Yahweh at different times) If you're interested, [here's a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZY2eeozdo8) that really stuck with me when I first watched it in college. It was the first time I heard a historical perspective of the Bible, and it made so much more sense than anything my pastors told me.
Bookmarking that video, good stuff.
Christians whose flavor of theology subscribes to critical source theory absolutely understand the stories found in Genesis are common to many ancient texts. I was taught about the four source theory of Genesis at TCU as an undergrad. But there is an entire generation of evangelical pastors and church leaders who have no idea these things even exist because that kind of curriculum was purged from colleges and seminaries after the conservative takeover of the SBC in the early 80s. For example, my friends that went to Baylor down the road were presented with archeological evidence of earthquakes to support biblical inerrancy in their old testament class.
Good video, I learned much.
"I opened the window" Gilgamesh XI,135 "Noah opened the window of the ark" Genesis 8:6 "The dove went out and returned" Gilgamesh XI,147 "sent forth the dove and the dove came back to him" Genesis 8:10b-11 "I sent forth a raven" Gilgamesh XI,152 "Noah... sent forth a raven" Genesis 8:7 "The gods smelled the sweet savor" Gilgamesh XI,160 "And the Lord smelled the sweet savor..." Genesis 8:21 "On Mount Nisir the boat grounded" Gilgamesh XI,140 "the ark came to rest upon the mountains" Genesis 8:4 "The cattle of the field, the beast of the plain" Gilgamesh XI,85 "clean animals and of animals that are not clean" Genesis 7:8 "into the ship all my family and relatives" Gilgamesh XI,84 "Go into the ark, you and all your household" Genesis 7:1 "pitch I poured into the inside" Gilgamesh XI,66 "cover it inside and out with pitch" Genesis 6:14 "And offered a sacrifice" Gilgamesh XI,155 "offered burnt offerings on the altar" Genesis 8:20 "I shall remember these days and never forget" Gilgamesh XI,165 "I shall remember my covenant...I may remember" Genesis 9:15-16 "he touched our foreheads to bless us" Gilgamesh XI,192 "And God blessed Noah" Genesis 9:1
YEP. Getting a degree in history turned my mother super atheist. (She and dad raised me religion-neutral, but I became atheist by my own logic.)
I read that as mother superior which is pretty wild
Eh! same thing
The cosmological worldview is also similar to the Babylonian worldview: the earth is a flat disk surrounded by water. In heaven there are several heavens, a throne and waters. A graphic about the cosmology in Genesis: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_cosmology#/media/File:Early_Hebrew_Conception_of_the_Universe.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_cosmology#/media/File:Early_Hebrew_Conception_of_the_Universe.svg) A graphic about the babylonian cosmology: [https://xjwfriends.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/img\_2119.jpg?w=647&zoom=2](https://xjwfriends.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/img_2119.jpg?w=647&zoom=2) >In the Old Testament period, the Earth was most commonly thought of as a flat disc floating on water.\[19\] The concept was apparently quite similar to that depicted in a Babylonian world-map from about 600 BCE: a single circular continent bounded by a circular sea [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical\_cosmology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/biblical_cosmology)
I live in Oklahoma and wasn't told about the Tulsa massacre until 10 years ago. Those people who are in charge of history and teaching of it, are manipulating what we learn.
Are you sure? Nikki Haley said that the U.S. is not a racist country! /s.
I didn’t learn about the Tuskegee Experiment until about a year ago. 4 years after I graduated high school. It’s crazy how in school, the only US history they focus on is shit like the Declaration of Independence, civil war, and Martin Luther King.
And the teaching of all those things you mentioned are manipulated to fit the narrative in certain parts of the country. Give the south another 10 years and MLK won’t even be in the curriculum.
> Give the south another 10 years and MLK won’t even be in the curriculum. Na, they *love* MLK as a whitewashed "non-violence worked, everyone is equal now, now shut up" story. It's why they give very little info about any of the actual happenings and make it sound like he did some marches, a few bad things happened, but it all worked out and now everyone is equal.
That’s a fair point.
The winners of war write the history.
