When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David

1. On the dates of the earliest forms of the Gilgamesh and David stories that have come down to us, see my discussions in chapter 2 with regard to the Gilgamesh traditions and in chapter 6 with regard to the David materials.

2. See, for example, Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, pp. 75–87.

3. As in n. 1 above, see, on the dates of the final and most elaborate versions of the Gilgamesh and David stories, my discussions in chapter 2 with regard to the Gilgamesh traditions and in chapter 6 with regard to the David materials.

4. The description of Gilgamesh as the “greatest among kings” is found in Tablet I, line 27, of the Standard or Late version of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (the version standardized by the mid first millennium BCE). The line number here is taken, as are line numbers from the Standard or Late version cited elsewhere in this volume, from Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh. The translation is my own, as are the translations of ancient Near Eastern texts found throughout unless otherwise noted. As is conventional in Assyriological scholarship, brackets in the translations of some of the Mesopotamian materials mark gaps in (and, in some cases, proposed restorations to) the original text; parentheses in these translations typically mark annotations I (or in some cases, other translators) have added. Brackets and parentheses are also used in this way in my occasional translations of Canaanite texts. In translations of biblical materials, however, brackets typically mark my (or others’) annotations.

5. For the biblical descriptions of David killing tens of thousands of ancient Israel’s enemies as opposed to King Saul’s thousands, see 1 Sam 18:7, 21:11, 29:5; for the descriptions of David’s prowess against Aramaean troops, see 2 Sam 8:3–5; for the story of David’s defeat of the Philistine champion Goliath, see 1 Sam 17:1–58.

6. Jackson, The Hero and the King; this reference brought to my attention by Neal Walls, personal communication.

1. The card was produced by Robert Lentz and published in 1995 by Bay Area Dignity. “Dignity,” in the words of the Roman Catholic priest Daniel J. Helminiak, who has worked with several of its chapters, “is a support group for lesbian, gay, bisexual Catholics and their friends”; see Helminiak, What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality, p. 11.

2. The card does not identify the source of this quotation, but it is taken from the Jerusalem Bible translation of 2 Sam 1:26.

3. The fight for same-sex civil unions in Vermont first emerged in the public arena in 1997, when a suit arguing for same-sex couples’ right to marry was heard in Vermont’s Chittenden County Superior Court. That court’s negative decision was subsequently appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court, which in December 1999 issued a ruling overturning the lower court’s decision and requiring the Vermont legislature to create a system that provided the benefits and protections of marriage to same-sex couples. The Vermont legislature held several months of hearings in early 2000 in order to craft such a system before Vermont’s then-governor, Howard Dean, signed the civil unions bill into law on April 26, 2000. It took effect on July 1 of that same year.

5. Weeks, Coming Out, p. 2; these quotes brought to my attention by Jagose, Queer Theory, p. 16.

6. This definition is taken from Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, p. 16.

7. Paraphrased from Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, p. 86; Bray’s quote brought to my attention by Jagose, Queer Theory, p. 12.

8. The social constructionist bibliography is vast. In my own thinking I have been particularly guided by the following works: Butler, Gender Trouble; D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities; D’Emilio, “Gay History: A New Field of Study” and “Making and Unmaking Minorities: The Tensions Between Gay History and Politics,” in Making Trouble, pp. 96–113, 181–190; Dinshaw, “Introduction: Touching on the Past,” in Getting Medieval, pp. 1–54; Halperin, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality”; Halperin, “‘Homosexuality’: A Cultural Construct”; Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin, “Introduction,” in Before Sexuality, pp. 3–20; Jagose, Queer Theory, pp. 7–21; Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality, pp. 1–55; Padgug, “Sexual Matters,” pp. 3–23; Stein, Uncovering Desire; Stein, Forms of Desire; Weeks, Coming Out; Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents; Winkler, Constraints of Desire. Like almost all of these scholars, moreover, I owe an enormous debt to Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction.

9. As pointed out by Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, p. 15; Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality, p. 10. Cf., however, Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, p. 42, n. 4, who cites a reference to “homosexual instincts” in Symonds, Problem in Modern Ethics (privately printed in England in 1891), as the earliest use of the term homosexual in English.

10. The earliest use of the term homosexual in an American publication is also in 1892, by Kiernan, “Responsibility in Sexual Perversion,” p. 198, citing Chaddock’s translation of Krafft-Ebing. See Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, p. 155, n. 1; Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality, pp. 19–21.

11. Herzer, “Ein Brief von Kertbeny,” pp. 28, 33; Feray and Herzer, “Homosexual Studies and Politics,” p. 29. As Herzer points out (“Kertbeny and the Nameless Love,” p. 16), Kertbeny’s original terminology has changed somewhat in the modern German lexicon, as in German today, Kertbeny’s nouns Homosexual and Heterosexual have been replaced by Homosexuelle and Heterosexuelle.

12. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, p. 155, n. 2; Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality, p. 53; Moore, God’s Beauty Parlor, p. 16; and, most thoroughly, Herzer, “Kertbeny and the Nameless Love,” pp. 1–26.

14. “The Debut of the Heterosexual” is the title of chapter 2 in Katz’s Invention of Heterosexuality.

15. This example evoked by Boswell, “Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories,” p. 96.

17. On the religions, versus religion, of ancient Israel, see Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel, pp. 14–15.

18. A similar point is made by Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, p. 11; see also Boswell, “Categories, Experience and Sexuality,” pp. 142–143, on the lack of a word for religion in ancient Rome, despite the fact that it seems obvious to scholars that we can speak of such a phenomenon.

23. Halperin describes his own position as “close to that of the constructionists” and not necessarily as full-blown social constructionism (One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, p. 42). Nevertheless, his position is close enough that I feel, for my purposes here, it is reasonable to place him under the larger social constructionism rubric.

25. Chauncey, “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality,” pp. 116, 117–122, as cited in Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, pp. 15–16.

30. Ibid., p. 121; this quote brought to my attention by Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality, p. 47.

31. Data from the Greek world are central in Foucault’s analysis (see especially History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure); they are in addition crucial to the arguments of Nussbaum, “Therapeutic Arguments”; Padgug, “Sexual Matters,” pp. 3–4, 13, 16.

33. Plato, as quoted in Waetjen, “Same-Sex Sexual Relations in Antiquity,” p. 107.

37. This conceptualization of sex as an act of use in the Greco-Roman world is particularly well described by Fredrickson, “Natural and Unnatural Use in Romans 1:24–27,” pp. 200–205.

46. Although he considers only studies that examine Romans 1 and its attitudes toward same-sex erotic and sexual interactions, Martin, “Heterosexism and the Interpretation of Romans 1:18–32,” pp. 349–350, reaches a similar conclusion in describing how the “modern logic [of sexuality] … rules virtually every current discussion [of Romans 1], including those by people priding themselves on being ‘true to the Bible.’”

47. The number of works written prior to 1980 that consider the Bible’s attitudes toward same-sex erotic and sexual interactions is relatively small. Most significant is Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, whose initial focus is the Bible, although, as his book’s title implies, he considers as well the nearly two thousand years of the postbiblical period. Two other “history of homosexuality” books from the 1970s also devote some space to biblical analysis: Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, and Vanggaard, Phallos. The only other major pre-1980 studies that consider the Bible of which I am aware are Atkinson, Homosexuals in the Christian Fellowship; Bahnsen, Homosexuality: A Biblical View; Horner, Jonathan Loved David; Jones, Toward a Christian Understanding of the Homosexual; and McNeill, The Church and the Homosexual, especially pp. 37–66. Important articles published before 1980 include: Bartlett, “A Biblical Perspective on Homosexuality”; Furnish, “Homosexuality,” in The Moral Teaching of Paul, pp. 52–83 (republished in a revised edition of this book in 1985, pp. 52–82); and Pope, “Homosexuality.” It is also appropriate to mention here a book published the same year as Boswell’s, Coleman, Christian Attitudes to Homosexuality, and to note as well three pre-1980s studies in German that are cited by Brooten in the bibliography of her Love Between Women, pp. 368–370: Kähler, “Exegese zweier neutestamentlicher Stellen”; Ridderbos, “Bibel und Homosexualität”; and van de Spijker, Die gleichgeschlechtliche Zuneigung.

48. Although the terms social constructionist and essentialist are commonly used in the debate being discussed here, Boswell himself rightly rejects the epithet essentialist as one not of his making, nor of the making of his intellectual allies. Rather, as he points out, the term was coined by the social constructionists and used as what even Halperin admits is “a retroactive and pejorative label” to denigrate a position the constructionists oppose (Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, p. 168, n. 1). See Boswell, “Gay History,” p. 74; Boswell, “Postscript” to “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories,” p. 35; Boswell, “Concepts, Experience, and Sexuality,” pp. 67–68; Boswell, “Categories, Experience and Sexuality,” pp. 133–134. Boswell himself prefers the terms nominalists and realists, nominalists being those who regard categories like homosexual and heterosexual as “arbitrary conventions, simply names for things which have categorical force because humans agree to use them in certain ways,” and realists considering “categories to be the footprints of reality (‘universals’) [that] exist because humans perceive a real order in the universe and name it.” Boswell, “Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories,” p. 91.

49. In Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality Boswell carefully differentiates between the terms gay, which he defines as “a person who prefers erotic contact with his or her own gender” (Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, p. 41), and homosexual. His objections to the latter term, if I read him correctly, are primarily literalistic: the most obvious literal meaning of the artificially constructed term homosexual (with its Greek prefix and Latin root) is, he argues, “of one sex,” which, according to Boswell, may well describe a certain kind of sexual act performed by two persons of the same sex, but hardly describes the kind of person who might perform these acts and even less so the sort of person who “dreams of committing the act but never realizes the ambition” (Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, p. 41). For Boswell, then, homosexual can function as an adjective, and thus he can speak of a “homosexual marriage” or even elliptically of a “homosexual person,” as in a person “of predominantly homosexual erotic interest” (Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, p. 44). But, because of its ambiguities, homosexual cannot serve as a noun that seeks to distinguish “who is and who is not” (Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, p. 43). The term gay, Boswell suggests by way of contrast, is more precise with regard to the “who is and who is not” question in that it describes persons “who are conscious of erotic preference for their own gender,” the key qualifier here seemingly being conscious, which, in Boswell’s words, makes “the category one which is principally self-assigned” (Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, p. 43).

My own sense, however, is that Boswell’s insistence on conscious erotic preference potentially hamstrings his work as a historian, since the historian will more often than not have little or no access to the consciousness of his or her subjects. Yet Boswell elsewhere makes clear that it is these individual subjects whom he thinks are properly studied as part of the enterprise of “gay history”: “city-states of the ancient world did not, for the most part, discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, and, as societies, appear to have been blind to the issue of sexual object choice, but it is not clear that individuals were unaware of distinctions in that matter” (“Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories,” p. 98). I would also argue that whatever the literalistic meaning of homosexual as “of one sex,” the term is typically understood to have a much broader meaning, as in Nissinen’s definition of homosexuals that I quoted earlier (individuals who have “most of [their] erotic needs met in interactions with persons of the same sex”; Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, p. 16). Indeed, Boswell, according to his 1988 “Postscript” to “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories,” p. 35, seems to come to exactly this realization, writing:

I would now define ‘gay persons’ more simply as those whose erotic interest is predominantly directed towards their own gender (i.e., regardless of how conscious they are of this as a distinguishing characteristic). This is the sense in which, I believe, it is used by most American speakers, and … when communicating with the public it seems to me counterproductive to use common words in senses different from or opposed to their ordinary meanings.

Yet cf. Boswell in “Jews, Bicycle Riders, and Gay People,” p. 206, n. 2, which appeared in the year after the 1988 “Postscript” to “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories.” In this article Boswell, as in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, insists on differentiating between the terms gay people and homosexual, the latter being “applicable to acts independent of erotic inclination” and the former being applicable to all persons “sexually attracted to their own gender,” even if those persons “do not engage in sexual activity.”

At best, it seems that one would have to say Boswell’s ideas regarding terminology remained fluid during the decade after Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality was published, which suggests, by extension, that the terms gay and homosexual themselves are used with a certain fluidity in his writings. See further the comments of Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 29, who argues that, at least in Boswell’s 1982–83 essay “Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories,” homosexuality and gayness seem to mean the same thing.

54. See Boswell, “Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories,” passim; Boswell, “Gay History,” especially pp. 74–75; Boswell, the 1988 “Postscript” to “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories,” pp. 34–36. A fundamentally essentialist position is also presumed, although not argued for, in Boswell’s “Jews, Bicycle Riders, and Gay People,” pp. 205–228. See as well the last work Boswell published before his untimely death, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, in which Boswell, although he backs down somewhat from his earlier essentialist language (for example, by substituting the presumably more neutral phrase same-sex union for, say, gay marriage), nevertheless “signals an unwillingness to accommodate the questions posed by theorists of social construction” (Cadden, “Review of Boswell,” p. 695). Note the similarly trenchant analysis of Boswell’s fundamental essentialism, despite his own partial disclaimers, in Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, pp. 30–31.

55. This is Boswell’s characterization of what he calls the realist (here essentialist) position (see further above, n. 48), in “Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories,” p. 92.

