Gilgamesh Immortal Page 26

  Gilgamesh considered her offer.

  Ninurta leaned in and whispered some advice. He did not trust this dragon one bit. He knew her schemes and devices. He knew what she really wanted.

  Gilgamesh shook his head to Ninurta. He really had no other choice. Ishtar would surely engage in unending terrorism to foil the plans of the assembly, to foil his plans. He was going to build several cities up north anyway. Each of them needed a patron deity. So it was not all that much of a sacrifice on his part to give her one of them for her own little fiefdom. He wondered what she was not telling him. What nefarious double cross she may be scheming over, what small wording she might place at the bottom of the covenant that he could not read. It was never so simple with Ishtar. There were always hidden agendas and ulterior motives and unintended consequences. She could not be trusted.

  But he had no other choice. She would thwart his plans before he could build his forces strong enough to defy her.

  “Accepted,” said Gilgamesh.

  She brightened. Ninurta sighed.

  But then he added, “On one condition.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She knew this king would not be so easily outmaneuvered.

  “That you preside over my funeral,” said Gilgamesh.

  Chapter 51

  The funeral of Gilgamesh was extravagant. Citizens packed the Processional Way, weeping and tearing their clothes and throwing dust over their heads. The funeral procession was led by Ishtar dressed up in her funerary best, a black costume of leather and satin with flowing robe and horned headdress of deity. She painted her face death white with black lipstick and heavy black eyeliner. She felt ravishingly dead as she led the procession out of the city toward their destination down to the Euphrates River bed.

  Behind Ishtar was a large empty golden chariot drawn by four stallions. Next, a small band of minstrel singers playing a dirge on their instruments and singing with a low chant like sorrow.

  Then came a portable throne bearing Gilgamesh’s ten-foot long sarcophagus, carried on poles by dozens of slaves. It was inlaid with gold and carnelian and lapis lazuli.

  Then came a long line of the mostly female palace servants richly adorned with gold and silver jewelry and wreaths of gold leaves, carrying small cups in their hands. They included the cup bearer, the barber, the gardener and other palace retainers, grooms and musicians. Lastly, a series of oxen drawing carts of wealth and goods for Gilgamesh to take with him into the afterlife.

  Gilgamesh sat above the sevenfold gate of the city watching the funeral train parade below through the gates out into the plains. He had exhumed Enkidu’s body from his tomb and arrayed his decayed corpse with garments fit for a dead king, including the golden family amulet that Enkidu treasured as his birthright. Enkidu’s body was placed into the sarcophagus intended for Gilgamesh. He had concluded that this was the perfect substitution. Enkidu could be king and experience all the pomp and circumstance he deserved as a great man, the adopted son of Lady Wild Cow Ninsun, high priestess of Shamash, whose sarcophagus followed behind Gilgamesh’s on a more humble funerary cart.

  Gilgamesh had taken some time alone with Enkidu’s corpse during the preparation period. He looked close into the sunken sockets of Enkidu’s skull, saturated with spices and herbs to preserve the flesh for its destination. He knew Enkidu’s destination was not an afterlife. His destination was the grave. All the journeys and all the quests he had shared with this great warrior of the steppe were now distant memories that had faded in his mind. He was no longer that man. He had faced the future and he had changed. He was not burying his friend for the afterlife, he was burying his past along with any shred of mercy, friendship, and compassion that he once toyed with. This would be the last bit of sentiment that he would allow to endanger his position of power ever again.

  The funeral procession approached the tomb out by the river. Gilgamesh had a workforce of laborers temporarily divert the Euphrates so that they could build his stone tomb below the riverbed itself. It would be a way of discouraging tomb raiders as well as symbolically uniting him with the great river that, along with the mighty Tigris, fed the life of the Fertile Crescent for millennia past, and would continue to do so for millennia to come.