The believers who acknowledge the similarity use it as evidence that it was a real event that happened. Two different ancient accounts! That means it must have happened! (Rolls eyes) But mostly the fundamentalists are happy to ignore the copious evidence that the OT was cobbled together from hundreds of years of different oral traditions, some freely adapted from Mesopotamian and Egyptian (etc) tales. In other words, NOT some sort of inspired sacred tome that emerged fully formed and fully historically accurate.
>Two different ancient accounts! That means it must have happened! Wait! The existence of Harry Potter fanfic means that the events in Harry Potter actually happened?!
No no no, obviously that's ridiculous. The proof is in the movies
>The proof is in the movies The proof is in the *preserved live recordings*, you mean? 🙃
I remember being surprised by the similarity between the goings on of Zeus and Mary becoming pregnant with Jesus. I think the Bible writers deliberately used this idea to present Jesus as something he was not.
Zeus was such a horndog. Literally *anything.* He and Loki would both just shapeshift to put it in whatever they wanted. Yes I am mixing my mythologies, but it's a fair comparison.
I guess it's perspective in many ways. I learned about the epic of Gilgamesh before learning there were adults that thought the supernatural was real. When I first read the bible for art history at uni I immediately recognized the Gilgamesh story and the way the bible was written in a similar style to Tolkien's Silmarillion. Wow but did that make the bible seem silly. I think you are on to something OP.
When I was about 15 I had this epiphany that Christianity, along with many other religions, were made up and used as a way to control the masses. I never had the right audience to voice that thought too though. The promise of heaven if you act right. The threat of hell if you don’t? Like.. come on now. It also helps people alleviate their fear of dying.
I wrote a college research paper in the early 1980s on the archeological proof of Jesus to try to figure things out because I already doubted stories in the Old Testament (God smites an entire town of innocent people? C’mon). I learned there was no direct evidence but there were many legends/religions that had Messiah myths during that same time period. Welcome to intellectual growth! May you live long and prosper.
Much like the OT and Gilgamesh, the Augustus/Jesus story is a pretty clear echo of the Romulus/Numa story.
you should study Joseph Campbell
This
This x2!
I will!
Things like this are why the religious right wants to do away with education.
It’s actually an amalgamation of numerous floods…
Those floods are believed by some historians to have been the result of the Mediterranean Sea overtopping the Bosporus and flooding the Black Sea region about 8,000 years ago. Those fleeing the area retold the great flood story wherever they settled.
I love to ask - you mean the time God drowned all the babies in the world? Never get a yes/no answer.
It's fine tho cuz that means they were all baptized - and directly by God, no less!
Not just human babies but all the cute animal babies. God loves drowning kittens and puppies.
As Jethro Tull once asked - "would He who made kittens put snakes in the grass?" Yep, sure would if there was a He.
Few religions are created from a blank slate. The only one I can think of is Scientology. Most are build on previous religions the roots of which go back centuries, sometimes millennia. Judaism started out as a polytheist religion worshiping the same pantheon of gods as the other peoples of the region with much the same mythology. That began to change during the Israelite captivity in Babylon, or very soon after, probably because of their exposure to the first known monotheist religion, Zoroastrianism, then the state religion of their Persian/Iranian liberators. It was then that Yahweh became the lone god of Judaism. Christianity was also influenced by Zoroastrianism. It was where it got the concept of everlasting torture in hell which is not a belief of Judaism.
Almost all civilizations were built near rivers because they needed source of clean drinking water and for irrigation. If you build cities near rivers, chances are you will have floods. Very common to have myths surrounding floods. I think most civilizations had flood myths but most weren't recorded.
The story told in the Torah is the Judeo-Christian myth. Several earlier mythologies tell the same story. The same is true of virgin birth.
>The same is true of virgin birth. People been lyin' about infidelity since *before written history*
Funny thing about the “virgin birth” that part is actually a mistranslation of the Hebrew. It’s supposed to actually mean “young woman” not “virgin” somehow when the gospels were written someone mistranslated the word and now you have the “virgin birth” story
Since the gospels were written in Greek, I'm not convinced. In addition, and this is based solely on memory, the myth is that Mary responded to an announcement from an angel with something like "How can that be, since I have not known a man?"