56. Some recent commentaries have challenged the traditional interpretation that understands Rom 1:18–32 as addressing the “failure of the Gentiles,” arguing instead that Paul’s topic is humanity more generally. For discussion, see Brooten, Love Between Women, pp. 204–206; Martin, “Heterosexism and the Interpretation of Romans 1:18–32,” pp. 333–339; Stowers, A Rereading of Romans, pp. 83–125.

57. The most comprehensive discussion of the terms natural and unnatural is that of Brooten, Love Between Women, pp. 215–302; see as well Martin, “Heterosexism and the Interpretation of Romans 1:18–32,” pp. 339–349. Note also Brooten’s “Select Annotated Bibliography on Romans 1:26f and the New Testament and Homosexuality Generally,” in Love Between Women, pp. 363–372, for a survey of various scholarly positions on Rom 1:26–27, to which should be added the following materials published subsequent to Brooten’s book: Blount, “Reading and Understanding the New Testament on Homosexuality”; Fredrickson, “Natural and Unnatural Use in Romans 1:24–27”; Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice, pp. 229–303; Jewett, “The Social Context and Implications of Homoerotic References in Romans 1:24–27”; Mauser, “Creation and Human Sexuality in the New Testament”; Mauser, “Creation, Sexuality, and Homosexuality in the New Testament”; Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, pp. 103–113; Schoedel, “Same-Sex Eros”; Waetjen, “Same-Sex Sexual Relations in Antiquity.”

58. In Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, p. 9, n. 9, Boswell seems to evince some sympathy for a biological or genetic etiology for homosexuality, although, in his 1988 “Postscript” to “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories,” p. 36, he insists that he was, when writing Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, “agnostic about the origins and etiology of human sexuality” and that he remains so (see similarly Boswell, “Concepts, Experience, and Sexuality,” p. 69, and Boswell, “Categories, Experience and Sexuality,” p. 137).

60. By biblical scholars I mean those who have trained professionally in Ph.D. or Th.D. programs in biblical studies and who typically use this training to attain a faculty position in a college, university, or seminary setting, where they teach courses and conduct research on the Bible and biblically related topics.

61. In addition to the exegetes listed below, see the pastoral counselor and ordained Roman Catholic priest Daniel J. Helminiak, What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality, pp. 61–83.

65. This description taken from the back jacket flap of McNeill’s book Freedom, Glorious Freedom.

68. A phenomenon that Boswell himself apparently commented upon: see Hays, “Relations Natural and Unnatural,” p. 184.

69. As is indicated by the fact that Furnish cites Richard B. Hays’s important critique of Boswell, “Relations Natural and Unnatural.” See Furnish, “The Bible and Homosexuality,” p. 34, n. 14.

70. Mauser, “Creation and Human Sexuality in the New Testament.” Boswell is cited in a note on p. 15 but not elsewhere discussed. This article is published also as “Creation, Sexuality, and Homosexuality in the New Testament,” but without footnotes (and so without any citation of Boswell).

71. In n. 1 on p. 37 of “Reading and Understanding the New Testament on Homosexuality,” Blount cites Hays’s critique of Boswell that is cited in n. 69 above.

72. Smith, “Ancient Bisexuality and the Interpretation of Romans 1:26–27,” p. 225.

78. Hays, “Awaiting the Redemption of Our Bodies,” p. 9; Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, p. 388.

83. As most astutely pointed out by Bird, “The Bible in Christian Ethical Deliberation,” p. 166.

84. Hays, “Awaiting the Redemption of Our Bodies,” p. 10; Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, p. 390.

85. Hays, “Awaiting the Redemption of Our Bodies,” pp. 9, 12; Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, pp. 388–389, 397–398. For a similar analysis of the inconsistencies in Hays’s logic, see Martin, “Heterosexism and the Interpretation of Romans 1:18–32,” p. 340 and n. 22 on that page.

87. Ibid., p. 487; this quote brought to my attention by Wink, “To Hell with Gays?” p. 32.

89. For Gagnon’s characterizations of gay men, see especially The Bible and Homosexual Practice, pp. 30 and 471–483, and also the devastating critique of this part of Gagnon’s analysis by Wink, “To Hell with Gays?” p. 33 (with a response by Gagnon, “Gays and the Bible,” pp. 40–43, and a further rejoinder by Wink, “A Reply by Walter Wink,” pp. 43–44). For Halperin’s self-identification as gay, see, for example, the autobiographical comments found in his “‘Homosexuality’: A Cultural Construct.”

104. Martin, “Heterosexism and the Interpretation of Romans 1:18–32,” p. 349.

115. This description taken from Stein, “Introduction,” in Forms of Desire, p. 6.

122. Ibid., p. 23, quoting a mid-fifth-century Latin translation and adaptation of Soranos’ work by the African writer Caelius Aurelianus.

126. Stone, “Gender and Homosexuality in Judges 19,” p. 96; see similarly Stone’s discussion in his Sex, Honor, and Power in the Deuteronomistic History, pp. 75–76.

127. Stone, “Gender and Homosexuality in Judges 19,” p. 99; Stone, Sex, Honor, and Power in the Deuteronomistic History, p. 79.

128. Stone, “Gender and Homosexuality in Judges 19,” p. 100; Stone, Sex, Honor, and Power in the Deuteronomistic History, pp. 80–81.

129. Stone, “Gender and Homosexuality in Judges 19,” pp. 99–102; see similarly Stone’s discussion in his Sex, Honor, and Power in the Deuteronomistic History, pp. 80–84.

132. Boyarin, “Are There Any Jews in ‘The History of Sexuality?’” p. 354.

135. Boyarin, “Are There Any Jews in ‘The History of Sexuality?’” p. 341, n. 18. Note similarly Moore, God’s Beauty Parlor, p. 255, n. 16.

1. According to William L. Moran, the Epic of Gilgamesh is “the supreme literary achievement of the ancient world before Homer” (“Ut-napishtim Revisited,” p. 13); Tzvi Abusch similarly describes the Epic as having a place in Western literature “beside Homer and the Books of Judges and Samuel” (“Ishtar’s Proposal,” p. 143). Moran elsewhere points out that, among those who have made this sort of claim for Gilgamesh, we should particularly attend to the praise extended by Rainer Maria Rilke, who in a letter to Katharina Kippenberg calls Gilgamesh “overwhelming,” “the greatest thing one can experience.” As Moran suggests, the opinion of such a great poet, writing about poetry, deserves our “special attention and respect,” for Rilke is among those who have stood “not only in the outer chambers of reading, theory, and criticism, but within the sacred precincts of poetry itself.” See Moran, “Rilke,” p. 208; also Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2327, and Moran, “Epic of Gilgamesh: A Document of Ancient Humanism,” p. 15 (this latter reference brought to my attention by George, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. xxxii–xxxiii).

2. For one of the most recent and easily accessible reviews of Mesopotamian history, see Charpin, “History of Ancient Mesopotamia,” pp. 807–829.

3. On the location of the Cedar Forest in the west, see below, chapter 4, n. 141.

4. Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, p. 219; see likewise Jacobsen, “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” p. 249; also Rivkah Harris, Gender and Aging, pp. 32–49; Moran, “Epic of Gilgamesh: A Document of Ancient Humanism,” p. 18, and the references listed there; Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2332; Vanstiphout, “Craftsmanship of Sîn-leqi-unninnī,” pp. 49, 65–66. Abusch speaks somewhat similarly of the Gilgamesh Epic as a story about “growth” but (correctly in my opinion) does not insist on linking this growth to the chronological point in the human life cycle at which a youngster comes of age: see Abusch’s “Development and Meaning,” p. 616; also Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal,” p. 144.

5. In addition to my discussion here, see the evidence proposed by Harris, Gender and Aging, pp. 37–43, although I would note that I am not nearly as confident as is Harris about using cross-cultural psychological markers of adolescence (for example, antisocial behavior, competitiveness, aggressiveness, recklessness, risk taking) as proof of Gilgamesh’s youthfulness.

6. As I noted in the prologue, the line numbers here and throughout that refer to the text of the Gilgamesh Epic’s Standard or Late version (the version standardized by the mid-first millennium BCE) are taken from Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh.

7. These lessons of the Gilgamesh Epic are nowhere more masterfully or movingly discussed than in Moran, “Epic of Gilgamesh: A Document of Ancient Humanism,” pp. 20–22.

8. Somewhat similarly, Thomas van Nortwick, despite arguing that Gilgamesh is “obviously a young man,” describes his story as one that “leaves us with a ‘middle-aged’ view of the world” (Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, p. 37). Note also, on Gilgamesh’s age, Hillers, “Bow of Aqhat,” p. 76.

10. The evidence for a historical Gilgamesh has been recently and well discussed by Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. xxvii–xxix, and Tigay, Evolution, pp. 13–16. See also Lambert, “Gilgameš in Religious, Historical and Omen Texts,” pp. 39–56, and Sasson, “Some Literary Motifs,” pp. 259–262.

11. A convenient rendering of the parts of the Sumerian King List discussed here can be found in A. Leo Oppenheim’s translation in ANET, pp. 265a–266a, and all quotes are taken from this edition. For the entire text, see Jacobsen, ed., The Sumerian King List.

12. For the text of the late third-millennium BCE hymn written in praise of Gilgamesh, see Klein, “Šulgi and Gilgamesh,” pp. 271–292. A conveniently located translation of the epic tale of “Gilgamesh and Agga,” by Samuel Noah Kramer, can be found in ANET, pp. 44b–47a; for more recent translations, see Frayne, “Sumerian Gilgamesh Poems,” pp. 99–104, and George, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 143–148. With regard to the “Gilgamesh and Agga” text, it is important to note that, although the tablets on which it is inscribed date only to the first half of the second millennium BCE, most scholars assume (as I do here) that the date of the original composition was in the late third millennium BCE; see below, n. 13, and also Kramer’s comments in ANET, p. 45a.

13. As in n. 12 above, Kramer’s easily accessible translations of “Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living” and “The Death of Gilgamesh” can be found in ANET, pp. 47a–50a and 50a–52a, respectively; for more recent translations, and, for translations of “Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven” and “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,” see Frayne, “Sumerian Gilgamesh Poems,” pp. 104–154, and George, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 149–208. As also in n. 12, it is important to note that we actually know these Sumerian texts only from copies dating from the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE), but scholars generally presume, as I do here, that these Old Babylonian tablets date back to the late third millennium BCE. See Tigay, Evolution, p. 12, and n. 40 on that page.

14. Scholarship of the earlier twentieth century argued that there was already an integrated Gilgamesh Epic during the Sumerian period; that the Sumerian compositions were instead separate tales was first demonstrated by Kramer, “Epic of Gilgameš,” pp. 7–23. Cf., however, Bing, “Sumerian Epic,” pp. 1–11.

15. There is some debate on exactly what parts of the flood tradition were incorporated into the Old Babylonian version of the Epic. Most agree that the extended flood narrative found in the later version was not present (see, for example, Moran, “Epic of Gilgamesh: A Document of Ancient Humanism,” p. 20) but that some elements from the story of the flood were present. Abusch concurs, but he has also provocatively argued that in the Old Babylonian version, as opposed to the Standard version, Utnapishtim’s dwelling place was not the original goal of Gilgamesh’s journey but one that he developed only after he encountered the alewife Siduri at her tavern that stood on the shores of the sea across which Utnapishtim lived. See Abusch’s “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part I,” pp. 9–14, and his “Mourning the Death of a Friend,” pp. 55–59 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume); also Abusch, “Development and Meaning,” p. 615, n. 3, and pp. 617–618.

16. For example, “the fifty Urukites who set out with Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Sumerian version of the journey to the Cedar Mountain [the dwelling place of Huwawa/Humbaba] are absent in the epic”; “the third-person style” of both the Sumerian and Akkadian stories of the flood “is replaced by first-person narrative, as is required by the plot of Gilgamesh”: Tigay, Evolution, pp. 24–25. See also Kramer, “Epic of Gilgameš,” pp. 15–16; my discussion below in this chapter and in chapter 3 concerning the Akkadian reconceptualization of the nature of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship; and my comments in chapter 5 exploring the reasons that may have driven some of the other changes from the Sumerian to the Akkadian.

18. The parade presentation of this thesis is Tigay, Evolution, pp. 39–54; see, less substantially, Tigay, “Was There an Integrated Gilgamesh Epic?” pp. 215–218.

19. The Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet. For the text, see Langdon, Epic of Gilgamish.

20. The Old Babylonian Yale Tablet; Harmal Fragments A and B; and the Oriental Institute Fragment (also called the Ishchali Tablet, the Chicago Tablet, or the Bauer Fragment). For the text of the Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, see Jastrow and Clay, Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic. For Old Babylonian Harmal Fragments A and B, see van Dijk, “Textes divers du Musée de Baghdad, II,” p. 91 (Pl. 12); van Dijk, “IM 52615: un songe d’Enkidu,” pp. 114–121; van Dijk, “Textes Divers Du Musée de Bagdad III,” pp. 9–10, and Pl. 3–4. For the Old Babylonian Oriental Institute Fragment, see Bauer, “Ein viertes altbabylonisches Fragment,” pp. 254–262.

