I grew overwhelmed over the past few years with how many books I’ve read and I thought I needed to write drawn out reviews for everything. That’s not so true: short reviews work just as well and that’s just as true for this Epic of Gilgamesh review.

The things that struck me most about this book have to do with how fully it paralleled the Noahic flood narrative, though from the perspective of a different culture. The journey through the tunnel of the sun really grabbed hold of my heart in a weird way and snatched away my breath.

I think it bothered me how many of the translators and interpreters and even friends reading alongside tried to translate “prostitute” as “priestess” saying we’re reading a moral bias into a culture that didn’t have it (and, subsequently, trying to justify a modern immoral bias into the text, therefore reading an immoral bias into a moral bias read into a text — hypocrisy of hypocrisies). Quite clearly in the text, the bride is furious with him for sleeping with the priestess/prostitute. Because she feels cheated on, she feels like he’s committing adultery. Otherwise, if it’s “culturally morally okay,” then why are half of the women mad?

Featured Download: The ultimate list of book club suggestions — dos and don’ts.

They’re mad because it’s wrong, plain and simple, and reading our immoral preferences into an ancient text is just as chronologically snobbish as reading specific moral laws. Some moral laws transcend time and space and culture and this seems to be one of them:

If a married man sleeps with another woman, he has betrayed his wife. If he does so with a woman whose sole job is to make her living off of such adulteries, the offense is double.

The text bears this out in nearly every version, not due to the translation of the priestess/prostitute word, but rather to the contextual reaction of his bride.

Further, I find the perspective of the giant / hero battle to show us a great deal about how various cultures warred one another for the supremacy of deities and local heroes. We still do this, of course, because the world never stops being tribal, it only has seasons where good men and women die for their enemies and neighbors and strangers and foreigners.

Which, if you consider the initial battle, Gilgamesh does as much for Enkidu who was once his enemy. The best you can do is love your family and friends and be a good man rather than trying to spray paint your name all over everything.

I definitely recommend reading it in a good translation. It’s only 80 pages or so.

Featured Download: The ultimate list of book club suggestions — dos and don’ts.