It is quite clear that the parallels are minor and relate to what appear in many myths, the giving of wisdom by the gods, the desire for immortality, and the failure to achieve it. There are really no grounds for considering that there is any borrowing between the two stories, except in the sense of a general background of such ideas.

Some have sought to link the name Adam with Adapa, but these attempts have not generally been recognised as successful.

2). Gilgamesh and the Snake

A second myth which is seen as related in part is the story of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh was a Sumerian king who sought immortality. After many adventures he finds Utnapishtim who received immortality as a result of surviving a great flood. Utnapishtim then shows him how he can obtain immortality.

 Then Utnapishtim called out to him,

"Gilgamesh! You laboured much to come here.

How can I reward you for travelling back?

May I share a special secret, one that the gods alone know?

 There is a plant that hides somewhere among the rocks that thirsts and thrusts itself deep in the earth, with thistles that sting.

 That plant contains eternal life for you."

Immediately, Gilgamesh set out in search.

Weighed down carefully, he dove beneath the cold, cold waters and saw the plant.

Although it stung him when he grabbed its leaf, he held it fast as he then slipped off his weights and soared back to the surface.

Then Gilgamesh said this to Urshanabi, the sailor-god:

"Here is the leaf that begins all life worth having.

I am bound now for Uruk, town-so-full-of-shepherds,

and there I'll dare to give this plant to aged men as food

and they will call it life-giving.

 I too intend to eat it

and to be made forever young."

After 10 miles they ate.

After 15 miles they set up camp where Gilgamesh slipped into a pool;

but in the pool, a cruel snake slithered by and stole the plant from Gilgamesh

who saw the snake grow young again, as off it raced with the special, special plant.

Right there and then Gilgamesh began to weep

and, between sobs, said to the sailor-god who held his hand:

 "Why do I bother working for nothing?

Who even notices what I do?

I don't value what I did and now only the snake has won eternal life. In minutes, swift currents will lose forever that special sign that god had left for me."

Parallels with Genesis 2 & 3

There is really very little parallel. Immortality is not offered as such, but is found to be obtainable from a certain stinging plant at the bottom of the sea. Gilgamesh obtains it, but while he is returning home a snake steals it and itself become immortal.

The action of the snake might well be seen as contributing to a general background that sees snakes as causing the loss of immortality, but the snake in Genesis is a far cry from the snake here which only appears fleetingly and is not prominent. (The story itself is but a tiny part of the epic).

Enki and Ninhursag

This myth which is really about how the water god links with the earth goddess and her daughters to produce fruitfulness, mentions painless birth (for the goddess), contains a description of the Sumerian ‘paradise’ called Dilmun, and mentions a ‘lady of the rib’, who results from the restoration of Enki when he is ill. Dilmun is described as a place of plenteous waters (supplied by Enki) -

“After Time had come into being and the holy seasons for growth and rest were finally known, holy Dilmun, the pure, clean and bright land of the living, the garden of the great gods, the divine Paradise, was the place where Ninhursag-Ki, the Earth Mother, Most Exalted Lady and Supreme Queen, could be found. There she lived for a season during the Wheel of the Year, when the Earth lay deep in slumber and rested before the onset of Spring, in the land that knew neither sickness, nor death, nor old age, where the raven uttered no cry, where lions and wolves killed not, and unknown were the sorrows of a widow or the wailing of the sick. And it was in Dilmun, at that time that Enki, the wise god of Magic and the Sweet Waters, the Patron of Crafts and Skills, met, fell in love and lay with the Lady of the Stony Earth, Ninhursag-Ki.

The Earth Mother's kiss did change the carefree and sensual Sweet Waters Lord, for Ninhursag had wholly captivated him through the most profound of all bonds, the thread of enchantment, passion and daring called Love. So profound the feeling was, that the god of all Sweet Waters, Magic and Crafts proposed to Ninhursag, with the enthusiasm of a young lover's heart.

Ninhursag looked around the land, her stony body, and remembered the taste of the wondrous moisture of the Sweet Waters God within herself. She wondered whether the land should not feel the same loving touch without. She said then to Enki:

' I heard your heart speak, Enki dearest. But if I feel your wondrous moisture within me, I look at the earth of Dilmun, also my body, and feel its longing, the thirst for the gifts that you, dear heart, for sure can bring. Thus I ask you, what is a land, what is a city, that has no river quay? A city that has no ponds of sweet water?'

Taken by surprise, Enki realised that indeed he had given his whole essence to the beloved, but forgotten to look after her Earthly Body, the land. He then rose to the challenge of providing water for the land speedily. He told Ninhursag:

' For Dilmun, the land of my lady's heart, I will create long waterways, rivers and canals, whereby water will flow to quench the thirst of all beings and bring abundance to all that lives.'