21. The Old Babylonian Meissner and Millard Fragments; for the texts, see Meissner, Ein altbabylonisches Fragment, and Millard, “Gilgamesh X,” pp. 99–105. For the phrase “waters of death” cited here, see the Millard Fragment, col. iv, line 8.

23. Ibid., pp. 46–47; as in n. 15 above, however, cf. Abusch regarding the question of whether or not the dwelling place of Utnapishtim was the goal of Gilgamesh’s journey when he first set off wandering in the Old Babylonian story.

24. Tigay, Evolution, p. 244; Tigay, “Summary: The Evolution,” pp. 43–44.

25. Moran reports that “unpublished tablets from Emar in Syria indicate that the epic, with the probable exception of Tablet XII, had assumed more or less final form by the thirteenth century BCE” (“Gilgamesh,” p. 559a); Abusch, “Development and Meaning,” p. 618, seems basically to presume a similar chronology.

27. The translation of this line is taken from Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2331.

28. Ibid., p. 2332; see similarly Moran, “Epic of Gilgamesh: A Document of Ancient Humanism,” pp. 17–18.

29. Restoring “mother” (ummu) in lines 62 and 74, as proposed in the collation of Thompson, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 11–12 (Thompson’s Tablet I, col. ii, lines 16 and 27) and adopted in the recent translations of Foster, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 5–6; Gardner and Maier, Gilgamesh, p. 67; and Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 5. The Gardner and Maier translation must, however, be used with caution; see Moran, “Ut-napishtim Revisited,” pp. 13–14. Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 71–72, suggests the restoration “husband, lover” (ḫā’iru), reflected also in the translation of George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 4.

30. See especially the discussions of Moran, “Gilgamesh,” pp. 558b–559a; Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” pp. 2328–2329; and Tigay, Evolution, pp. 202–209.

31. Although some see the Akkadian šam-ḫat as a generic noun meaning “prostitute” rather than a name (for example, Grayson, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” 503; Lambert, “Prostitution,” pp. 128, 139; Speiser, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” p. 74, n. 23), most commentators treat it as a proper name. See Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 126, n. 14; Diakonoff, “Review of Böhl,” p. 62; Foster, “Gilgamesh,” p. 25; Huehnergard, Grammar, p. 477, n. 21; Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 20.

32. The interpretation of this passage is much debated; see further my discussion in chapter 3.

33. See further Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2332; Tigay, Evolution, pp. 76–81; and my discussion in chapter 5.

34. This has been argued especially by Abusch; see his “Ishtar’s Proposal,” pp. 180–187, and his “Development and Meaning,” p. 615, n. 3, and p. 618. Abusch’s analysis depends on his understanding of Ishtar’s proposal in Tablet VI as being, although ostensibly an offer of marriage, actually an offer to Gilgamesh to become a functionary of the netherworld. As Abusch sees it, Gilgamesh, while initially rejecting this offer of Ishtar’s, eventually must accept what is his inevitable role as the netherworld’s lord. But he does this only in Tablet XII of the Standard version of the Epic (on which see further below). Ishtar’s proposal in Tablet VI, that is, only makes sense in Abusch’s interpretation when read in conjunction with the Standard version’s Tablet XII; hence the goddess’s proposal, according to Abusch, could not have been part of the Old Babylonian epic tradition, of which Tablet XII was not a part.

35. But cf. again, as in nn. 15 and 23, Abusch on the goal of Gilgamesh’s journey in the Old Babylonian version.

36. See Tigay, Evolution, pp. 95–103, for a close analysis of the Tablet X speeches; for more on the phenomenon of homogenization in the Standard version, see Cooper, “Gilgamesh Dreams of Enkidu,” pp. 39–44, and note also Cooper’s “Symmetry and Repetition,” pp. 508–512.

37. See Moran, “Gilgamesh,” p. 559b; Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” pp. 2329–2330; and Jacobsen, “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” p. 243.

38. This translation of the plant’s name is Moran’s, in “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2335.

39. Most thoroughly argued by Jacobsen in “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” pp. 246–249; see also Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, p. 208; Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2335; Moran, “Epic of Gilgamesh: A Document of Ancient Humanism,” pp. 21–22.

40. Here I break with the analysis Jacobsen offers in “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” pp. 246–249, for, while I agree with him (as in n. 39 above) that the ending of the Standard version is not meant to be unremittingly bleak, I disagree with his assessment that the Standard version’s conclusion somehow presents a romantic vision as opposed to the Old Babylonian’s tragic one. As Jacobsen sees it, the Standard version’s Gilgamesh, once resigning himself to the inevitability of death, “rallies quickly” and reassumes the identity of the “brilliantly successful Gilgamesh” introduced in the Standard version’s prologue, “first and foremost the great explorer and discoverer” (p. 248). In making this argument, Jacobsen relies particularly on his sense that there is something almost triumphant and uplifting about the tour of Uruk’s walls that Gilgamesh gives Urshanabi, so that the pride Gilgamesh is said to take in these structures really does replace completely his hope for immortality; thus Gilgamesh at the Epic’s end, according to Jacobsen, derives just as much satisfaction and joy from Uruk’s walls as he would have derived from a grant of eternal life. As I have indicated above, I would read much more a resigned note in Gilgamesh’s final speech regarding the walls, suggesting that they represent only a fraction of the sort of heroic triumph for which Gilgamesh had hoped. For a more pessimistic reading still, see Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, pp. 71–72.

41. For this translation, and on the image of the weary yet peaceful Gilgamesh, see Moran, “Epic of Gilgamesh: A Document of Ancient Humanism,” p. 16; also pp. 21–22. Some commentators, however, translate pašāḫu as “resigned”: see, for example, Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 50.

42. Tigay, Evolution, p. 27; see similarly Tigay, Evolution, pp. 5, 105–107, 138; Kramer, “Epic of Gilgameš,” p. 23; also the comments of Bottéro, L’Epopée de Gilgameš, pp. 53–55 (this reference brought to my attention by Vulpe, “Irony and Unity,” p. 275); George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 100; Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, p. 215; Jacobsen, “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” p. 232; Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. xxi, daggered note on the bottom of the page, and pp. 116–117; Kramer, From the Tablets of Sumer, p. 214; Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2335; Sasson, “Some Literary Motifs,” p. 267 (but cf. Sasson’s “Gilgamesh Epic,” p. 1027a); and Vanstiphout, “Craftsmanship of Sîn-leqi-unninnī,” p. 46, n. 7. Cf., however, Harris, Gender and Aging, pp. 35, 48, and 119–128, who sees Tablet XII as “an integral part of the Gilgamesh Epic” (p. 48); similarly, Alster, “Paradigmatic Character,” pp. 55–60; Kilmer, “Note on an Overlooked Word-Play,” pp. 130–131, who argues that Tablet XII is a “dramatic capstone”; Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, p. 23, and Parpola, “Assyrian Tree of Life,” pp. 193–194, both of whom regard Tablet XII as “the necessary climax of the whole story” (Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, p. 145, n. 17); Oppenheim, “Mesopotamian Mythology II,” p. 20, who suggests Tablet XII may be “the crowning stone”; and Vulpe, “Irony and Unity,” passim. Gwendolyn Leick too sees a place for Tablet XII in the Epic’s story, although she admits it fits “rather uneasily” (Sex and Eroticism, p. 267). Abusch, “Development and Meaning,” pp. 618, 620–621, differentiates between a late second-millennium BCE eleven-tablet version, roughly identical to the first eleven tablets of the Standard version as we know it, and the twelve-tablet version of the mid-first millennium BCE. He then argues the twelfth tablet was added intentionally to change the focus of the Epic. Not dissimilar is the analysis of Ray, “The Gilgamesh Epic,” p. 306.

43. Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh, also restores bēlu, “master,” in Tablet XII, line 31. See as well Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 121; cf. George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 192.

45. “Probably the most inspired literary achievement in the annals of Mesopotamian creative thinking” according to Sasson, “Some Literary Motifs,” p. 265.

46. Jacobsen, “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” p. 245. Jacobsen goes on to speak of the Sumerian Enkidu as Gilgamesh’s slave, who watches “over his young master somewhat in the manner of an anxious nanny watching a child.”

47. Tigay, Evolution, pp. 29–30; see also Tigay, “Was There an Integrated Gilgamesh Epic?” p. 217.

1. Jacobsen, “How Did Gilgameš Oppress Uruk?” passim; Jacobsen came to this conclusion independently, but notes (on p. 70, n. 1) that he learned after he had finished his article that Küchler, Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Assyrisch-Babylonischen Medizin, p. 124, “also mentions sexual intercourse between the heroes as a possibility. He does not, however, go further into the problem.”

2. As in previous chapters, line numbers for the Epic’s Standard version here and throughout are taken from Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh. For the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, see, as noted in chapter 2, n. 19, Langdon, Epic of Gilgamish. Line numbers for this text are given according to the transcription found in Huehnergard, Grammar, pp. 475–484.

7. Although see Kilmer, “Note on an Overlooked Word-Play,” p. 129: “Just exactly what else Gilgamesh did to oppress the men and women, girls and boys of Uruk remains unclear, though some sort of sexual harassment is indicated. It should be obvious, in any event, that Enkidu is created specifically to be Gilgamesh’s match in … sexual appetite.” Also note Kramer, “Epic of Gilgameš,” p. 9, who, in his discussion of Gilgamesh’s oppression of Uruk, speaks of Gilgamesh’s “unreasonable demands for the satisfaction of his Rabelaisian sex appetite”; see too Kramer, From the Tablets of Sumer, p. 211, and Held, “Parallels,” p. 135, who speaks of “Gilgamesh’s extraordinary sexual demands on the youthful populace of Uruk.”

8. Jacobsen, “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” pp. 234–235, n. 7. On the date of this article’s composition in the mid-1980s, as opposed to the date of its publication in 1990, see the comments of the editors Abusch, Huehnergard, and Steinkeller in the volume’s preface and acknowledgements, p. v. For the fullest available discussion of the issue of Uruk’s oppression, see Tigay, Evolution, pp. 178–191; for the most recent analyses, see especially Cooper, “Buddies in Babylonia,” pp. 77–81; Klein, “A New Look at the ‘Oppression of Uruk’ Episode.”

9. To my discussion of Jacobsen here, cf. Cooper, “Buddies in Babylonia,” pp. 73–75, who (mistakenly, as my comments below will suggest) reads the later Jacobsen as “completely abandon[ing] his 1930 idea of a homosexual relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu.”

10. Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, p. 218 and the starred note on the bottom of the page. But cf. Held, “Parallels,” p. 137, who (mistakenly in my opinion) claims that in his discussion of the Gilgamesh Epic in The Treasures of Darkness, “Jacobsen makes no reference to homosexuality.”

11. Jacobsen, “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” p. 245. In this piece, moreover, as opposed to the analysis he offers in The Treasures of Darkness, Jacobsen does not consign the relationship as described in the Old Babylonian version to a growing-up “phase” (which Jacobsen in this essay suggests belongs only to the later Standard version of the Epic). See “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” p. 249.

12. See CAD 6(Ḫ), pp. 2b–3a, s.v. ḫabābu B; Moran, “New Evidence from Mari,” p. 31, n. 3. See also the additional references in support of this translation assembled by Cooper, “Gilgamesh Dreams of Enkidu,” p. 43, n. 22; Cooper, “Buddies in Babylonia,” p. 80, n. 50; Foster, “Gilgamesh,” p. 25; Tigay, Evolution, p. 274, note on col. i, line 34, of the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet; and Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 24; cf. Speiser, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” p. 75, n. 27.

13. As is reflected, for example, in the translations of Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, pp. 57–59; Foster, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 10–11; Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 11–12; and Speiser, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” p. 76. But see the older restorations [a-na-ku ki-m]a aš-ša-te eli-šu aḫ-pu-up, [kima aš-ša-te] e-li-šu taḫ-[pu-up], and [ša (?) at-ta kima aš-ša-te] e-li-šu taḫ-p[u-pu], proposed in the collation of Thompson, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 15 (Thompson’s Tablet I, col. v, lines 36 and 47, col. vi, line 4), and adopted by Foster, “Gilgamesh,” pp. 26–27 (at least at col. v, line 36), and by Gardner and Maier, Gilgamesh, pp. 81–82, 86 (although see the cautions I have raised about this translation above, in chapter 2, n. 29). Note also that George, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 10–11, reads in each of the Standard version dream descriptions that Gilgamesh “loved” the metaphorical representation of Enkidu “like a wife,” and that he “caressed” and “embraced” it. George, that is, seems to read three verbs in the Akkadian text as opposed to the two (râmu and ḫabābu) that most commentators assume. George is dependent here on his own critical edition of the text of Gilgamesh, which, as I noted in the prologue, I was unable to consult before this volume went to press; consequently, I cannot be certain of the precise Akkadian text on which George’s translation is based. But, for my purposes here, it is of no matter: whatever the specifics of George’s translation, he certainly agrees with most other commentators regarding the eroticized language Gilgamesh uses in the Standard version to describe his visions of Enkidu.

14. See, for example, Cooper, “Gilgamesh Dreams of Enkidu,” p. 43, n. 22, for whom ḫabābu is “most certainly a euphemism for sexual intercourse”; Moran, “New Evidence from Mari,” p. 31, n. 3, who does not wish to exclude the “connotations of dalliance”; Tigay, Evolution, p. 274, note on col. i, line 34, of the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, who writes, “the word could refer to sexual intercourse”; and Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 54, who, similar to Cooper, maintains, “the verb ḫabābu clearly carries a sexual meaning.”

