Anyone who claims any education must read Gilgamesh. The Epic of Gilgamesh is an astonishing piece of literature, astonishing not only because it is modern and moral and profound, but astonishing because it is all these things and over three thousand years old. So, put down your Homer and your Shakespeare, put down even your Bible, and read Gilgamesh.
I have been reading Stephen Mitchell’s New English Version, and it is this book that has got me thinking about Mormon things.
The distance from Mitchell’s “translation” (scare quotes are intentional) and the man Gilgamesh is vast and varied. Here’s the intellectual history, in brief.
A great king of Uruk in Mesopotamia (Iraq) called Gilgamesh (or perhaps Bilgames) lived around 2750 BC. He was evidently a pretty memorable chap because legends of his life soon began to circulate among Sumerian storytellers. Towards the end of the third millennium BC these tales were written on clay tablets (perhaps earlier, but these are the earliest extant copies). That Gilgamesh was a real man who did real things can probably be taken for granted, but the tales themselves reflect some kind of mythologizing. After all, it is unlikely that the historical Gilgamesh fought an actual giant monster in the mountains of Lebanon.
Several hundred years later these stories were collected and woven into a new tale, what we call the Old Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. Then, around 1200 BC, a priest-scribe called Sin-leqi-unninni produced the definitive “Standard Version,” using the earlier tale and also writing Gilgamesh into the already ancient Flood myth. The earliest extant version of the standard tale dates to Nineveh around 650 BC.
To sum (and simplify), here’s the evolution of Gilgamesh:
1. Real king named Gilgamesh. Impressive dude. (c. 2750 BC)
2. Tales of Gilgamesh. (c. 2750 BC +)
3. Tales of Gilgamesh are mythologized (2750 BC +) and written in Sumerian ( – c. 2100 BC).
4. Old Babylonian (Akkadian) version of Gilgamesh. (c. 1700 BC)
5. Standard Version of Gilgamesh (with Flood). (c. 1200 BC)
6. Earliest extant copies of Standard Version of Gilgamesh. (c. 650 BC.)
Gilgamesh was lost until 1850 AD when the tablets were found by the British in the dirt of Nineveh. It was translated in the 1870′s and has been subject to numerous translations and editions since then.
Mitchell’s version is not a translation per se. He doesn’t read Akkadian and is really just reworking more scholarly English translations. Adept at such endeavours (he has done similar work with the Bhagavad Gita and Tao Te Ching), Mitchell breathes new life into the text. But he does more than that. He makes changes for aesthetic reasons and fills in some of the quite large textual lacunae (about 1/3 of the entire work is missing). It is, however, true in spirit to the original. I think so anyway, although some scholars grumble. Just remember that you are not reading a strict translation and you’ll be fine.
So, what’s the Mormon angle? If we add a 7 and 8 to the list above, astute readers may be able to guess where I might be inclined to take this (particularly 8):
7. The Epic is discovered in modern times (1850 AD) and careful, scholarly translations are made (1873 – 2007 AD).
8. An outsider takes the text, expands it, and offers something new.
Possibility: one could take a figure such as Enoch and take him through steps 1-8 in a Mormon context: historical Enoch > mythologized Enoch > biblical Enoch > scholarly Enoch > Joseph Smith’s Enoch. I would be interested in developing this parallel. At the very least, the evolution of the Gilgamesh epic may be similar to the evolution of the Bible: history > mythology > written versions (JEDP) > edited version (Redactor) > earliest texts > translations. (It is for individual readers of the Bible to decide where or if to place the hand of God in this process.)
_________
The scholarly magnum opus on Gilgamesh is by A.R. George, both an edited edition and a translation.
March 13, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Very nice parallel, Ronan. JS’ Enoch is a wonderful and rich character. Possibly more “true,” and less historical, than any other figure in our scriptures. I do think that Joseph transcends Mitchell and is a different creature for a host of obvious reasons, but I do think there are parallel transformations going on.
March 13, 2007 at 2:02 pm
I should add that Stephen Mitchell’s name is “held for good and evil” among scholars…
March 13, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Obviously there’s a religious motivation to Smith that creates a certain (major) difference.
But the notion of reworking an ancient text from the English and adding something new pretty seamlessly is quite similar.
March 13, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Ronan, I’m with you on that point – it’s fascinating stuff.
March 13, 2007 at 2:16 pm
To avoid the derailment that would occur if people think I am equating a Stephen Mitchell with a Joseph Smith, let me put it differently:
Stephen Mitchell is to Assyriology what Joseph Smith is to religion-making.