Enki then summoned Utu, the Sun God and Light of the Day. Together, they brought water from the depths of the earth and watered the ground thoroughly. Then Enki and Utu created waterways to surround the land with a never-ending source of fertile sweet waters, and Enki also devised basins and cisterns to store the waters for further needs. From these fertile sweet waters flow the great rivers of the world. Thus, from that moment on, Dilmun was blessed by Enki with everlasting agricultural and trade superiority, for through its waterways and quays, fruits and grains were sold and exchanged by the people of Dilmun and beyond.

Ninhursag rejoiced in Enki's mighty prowess and said to him:

' Beloved, the powerful touch of your sweet waters, the essence of Mother Nammu that lies deep within you, transformed the land, my stony body. I feel the power of life throbbing within to be revealed without my very depths as I give joyously birth and sustenance to the marshes and reed-beds, that from now on will shelter fish, plant, beasts and all that breathes. Thus I call myself Nintur, the lady who gives birth, the Womb of the Damp Lands by the riverbanks.'

The myth goes on to describe how she produces a daughter painlessly, and how she becomes angry when Enki makes love first to her daughter, and then to her resulting granddaughter (these both represent vegetation that needs watering).

However when he does the same to Uttu, her great granddaughter, and Uttu appeals to Ninhursag for help, Ninhursag takes the seed implanted in Uttu by Enki and buries it, with the result that eight luscious plants grow. Along comes Enki and seeing the plants, wants to eat them, and proceeds to do so. This infuriates Ninhursag who walks out on him. He is then struck with a strange illness that infects eight parts of his body, including jaw, tooth, mouth, throat, limbs and rib. Ninhursag returns as the only one who can heal him and takes into her body (as mother earth) the hurt parts and produces out of them gods and goddesses. Each one is named as it is produced and the last one produced from the rib is the lady of the rib (which can also mean ‘the lady who makes live’ i.e. who makes Enki live).

Once Enki is well again their love affair continues.

Comparisons with Genesis 2 & 3 (as suggested by S. Kramer, the Sumerian scholar, words in brackets ours).

1). The idea of a divine paradise, the garden of gods, was known by the Sumerians, who depicted it as Dilmun, the land of immortals situated in southwestern Persia. It is in the same Dilmun that, later, the Babylonians, the Semitic people who conquered the Sumerians, located their home of the immortals. There is a good indication that the Biblical paradise, which is described as a garden planted eastward in Eden, from whose waters flow the four world rivers including the Tigris and the Euphrates, may have been originally identical with Dilmun. (We would assume that if the story of an earthly ‘paradise’ was true, such stories would be found in different forms in other countries. We would therefore not dispute that the same idea is to some extent in mind. However, Dilmun is far removed from the Garden of Eden. The latter is home to two human beings, the former originally to gods and goddesses, and then to a multitude of people. In the case of Dilmun the motif is the conjoining of land (Ninhursag) and water (Enki) to produce a fruitful combination. But Dilmun is a Paradise before then. This is simply something extra to relieve Ninhursag’s ‘stoniness’. The aim is to demonstrate how earthly fruitfulness depends on the activities of the gods. This is all a far cry from the Garden of Eden).

2). The watering of Dilmun by Enki and the Sun god Utu with fresh water brought up from the earth is suggestive of the Biblical phrase, ‘But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground' (Genesis 2:6). (As the story of Dilmun originated in Mesopotamia we would expect the land to be fed from water sources related to the ground rather than rain. Where else would the water come from? But again we would expect such similarities of idea if Genesis is true, and the similarity is really inevitable as the background to Eden is Mesopotamia).

3). The birth of goddesses without pain or travail illuminates the background of the curse against Eve, that it would be her lot to conceive and bear children in sorrow. (No woman would agree that this was an unusual motif. The dream of painless birth is one that women have held for millenniums. Again we would expect that gods and goddesses would have painless births. But this is never drawn attention to in Eden except by inference from Eve’s punishment).

4). Enki's greed to eat the eight sacred plants which gave birth to the Vegetal World resonates the eating of the Forbidden Fruit by Adam and Eve. (But man’s greed is proverbial and occurs constantly in mythology. Enki ate them because they were novel and desirable, as would indeed be any food which tempted anyone. There was no suggestion that they were ‘forbidden’ by the gods or would give anything extra, and they were eaten by a god for his own pleasure. Ninhursag is angry because having ‘tasted’ her daughters he now eats her plants. Hardly the same motif).