15. Although, in the Enkidu-Shamhat lovemaking passage, the verb appears in the Dt conjugation as opposed to the G conjugation used in the dream accounts.

16. Although, as in n. 15, the verb appears in a different conjugation in the Enkidu-Shamhat lovemaking passage than it does in the axe-dream account (the Dt versus the G).

17. Although brief, the premier discussion of the differences between the Old Babylonian dream accounts and those of the Standard version is that of Cooper, “Gilgamesh Dreams of Enkidu,” pp. 39–41.

19. Reading su-mu-ku-nim-ma ka-ka-bu! ša-ma-i for ib-ba-šu-nim-ma ka-ka-bu! ša-ma-i, and translating samāku as “to heap”; on samāku = paḫāru, “to heap,” see Frankena, Briefe aus der Leidener Sammlung, letter 11, line 39, pp. 10–11. This reading was suggested to me, and the Frankena reference pointed out to me, while I was still in graduate school, by my late teacher William L. Moran, and it is a great pleasure and indeed honor to acknowledge here Professor Moran’s contribution to my work and, more generally, to acknowledge how grateful I am for all he taught me about the Akkadian language, about the Epic of Gilgamesh, about Mesopotamian religion, and about many other aspects of Mesopotamian culture and the cultures of the ancient Near East.

21. In the Old Babylonian version Enkidu grieves over his failing strength and slackening muscles, weakness that is presumably a consequence of the leisurely ways of city life that he has adopted by this point in the Epic.

22. See Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 134, n. 157, and also p. 330; Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 147b, s.v. Nergal.

24. For minde meaning “certainly,” “indeed,” “for sure,” see Moran and Hallo, “First Tablet of the SB Recension of the Anzu Myth,” pp. 94–95 and n. 46 on p. 94; this rendering adopted in the translations of Cooper, “Gilgamesh Dreams of Enkidu,” p. 43, and George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 102.

25. Cooper, “Gilgamesh Dreams of Enkidu,” pp. 39–40, similarly suggests the Old Babylonian dream accounts may describe two stages in the development of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship, although the specifics of his interpretation differ from the reading I offer here.

26. While Langdon, Epic of Gilgamish, p. 211, ventured a reading of kiṣrum, “meteor,” in col. i, line 7, of the editio princeps of the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, the initial signs are utterly unclear. In the Supplement to AHw, Wolfram von Soden suggests arrum, “weapon” (AHw 3, p. 1544, s.v. arru(m) IV); Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 74, note on line 231, reads šiprum, “the thing sent (by Anu).”

28. See CAD 8 (K), p. 316b, s.v. kezru; also Kilmer, “Note on an Overlooked Word-Play,” p. 128; Lambert, “Prostitution,” p. 132; Leick, Sex and Eroticism, pp. 265–266.

31. Although the precise nature of the assinnu’s role in the Ishtar cult is unclear; see CAD 1, Part II (A), pp. 341b–342b, s.v. assinnu.

33. See also Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 137; George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 102; Speiser, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” p. 77.

34. The brother/side pun in this passage has been noted by many: for example, Cooper, “Gilgamesh Dreams of Enkidu,” p. 40; Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 152, n. 4; Foster, “Gilgamesh,” p. 27; George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 102.

35. Unfortunately, as the brackets in my translation indicate, the line is fragmentary, and so the interpretation that sees Anat’s words as a sexual proposition cannot be regarded as secure. For discussion, see Walls, The Goddess Anat, pp. 193–194; Dressler, “The Metamorphosis of a Lacuna,” pp. 211–217.

36. Fox, Song of Songs, pp. xii–xiii, 8, 12–13, 136; White, Language of Love, pp. 95–96, 130.

37. This reference brought to my attention by Pope, Song of Songs, pp. 480–481. See also, from second-century BCE Qumran, the Genesis Apocrypon scroll (1QapGen), in which, in column ii, Lamech is addressed by his wife Bitenosh as “my brother” (this reference brought to my attention by Moore, Tobit, p. 190).

38. The bibliography on sacred marriage is vast. Kramer, Sacred Marriage Rite, remains a standard source, although some of the conclusions of this work are now considered outdated. See, more recently, Cooper, “Sacred Marriage,” pp. 81–96; also note the comments of Leick, Sex and Eroticism, pp. 97–110.

39. The translation is by Jacobsen, Harps That Once, p. 341; see also, most recently, Vanstiphout, Epics of Sumerian Kings, p. 155.

40. The translation is by Kramer, “Set Me Free, My Sister,” in ANET, p. 645b. But cf. Jacobsen, Harps That Once, pp. 8–9, who takes the terms brother and sister literally and understands the text to be a dialogue between Inanna’s mythological lover, Dumuzi/Tammuz, and his sister Geshtinanna. For arguments against Jacobsen’s position, see Alster, “Marriage and Love,” p. 17, n. 17; also Alster’s own translation of this hymn on pp. 22–23 (no. 12). The most up-to-date discussion of the poem of which I am aware is that of Leick, Sex and Eroticism, pp. 71–73.

41. Cooper, “Sacred Marriage,” p. 85, doubts whether the Shu-sin texts are actually to be associated with the sacred marriage. The issue is one that need not concern us here; whether the texts are part of the sacred marriage tradition or are, as Cooper suggests, “more at home in the harem,” they still use the language of eroticized brotherhood that I seek to document.

42. “Lettuce Is My Hair,” translated by Kramer, in ANET, p. 644a-b; see also the translation of Jacobsen, Harps That Once, p. 93.

44. The examples offered here, which have been chosen because of their ready accessibility in ANET, could be easily multiplied; see, for example, Kramer, Sacred Marriage Rite, pp. 97–101, 104–105; Alster, “Marriage and Love,” p. 17, n. 16, and the references listed there; also, in that same article, the poem translated on p. 21 (no. 8), and in addition, Alster, “Sumerian Love Song SRT 31,” pp. 1–11, to which cf. Alster’s discussion of this poem in his “Sumerian Love Songs,” pp. 142–146 (text no. 4). See too, in Alster’s “Sumerian Love Songs” article, the eroticized language of brotherhood used in text no. 5, pp. 146–152.

45. See Alster, “Marriage and Love,” p. 16, n. 13, and the references listed there; Nissinen, “Love Lyrics of Nabû and Tašmetu,” p. 586 and n. 7, and the references listed there. Also see Cooper, “Kuss,” p. 377a; Westenholz, “A Forgotten Love Song,” p. 415; Westenholz, “Love Lyrics from the Ancient Near East,” pp. 2476–2477.

46. The line numbers here are those of the Hittite tablet, as analyzed by Stefanini, “Enkidu’s Dream,” pp. 40–47; the translation is by Beckman, “The Hittite Gilgamesh,” p. 163.

48. Foster, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 6. See similarly Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 52; George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 5. Other commentators understand this line to mean that Enkidu was created in the image of Anu (for example, Gardner and Maier, Gilgamesh, p. 71, followed by van Nortwick, Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, p. 14). Jack M. Sasson argues, moreover, that while the gods had asked Aruru to create Enkidu as a double for Gilgamesh, she creates him as a “double of the god Anu” and thereby changes the future of the Gilgamesh-Enkidu relationship (Sasson, “Gilgamesh Epic,” p. 1025b).

49. See, for example, CAD 21 (Z), p. 116b, s.v. zikru B; Gardner and Maier, Gilgamesh, p. 68 (but on this translation, see above, n. 13); George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 4; Oppenheim, “Mesopotamian Mythology II,” p. 23; Speiser, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” p. 74. For a somewhat different interpretation, see Sasson, “Some Literary Motifs,” p. 272.

52. For the Old Babylonian Yale Tablet generally, see, as in chapter 2, Jastrow and Clay, Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic; for this particular text, which is not reflected in Jastrow’s and Clay’s editio princeps, see Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 142; George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 108; and, on the placing of this fragmentary text at the end of the wrestling-match scene, Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 76 (Parpola’s line 113 of Tablet II); Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 59.

53. Sperling, “Genesis 41:10,” pp. 114–115, n. 12; Cooper, “Kuss,” pp. 375b–379a. Cooper specifically describes the kiss Gilgamesh and Enkidu exchange after their wrestling match as a “token of friendship” (p. 377a–b).

54. For further discussion, see Finkelstein. “Recent Studies in Cuneiform Law,” pp. 251–252; Greengus, “Old Babylonian Marriage Ceremonies,” pp. 60, 68; Landsberger, “Jungfräulichkeit,” pp. 41–105; Ravn, “Gilgamesh and the Wives of Uruk,” pp. 12–13; von Soden, “Gab es in Babylonien die Inanspruchnahme des ius primae noctis?” pp. 103–106.

55. While the references in the marital scene to Ishhara, a name of the goddess Ishtar (see the Epic of Atrahasis, Tablet I, line 304), suggest to some commentators that it must be the sacred marriage that is about to be celebrated, it seems rather that we should understand Ishhara here as a reference to an Ishtar priestess who apparently was present at all marriages (as in the Epic of Atrahasis, Tablet I, lines 299–305). Note, moreover, that interpreting this scene as a sacred marriage raises as many interpretive problems as it claims to solve. For example, while Enkidu can logically be understood as objecting to the Gilgamesh’s bedding the bride if this is done on account of Gilgamesh’s rather tyrannical presumption of ius primae noctis, there is no logical reason why Enkidu should object to Gilgamesh’s participation in the sacred marriage, which was a well-established and accepted part of Mesopotamian ritual tradition. Also, if this scene is to be interpreted as sacred marriage, why should Gilgamesh so enthusiastically seek to participate in it here, yet reject what seems to be a proposition to participate in the sacred marriage with Ishtar in Tablet VI?

57. In the editio princeps, Langdon, Epic of Gilgamish, p. 218, read i-tu-ru (Langdon’s line 19 of the Tablet’s reverse, col. ii), but commentators have since suggested the better reading is i-ša-ru. See, for example, Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 152, n. 11; Huehnergard, Grammar, p. 482.

59. On the difference between the Old Babylonian and Standard versions here, see Tigay, Evolution, p. 68.

60. Leick, Sex and Eroticism, p. 266. This reading is also suggested by van Nortwick, Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, p. 18 (although he does not himself advocate an eroticized interpretation of the combat), and by Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 58.

61. Leick, Sex and Eroticism, p. 266; see further, on feet as euphemistic for genitalia in West Semitic tradition, Biale, Eros and the Jews, p. 14; Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus, p. 78; Wolfson, “Images of God’s Feet,” pp. 145, 164.

62. She does, however, get mentioned again, in Enkidu’s deathbed scene in Tablet VII.

65. Following here most translators: for example, Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal,” p. 157; Foster, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 61; Gardner and Maier, Gilgamesh, p. 187 (but on this translation, see above, n. 13); George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 65; Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 70. As Abusch points out, however (“Ishtar’s Proposal,” pp. 157–158, n. 36), some read “friend” as the subject, rather than object, of the verb “to cover”—for example, Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 93; CAD 8 (K), p. 299a, s.v. katāmu—thus translating (so CAD), “my friend veiled his face like a bride.”

66. See Bird, “Harlot as Heroine,” p. 134, n. 5, and the references there. See also Lambert, “Prostitution,” p. 141.

68. For example, Damrosch, Narrative Covenant, p. 103, suggests that Gilgamesh might reject here “the love of women in favor of the more solid and lasting male bonding seen between Gilgamesh and Enkidu,” and although Damrosch does not at this point define what he means by male bonding or comment on its possible erotic or sexual characteristics, he later (p. 203) does speak of the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu as being like that of “husband and wife,” with Enkidu “tak[ing] the place of women in Gilgamesh’s heart.” See somewhat similarly Vanstiphout, “Craftsmanship of Sîn-leqi-unninnī,” p. 62, although Vanstiphout claims only that Gilgamesh prefers his “exclusive friendship” with Enkidu to a marriage with Ishtar; as to whether the exclusive friendship with Enkidu should be seen as sexual, Vanstiphout maintains an “open mind” (n. 77 on p. 62). The question of whether Gilgamesh rejects Ishtar because he prefers a sexual relationship with Enkidu is also raised by Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, p. 23, although his answer is ultimately no.

69. Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal,” pp. 147–148; see similarly Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, pp. 41–42.

70. I should make clear here that although it is Abusch, more than any commentator, who points to the peculiarities of Gilgamesh’s rejection, the explanation he offers does not look toward the suggestion that Gilgamesh rejects Ishtar in favor of a relationship with Enkidu. He proposes rather that, although ostensibly an offer of marriage, what Ishtar really extends to Gilgamesh is a death threat, so to speak; more specifically, an offer to become a functionary of the netherworld. See Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal,” passim; also Abusch, “Development and Meaning,” p. 615, n. 3, and p. 618, and my comments in chapter 2, n. 34, and chapter 5.

71. Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 46. Walls further suggests (on pp. 47–49) that the various stories to which Gilgamesh alludes in deriding Ishtar for her past affairs, especially the stories that describe her “unconventional couplings” with animal consorts, may be intended to indicate that Gilgamesh too is to be understood as susceptible to “an unconventional and socially unsanctioned passion [for Enkidu],” that “Gilgamesh’s listing of Ishtar’s animal affairs may therefore be a subtle defense of his own unconventional liaison with Enkidu,” that “Gilgamesh’s absence of desire for Ishtar may represent … the homoerotic rejection of heterosexual attraction.”

72. For the Old Babylonian Meissner Fragment, see, as in chapter 2, Meissner, Ein altbabylonisches Fragment. For discussion on whether Gilgamesh was actually on his way to see Utnapishtim when he encountered Siduri or only wandering aimlessly, see, as again in chapter 2, Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 1,” pp. 9–14; Abusch, “Mourning the Death of a Friend,” pp. 55–59 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume); also Abusch, “Development and Meaning,” p. 615, n. 3, and pp. 617–618.

73. Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, p. 218, starred note on the bottom of the page.

75. Cooper, “Buddies in Babylonia,” p. 80, paraphrasing Lambert, “Prostitution,” p. 157, n. 31.

77. Translation Leick, Sex and Eroticism, p. 217; see also Lambert, “Prostitution,” p. 151.

79. Although note again that the Ugaritic text in which the language of eroticized brother- and sisterhood seems to appear is fragmentary: above, n. 35.

80. Olyan, “‘Surpassing the Love of Women.’” To the references Olyan cites, add Fishbane, “Treaty Background of Amos 1 11,” p. 314 and nn. 7 and 8 on that page.

82. See further the discussions of Bottéro and Petschow, “Homosexualität,” pp. 459b–468b; Cooper, “Buddies in Babylonia,” pp. 83–85; Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, pp. 19–36; Olyan, “‘And with a Male,’” pp. 192–194.

83. Translation Roth, Law Collections, p. 160, with some modifications. In particular, I have rendered the verb nâku, translated by Roth as “sodomize” according to “the context” (Law Collections, p. 192, n. 15), in accord with the more literal and less pejorative “to have intercourse” (see CAD 11, part 1 [N], p. 198a, s.v. nâku).

86. See, somewhat similarly, Cooper, “Buddies in Babylonia,” pp. 84–85; Driver and Miles, Assyrian Laws, p. 71.

87. Olyan, “‘And with a Male,’” pp. 195, 205; Stone, “Gender and Homosexuality in Judges 19,” pp. 96–99; Stone, Sex, Honor, and Power, pp. 75–79. See further my discussion in chapter 1.

88. Olyan, note, would not agree with the use I make of his work here, as he maintains that, while status is not of issue in Israel, social position probably is a consideration in the Middle Assyrian Laws. See Olyan, “‘And with a Male,’” p. 194.

89. Olyan, “‘And with a Male,’” passim, especially pp. 183–188; Stone, “Gender and Homosexuality in Judges 19,” passim, especially pp. 96–98; Bird, “The Bible in Christian Ethical Deliberation,” passim, especially pp. 148–154, 157.

90. Lambert, “Prostitution,” p. 147. Note, however, that Lambert would not agree with the conclusions I draw from his analysis here, but rather suggests that in MAL A §20, nâku is anomalously used to describe male-male intercourse that was a matter of mutual consent, the scribe being forced to use the verb contrary to its usual sense because “his standard vocabulary had no word expressing mutual sex acts.”

91. The terminology is from Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, p. 31.

92. Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, p. 26; see similarly Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 15.

93. All that follows contra, in particular, Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, p. 78, who argues Enkidu throughout the Epic is rendered as subordinate to Gilgamesh. In addition to the arguments I present here, note that Halperin’s description of Enkidu as younger than Gilgamesh relies on an idiosyncratic reading in Speiser, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” who in Tablet VIII, col. ii, lines 8–9 and Tablet X, col. i, lines 53–54 (Speiser’s enumeration), suggests that Enkidu is described as quṭānu, which Speiser translates (following a suggestion made by P. Jensen in 1900) as “younger” (see Speiser, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” p. 87b, n. 137). But this reading quṭānu is not supported either by the older collation of Thompson, Epic of Gilgamesh (see pp. 48 and 56) or by Parpola’s more recent edition (Epic of Gilgamesh; see pp. 99 and 103). Nor is there even an Akkadian word quṭānu according to the standard authorities (see AHw and CAD).

94. For the translation of šutamḫuru(m) as “to make equal,” see Cooper, “Gilgamesh Dreams of Enkidu,” p. 40; Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, pp. 58–59, 137; George, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 1–11, 103; cf. CAD 10, part 1 (M), p. 70b, s.v. maḫāru; Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 11–12; Tigay, Evolution, pp. 85–87, 275, note on col. ii, line 1, of the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet.

95. See AHw 3, p. 1161b, s. šanānu; Harris, Gender and Aging, p. 194, n. 40; Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 6. The more usual translation of šanānu in this passage is “to rival, vie,” advocated by CAD 17, Part I (Š), p. 369a, s.v. šanānu, and reflected in the translations of Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 52; Foster, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 6; Gardner and Maier, Gilgamesh, p. 68 (but on this translation, see above, n. 13); George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 5; Speiser, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” p. 74.

96. This latter line brought to my attention by Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 19.

97. Indeed, even Halperin, who cites Shamhat’s speech in support of his interpretation regarding the Epic’s insistence on Gilgamesh’s superiority, admits that her words may simply be an attempt “to rouse Enkidu by appealing to his competitive spirit.” See Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, p. 78 and p. 177, n. 18.

98. According to most commentators, Gilgamesh wins the wrestling match: see, for example, Foster, “Gilgamesh,” p. 32; George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 12; Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 14; Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2329; Oppenheim, “Mesopotamian Mythology II,” p. 30; Sasson, “Some Literary Motifs,” p. 266; Sasson, “Gilgamesh Epic,” p. 1025b. Jacobsen, however, suggests that because Gilgamesh “sinks down on one knee” at the end of the combat (according to the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. vi, lines 20–21; this episode is not preserved in the Standard version), it is Enkidu who should be understood as the victor. See Jacobsen, “Classical Statement,” p. 83; Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, p. 199; Jacobsen, “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” p. 237. Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 141, seems likewise to understand Enkidu as victorious; cf. also Kramer, “Epic of Gilgameš,” p. 9; Wolff, “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Heroic Life,” p. 397; and Langdon (the publisher of the editio princeps of the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet), “The Epic of Gilgamish,” p. 36; this reference brought to my attention by Keppler, The Literature of the Second Self, p. 216. n. 40. Yet another possible interpretation, as proposed here, is that the wrestling match ends in a standstill.

99. For the suggestion that it is Uruk’s young warriors or “officers” who speak to Gilgamesh in this second passage in the Standard version, see George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 28, who relies here on his own critical edition of the text, which, as I noted in the prologue, I was unable to consult before this volume went into production.

100. Lambert, “Gilgamesh in Literature and Art,” p. 47; this reference brought to my attention by Harris, Gender and Aging, p. 39 and p. 194, n. 41.

106. Hammond and Jablow, “Gilgamesh and the Sundance Kid,” p. 242 (cited from the original publication of this article found in The Making of Masculinities).

107. Van Nortwick, Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, p. 18; Beye, “Gilgamesh, Lolita, and Huckleberry Finn,” p. 40.

110. Cooper, “Buddies in Babylonia,” p. 80, and n. 50 on that page; see also Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 54.

114. Ibid., p. 25, citing Moran, “New Evidence from Mari,” p. 31, n. 3, and Cooper, “Gilgamesh Dreams of Enkidu,” p. 43, n. 22.

130. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, p. 80; see similarly Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal,” p. 144.

131. On pašāḫu, “to be at peace,” in Tablet I, line 7, see above, chapter 2, n. 41.

132. See also, in critique of Leick’s (and in addition Foster’s) asceticized interpretation, Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 46.

1. Van Gennep, Rites of Passage, as quoted in Turner, Forest of Symbols, p. 94; Turner does not, unfortunately, give a page number for his citation. This quote was originally brought to my attention by Deflem, “Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion,” p. 7.

2. Deflem, “Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion,” pp. 7–8, paraphrasing Turner, Forest of Symbols, p. 94.

4. As Turner points out, van Gennep’s classification of these sorts of rituals as rites of passage has not necessarily been widely followed; see Turner, “Rites of Passage,” p. 386b; also, La Fontaine, Initiation, pp. 26, 28.

5. Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 18. This discussion of Eliade’s brought to my attention by Elliott, Roads to Paradise, p. 171.

9. Lefkowitz, “Myth of Joseph Campbell,” p. 432; for another trenchant critique of Campbell, see Doniger (formerly O’Flaherty), “Origins of Myth-Making Man.” Also in critique of Campbell, see Manganaro, Myth, pp. 151–185, and especially the references cited on pp. 165–167; Segal, Joseph Campbell, especially pp. 136–140.

11. Long, “The Dreams of Professor Campbell,” p. 169 (cited from the reprinted version of this article found in Paths to the Power of Myth). For other critiques of Eliade’s work, see Stenski, “Mircea Eliade,” and, especially, Smith, Map Is Not Territory, pp. 88–103; Smith, To Take Place, pp. 1–23.

12. Doniger (formerly O’Flaherty), “Origins of Myth-Making Man,” p. 182 (cited from the reprinted edition of this essay found in Paths to the Power of Myth).

13. According to Turner’s widow, Edith Turner, Turner himself considered the Epic of Gilgamesh in some of his work on narrative; see Edith Turner, “The Literary Roots,” p. 164. I have, however, been unable to find Turner’s analysis; it is not included in the article to which Edith Turner’s discussion refers (Turner, “Icelandic Family Saga”). Perhaps Turner’s consideration of Gilgamesh is found in the unpublished paper on “Comparative Epic and Saga” that Turner mentions on p. 98 of his “Icelandic Family Saga” essay?

15. Turner, Drums of Affliction, pp. 273–274; this quote brought to my attention by Segal, “Turner’s Theory of Ritual,” p. 332.

16. Turner, Drums of Affliction, p. 268; this quote brought to my attention by Segal, “Turner’s Theory of Ritual,” p. 332.

17. Turner, “Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga,” p. 352 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in The Translation of Culture).

19. Deflem, “Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion,” pp. 7–8, provides a good discussion of this aspect of Turner’s intellectual biography; see also the charmingly personal account provided by Edith Turner that describes aspects of liminality the Turners themselves were experiencing in their own lives during the time Victor Turner was first reading van Gennep: Edith Turner, “Prologue: From the Ndembu to Broadway,” pp. 7–8, and (briefly) Edith Turner, “Prologue: Exploring the Trail,” p. xii. Turner himself alludes to the same idea in his “Process, System, and Symbol,” p. 159 (cited from the reprinted edition of this essay found in On the Edge of the Bush).

20. The phrase “diachronic profile” is from Turner, “Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga,” p. 351 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in The Translation of Culture).

22. Edith Turner, in “Prologue: From the Ndembu to Broadway,” p. 8, notes that “at that time [that is, the early 1960s] hardly anyone had considered its [liminality’s] nature, except for van Gennep himself and Henri Junod [in his Life of a South African Tribe].” Edith Turner goes on to state that even Victor Turner’s teacher, Max Gluckman, made only a solitary reference to liminality, in his 1962 essay on van Gennep (Gluckman, “Les Rites de Passage,” p. 3).

23. Turner, The Ritual Process, pp. 94–130; see further the discussion in Deflem, “Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion,” p. 13.

24. Turner, “Process, System, and Symbol,” p. 159 (cited from the reprinted edition of this essay found in On the Edge of the Bush). For the reference to Henri Junod’s work that Turner cites, see Junod’s Life of a South African Tribe.

26. Turner, Drums of Affliction, p. 1; this quote brought to my attention by Segal, “Turner’s Theory of Ritual,” p. 330.

28. Turner, Drums of Affliction, p. 2; this quote brought to my attention by Segal, “Turner’s Theory of Ritual,” p. 330.

30. Turner, “Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga,” p. 353 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in The Translation of Culture).

32. Turner, “Social Dramas and the Stories About Them,” p. 158 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in Critical Inquiry).

34. Turner, however, suggested in his 1971 piece that in the Icelandic sagas, as in certain social dramas elsewhere, “the contradictions between forces making for centralization and forces making for decentralization, between extreme individualism and family loyalty, between kinship and citizenship, and, perhaps, also between a bare subsistence economy and the aspiration (among many leading Icelanders) to an aristocratic lifestyle” were never resolved; see Turner, “Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga,” p. 372 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in The Translation of Culture).

36. Ronald L. Grimes calls Turner the “most influential” ritual theorist of the twentieth century; see Grimes’s “Ritual,” p. 264.

37. See, for example, the questions raised and critiques offered by Alexander, Victor Turner Revisited, pp. 13–26; Alexander, “Ritual and Current Studies of Ritual,” pp. 150–151; Grimes, “Ritual Studies,” p. 23 (cited from the original publication of this article found in Religious Studies Review; some further critical questions are raised on pp. 155–157 of the reprinted version, found in Beginnings in Ritual Studies); Grimes, “Victor Turner’s Definition,” pp. 141–146; Grimes, “Ritual,” pp. 266–267; La Fontaine, Initiation, p. 34; Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion, pp. 258–263; Ray, “Turner,” p. 96a; Segal, “Turner’s Theory of Ritual,” p. 333.

