Loomis

Set aside Gilgamesh and the flood story for a minute, and look at Genesis 11:3-4

Genesis 11:3-4
They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

Compare that with Enuma Elish Tablet 6:

The Anunnaki began shovelling.
For a whole year they made bricks for it.
When the second year arrived,
They had raised the top of Esagila in front of (?) the Apsu;
They had built a high ziggurat for the Apsu.
They founded a dwelling for Anu, Ellil, and Ea likewise.

Do you see the similarities?

The early chapters of Genesis appear to be dedicated to combining and assimilating motifs from earlier Sumerian legends.

ApostateAbe

Yes, I suppose that is true. But, really, I only intended to answer your question, "How’s that?"

Loomis

I don’t understand what the first sentence has to do with the second sentence. The word but indicates a contrast or exception, but what does the age of Gilgamesh issue have to do with the names of God issue?

Afaik, the Documentary Hypothesis makes no statement about Gilgamesh. It looks like you are comparing apples with laziness.

Toto

Biblical inerrantists reject the documetary hypothesis, because it means that the first 5 books of the Hebrew Scriptures were not written by Moses. They claim that Moses did write those books; and therefore Gilgamesh must have been derived from the Bible. That's the only connection.

Craigart14

She is my student, and not at all an idiot except where the god virus has infected part of her brain. She tells me that Wellhausen has been "disproved," which is not a word real scholars use all that often, and that her husband, a minister working on a DOCTORATE in divinity, showed her a reference book. I am trying to understand their thought processes in order to teach her a little more about ancient literature and about scholarship, and to keep up with True Believer thinking so as to be able to refute it when I should. Sometimes my job requires a little tightrope walking.

Craig

Craigart14

Sorry for the confusion. In looking up more on Wellhausen, I stumbled onto some fundamentalist material that discounted the documentary hypothesis re: Genesis with a wave of the hand, saying basically that one writer might use different names for God and different writing styles. The typical nonsense. Since Wellhausen seems to be known more for JEDP than Gilgamesh, I conflated them. I'm thinking that if my student and her husband believe they have disproved (or chosen not to believe) some aspect of Wellhausen's work, they can then discount all the rest and any work by other scholars that followed. I'm just trying to figure out where these people are coming from so I can educate my student. Sometimes I get statements from students that leave me so baffled it's not funny. I teach so many different courses that I can't be up on every detail of every bit of literature we study, since I have to cover the entire world since the beginning of recorded history.

Also, I teach at a historically black institution. Most of the students and many of the faculty have been raised in the church, as they say around here, and so brainwashed with fantasy that critical thinking eludes them, and they have been taught since early childhood never to question the Bible--which really means never to evaluate what they have been told it means. They have been taught to accept authority, so just about any quotation from any book written by any church figure ends any discussion, as far as they are concerned. If it's in print somewhere and they agree with it, it's true. And about half my students believe that Jesus, Beethoven, Alexander Hamilton, and the first president of the US were all black. They also believe that the Statue of Liberty was intended to represent a black woman and commemorate the end of slavery in the US, but we evil whites changed it. There is a tendency among students and scholars with an axe to grind to take one little bit of evidence and run with it instead of considering all available evidence.

Do you see my problem?

By the way, if anyone out there happens to chair an English department somewhere--preferably outside the Bible Belt--and would like a pretty knowledgeable smartass to enliven department meetings, I am always on the market.

Craig

Toto

I understand that Beethoven had enough African ancestry to be considered black in the confederate states. (link). But the rest is just ...