Book Information
Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse
David Ferry
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
Copyright 1992
ISBN: 978-0-374-52383-1
When we last left the Epic of Gilgamesh in Episode ii, Enkidu, the wild man, had just been created by the mother goddess Aruru. In the process of learning more about Enkidu, we begin to suspect that the story might not have a reliable narrator. In fact, one wonders if Gilgamesh himself is the narrator. Recall in Episode i, the poem’s opening lines:
“of him who knew the most of all men know;
who made the journey; heartbroken; reconciled;” (Ferry 3)
Gilgamesh is supposed to be all-knowing. Yet, we learn that he is not. When Enkidu is created, his loyalty lies with the animals with whom he lives. He is not yet human in thought or behavior. Yet he is clever enough to realize that his animal friends are being hunted and trapped. He craftily discharges the traps and fills the hunter’s pits before they can capture anything. The hunter, unsure what to do at the loss of his livelihood, goes to his father. His father devises a solution. Go to King Gilgamesh and tell him about the strong and wild man. Ask Gilgamesh to send a prostitute from the Temple of Ishtar back to the grasslands with you. The prostitute will entice Enkidu to have sex with her. The animals will watch and realize that Enkidu is a man and not an animal. But when the hunter visits Gilgamesh, we are told that the King devised the plan. The hunter’s father is given no credit, yet we know the truth. Gilgamesh, the “all-knowing” is no wiser than a hunter’s father.
Long before the writings of J in the Book of Genesis, Mesopotamian literature suggested that sexuality, or the awareness of it, changed human beings, just like it changed Adam and Eve:
“…And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” (Carroll 3)
After Enkidu spends seven nights having sex with the prostitute Shamhat, “everything was changed”. “But in the mind of the wild man, there was beginning a new understanding.” (Ferry 8) Shamhat is one of the wisest and most mature characters in the Epic of Gilgamesh. She entices Enkidu, becomes his confidant, and teaches him lessons about humanity. “It should be remembered that prostitutes were sacred to Ishtar. Enkidu and Shamhat make love for six days and seven nights until Enkidu has been humanized, told about Gilgamesh, and deprived of some of his purely animal nature. The reader here can hardly avoid a fleeting vision of the story of Samson and Delilah.” (Leeming, 151) Here we have another example of an ancient Mesopotamian story that later influenced the Biblical writers in which a woman depletes the strength of a man through her sexuality. From the Book of Judges, Chapter 16:
“And [Delilah] said unto him, How canst thou say, I love thee, when thine heart is not with me? thou hast mocked me these three times, and hast not told me wherein thy great strength lieth. And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death; That he told her all his heart, and said unto her, There hath not come a razor upon mine head; for I have been a Nazarite unto God from my mother’s womb; if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall become weak, and be like any other man … And she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head; and she began to afflict him, and his strength went from him.” (Carroll 317)
According to David Leeming in the Oxford Companion to World Mythology, the femme fatale is a common device in literature. “In the heroic monomyth, the questor-hero is confronted by various barriers to the achievement of the sacred goal. Monsters can represent various human distortions… The femme fatale – the female enchantress – can also stand in the way of the male hero’s quest, providing an immediate goal that distracts the protagonist from the sacred one.” (Leeming 133)
I do not agree that Shamhat is a femme fatale in the traditional sense. She is one of the few likable characters in the story. The only way the femme fatale device works would be for Enkidu to have been created for no other purpose than to exist. Yet, as we shall see, Enkidu was created for a specific purpose – to tame the Wild Ox King. His destiny is not his own and therefore, his loss of animalistic power and eventual demise cannot be pinned on Shamhat.
We leave Enkidu as he and Shamhat head toward Uruk and his fateful meeting with Gilgamesh. Shamhat tells Enkidu of the King, his strength, and his wicked behavior. Enkidu is eager to meet and challenge him. His motives are at cross-purposes. He claims that he wants Gilgamesh’s companionship yet at the same time wants to fight him. We will learn in the next episode which of these two motives wins out.
Bibliography
Carroll, Robert and Prickett, Stephen. The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Ferry, David. Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992.
Leeming, David. The Oxford Companion to World Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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