40. Turner, “Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?” p. 295 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in On the Edge of the Bush).

41. As opposed, say, to the cultures described in the essays collected in Herdt, ed., Third Sex, Third Gender.

42. “Liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.” Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 95.

47. Droogers, “Symbols of Marginality”; this reference brought to my attention by Elliott, Roads to Paradise, p. 171.

48. Elliott, Roads to Paradise, p. 172, citing Turner, The Ritual Process, pp. 252–253.

56. Haldar, The Notion of the Desert, p. 5; Talmon, “The ‘Desert Motif,’” pp. 50, 54; Talmon, “Wilderness,” p. 947b; Cohn, Shape of Sacred Space, pp. 7–23; Propp, Exodus 1–18, pp. 35–36. The Haldar, Talmon, and Cohn references were all brought to my attention by Propp, Exodus 1–18, p. 35. See in addition my own article, “Why Is Miriam Also Among the Prophets?” pp. 47–80.

57. Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2328; see similarly Moran, “Gilgamesh,” p. 559a; Moran, “Epic of Gilgamesh: A Document of Ancient Humanism,” pp. 18–19; this latter reference brought to my attention by George, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. xxxii–xxxiii. In “Epic of Gilgamesh: A Document of Ancient Humanism,” p. 19, Moran cites Wolff, “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Heroic Life,” p. 393, n. 2, as having first proposed the importance of the three seven-day periods in the structure of Gilgamesh, although as Moran points out, Wolff did not explore the ritual imagery associated with these transformational episodes. See also, regarding Wolff’s intimations regarding rites-of-passage imagery in Gilgamesh, Wolff, Study in the Narrative Structure, p. 77.

58. Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” pp. 2328–2330. See similarly, although somewhat less thoroughly, Moran, “Gilgamesh,” p. 559a; cf. also Sasson, “Some Literary Motifs,” p. 272.

59. Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2328; see similarly Moran, “Gilgamesh,” p. 559a.

60. Anderson, A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance, p. 79; see similarly Wolff, Study in the Narrative Structure, p. 89, although unlike Anderson, Wolff neglects the importance of Gilgamesh’s ritual acts as markers of the hero’s movement into liminality, focusing instead only on Gilgamesh’s emotional distress after Enkidu’s death.

61. Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal,” pp. 143–187, especially pp. 158–161, pp. 179–187; see similarly Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part I,” p. 7, and Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part II,” p. 11 (although in these latter two articles Abusch, as opposed to his “Ishtar’s Proposal” article, does not explicitly evoke rites-of-passage language). Abusch elsewhere, without explicitly evoking rites-of-passage language, intimates that he finds rites-of-passage imagery also in the scene in which Gilgamesh envisions the netherworld in Tablet XII, as this vision, as Abusch sees it, “serves to teach Gilgamesh how to be a normal god and to induct him into his new identity” (by which Abusch means Gilgamesh’s accustomed role in Mesopotamian tradition as a netherworld functionary); see Abusch’s “Development and Meaning,” p. 621.

62. Harris, Gender and Aging, pp. 35–36, 43. In Harris’s understanding, this theme of initiation is present only in the Standard version, introduced there by the Standard version’s author Sîn-leqi-unninnī and reflecting Sîn-leqi-unninnī’s own experiences of being initiated into the guild of exorcist-priests. Somewhat kindred is Mircea Eliade’s proposal that the Epic of Gilgamesh is the story of a failed initiation, one that posits that, while it is in fact possible for certain humans, including Gilgamesh, to become immortal, Gilgamesh fails to do so by not succeeding at the “initiatory ordeals” of staying awake for a week and of reaping the profit of an unexpected gift (the Plant of Rejuvenation). See Eliade, History of Religious Ideas 1, pp. 77–80.

64. Mandell, “Liminality, Altered States, and the Gilgamesh Epic,” p. 123. As I have noted above, Harris, Gender and Aging, pp. 35–36, also (problematically, in my opinion) reads the Gilgamesh Epic in terms of a “symbolic initiation,” although, less problematically than Mandell, she is not dependent on Campbell in doing so.

65. Mandell, “Liminality, Altered States, and the Gilgamesh Epic,” pp. 124–125.

66. As in previous chapters, line numbers for the Epic’s Standard version here and throughout are taken from Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh.

67. Harris, Gender and Aging, p. 195, n. 56, paraphrasing Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 221.

68. Mandell, “Liminality, Altered States, and the Gilgamesh Epic,” p. 125.

72. Turner, “Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?” p. 295 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in On the Edge of the Bush). See similarly Turner, “Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama,” pp. 41–42.

74. This description comes from Leach, “Approaches to the Study of the Bible,” p. 24 (cited from the reprinted edition of this essay found in Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth).

76. Turner was not necessarily “given to sustained theoretical exposition, and he often let unclarities remain in his writings” (Ray, “Turner,” p. 96a; see similarly Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 29). However, in one of the last lectures Turner gave during his lifetime (in 1982), which was published posthumously, he included a chart that more systematically than he does elsewhere describes 1. his notions of social drama, 2. the relation of social drama to the tripartite ritual process of separation-liminality-reaggregation, and 3. his understanding of the three crucial features of the liminal phase on which I am focusing here. These are, first, the deconstruction and recombination of familiar cultural configurations, second, the simplification of social-structural relationships (the absolute authority of leaders over liminars and communitas among liminal entities), and third, the communication of the sacra, the secret symbols of a community’s unity and continuity. See Turner, “Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?” p. 293 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in On the Edge of the Bush).

79. Ibid., p. 101; this quote brought to my attention by Perdue, “Liminality as a Social Setting,” p. 117, n. 20.

81. Myerhoff, Camino, and Edith Turner, “Rites of Passage,” pp. 381b–382a.

83. See, for example, Turner, “Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?” p. 295 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in On the Edge of the Bush).

85. On the nature of Gilgamesh’s oppressive behavior, see further my discussion in chapter 3 and, as there, Tigay, Evolution, pp. 178–191.

86. Mandell, “Liminality, Altered States, and the Gilgamesh Epic,” p. 126. See also the comments of Foster regarding Gilgamesh in the Epic’s early scenes as the “shepherd” who oppresses, rather that protects his flock, or his people (“Gilgamesh,” pp. 22–23). Similarly, Wolff, “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Heroic Life,” p. 394, writes that Gilgamesh, who should be the shepherd of his people, instead behaves among them as a “wild ox.”

87. See somewhat similarly Kirk, Myth, p. 147; Wolff, “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Heroic Life,” p. 394.

88. Note similarly in this regard how Gilgamesh seemingly requires the approval and even permission of the elders of Uruk before he and Enkidu embark on their expedition to face Huwawa/Humbaba; I discuss this very interesting scene more thoroughly in chapter 5. For the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, see, as in previous chapters, Langdon, Epic of Gilgamish. Line numbers are given according to the transcription found in Huehnergard, Grammar, pp. 475–484.

89. See CAD 6(Ḫ), p. 14a, s.v. ḫadī-ū’a-amēlu; Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 10, n. 13; this latter reference brought to my attention by Harris, Gender and Aging, p. 194, n. 6.

90. Falkenstein, “Gilgameš,” p. 357a. This reference brought to my attention by Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. xxvii, daggered note on the bottom of the page.

91. See similarly the Standard version, Tablet VIII, lines 3–6, where Gilgamesh, in his eulogy over the dead Enkidu, speaks of his friend’s mother as a gazelle (ṣabitu), of his father as a wild donkey (akkānu), and of the milk of wild asses (ša si[rrimī] še-zib-bi-šun) on which Enkidu was raised. Reading here sirrimī, “wild asses,” in line 5 with most commentators: see, for example, CAD 15 (S), p. 318b, s.v. sirrimu; CAD 17, Part 3 (Š), p. 149a, s.v. šizbu. However, Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 99, reads būlī, “cattle, wild beasts.”

95. Indeed, as the narrative continues, an older generation of interpreters read (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. ii, lines 31–34):

See, for example, E. A. Speiser, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” in ANET, p. 77a. The reading “like a child” has also been championed recently by Gardner and Maier, Gilgamesh, p. 91, and Sasson, “Gilgamesh Epic,” p. 1025b (the Gardner and Maier translation, however, must be used with caution; see Moran, “Utnapishtim Revisited,” pp. 13–14). More commonly, however, the reading “like a child” is now rejected in favor of the reading “like a goddess,” suggesting that Shamhat leads Enkidu to the shepherds’ camp in the same way that deities lead supplicants to their audience before other deities in Old Babylonian presentation texts. This was originally suggested by Renger, “Notes Brèves,” p. 190, and has been followed by Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 138; Foster, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 13; George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 13; Huehnergard, Grammar, p. 478; and Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 15. See further Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 1,” p. 8, n. 37.

96. On Shamhat’s dual role as sexual and maternal in this passage, see further Harris, “Images of Women,” pp. 223–224 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in Lingering Over Words).

99. Leach, “Approaches to the Study of the Bible,” p. 16 (cited from the reprinted edition of this essay found in Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth); this quote brought to my attention by Elliott, Roads to Paradise, p. 173.

101. Also worthy of note is the dream scene at the beginning of Tablet VII in which Enkidu envisions the gods decreeing that he must die as punishment for the two heroes’ killing of Huwawa/Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. As Enkidu reports the gods’ deliberations, the sun god Shamash protests to the god Enlil that punishing the heroes is unfair because both Huwawa/Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven were killed at “your command.” Some commentators, however, emend “your” to “my,” in accord with the sentiments of Tablets III, line 46, and V, line 130, and see here further evidence that Shamash was the instigator of the Huwawa/Humbaba expedition. See, for example, Beckman, “The Hittite Gilgamesh,” p. 163; Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 59, and n. 2 on that page. Because, however, this part of the Epic is preserved for us only in a prose fragment written in Hittite, it is precarious to say anything too definitive about this passage. The most recent treatment is the translation of Beckman cited above; the most substantive commentary is provided by Stefanini, “Enkidu’s Dream,” pp. 40–47.

103. For the Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, see, as in previous chapters, Jastrow and Clay, An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic.

104. See, for example, the several masks pictured in Foster, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 41, and in Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. xxx.

106. Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 127, n. 21; Huehnergard, Grammar, p. 581.

109. Vanstiphout, “Craftsmanship of Sîn-leqi-unninnī,” p. 47, somewhat similarly argues that the journey to the Cedar Forest “leads the heroes on to the highest satisfaction,” but only “for just one brief moment.” Yet while I agree with Vanstiphout that there is a sort of denouement at the beginning of Tablet VI, with the successful conclusion of the Huwawa/Humbaba episode, and also agree with him that this denouement is only briefly sustained, I see no justification for his claims that what throws the Epic’s story back into crisis is that “the ambitions of the young hero (or heroes) [are] accompanied by a growing disappointment over the lack of fulfillment—or the lack of contentment in fulfillment … they feel that they have not reached everything there is to reach.” No text I can cite suggests to me disappointment or a lack of contentment regarding their accomplishments in defeating Huwawa/Humbaba on either Gilgamesh’s or Enkidu’s part. Indeed, if anything, I would suggest the opposite: by redonning his royal robes and rejecting Ishtar at the beginning of Tablet VI, Gilgamesh seems to signal his conviction that the expedition against Huwawa/Humbaba has so cemented his reputation as “the greatest (and most invincible) among kings” (Tablet I, line 27) he need fear nothing, even a formidable goddess. Gilgamesh also seems to me to express only satisfaction and contentment regarding his accomplishments at the end of Tablet VI, when he boasts he is the greatest among Uruk’s warriors (Tablet VI, lines 176–179).

112. Although Deuteronomistic law (Deut 14:1) forbade the ancient Israelites to make themselves bald as an act of mourning, the rite, along with the related shaving of the beard, seems to have been known and, for some, considered acceptable. See Lev 10:6, 13:45, 21:5, Jer 7:29, 16:6, 41:5, and Mic 1:16. Isa 15:2 and Jer 48:37 suggest, moreover, that making oneself bald was an act of mourning among the ancient Moabites, and Jer 47:5 suggests the same thing of the Philistines. It may also be that Ugaritic mythology describes the high god of the Canaanite pantheon, El, as shaving off his facial hair when mourning the death of the Canaanite fertility god Baal, although the text (CAT 1.6.5.11–22) is not wholly clear. In addition, note the description of Achilles tearing out his hair as he laments the death of Patroclus (Iliad 18.27, 23.46). For other Greek references to this rite, see the examples cited in LSJ, p. 935a, s.v. keirō, and Vermeule, Aspects of Death, p. 63, and n. 46 on p. 227; for further discussion of the Israelite data, see Olyan, “What Do Shaving Rites Accomplish?” pp. 611–622, especially pp. 616–617. For the stripping off of one’s normal clothes as an ancient Mediterranean mourning rite, see, from Canaanite culture, Ugaritic mythology’s description of El donning sackcloth as he mourns the dead Baal (CAT 1.6.5.11–22); from ancient Israelite culture, Isa 32:11, Jer 6:26, Amos 8:10; from Moabite culture, Jer 48:37; from Phoenician culture, Ezek 27:31; from ancient Greece, Iliad 18.23–25, 24.162–165, Odyssey 24.316–317.

