Similarities Between The Epic Of Gilgamesh And The Bible

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Before those early near east religious texts, especially the Epic of Gilgamesh, were discovered, most Christians believed that the Bible is the revelation of God and is absolutely original. However, after the discoveries of earlier religious documents in regions near Israel such as Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece, the originality of Bible has been questioned by more and more people, since there are assignable similarities between Bible and these newly discovered texts. Those texts and the Bible share the same stories, similar characters and sometimes mutual motifs, and by a careful investigation in history and geography elements, it can be found out that the Bible borrowed those factors from those earlier religious texts. However, since Bible…show more content…
(Lorey) These similarities which lay between the stories reveal that there must be a strong relation between the two religion texts, since except the name of the people who survived from the flood, all factors are same in these two stories; while other records about floods, such as those in Greek mythologies, have a distinctive difference with the record of Epic of Gilgamesh. The similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible also lay in some of the symbols they use. The most famous story in the Bible, the story of Adam and Eva, in which the serpent was a symbol of evil and the one which caused the loss of forbidden knowledge, echoed with the story at the end of the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh got the magic grass which can stop mortality but finally the grass was taken away by a serpent. (Dolansky) Considering about the fact that the Epic of Gilgamesh was the earliest written document in the world, and considering about the distance between Israel and Mesopotamia, it’s reasonable to conclude that the Bible borrowed the motif of forbidden knowledge and the symbol of serpents from Mesopotamia. Moreover, there are motifs and symbols that

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