  The entire population of Uruk had followed the parade out to the tomb and gathered around for the mourning ceremonies. Thousands filled the plains with rapt attention as the entire funerary procession marched into the mammoth tomb and down a long sloping passageway. Inside the stone crypt they took various compartments as their residence. Even the oxen and their carts had a large room for sequestering.

  Copper helmeted guards stood by the inside doors. The retinue of over one hundred royal servants gathered around the sarcophagus of their king and the tomb was sealed. They drank poison from their carried little cups. They laid down in an orderly fashion and fell asleep, never to waken. They would enter the afterlife with their king — rather, who they thought was their king.

  The oxen were given the poison to drink as well and the room of gathered wealth was sealed forever into the earth.

  Up above the tomb, Ishtar presided over the ceremonies along with Gilgamesh’s successor, one of his royal sons, Ur-Nungal, who would rebuild the Urukean armed forces to maintain rule over the southern region, including Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Larsa, and others.

  The ceremony bored Ishtar to death. It was all so much wasted ritual for her. She wanted to get on with her kingdom building. Her duties here were now done, so she left the mourning ceremonies behind her to meet with Gilgamesh high upon the city walls.

  As the mourning for Gilgamesh continued out by the river, Gilgamesh oversaw a contingent of several thousand soldiers leave the city to march north up the river. He stood on the parapet of the city gates, Ninurta to his right and Ishtar to his left. They watched the soldiers marching away from their beloved city to start anew upriver. Gilgamesh’s royal giant progeny led the marching mass and said goodbye to their past forever.

  As Gilgamesh gazed over his corps of marching loyal soldiers, he looked out onto the horizon and spoke words he knew would change the world.

  “We will travel several leagues upriver to our new home. I shall build a city in the north for the esteemed goddess of sex and war. You shall be Ishtar of Nineveh.”

  Ishtar smirked with satisfaction.

  “It will be a new world with new gods,” added Gilgamesh. “Ninurta, you shall be called by a new name, Marduk.”

  Marduk nodded with acceptance.

  Gilgamesh stared out as if into the Abyss itself. “Together, we shall build a city and a temple-tower with its top in the heavens and its roots in Sheol. We will make a mighty name for ourselves, that will resound in eternity.”

  “What will be that name?” asked Ishtar.

  “Babylon,” said Gilgamesh. “Gate of the Gods.”

  Ishtar mused, “Mighty Gilgamesh, potentate and god.”

  “Gilgamesh is dead,” he replied, looking out upon the distant funeral by the riverbed. “I am reborn, as you once were from Sheol.”

  Gilgamesh remembered the word that Noah had warned him of becoming and embraced it deep in his soul with consuming rage.

  That word would become his name.

  He said with slow burning pause…

  “I am Nimrod.

  I am Rebel.

  I am Empire.”

  Epilogue

  Leviathan swam through the waters of the Abyss toward its destination. Its seven heads pointed in earnest, its body wriggling and twisting in perfect synchronization to maximize its speed. It moved like one colossal muscle of power and destruction. It retained the magic plant in one of its mouths that it had taken from the swimming demigod in the water. It had not eaten the plant. It did not need it. But something else did.

  It journeyed up an underwater cavern to a small lake opening not too far inland from the gulf of the Southern Sea. It knew the exact location and had been waiting for the moment to be able to accomplish its goal.

  It came throu
gh an opening into the small lake that was created by breaking through to the water table. It glided along the bottom looking for its object.

  And then it found it. A huge skeleton of rotted flesh with skull and teeth sticking out of the rock sediment at the bottom.

  Leviathan with its cunning intelligence knew exactly what it had to do. It placed the magic plant into the jaws of the great skeletal carcass and pushed the jaws shut, grinding the plant into its mouth.

  Leviathan swam in slow circles around the skeleton, waiting.

  Suddenly, the huge skeleton shuddered.

  Its flesh began to regenerate, its organs recompose.

  It was coming back to life from the dead.