113. Harris, Gender and Aging, p. 44. See similarly, on Israelite mourning rituals, Olyan, “What Do Shaving Rites Accomplish?” p. 616.

114. Olyan, “What Do Shaving Rites Accomplish?” p. 616; on the seven-day period prescribed for ritual mourning in Mesopotamia, see Anderson, A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance, p. 77; Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part II,” p. 8, n. 5.

115. Abusch very provocatively points out that Gilgamesh’s mourning behaviors here are “perverse and topsy-turvy” in another significant way, given that Gilgamesh leaves Enkidu’s body unburied for a week (Old Babylonian Meissner Fragment, col. ii, lines 5–9; in the Standard version, Tablet X, lines 61–65, 135–138, 234–238). As Abusch notes, “Leaving the dead unburied is actually the worst treatment that can be accorded them … Gilgamesh’s behavior actually resulted in the mistreatment and dishonor of Enkidu. Gilgamesh has committed an offense against Enkidu and deprived him of that which he had been promised: a proper burial.” See Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part II,” p. 10; for the Old Babylonian Meissner Fragment, see, as in previous chapters, Meissner, Ein altbabylonisches Fragment. In terms of the analysis I seek to develop here, I would suggest that Gilgamesh’s “perverse and topsy-turvy” failure to bury Enkidu can be read as yet another marker of what Turner calls the “bizarre and terrifying” world of liminality that the narrative seeks to evoke at this point (Turner, “Myth and Symbol,” p. 577b).

117. As noted in chapter 2, nn. 15 and 23, Abusch has argued that Utnapishtim’s dwelling place was not Gilgamesh’s original goal in the Old Babylonian version of the Epic, but that he was only wandering aimlessly until he encountered Siduri. See further, as also in chapter 2, Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part I,” pp. 9–14; Abusch, “Mourning the Death of a Friend,” pp. 55–59 (cited from the original publication of this essay in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume); also Abusch, “Development and Meaning,” p. 615, n. 3, and pp. 617–618.

118. See similarly, on these fearsome beings as typical of the liminal experience of suffering and woe, Harris, Gender and Aging, p. 45.

119. Oppenheim, “Mesopotamian Mythology II,” p. 47, suggests that Gilgamesh even “cries out in fear” (ṣarāḫu) in the eighth stage of his passage (Tablet IX, line 162), so terrifying is Mashu’s utter darkness; see similarly Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 78; Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 139a, s.v. ṣarāḫu. Other commentators, however, read ṣarāḫu, “to hurry,” here; for example, CAD 16 (Ṣ), p. 101a, s.v. ṣarāḫu D; Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 98; Foster, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 69; George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 74.

120. See, somewhat similarly, Harris, Gender and Aging, pp. 35 and 47, who argues, as I do here, that the secret knowledge Gilgamesh receives from Utnapishtim is to be understood according to the model of a rite of passage. In my opinion, however, Harris overstates when she suggests that it is the author to whom the Standard version is commonly attributed, Sîn-leqi-unninnī, who incorporates this motif of the revelation of sacred knowledge in response to his own experience of initiation as an exorcist-priest. See further my discussion above, nn. 62 and 64.

121. As Moran points out (“Epic of Gilgamesh: A Document of Ancient Humanism,” p. 20), the Epic’s intention in insisting on this point is probably somewhat pragmatic: “If there was only one survivor of the Flood and he lives at the end of the world, how do we know the story at all? Who contacted this survivor? The epic supplies the answer.” Yet Moran goes on to say that “there is more to the importance of the Flood story than that,” and, while he describes a different significance for the tale than I do here, I certainly agree with his overall assessment.

123. See Moran, “Gilgamesh,” p. 559b; Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” pp. 2329–2330; and Jacobsen, “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” p. 243.

124. As noted in chapter 2, n. 38, this translation of the plant’s name is Moran’s, in “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2335.

125. Utnapishtim is called here by his cognomen Atrahasis, the name that is used of the flood hero regularly in the separate Old Babylonian account of the flood story known as the Epic of Atrahasis. See Lambert and Millard, Atra-Ḫasīs.

127. Gilgamesh’s words to Utnapishtim at the beginning of Tablet XI, “you are like me” (line 4), take on a special resonance in this regard. The “doubling of Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh” is elsewhere explored by Damrosch, Narrative Covenant, p. 114.

130. Turner, “Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?” p. 295 (cited from the original publication of this essay in On the Edge of the Bush); see similarly Turner, “Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama,” pp. 41–42.

131. In addition to my comments that follow, note also Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part II,” p. 11, who writes of how Gilgamesh at this point, at least in the Old Babylonian version of the Epic, is in a state of “confusion and disorder,” and how “his world has collapsed and his identity within it” (emphasis mine).

132. George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 73, similarly has one of the scorpion-men who guard Mount Mashu describe Gilgamesh as “the flesh of the gods” (Tablet IX, line 130). George is dependent here on his own critical edition of the text of Gilgamesh, which, as I noted in the prologue, I was not able to consult before this book went into production. Thus, I cannot be sure of the precise Akkadian text on which George’s translation is based. I can note, however, that he places the phrase “flesh of the gods” in brackets in his translation, indicating the phrase is restored in his edition and thus conjectural.

134. Ibid., p. 74, quotes Shemaryahu Talmon: “The Mesopotamians for whom the Arabian desert lay to the West, where the sun sets, identified the wilderness as the area which leads to the netherworld” (Talmon, “Wilderness,” p. 946b).

137. For example, ibid., pp. 76–77; Hendel, Epic of the Patriarch, pp. 116–121; Tigay, Evolution, pp. 7–8; van Nortwick, Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, p. 31.

138. Tigay, Evolution, pp. 7–8. The passages to which Tigay refers are Tablet I, lines 103–104, Tablet IX, lines 4–5, Tablet X, lines 8–9, 43–44, 117–118, 124–125, 216–217, 223–224.

141. On the location of Mount Mashu in the east, at the place of the rising of the sun, see the Old Babylonian Meissner Fragment, col. iv, line 11, and, in the Standard version, Tablet IX, line 39 (restored; see Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 96; George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 71; cf. Thompson, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 50 [Thompson’s Tablet IX, col. ii, line 3]; Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 101); this Standard version text is quoted above on p. 114. On the location of the Cedar Forest in the west, in Lebanon, see the Old Babylonian Oriental Institute Fragment, rev. 13 (Bauer, “Ein viertes altbabylonisches Fragment,” pp. 254–262), and, in the Standard version, Tablet IV, lines 4, 37 (restored), 76 (restored), 113 (restored), Tablet V, line 117; also the discussion of Tigay, Evolution, p. 78. As Tigay notes, this is a change in the Akkadian from the older Sumerian, which seems to locates the Cedar Forest in the east. Tigay hypothesizes that the change is “influenced by the western orientation of the West Semitic dynasties that came to dominate Mesopotamia in the Old Babylonian period and the campaigns of certain kings of that period to the west.” I suspect, however, that the Akkadian Epic’s interest in juxtaposing structurally the journeys to the Cedar Forest and to Mount Mashu may have been as (or even more) important in generating the geographical change. See further my discussions in chapter 5 concerning other changes I believe were introduced in the Akkadian tradition for structural and thematic reasons.

143. Although somewhat dated, the discussion of Oppenheim, Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 215–217, is still quite useful.

144. Asher-Greve, “The Oldest Female Oneiromancer,” pp. 31–32; Harris, “Images of Women,” p. 221 (cited from the original publication of this essay in Lingering Over Words); see too Harris, Gender and Aging, pp. 105–106, 155–156.

146. Starr, Rituals of the Diviner, p. 7; this reference brought to my attention by Asher-Greve, “The Oldest Female Oneiromancer,” p. 31, n. 41.

148. Note also Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, pp. 53, 59, who suggests that as the prostitute Shamhat was sent into the wilderness to entrap Enkidu, so too is Enkidu “an erotic trap to ensnare Gilgamesh”; like the woman Shamhat, that is, Enkidu is envisioned as a seductress.

149. This reference brought to my attention by Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 56.

150. As I noted in chapter 3, n. 65, I follow here most translators, for example, Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal,” p. 157; Foster, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 61; Gardner and Maier, Gilgamesh, p. 187; George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 65; Kovacs, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 70. As Abusch points out, however (“Ishtar’s Proposal,” pp. 157–158, n. 36), some read friend as the subject, rather than object, of the verb “to cover”—for example, Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 93, CAD 8 (K), p. 299a—thus translating (so CAD), “my friend veiled his face like a bride.”

155. Turner, “Process, System, and Symbol,” p. 160 (cited from the reprinted edition of this essay found in On the Edge of the Bush).

157. Turner, Forest of Symbols, p. 97; this quote brought to my attention by Bell, Ritual, p. 40.

1. See chapter 3, pp. 59–60 and n. 27, where I cite Kilmer, “Note on an Overlooked Word-Play,” p. 128.

2. See chapter 3, pp. 66–67 and n. 51, where I cite Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 126, nn. 9, 10.

3. In addition to my discussion below, see further Leick, Sex and Eroticism, pp. 162–169, who, notably for our purposes, discusses prostitution in a chapter entitled “Liminal Sexuality.”

4. See chapter 3, p. 74 and n. 78, where I cite Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, p. 34; see also, for the translation of the text quoted here, Leick, Sex and Eroticism, p. 217; also Lambert, “Prostitution,” p. 151.

5. See CAD 1, Part II (A), p. 341 b, s.v. assinnu; Bird, “The Bible in Christian Ethical Deliberation,” p. 160, and n. 46 on that page; Lambert, “Prostitution,” pp. 147–153; Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, pp. 28, 30; and Leick, Sex and Eroticism, pp. 159–162, who notably discusses the assinnu in her chapter entitled “Liminal Sexuality.”

6. On the problems of evoking androgyny more universally as a symbol of liminality, see above, chapter 4.

8. See chapter 2, p. 44, and nn. 46–47, where I cite Jacobsen, “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” p. 245, and Tigay, Evolution, pp. 29–30; see also Tigay, “Was There an Integrated Gilgamesh Epic?” p. 217.

10. As in previous chapters, line numbers for the Epic’s Standard version here and throughout are taken from Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh.

11. These seven times are Tablet III, lines 11, 12, 230, 231, Tablet V, line 131, Tablet VI, line 89, Tablet IX, line 132.

12. Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” p. 101 (quoted from the reprinted version of this essay found in Turner, Forest of Symbols).

13. See the glossary and concordance compiled by Parpola, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 127a.

14. In addition to the discussion that follows, see my brief comments in chapter 2, p. 17 and n. 16 and, as in that note, Tigay, Evolution, p. 24.

15. For the Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, see, as in previous chapters, Jastrow and Clay, Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic.

17. As in chapter 2, see further Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2332; Tigay, Evolution, pp. 76–81.

18. Tigay, Evolution, pp. 76–81, while agreeing with my understanding here that the change in Shamash’s role is significant, offers a somewhat different interpretation of the motivation that underlies the change. He describes three stages. First, he argues that in the Sumerian the role of Shamash (or, more properly, Utu, Shamash’s Sumerian name) is simply to aid Gilgamesh in the latter’s quest, this because, in the Sumerian, Huwawa’s Cedar Mountain is located in the east, not the west (as in the Akkadian), and is moreover identified as the place of the rising of the sun; it is thus a place in which Shamash takes special interest. Then, in the Old Babylonian as Tigay sees it, Shamash is still identified only as a helper to Gilgamesh and not the instigator of the expedition, but since in the Old Babylonian the Cedar Forest is relocated to the west (see chapter 4, n. 141), the reason Shamash is cast into this role as helper is because of his special capacity as protector of travelers and because he stands opposed to all that is “baneful,” as is Huwawa/Humbaba. Finally, according to Tigay, in the Standard version, the notion of Shamash as the enemy of the baneful Huwawa/Humbaba suggests to this text’s redactors that Shamash must have inspired Gilgamesh to engage in battle against the monster. I have already made clear I would interpret the changes in the role of Shamash differently; here I would just add that I am not as confident as Tigay that Shamash’s role as instigator is lacking in the Old Babylonian, given that the text of the Old Babylonian account available to us is only very partially preserved. See similarly Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2332, who writes, “The role assigned to Shamash is an innovation, but probably not of the late edition” (emphasis mine).

19. Anderson, A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance, pp. 78–80; see also Tigay, Evolution, pp. 50–51; Ray, “The Gilgamesh Epic,” p. 312; and Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 1,” p. 7, n. 30. As I read him, Abusch interprets somewhat differently in “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 2,” pp. 12–17, by stressing less that the sort of rejoicing Siduri urges stands generally in structural opposition to mourning and focusing instead more on the excessiveness of Gilgamesh’s mourning and the “exaggerated” celebration Siduri suggests “as a way of vigorously re-affirming life.”

20. The other major interpreter of Siduri’s speech is Abusch: see his “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 1,” pp. 1–14; Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 2,” pp. 3–17; Abusch, “Mourning the Death of a Friend,” pp. 53–62 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume); Abusch, “Development and Meaning,” pp. 617–618.