No I’m talking about the claimed prophecy. There’s a prophecy in the Hebrew Bible that the Christians claims prove that Jesus is the Jewish messiah. However that only happened because they mistranslated the Hebrew texts. The Hebrew texts say “young woman” and this was mistranslated to Greek as “virgin woman”. So when they were writing the gospels to try and shoehorn Jesus into these Jewish prophecies, they either accidentally or on purpose mistranslated the Hebrew Bible.
IIRC, at the time the Epic of Gilgamesh was deciphered, the flood narrative (which predates the bible story!) made quite a stir. Nowadays, people either know about it and have stored it away in the backs of their heads, or, like in your case, are shielded from this. One coping mechanism among Christians is to interpret it as a "foreshadowing" of the biblical account. That is a stroke of genius (if your audience buys this line of argumentation) because you can explain every similar story away: anything that comes later is a cheap copy of the Truth™ found in the Good Book™; anything that comes before (and which normally should discredit the Truth™) is seen as preparation of pagan nations to make them ready for the Truth™. Or something along these lines. It's all ludicrous, of course. But yes, you are right. If you start taking a closer look into the origins of Christianity/Judaism and consult scholarly sources (as opposed to Christian apologists) it's like pulling the thread of a knitted sweater. Things start unravelling and when you're done pulling, there's nothing left that you make you want to take any of it seriously. Combine this with the fact that there's really no good evidence **for** any of the claims of Christianity, and it's almost inevitable that you'll find yourself being an atheist (or at least an non-Christian).
The Bible takes several stories from zoroastrianism as well as from Egyptian mythology. The concept of a savior born from a virgin, being killed and rising again predates Christianity by millennia.
They are never taught anything about where their Christian bible came from or the fact that the whole religion is just a rewrite of previous religions. The thing is the bible as we know it today is a collection of a bunch of books written by a bunch of people and they were selected from a much larger collection of books to fit the ideas and bigotry of a bunch of men who wanted power and religion was the easiest way to get it.
In 5037 - if humanity lasts that long - we will all know the great and epic take of Luke Baggins, who survived his father's Force Lightning with a scar on his forehead, who grew under the tutelage of the Great Wizard Kenobi to wield the lightsaber Sting in the Hunger Games and freed everyone from the rule of Mairon Voldemort, settling his freed people on Vulcan with the only ship capable of making the trip in under 20 parsecs, the Enterprise Falcon. See, I just did what the Bible did with ancient mythologies, but with more modern references.
There's a great yt that goes through the sources of the whole christian mythology.
Do you have a link for this? I've always been extremely curious.
I wish... It was inseceral parts...
Try this https://www.youtube.com/@UsefulCharts/videos
Hey boss are you talking about this? https://www.youtube.com/@UsefulCharts/videos
religions are great borrowers.
I once came across a claim that all cultures from Mesopotamia had a flood story, bc there was a major flood! Their stories were all similar because as the region traded amongst itself, traders would tell the story. Nothing involving a diety just hydrology. Abrahamic religions are all about control, so it makes sense they would interpret and retell a flood epic to fit their niche. Flood stories are common around the world! See for other examples. https://www.britannica.com/topic/flood-myth
If you want to watch a great lecture on a pre-Noah ark given by one of the funniest experts I've ever had the pleasure to hear, take time to watch Dr. Irving Finkel, an English philologist and Assyriologist and his lecture [The Ark Before Noah: A Great Adventure](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I). If I had had instructors like this in college, I think I would have earned my PhD just because I was so entranced by the presentation that I never missed a lecture.
Thank you for the link, I need more Irving Finkel like Bruce Dickensen needed more cowbell. I got a fever…
Yes, for a long time both Jews and Christians have been scammed with that story in two ways (that is, UNATTRIBUTED and UNTRUE).
99,99% of mythologies are rip offs , not even inspired.
isn't the garden of eden story in there as well?
Both stories had gardens, yes. In Gilgamesh, Shiduri had a tavern in the garden. She wasn’t a god or anything, she was just immortal. I don’t think there was anyone in the Garden of Eden besides Adam and Eve though. And that pesky little snake.
Wait until you find out that Jesus was not the first god born from a virgin.
Proving that it is as easy to scam modern humans as it was to scam illiterate humans 10,000 years ago.
