Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story by Worthington, Martin;

Short description:

This volume opens up new perspectives on Babylonian and Assyrian literature, through the lens of a pivotal passage in the Gilgamesh Flood story. It shows how, using a nine-line message where not all was as it seemed, the god Ea inveigled humans into building the Ark.

Long description:

This volume opens up new perspectives on Babylonian and Assyrian literature, through the lens of a pivotal passage in the Gilgamesh Flood story. It shows how, using a nine-line message where not all was as it seemed, the god Ea inveigled humans into building the Ark. 　

The volume argues that Ea used a ‘bitextual’ message: one which can be understood in different ways that sound the same.  His message thus emerges as an ambivalent oracle in the tradition of ‘folktale prophecy’. The argument is supported by interlocking investigations of lexicography, divination, diet, figurines, social history, and religion. There are also extended discussions of Babylonian word play and ancient literary interpretation. Besides arguing for Ea’s duplicity, the book explores its implications – for narrative sophistication in Gilgamesh, for audiences and performance of the poem, and for the relation of the Gilgamesh Flood story to the versions in Atra-hasīs, the Hellenistic historian Berossos, and the Biblical Book of Genesis.

Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story will interest Assyriologists, Hebrew Bible scholars and Classicists, but also students and researchers in all areas concerned with Gilgamesh, word-play, oracles, and traditions about the Flood.

"Worthington’s Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story is an outstanding book. It is extraordinarily well researched, superbly written, and thought provoking. The new approach brought forth by Worthington has tremendous potential for furthering the study of Mesopotamian literature. I cannot emphasize enough how engaging Worthington’s prose is, something which we do not see often in studies on the ancient Near East." - Alhena Gadotti, Journal of Near Eastern Studies

"Ea’s Duplicity is surely the most detailed, intense, penetrating, interesting, erudite, and imaginative critical engagement with a swatch of cuneiform literature thus far offered, so cast as to be accessible to any willing reader, even one straying in from outside the narrow pale of Assyriology. It will amply repay that reader’s no less intense engagement with the author’s steady flow of questions, compelling logic and exposition, and his vast treasury of information and association. No one who savors the arguments put forth so elegantly in this book will read the Flood Story again without thinking about what Worthington has to say about it." - Benjamin Foster, Journal of the American Oriental Society

"Worthington’s Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story certainly considers nine lines from tablet XI of the best known epic from Mesopotamia, this passage forms the microcosmic core of a macrocosmic exploration of a world of Assyrian and Babylonian literature, prophecy, historiography, and ancient wisdom. Worthington unfurls new and hidden meanings in his passage from tablet XI, but to do so he takes a winding road, inviting the reader on a dizzying journey involving storm-demons, competing translations, species of ancient grains, and much more." - Review of Biblical Literature

"Worthington offers profitable insights into the Gilgamesh Flood Story[...] The complexities of his research will challenge and divide Assyriologists just as, as he claims, Uta-napishti may have been divisive to ancient audiences!" - Alan Millard, Strata

"[this book] is of primary use to scholars in Assyriology and Classical studies, and it will also be of interest to those studying the flood story in the Hebrew Bible ... meticulous... the author is to be commended for his mastery of Akkadian, Arabic, Hebrew, French, German and Italian." - Rebecca Huskey, Classical Journal 

"In Martin Worthington’s study of Gilgamesh, the delight is in the details... [He] makes a compelling case that ancient scholars could and did produce interpretations that were as complex, detail-oriented, and individually varied as those of modern scholars... The book proceeds as a sequence of tightly reasoned, clearly formulated arguments, but its theme is the ultimate elusiveness of Ea, the god of wisdom and water; and as we are reminded in the book’s epigraph, a quotation from Thorkild Jacobsen: “the ways of water are devious”. It is this productive tension between form and content, between the solid and the fluid, that make Ea’s Duplicity such a delightful contribution to the scholarship on Gilgamesh." - Sophus Helle, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

Table of Contents:

Preface; Acknowledgments; Copyright credits; Abbreviations; Conventions  PART I – Preliminaries; 1 Introduction; 2 ‘Interrogating’ Babylonian narrative poetry; 3 ‘Identifying’ puns; 4 The high concentration of puns in the Gilgameš Flood story; PART II – Dissecting Ea’s message; 5 The lines about the Flood hero; 6 Raining ‘plenty’: ušaznanakkunūši nuhšam-ma; 7 The birds: [hiṣib] iṣṣūrāti; 8 The fish: puzur nūnī; 9 The harvest: [...] mešrâ ebūram-ma; 10 ‘Cakes at dawn’: ina šēr(-)kukkī; 11 ‘In the evening’: ina līlâti; 12 The ‘rain of wheat’: šamût kibāti; 13 Recapitulation; 14 Issues of textual history; 15 Meaning and performance; PART III – Conspicuous silences in the Gilgameš Flood story; 16 Outlining the problems; 17 Does Atra–hasīs ‘fill in the gaps’?; 18 Communications between Ea and the Flood hero; 19 Communication between the Flood hero and the people of Šuruppak; 20 Ea’s elusiveness; 21 The enigma of Uta–napišti; 22 Why the ‘gaps’?; PART IV – Other interconnections; 23 Ea’s duplicity and Babylonian/Assyrian divination; 24 Beyond Cuneiform; 25 Conclusions; References; Alphabetical index; Index locurum