22. Two very enigmatic lines in Tablet III of the Standard version (lines 10 and 229) connect Gilgamesh with “wives” (ḫirāti), but it is not at all clear if these are wives already in his harem or brides he is to wed on his return from expedition to the domain of Huwawa/Humbaba. Possibly, as Dalley suggests (Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 127, n. 26), the Epic’s intent here, in these ominous passages in which first the elders and then, perhaps, the officers of Uruk caution Gilgamesh about the dangers of his proposed undertaking, is paronomastic, a pun between ḫirāti, “wives,” and ḫirāti, “graves.” Foster seems to attempt to capture this potential wordplay by translating the elders’ and then officers’ words as “let him [Gilgamesh] return, to be a grave husband” (Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 23, 27). For the suggestion that it is Uruk’s young warriors or “officers” who speak to Gilgamesh in the very fragmentary second passage, see George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 28, who relies here on his own critical edition of the text, which, as noted in the prologue, I was unable to consult before this volume went to press.

23. See somewhat similarly Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 1,” p. 4, who argues that the idea that Gilgamesh should take a wife is “one of the most important elements—perhaps the most important element—of Siduri’s message” and who further suggests that it is crucial to the message that Gilgamesh and this wife have children (p. 7).

25. See Moran, “Gilgamesh,” p. 559b; Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” pp. 2329–2330; and Jacobsen, “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” p. 243.

28. Ibid., p. 382b. On pašāḫu, “to be at peace,” in Tablet I, line 7, see above, chapter 2, n. 41.

30. Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2328.

31. As is suggested, for example, by Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 1,” p. 7; Abusch, “Mourning the Death of a Friend,” p. 58 (cited from the original publication of this essay found in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume).

32. On the Standard version’s lack of interest in the institutions of marriage and family, see similarly Harris, Gender and Aging, p. 45, although she appears to contradict herself subsequently, on p. 48, where she argues that Tablet XII, which she feels does stress family and offspring, is to be understood as integral to the Standard version. See further above, chapter 2, n. 42.

33. For other attempts to explain why the Standard version deletes Siduri’s speech, see Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 1,” p. 12 and p. 13, n. 58; George, Epic of Gilgamesh, p. xliii.

34. See further Cooper, “Gilgamesh Dreams of Enkidu,” p. 39; cf. also Cooper, “Symmetry and Repetition,” p. 508–512.

35. Tigay, Evolution, pp. 99–100. Although we do not in fact have an Old Babylonian account of Gilgamesh’s meeting with Utnapishtim, Tigay presumes that this must have been a part of the Old Babylonian version since reaching Utnapishtim was, after all, the goal of Gilgamesh’s journey. See Tigay, Evolution, p. 99, and also n. 58 on that page; however, as in chapter 2, nn. 15 and 23, cf. Abusch regarding the question of whether or not the dwelling place of Utnapishtim was the goal of Gilgamesh’s journey when he first set off wandering in the Old Babylonian story.

37. This interpretation might also help explain why, in its reformulation of the elders’ speech that tries to dissuade Gilgamesh from his proposed expedition against Huwawa/Humbaba, the Standard version deviates from its Old Babylonian prototype in adding a line that refers to Gilgamesh’s “wives,” possibly current, possibly wives to be (cf. the Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, lines 249–271, to the Standard version, Tablet III, lines 2–10, and also, in the Standard version, the fragmentary Tablet III, lines 228–229; see further above, n. 22). If, as I have suggested here, the Standard version rejects the Old Babylonian’s notion that marriage and family are the crucial aspects of human existence that will only become part of Gilgamesh’s life in the reaggregated or reintegrated state of a rite of passage, then the Standard version, unlike the Old Babylonian, would feel perfectly free to suggest, in the context of the Huwawa/Humbaba episode, that Gilgamesh may have already been married. See also my comments below in n. 46 on Abusch’s analysis of the differing messages of the Old Babylonian and Standard versions.

38. Anderson, A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance, pp. 79–82; Tigay, Evolution, pp. 210–211.

42. For the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, see, as in previous chapters, Langdon, Epic of Gilgamish. Line numbers are given according to the transcription found in Huehnergard, Grammar, pp. 475–484.

45. Tigay, Evolution, p. 51; see similarly Tigay, Evolution, p. 243, and Tigay, “Summary,” p. 43.

46. Although our modes of interpretation are significantly different, I do find that the analysis I suggest here regarding the difference between the Old Babylonian and the eleven tablets original to the Standard version complements nicely the understanding proposed by Abusch, “Development and Meaning,” passim, but especially pp. 616–620; see also Abusch, “Gilgamesh and the Homeric Epics,” passim, but especially pp. 2–3. Abusch argues that Siduri’s speech may represent the very essence of the Old Babylonian version’s message, that Gilgamesh must learn to be satisfied with “the normal pleasures of everyday human life” (p. 617; emphasis mine), whereas in the first eleven tablets of the Standard version there is a greater emphasis on “community, on universal history, and on continuity” and, consequently, a greater focus on Gilgamesh as king and “Gilgamesh’s acceptance of communal responsibility” (p. 620; emphasis mine). Abusch further suggests that when Tablet XII was added to the older eleven-tablet corpus of the Standard version, the Epic’s focus changed yet again, with an “emphasis … now on Gilgamesh’s relationship to the netherworld” and his role as divine judge in that realm (p. 621; see also above, chapter 2, n. 42).

I also find my analysis here complements the observations of Vanstiphout, “Craftsmanship of Sîn-leqi-unninnī,” p. 66, that the Standard version of the Epic sees children as providing a sort of immortality for “common mortals” but that those of “royal and heroic stature” find immortality through “great works … left to mankind.” I have not been particularly compelled, conversely, by the attempts of some other scholars to differentiate between the thematics of the Old Babylonian and Standard versions: for example, Foster, “Gilgamesh,” pp. 21–42; Harris, Gender and Aging, pp. 32–49; Jacobsen, “Gilgamesh Epic: Romantic and Tragic Vision,” pp. 231–249, especially pp. 246–249. On Harris, see further my discussion in chapter 4, n. 62; on Foster, see the criticisms of Harris, Gender and Aging, p. 34; and on Jacobsen, see further the critique I offer in chapter 2, n. 40.

47. Pointed out by Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 33, footnoting Turner, The Ritual Process, pp. 99–105, and Turner, Process, Performance, and Pilgrimage, pp. 104–105.

52. Moran, “Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia,” p. 2328; see similarly Moran, “Gilgamesh,” p. 559a.

53. Harris somewhat similarly comments that Shamhat performs a “mediating role” in the acculturation of Enkidu because she herself, as a prostitute, stands as an intermediate position within Mesopotamian society. See her “Images of Women,” p. 223 (cited from the original version of this essay found in Lingering Over Words). On Shamhat as mediator, see also Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, pp. 29–32.

54. Niditch, “Wronged Woman Righted,” p. 147 and n. 13 on that page. These observation’s of Niditch’s were brought to my attention by Bird, “Harlot as Heroine,” p. 135, n. 17.

57. Ibid.; see similarly Walls’s descriptions of the “prostitute’s ambiguous social status” and of prostitutes as “socially marginal women” in Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 21.

60. For a convenient translation of this text, see Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, pp. 154–162, and the translation by E. A. Speiser in ANET, pp. 106b–109a. For comments on the parallels between Ereshkigal’s curses of the assinnu sent to her and Enkidu’s curses of Shamhat, see Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, p. 161, nn. 15 and 16; also the comments of Bird, “The Bible in Christian Ethical Deliberation,” p. 160, n. 46; Leick, Sex and Eroticism, pp. 166–167; Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, p. 32.

61. Harris, “Images of Women,” p. 222 and n. 26 on pp. 224–225 (cited from the originally published version of this essay found in Lingering Over Words).

62. Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 1,” pp. 7–8; Abusch’s citation of Moran’s work is to “Ovid’s blanda voluptas,” pp. 121–127, especially pp. 126–127. Cf. also Abusch’s comments in “Development and Meaning,” p. 617: “Just as a prostitute, a woman, humanized and acculturated Enkidu at the beginning of this [the Old Babylonian] version, so a tavern-keeper, another woman, humanizes and acculturates Gilgamesh at the end”; similarly, see Mobley, “Wild Man,” p. 222: “Women—first Siduri, the tavern-keeper, and later Utnapishtim’s wife—figure in the wild man Gilgamesh’s return to culture, just as Shamhat was the principal agent of Enkidu’s domestication.”

64. Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 1,” p. 7, n. 29, and the references listed there.

66. See above, chapter 4, p. 117, and, as there, the comments of Harris, Gender and Aging, p. 46.

67. Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 1,” pp. 11, 12.

68. It is worth noting in this regard how liminally charged Abusch’s interpretation of the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh-Siduri encounter is. As Abusch sees it, Gilgamesh, upon “seeing the face” of the divine alewife (Old Babylonian Meissner Fragment, col. ii, line 12), desires to marry the goddess and, through that marriage, partake in her life of immortality. Abusch argues, though, that although Gilgamesh believes this strategy will bring him eternal life, it is in fact a death wish, a plea to enter a world in which he will “live without living and die without dying” (“Mourning the Death of a Friend,” p. 56 [cited from the original publication of this essay found in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume]). The proposed union, Abusch writes, “would be a mingling of human and god, life and death,” which is to say, to employ the analysis I have adopted in this study, it would be liminal in nature and, moreover, permanently and thus destructively so. What Siduri counsels instead then, in the Old Babylonian Meissner Fragment, col. iii, line 13 (“May your spouse rejoice continuously in your lap”), is a normal marriage with a human spouse. See Abusch, “Gilgamesh’s Request and Siduri’s Denial, Part 1,” passim; Abusch, “Mourning the Death of a Friend,” pp. 55–59 (cited again from the publication of this essay found in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume).

70. Harris, “Images of Women,” p. 222 (cited from the originally published version of this essay found in Lingering Over Words).

72. Harris, “Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox,” pp. 263, 265 (cited from the originally published version of this essay found in HR 30). See further, on Ishtar’s contradictory nature, Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal,” p. 159, who speaks of Ishtar both as a goddess of fertility and life but also of death; Vanstiphout, “Inanna/Ishtar as a Figure of Controversy,” pp. 225–238.

73. Harris, “Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox,” p. 264 (cited from the originally published version of this essay found in HR 30); see also Harris, “Images of Women,” pp. 226–227 (cited from the originally published version of this essay found in Lingering Over Words).

74. See, among others, Moran, “Epic of Gilgamesh: A Document of Ancient Humanism,” p. 20.

75. Harris, “Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox,” p. 272 (cited from the originally published version of this essay found in HR 30); Harris, “Images of Women,” pp. 227–228 (cited from the originally published version of this essay found in Lingering Over Words). See also, on the very masculine nature of Ishtar’s proposition of Gilgamesh, Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, p. 22.

76. Harris, “Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox,” p. 271 (cited from the originally published version of this essay found in HR 30); on Ishtar as the patron of prostitutes, see further Lambert, “Prostitution,” pp. 135–136.

77. See chapter 2, p. 41 and n. 34, and, as there, Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal,” pp. 180–187, and Abusch, “Development and Meaning,” p. 615, n. 3, and p. 618.

80. Vanstiphout, “Craftsmanship of Sîn-leqi-unninnī,” passim, also reads the Tablet VI material as pivotal in terms of the Epic’s structure, although his overall understanding of its significance differs from mine. See further n. 109 in chapter 4.

83. The purpose of the sacred marriage ritual is debated. An older reconstruction sees it as a ritual in which the king, representing the young fertility god Dumuzi (Akkadian Tammuz), has intercourse with a priestess, representing the fertility goddess Inanna (the Sumerian name of Ishtar), in order to emulate these two deities’ mythological coupling and thus stimulate both human and agricultural fecundity within the realm. More recently, Cooper has argued that the ritual has more to do with securing divine legitimization of the king’s rule and also with regulating relations between humans and the divine and reaffirming a king’s and people’s obligations to the gods. See Cooper, “Sacred Marriage,” pp. 89–92; also Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 43.

86. As in n. 68 above, it is worth noting how liminally charged Abusch’s interpretation of Ishtar’s marriage proposal is, as Abusch’s suggestion that “Ishtar is attainment, but also attenuation—to love her is to surrender one’s identity” (Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal,” p. 173) is similar to his argument that a potential union between Siduri and Gilgamesh, although it might appear to offer life (indeed, eternal life), is in truth a death wish for Gilgamesh. Consistent with this liminally charged interpretation of Ishtar’s proposition, Abusch suggests an ambiguous character to Gilgamesh’s acts of clothing and cleansing in Tablet VI, lines 1–5, just prior to the hero’s encounter with Ishtar: these could be taken as either life-affirming acts or the washing and ceremonial dressing of the body as it is prepared for burial (Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal,” p. 161). He also notes more generally the ambiguous overlap many scholars have observed between marriage and funerary rites (Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal,” pp. 157–158; in addition to the reference to van Gennep that Abusch cites, see Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play, p. 234, and p. 317, n. 1, and the references listed there).

87. Further aspects of the relationship between the Shamhat and Ishtar episodes in the Epic of Gilgamesh are provocatively explored by Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, pp. 36–40. See also, the comments of Foster, “Gilgamesh,” p. 36.

88. Note the somewhat similar comments of Harris, “Images of Women,” p. 226 (cited from the originally published version of this essay found in Lingering Over Words); also Foster, “Humor and Wit,” p. 2468. This latter reference brought to my attention by Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 82, n. 15.