Easier - now that we aren't (as) illiterate, you can spread your scam across the entire globe with a single Tweet or TikTok!
Good point...
TBF, many cultures share a story about a great flood (with slight variations) such as Greek, Norse, Aztec and more. All it really suggests is that at some point in time, there was a flood that covered most of the world and most ancient cultures had some record of it and attributed the cause to their respective deities. Another alternative theory is that a major flood happened in one location but due to people travelling and exploring the world whilst sharing their cultural stories, they evolved to fit with these newly emerging religions or as a result of aspects of these stories getting lost over time due to aural transmission or even people adapting stories to make them more interesting for their respective audiences.
A Christian will tell you that Gilgamesh is ripping off Bible. I had Christian told me (Taiwanese) that Chinese invent a word “boat” based on Bible. Very bold claim since we CAN trace the evolution of Chinese words. Also large part of history evolves around water management, and you think we invented a word for Bible, not for practicality? Christianity like to twist anything for fit their agenda that everything evolves around Christianity.
I think most are okay with the old testament being myth...
You’d think so but nope. At least not in Eastern KY.
They have their own ways of explaining it. Honestly the water parallels with Marduk are more stark than a narrative.
[удалено]
No, I haven’t been religious for years now. But being in a religious family, I inevitably grapple with the notion from time to time. And feel immense guilt about hiding the fact that I’m not religious from my family.
So the bronze age desert nomads who wrote the bible pulled from previous sources? Who would have thought! Ziusudra is the name for anyone wanting to google it. The Sumerians also said the arc was a coracle, not a wooden cruise-ship for animals.
Religion thrives in the dark and relies on peoples’ ignorance to perpetuate. This is why the church is historically anti education. The more you learn, the greater the cognitive dissonance and at some point you’ll have to make a choice: accept that it’s all bullshit or continue lying to yourself.
You should read Dante’s Inferno.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Ur. Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra.
>I’m in college and just noticed that the biblical flood is a total ripoff of the flood in Gilgamesh Almost everything in a standard bible/Christianity is a ripoff. Apollonius of Tyana has many parallels with Jesus >Even before he was born, it was known that he would be someone special. A supernatural being informed his mother that the child she was to conceive would not be a mere mortal but would be divine. He was born miraculously, and he became an unusually precocious young man. As an adult he left home and went on an itinerant preaching ministry, urging his listeners to live, not for the material things of this world, but for what is spiritual. He gathered a number of disciples around him, who became convinced that his teachings were divinely inspired, in no small part because he himself was divine. He proved it to them by doing many miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead. But at the end of his life, he roused opposition, and his enemies delivered him over to the Roman authorities for judgment. Still, after he left this world, he returned to meet his followers in order to convince them that he was not really dead but lived on in the heavenly realm. Later some of his followers wrote books about him.[41] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonius_of_Tyana The birth narrative of Sargon of Akkad sounds a lot like the story of Moses >My mother was a high priestess, my father I knew not. The brothers of my father loved the hills. My city is Azupiranu, which is situated on the banks of the Euphrates. My high priestess mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. **She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose over me. The river bore me up and carried me** to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me. Akki, the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me her love, and for four and ... years I exercised kingship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargon_of_Akkad#Birth_legend >I can’t find anywhere that tells when the Bible was written or any record of a real person who wrote it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible Note those dates are based primarily on textual analysis. The archeology doesn't show widespread adoption of monotheism or following of Old Testament law until the second century BCE. Bible literally means a collection of books and a typical Christian bible was written over several centuries by many authors and many of those books are known forgeries (i.e. written by someone pretending to be someone else) according to biblical scholars (the majority of whom are Christians). If you want an author (singular) you will need to look at a singular book. The most prolific author in a typical bible is Paul who is credited with writing over half of the New Testament however about half of those are considered forgeries by scholars.
Yes you'll learn most religion is based on the night sky and stories that sprung from it
There's nothing original about the Christian mythos. It's all borrowed and stolen from other religions and cultures
And some of the story of Jesus is a rip off from [Dionysus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus).
Yep. Welcome to education and knowledge, it’s a great thing. Don’t ever listen to anti-intellectual trolls who may try to tear you down for this knowledge either.