  As it filled out its musculature with new flesh, it convulsed in a spasm that broke it free from the sediment, a broken body hanging limp in the water.

  But more muscle, and more skin and more armored scales reconstituted on this enormous creature of the deep. It was larger than Leviathan and more monstrous in its bulk and muscle. Its thorny spines and hardened scales were almost impenetrable.

  And finally, its brain and spine connected with functioning and it shivered as if hit by lightning. It opened its eyes. Its immense jaws yawned with hunger and the creature shook its tail to move.

  It was swimming.

  It was alive.

  It was reborn to chaos.

  Up above the small lake, the citizens of Uruk went about their business, unaware of the resurrection that had just taken place in their flooded clay pits.

  And they would never know because the two dragons of the deep left through the cavernous hole that led back down into the Abyss.

  And they were free again to rule the waters together. Free to wreak havoc and destruction in the cosmos.

  They were Rahab and Leviathan.

  Chronicles of the Nephilim continues with the next book, Abraham Allegiant.

  Appendix

  Gilgamesh and the Bible

  The Biblical fantasy novel Gilgamesh Immortal is a retelling of the ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. This narrative of the heroic journey of its protagonist, is a myth imagined around a supposedly historical figure, King Gilgamesh of Uruk, the fourth king of the first Dynasty of Uruk. His name is mentioned in an ancient Sumerian King List as reigning after “the flood swept over” the land, and scholars place him in the third millennium B.C. But the truth is, even this is not sure, and nothing much is known about this great hero except what we have in the epic, which was first uncovered in 1849 by Austen Henry Layard in the library of Ashurbanipal at the excavations at Nineveh in modern Iraq.

  Since that time, many other older fragments have been discovered in other locations around the Middle East that seem to indicate that the epic had been pieced together and rewritten from much earlier unconnected individual Gilgamesh episodes from Sumer. Jeffrey Tigay documented this editorial process from the extant clay tablets in The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic.[1] Tzvi Abusch concluded that at least three major versions of the epic can be documented as retellings of the story that embody the social, political, and religious concerns of the ever-changing national identity of Babylonia, from the older heroic age of individualistic kings into the more “civilized” existence of the state-governed city.[2]

  Gilgamesh Immortal was drawn from the various versions of the epic narrative as well as the original Sumerian Gilgamesh episodes now found in several published editions of the poem.[3] Upon first blush, some readers may question a novel about a non-Biblical character in a saga of Biblical heroes. But patient reading yields a powerful revelation of interconnectedness of these ancient Near Eastern narratives. When I was researching for the novel, I was amazed at how many elements of the epic fit within the storyline of the Chronicles of the Nephilim, so much so that very little was altered in terms of story structure, characters, and plot of the original Gilgamesh story. Of course, the context and meaning is reinterpreted through the Biblical paradigm, but readers of Gilgamesh Immortal will nevertheless be introduced to a prose edition of the epic poem that is fairly representative of the original plotline.

  The epic is relevant for the primeval history of Genesis because it sets the stage for a lost and rebellious Mesopotamian world in which God chooses his lineage to bring about the promised Seed. The time after the Flood before the Tower of Babel seemed to be a time where God was distant from humanity, “giving up” the pagans who did not honor God “over to their lusts,” “foolish hearts,” and “futile thinking,” to “worship and serve the creature instead of the Creator” (Romans 1). What better way to capture that hiddenness of God than to tell a pagan story that embodies the hiddenness?

  The Gilgamesh epic was a national story that embodied the worldview and spirit of Babylonia which would be the ultimate enemy of God’s chosen seedline. As readers of the novel discover, it depicts the origin of a very important character who embodies that rebellion against God which would ultimately lead to the scattering of the nations and their allotment (“giving over”) to the sovereignty of the rebellious Sons of God (Deut. 32:8-9).