5). Most remarkably, this myth provides an explanation for one of the most puzzling motifs in the Biblical paradise story - the famous passage describing the fashioning of Eve, the mother of all living, from the rib of Adam. Why a rib instead of another organ to fashion the woman whose name Eve means according to the Bible, 'she who makes live'? (As we show in the commentary, the rib idea is introduced much later by exegetes. The Hebrew is simply a word that means ‘side’, and never elsewhere means ‘rib’ in the Old Testament. Thus the coincidence now described disappears).

If we look at the Sumerian myth, we see that when Enki gets ill, cursed by Ninhursag, one of his body parts that start dying is the rib. The Sumerian word for rib is 'ti' . To heal each of Enki's dying body parts, Ninhursag gives birth to eight gods and goddesses. The goddess created for the healing of Enki's rib is called 'Nin-ti', 'the lady of the rib'. But the Sumerian word 'ti' also means 'to make live'. The name 'Nin-ti' may therefore mean 'the lady who makes live' as well as 'the lady of the rib'. Thus, a very ancient literary pun was carried over and perpetuated in the Bible, but without its original meaning, because the Hebrew word for 'rib' and that for 'who makes live' have nothing in common. Moreover, it is Ninhursag who gives her life essence to heal Enki, who is then reborn from her (Kramer, 1981:143-144). (But the goddess Ninhursag herself also calls herself earlier ‘the lady who gives birth’ - she is the earth goddess, although what she gives birth to is vegetation. It is thus her, and not ‘Nin-ti’ that the story describes in these terms. And Enki is not said to be reborn by Nin-ti. Nin-ti is only seen as ‘the lady who makes live’ because she is the last of the diseased organs to be removed, so that as a consequence of her removal and ‘creation’ the god Enki will now live. Thus she heals not brings to birth. This is nothing like the significance in Genesis 3. And it is accepted that would not even be a strict parallel, for ‘Eve’ does not remotely mean ‘rib’. Indeed once we have disposed of the so-called coincidence of the rib nothing really remains to be argued. The truth is that in Genesis there was no rib, and it is clear in the above story that the rib was only one of a number of parts detailed. It is by no means of primary importance. Had there not been a desire to parallel with Genesis it would never have been specially noticed. So it would appear to us that, while, as we would expect if the Genesis account is true, the Sumerian story contains aspects which partly parallel Genesis, they are the kind of parallels we would expect in such circumstances, given the nature of the sources of fruitfulness (water) universally recognised. Both stories contain features that reflect what men would see as the ‘ideal’. That is what we would expect when depicting ‘Paradise’. But there are no parallels which make us say, one of these stories is dependent in any way on the other).

4). Seals depicting a man, a woman, and a serpent have been found at Tepe Gawra, north of Nineveh, and at Nineveh itself - the latter showing a tree also. Both a man and a woman (not just the woman) were seated on either side of the tree in the presence of the upright serpent, but the man and the woman were both clothed, whereas in Eden they were unashamedly naked. It is, of course, possible that they are related to a story about the fall of man, but if so no remotely related myth has been discovered. However there may be no connection whatsoever. Other motifs actually present themselves from the ancient literature. Even if there were such myths, unless they were remarkably similar, all they would demonstrate is that there was a knowledge outside Israel of an ancient story of the Fall, which would not be completely surprising if the Fall occurred.

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THE PENTATEUCH

GENESIS ---EXODUS--- LEVITICUS 1.1-7.38 --- 8.1-11.47 --- 12.1-16.34--- 17.1-27.34--- NUMBERS 1-10--- 11-19--- 20-36--- DEUTERONOMY 1.1-4.44 --- 4.45-11.32 --- 12.1-29.1--- 29.2-34.12 --- THE BOOK OF JOSHUA --- THE BOOK OF JUDGES --- PSALMS 1-17--- ECCLESIASTES --- ISAIAH 1-5 --- 6-12 --- 13-23 --- 24-27 --- 28-35 --- 36-39 --- 40-48 --- 49-55--- 56-66--- EZEKIEL --- DANIEL 1-7 ---DANIEL 8-12 ---

NAHUM--- HABAKKUK---ZEPHANIAH ---ZECHARIAH --- THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW ---THE GOSPEL OF MARK--- THE GOSPEL OF LUKE --- THE GOSPEL OF JOHN --- THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES --- 1 CORINTHIANS 1-7 --- 8-16 --- 2 CORINTHIANS 1-7 --- 8-13 -- -GALATIANS --- EPHESIANS --- COLOSSIANS --- 1 THESSALONIANS --- 2 THESSALONIANS --- 1 TIMOTHY --- 2 TIMOTHY --- TITUS --- HEBREWS 1-6 --- 7-10 --- 11-13 --- JAMES --- JOHN'S LETTERS --- REVELATION

--- THE GOSPELS

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