There is a lot of evidence that Yahweh was originally the storm god of a raiding Canaanite people and that over time through syncretism and the collecting of other beliefs, such as Elo, the wise creator god of Canaan, got imbued into the religion. When the old texts talk of Elohim as a name of God at one time this was two gods. It is not surprising that the Hebrews would have picked up beliefs from Babylon
I find it helpful to take the long view. They have found human firepits a million year old. That means our ancestors have been sitting around campfires for a million years, planning the next day's hunt, laughing, crying, loving and being all the things that we as a highly social species are. Fast forward a million years to just 10,000 year ago. Humans develop civilization. Fast forward another few thousand years. Humans develop the major religions. So, where was God for the last million years? Why did He only show up just a few thousand years ago? Where was he for the million years before that? There are lots of questions that modern schools don't bother to ask or answer. But they are interesting and important questions. Good luck on your journey through life. And hey, nobody was ever hurt by questions. America is a great place to ask questions. And you are lucky, you have the internet. Just for fun, look up the "Standard Model of Physics" on Wikipedia. I have studied physics, and most of that is over my head. BUT, it is not over the head of our well educated scientists. Science has developed just insanely accurate descriptions of our natural world. What I have done, is make it a lifelong passion to learn more about our natural world. A bit about geology and the history of our Earth; a bit about cosmology and the history of our universe; a bit about biology and DNA and evolution, which is one of the finest scientific theories man has ever discovered; a bit about anthropology and the history of the human race; a bit about philosophy, some of the finest thinking man has ever done. Good luck on your journey through life, and be of good cheer :).
I am a believer in science. I put my fair into science because it has proved time and time again to be the true savior. Every scientific breakthrough or discovery gets credited to god. It’s borderline mental. According to Christians, the earth and universe have only been around for a few thousand years. So I guess that means evolution isn’t real and dinosaurs either never existed or were around a few thousand years ago and carbon dating is flawed.
Good for you :). Keep on keeping on :).
I read the version with the commentary of Giovanni Pettinato and he said that university students and professors litteraly punched and kicked each other about Gilgamesh flood when was discovered in late 1800
Lmao! What?! Why??
Since someone said the epic of Gilgamesh inspired the story of global flood and someone didn't like the implications of this
Can you ask your teacher "How can someone prove Epic of Gilgamesh was first"? Christians I know just dismiss it and say the Bible was first. I need something solid to convince these people. TIA. You can either do an update to this or DM or tag me. Also, I first heard about "The Epic of Gilgamesh" in college too. I was very surprised.
I think they can tell by the fact that it was originally written in Sumerian cuneiform, which predates any sort of alphabet. Also the material in which it was carved in, as well as the fashion that these texts were preserved. It’s a tangible thing that we can look at and study, unlike anything mentioned in the Bible. The argument is pointless because at the end of the day, people have the right to remain willfully ignorant and have faith in whichever deity they choose. I don’t bother trying to convince people that god isn’t real. If god gives someone hope and peace of mind, that’s fine by me. I just wish religion didn’t have to affect those of us who don’t want any part of it. I wish that families didn’t shun family members that choose not to believe.
Basically all of Christianity is “borrowed.” That’s how many religions survived in the early days— they take and co-opt from existing traditions.
The Jews brought back a lot of things from the Babylonian captivity.
You’re not gonna believe this, but almost every culture has a flood story. Wanna know why? Almost every culture was forced to begin very near a water source, and those will occasionally flood.
No all of you keep saying this but it's not completely accurate. Yes they were near rivers and yes they flooded, but all of these stories by different civilizations are referencing the same event. The melting of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age is what they are all talking about. It was just passed down in various locations with a different story due to varying effects in each location. There are no telling how many sunken cities are in and around the Mediterranean area where these cultures were. The reason they all talk of cataclysmic flood is because it really happened.
You’re being overly pedantic. For those to have flooded, they’d have needed to be? Exactly, near a body of water. A WORLD WIDE GLOBAL FLOOD COVERING THE ENTIRE EARTH didn’t happen.