  Death and the Meaning of Life

  The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest extant hero story excavated from ancient archaeological mounds in the Middle East, yet it reads like a modern novel or movie in its story structure and hero’s journey. Moderns fancy themselves as more intellectually sophisticated than ancient man, yet they are often ignorant of the fact that their notions of existential angst and individual identity that they think is the erudite offerings of modern existentialist philosophers like Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Nietzsche, were wrestled with millennia before the chaotic narcissistic spasm of the modern period.

  Gilgamesh is a ruler who is two thirds god, one third human, yet that humanity means he is ultimately mortal. He seeks significance and immortality because of the dread of death and its apparent blanket of meaninglessness on a world without a clear vision of the afterlife. He begins as a godlike oppressive king who lives in debauchery of power, only to discover his equal in the tamed “Wild-Born” Enkidu. He makes a friend of this champion and proceeds to pursue acts of heroism in the killing of Humbaba, the ogre guardian of the cedar forest of the mountain of the gods in Lebanon.

  With the aid of his loyal Enkidu, he brings back the head of the monster with such hubris that he defies the goddess Ishtar’s proposal of marriage. He spurns her promise of deification because he knows it will only lead to slavery in the Netherworld, not glorious immortality. When he overcomes the Bull of Heaven sent by the vengeful Ishtar, he becomes even more filled with pride, until his mighty equal Enkidu is struck dead with sickness from the gods. This brings him face to face with the fact that no matter how heroic or powerful he becomes, he too will die like all men. Death is both the great equalizer and the great destroyer of significance and meaning. The age of heroes does not bring lasting glory after all.

  So he seeks an audience with Utnapishtim the Faraway (Noah), the survivor of the Flood and the only human granted immortality along with his wife, who are now far removed from normal humans in a distant mystical island. Gilgamesh figures he might wrest from Utnapishtim his secret of eternal life from the gods. But when he discovers that death is intrinsic to human existence and the special gift will never be granted to another human being, he returns to his beloved city of Uruk and finds his final fame in building the mighty walls and city, which will continue after he is long dead. In the end, man can only find lasting glory in being a part of something bigger than himself that continues on when he is gone. For Gilgamesh that something bigger is the city-state.

  Gilgamesh’s ruminations of death, meaninglessness, and despair will be familiar to Bible readers in the similar ruminations of another king in the book of Ecclesiastes. Called Qoheleth or “the Preacher,” this king of Jerusalem writes about all of life being a vapor because death destroys all human pursuits. He tells of seeking pleasure, wealth, and wisdom, only to conclude that none of it brings lasting meaning because death turns it all upside down. The
Preacher speaks of enjoying the simple pleasures of life like a wife, good food, and hard work because the pursuit of power and glory is ultimately worthless and defeating, the equivalent of striving after wind.

  A side by side comparison of passages from the Gilgamesh Epic and the book of Ecclesiastes illustrates a profound congruity between the wisdom writings of the Old Testament and Babylonia.

  GILGAMESH EPIC

  ECCLESIASTES

  Do we build a house for ever?

  Do we seal (contracts) for ever?

  Do brothers divide shares for ever?

  Does hatred persist for ever in [the land]?

  Does the river for ever raise up (and) bring on floods? [4]

  There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.

  (Ecclesiastes 1:11)

  A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.

  All streams run to the sea,

  but the sea is not full…

  (Ecclesiastes 1:4–7)

  Since the days of yore there has been no permanence;

  The resting and the dead, how alike they are!

  Do they not compose a picture of death,

  The commoner and the noble, Once they are near to [their fate]?[5]

  For of the wise as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise dies just like the fool!

  (Ecclesiastes 2:16)

  [You,] kept toiling sleepless (and) what did you get?

  You are exhausting [yourself with] ceaseless toil,

  you are filling your sinews with pain,

  bringing nearer the end of your life.

  (Tablet X:297-300)[6]

  And what gain is there to him who toils for the wind? Moreover, all his days he eats in darkness in much vexation and sickness and anger.