Gilgamesh and the Bible

Sometime during 2020 when I was spending my time holed up at home, avoiding COVID by watching random YouTube videos, I discovered Peter Pringle, a musician who recreates ancient instruments and languages (making best guesses as far as pronunciation, I'm assuming). 

He did a stunning piece, from the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian. There's something very captivating about this, and the comment are fun to read as well:

The Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian

It started me down a path of reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, which has told and retold over centuries, eventually in Akkadian, which he voices in this video:

Lament for Enkidu

Akkadian seems to be completely unrelated to the Sumerian as a language, but has elements that will be recognizable to Arabic and Hebrew speakers. (Of course, I read it in an English translation; my interests don't go as deep as learning cuneiform.)

Any Jew or Christian -- and probably Muslims as well, given the overlap in our texts -- will do a double-take when they read this for the first time, because many of the stories from the Bible are here. The flood saga, particularly, and for those who read the story of the Exodus, including Joseph's time in Egypt, this passage from Gerald J. Davis's translation will be striking:

Of course, in the Tankah/Old Testament, the pharaoh of Egypt has a dream that Joseph interprets to mean that seven years of plenty will be followed by seven years of famine.

I don't know how authoritative this source is, but I found it to be a fascinating read when I started wanting to know more about the cross-talk in ancient times that led to these stories being retold in such different contexts. Dave Roos writes the article, based on research from Louise Pryke:

While the oldest partial fragments of Gilgamesh date back to nearly 2000 B.C.E., Pryke says that the best-known Babylonian version was likely penned by Sin-leqi-unninni, an exorcist priest who lived around 1100 B.C.E. The earliest parts of the Hebrew Bible, including much of Genesis, were written around 950 B.C.E.

Biblical scholars and Assyriologists can delve into these stories and see how they are told with very different emphases and conclusions, but I was just curious to know how they transferred from one culture to another. Dave Roose writes:

... the authors of Genesis were clearly aware of the divine deluge described in the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh.

"We actually have the smoking gun," says Pryke. "Archeologists have found bits of the Epic of Gilgamesh all over [Ancient Israel]. It looks like Gilgamesh was something that was in broad circulation at the time."

Since both the Bible and Gilgamesh were passed along as oral traditions long before they were written down, it's possible that the Mesopotamian flood narrative first entered Hebrew culture as a type of "contest literature" similar to 1001 Arabian Nights.