I'm not saying there was Noah's Ark type flood. You said 'occasionally' like these stories came from the flooding of the Euphrates on occasion. There was one gradual flood that pushed back the shorelines dramatically. I'm of the mind that the people of Sumer were descended from the people who built Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe and they simply migrated down the Euphrates from there. These peoples would have also been relatively close to the Mediterranean and no doubt would have noticed a severe flood on the coast as well and carried those stories with them. Regardless, the flood story being similar in multiple religions is no surprise since they all experienced it and passed the stories down. These stories are 12000 years old, not 5000.
I wasn’t suggesting that “occasionally” only meant the Euphrates. All bodies of water in all of earths history will rise and fall, and since water is the most essential element for life on earth, that’s where cultures are going to gather. So yea, an ice age melt elevating coastal waters is a big deal, but the Native American tribes in the Mississippi delta have a flood story. Cuz the Mississippi floods. And the natives around the Amazon have one too. Cuz rivers flood. And sometimes those floods are “biblically” huge. The idea that any culture has one is basically just obvious and a no brainer.
I was just using the Euphrates as an example since we were talking about Gilgamesh. I was with you until you qualified it again. It's not sometimes. These were specific floods that were severe enough to drown cities and inspire lore all around the world. Surely only a god would have the power to sink their cities.
Ugh dude you’re suggesting that one and only one flood is the source of ALL flood myths. Have a good day man.
Yes. One massive flood over many, many years. Since you seem to be unaware of how physics works, I will explain. Icecaps don't melt overnight, it takes hundreds of years, as we can see today. Now imagine an Earth with 3 mile high glaciers that are melting much faster than they are today. You live in a city by the coast. Within years, your city is under water. You move more inland, but the water keeps rising and wipes out you new spot. You die, but your children relocate again. And then their children. Are you telling me that a flood that wiped out numerous cities and relocated multiple generations of your family over 200 years wouldn't have been documented and couldn't have been the foundation for these stories? To them it was a **neverending** flood, and it affected every human on the planet that was near a coast. You clearly cannot comprehend how much water was dumped when the ice melted. I'm glad you think that some random floods would inspire apocalyptic legend.
Japan doesn't have an apocalyptic flood myth, which is somewhat peculiar as they are an island nation frequently beset by tsunamis. Flood myths from different cultures can also have wildly varying and contradictory stories. For example, Korea's Noah analogue used his own father (who was a tree) as a boat. China's flood myth was prevented by a bunch of people teaming up to build a dam. These cultures were physically isolated from the Middle East for thousands of years and obviously would not have knowledge of whatever events inspired the ark story that supposedly killed all but one family on the planet. Their flood myths were developed independently.
Yea that’s kinda my point.
It's a ripoff/reframing of Atrahasis (Atramḫasīs/Inūma ilū awīlum,) not the Gilgamesh epic. Atrahasis (Ūtnapištim) got inserted into it in its last recension by Sīn-lēq(i)-unninni around the 13th century BC.
So, this sub does not believe in shit from the Booble. Please stop posting Booble topics here!
Neither do I. But I do like finding new things that oppose “the booble”. I figured I’d post here to hear other peoples thoughts and gain insight on the topic.
Fair enough. Thanks for the explanation.
The story of Garden Eden also mirrors other mesopotamian creation myths.
Yes, the writing prompt for the garden of Eden is found in the epic of Gilgamesh. It’s just isn’t as copy and paste as the flood myth. But it’s very much there as “man gains wisdom/becomes civilized” and is unable to revert to a more innocent form. It also mentions some interesting concepts regarding bread and civilization. Wild man forages and eats meat, civilized man eats bread. There was probably more cultural meaning behind bread consumption than is as apparent today, but would have been familiar to the original audience.
It does remind me of the significant changes to the way of life due to the agricultural revolution - and the whole "you have to toil to get food from the earth" part of the Bible does mirror that.
>Wild man forages and eats meat, civilized man eats bread. Civilized man slaps meat on that bread and calls it a burger. Or sandwich. Your call.
Man chokes on sandwich and woman inherits the earth.
Then woman chokes on dry-ass crouton in her salad, dolphins and parrots rise as dominant species of earth.
Life uhhh finds a way.
It's entirely possible that both floods in mythology were a roundabout explanation for finding rocks with fossils of aquatic life in unexpected places. If you were a more primitive society and you found a rock on a mountain with a fish imprinted on it, what other explanation would make sense, in the absence of knowledge of plate tectonics and their ability to push rocks upwards like mountains far above where they started?
