![]() So when Joseph dreamed of sheaves of corn and bowing stars ( Gen 37:5-11), the author was probably not copying Gilgamesh’s oracular dreams. For example, it was widely believed that dreams could be divinely inspired, cryptic forecasts of the future. Because of this, it is difficult to state with any certainty that the Epic directly influenced the stories of the Bible. It shares many motifs and ideas (such as the Flood) with other ancient Near Eastern texts. The Gilgamesh Epic was familiar in the biblical world: copies have been found at Megiddo, Emar, Northern Anatolia, and Nineveh. But the Epic also includes a character whose story bears even more similarities to stories in the Hebrew Bible: Gilgamesh’s possession of a plant of immortality is thwarted by a serpent (compare Gen 3), he wrestles in the night with a divinely appointed assailant who proclaims the hero’s identity and predicts that he will prevail over all others (compare Gen 32:23-32), and he is taught that the greatest response to mortality is to live life in appreciation of those things which make us truly human (compare Eccl 9:7-10). Of these, the best-known is probably the Epic’s flood story, which reads a lot like the biblical tale of Noah’s ark ( Gen 6-9). The Epic of Gilgamesh, a literary product of Mesopotamia, contains many of the same themes and motifs as the Hebrew Bible.
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