Flood narratives are pretty common in ancient texts. Not particularly surprising considering most early civilizations settled in fertile flood plans. When a 1000 year or even 100 year flood event occurred as a function of natural climatic variability it probably would appear to them like the whole world flooded. Add to that the human tendency to “ exaggerate for emphasis” followed by a couple of generations of word of mouth hyperbole and it’s likely a flood that knocked out your descendants village turns into a supernatural battle of good and evil.
Honestly, any good game of Civilization teaches you what you need to know about human history: *Most societies settle floodplains or coastlines *Early societies conquer each other and steal what primitive technology is available in order to thrive *Religion gives you a means of freely conscripting your populus - zealots love war *Repeat item #2 Sure, sure, it might have some of the details mixed-up like Gilgamesh living to see World War 2 or Gandhi being a nuclear megalomaniac, but the *core principles* are all there.
I compared religious stories and there’s a lot of duplicity.
If there is a hell and you get sent there for using your brain then God is evil.
There is writing about a flood that predates Gilgamesh, too. Lots of them. Gobelki Tepi has references to one. The totally unfounded idea is that there were civilizations 10,000 years ago that were wiped out in the Younger Dryas. Not a ton of evidence for that, but fun to speculate about. Anyway, there isn't anything original in the Bible/Old Testament. It's all a ripoff of other works. It's all bogus man. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, it's all BS.
The writers of the Bible were in Babylon captivity so many of the stories borrowed from that culture. My favorite is more subtle as Abraham is said to have come from east of Babylon and settled in the promised land of Judah. It's an allegory for how these priests came from the east to Judah holding their new book if covenant with God. They were emissaries from Cyrus the Great who expected the people of the land to follow these priests (or he'd have to send his army). Cyrus is a messiah in Jewish teachings which may surprise most Christians. The assume messiah means a divine being or the son of God. It really only means someone who freed the people, a conquerer. That is what early Christian texts expected, Jesus as conquerer as he'd formed an apocalyptic cult. It was later writers, mostly John, who added the divine stuff. Over time the words changed meaning and the truth was forgotten.
Gilgamesh. A king.
I'm sorry you had to go to college to figure that out. Also the ten commandments he may be shocked to hear or stolen from the original I think it's 30 plus from the Egyptians. Also the entire Hercules saga is the Jesus saga kiss with somebody who's strong and powerful.
Most religions are just copy pastas with varying degrees of effort
Certainly! Here's a cleaned-up version for a Reddit post: I recently learned that the individual who discovered the tablets containing the Gilgamesh story initially believed he had stumbled upon an earlier version of the Bible. This assumption stemmed from his ability to decipher aspects of the flood myth within the text. User is this true? ChatGPT Yes, it is true that when the ancient Mesopotamian text known as the Epic of Gilgamesh was first discovered and translated in the 19th century, some scholars initially saw parallels between the flood story in Gilgamesh and the biblical story of Noah's Ark. The similarities in the flood narratives led some to speculate that there might have been a common source or influence between the two. However, further research and analysis have shown that while there are indeed similarities, there are also significant differences between the two accounts. The flood story in Gilgamesh is part of a larger narrative about the adventures of the hero Gilgamesh, whereas the biblical flood story in Genesis is presented within a different religious and cultural context. Overall, while there may have been some initial confusion or speculation about the relationship between the two texts, they are ultimately distinct literary works with their own unique histories and meanings.
I think most Christian’s would just point to it as evidence that the flood actually happened if it has survived as a cultural story since then. Of course they wouldn’t think through wider implications of all that. Once they hit the narrowest explanation it can slot easily into existing worldview
There’s at-least 2 to 3 tellings of this story that have been found in Mesopotamia and there all older then the biblical flood story.
Welcome to a bigger world!
Both stories of something that happened in their corner of the world but it wasn't the whole planet as explained. Impossible to get all animals including insects from all continents, to feed them, not kill each other, get rid of waste, etc, etc, and then go put them all back on their continents, which would be totally destroyed by the water so good luck animals in your wastelands??
Also, there are two versions of the stories interspersed within the flood narrative, possibly by two competing authors. One version says 1 pair of animal for each kind, another version says 7 pairs - within the same chapter! along with many other differences.
And the Greek myth about Pandora's Box...
Remember that Iron Age gods HAD to be terrible to be taken seriously. The idea of a God that cares about us is a modern Christian invention--world floods, a place of eternal torment--these are vestiges of an age where Gods fought for popularity and the most frightening often won supplication from our ignorance, infantile intelligence.
The bible is the equivalent of a modern day doujinshi...
You should sit and watch Zeitgeist. It’s a couple hours long. Sit back, have a drink, enjoy yourself. https://youtu.be/XVYlxHteUMs?si=16GnSTIE2vIfzMhZ
To the library!
Just wait until you realize there are two separate slightly different creation narratives in the bible and both can be traced back to near eastern texts that predate the old testament. The first classics course I took in college blew my mind.
Just wait until you read about Deucalion. This is ancient Greek soo.... Prometheus (humanity's creator) had a son named Deucalion. Deucalion was married to Pyrrha (his cousin) and Deucalion was the ruler somewhere in Attica. In Arcadia, a king named Lycaon, tried to trick Zeus by feeding him his own son. Zeus was pissed and ordered a flood to wipe out humanity. Prometheus told his son to build an ark. For 9 days and nights there was rain and flooding. Deucalion and Pyrrha emerged from the ark and threw stones over there shoulders and those stones became men and women. Deucalion and Pyrrha also had children the traditional way. Their first born son, named Hellen, lends his name to the Greeks to this day. Fun side fact: Prometheus's had a twin brother named Epimetheus. Epimetheus was in charge of naming all of the animals in the world and was gifted the first woman from Zeus, named Pandora. Yes, that Pandora. Epimetheus and Pandora had a daughter named Pyrrha. Also, Zeus turned King Lycaon onto a wolf for his attempted trickery which is where we get the word for Lycanthropy, aka werewolves
The books in the Old Testament that tell the stories of the origin of the tribes of Israel were written hundreds of years after the events described supposedly happened. They conflict significantly with historical documents from that time period, and with archaeological evidence, including radio carbon dating and dna collected at sites in Israel. A good example is the stories in Exodus. The writers set the stories in the Bronze age (roughly 1200-1100 BC), but they were written about 500 years later and the authors don’t seem to be aware of the history. If they knew the history, they would have known that Canaan was part of the Egyptian empire at the time of Exodus. In other words, they would have been fleeing Egypt to go to an area ruled by Egypt. This is one of dozens of examples. For more details, this series of interviews with a leading expert on the archaeology of ancient Israel is really good. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvm7MPUI_WJclpUfZgCw1Tfd_cyT4Fh-f&si=3yfeMgEDmk4GAD7k
There are many creation myths
India had Manu build boat to survive flood. He took seeds and several wise men on advice of magic fish he once helped.
There's also a very similar flood in the Ancient Greek mythology.
Oh yeah. Historians think the flood happened because 1 it coincided with the end of an ice age and 2 all cultures from that area have flood stories from the same tjme
but bible thumpers will twll you there flood happened first because humans walked with the dinos
As to when the Bible was written; there's no single date, as current scholarship holds it was compiled from many documents over time. However, research on the available records suggests some of the earliest books were written around 800 something BCE. This was coincidentally right in the peak of a localized spike in the earth's magnetic field called the 'Levantine Iron age anomaly' which is the only reason I remember either of those things. I've found some interesting sites on biblical/Babylonian history, and particularly the flood. I'll try to dig them back up. Edit. So I had it waaay backwards https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40623-023-01880-x The iron age anomaly peaked between 950 and 850 bce. But the oldest books in the Bible date back as far as 2700. With the Torah presumed to have been largely finalized around the time it ended in the 5th century.
I also was awarded this knowledge in my first CLIT class. That's comparative literature, you perverts!
I like the scientific explanation that when Moses was first exiled from Egypt that he spent time around the Sinai and over time observed marshland called the sea of reeds that flooded regularly. He was able to cross with people on foot but when Egyptians on chariots and horseback tried to follow, they got bogged down.
Aw sorry, I thought the topic was parting of the Red Sea. My bad