Anyway, this is only the final stage. The evolution of the historical Gilgamesh to the Gilgamesh of the texts is something that offers something to biblical studies too. Maybe.
March 13, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Stephen Mitchell is a force for modern-English literary good, although I can see where his tendency to move away from ancient source materials might raise hackles.
March 13, 2007 at 3:02 pm
I think it’s a good parallel. I think Joseph’s productions from antiquity involved a process I have called complex translation, meaning basically that Joseph started with a source and then targumized it.
A believer’s version of this view would be that Joseph targumized an ancient source; a nonbeliever’s version would be that he targumized modern source(s). But there is definitely midrashic embellishment going on and finding expression in the finished product.
March 13, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Kevin,
Link to your previous work, please. Joseph targumized the KJV, right? Did he ever claim otherwise?
March 13, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Obviously I’m on board Ronan — with one exception. There was no scholarly text from which Joseph worked. I believe that Joseph was aware that his additions to the JST were sometimes aesthetic — but I don’t believe that he saw his “textual revelations” that way. By “textual revelation” I mean a revelation of a text he never really possessed like D&C 8, the Books of Moses and Abraham where he never had an ancient text to work from and his additions go way beyond a textual emendation but expand to midrashic embellishment. Even the category of targum would be too limited for these numerous-chapter additions. Moreover, I don’t believe that Joseph himself believed that what he had was an expansion or addition — it was just the revelation from his POV and given his horizon. I believe that the Book of Mormon is essentially the same kind of revelatory process of loose-textually based translation.
March 13, 2007 at 3:14 pm
There was no scholarly text from which Joseph worked.
Wasn’t it the KJV?
March 13, 2007 at 3:15 pm
As I mentioned, Gilgamesh is actually the one who brings presents to our house (when my wife isn’t looking). I love the story. Is this the Wellesley professor’s translation? He gave a reading a few years back (can’t remember exactly when), and I remember thinking it was fine but not fantastic. Incidentally, I want someone to make a frigging movie of this (I think all the kinky sex can be done with taste, though how to handle the early bestiality with taste will be hard–doing anything but ignoring it would be hard for audiences to stomach). Can we talk a Mormon filmmaker out of doing roadshow comedies and into this? We could use the new James Bond guy. On a cultural sidenote, I wonder how current Westerners would deal with the great love between Enkidu and Gilgamesh? Would they snigger (or protest on late-night TV in Southern drawl) about Brokeback Mountain?
There is an area where Ronan’s analogy breaks down. Mitchell is functioning as a popularizer primarily, seeking to expand the audience for an ancient work, to interpret it for a new group who have been excluded by reason of training, avocation, and intellectual stamina (other reasons possible). Joseph Smith certainly did this with his translations.
But Joseph Smith was also seeking revelation from these experiences, new access to previously hidden truths obscured by the passage of time and the interventions of obscurantists. Smith was seeing himself as the peer, both in stature and in friendship, with these authors whose voices and whose people’s histories he was recovering, and this is an important difference, even with Ronan’s disclaimer in 5. Smith was not just a populist interpreter (as in Hatch’s model and by extension Ronan’s), he was also in search of primal truths and peoples, the original order of Adam and his earliest offspring.
As traditional as this sounds, and appropriating more biblical studies terminology, I think Joseph Smith was both an exegete and a prophet, while Mitchell, on this analogy, is a (populist) exegete.
March 13, 2007 at 3:19 pm
re: 10, I find Enoch fascinating in this respect–it’s a part of Smith’s JST, clearly meant to fit into the actual Biblical narrative, but when the Saints mention it in the early years (look in T&S when it’s published), they see it as (at least part of) the lost book that Jude mentioned. So even though the text wasn’t extant, it was still a part of the KJV.
March 13, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Maybe after Richard Dutcher finishes his Lilith movie, he can make Gilgamesh. Doing bestiality scenes could hardly hurt his popularity with Mormon audiences.
March 13, 2007 at 3:46 pm
smb,
I wouldn’t want to push the analogy further than necessary. In fact, the differences are instructive.
March 13, 2007 at 4:30 pm
I read the version you are reading to my kids last year. We looked at it in the context of “the flood”. I like that with syntopical reading, one can analyze, rectify or refute views in light of current infomation.
It’s one of the ancient texts that should be read in historical order – Creation myths, The Book of Dead, Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Pentateuch, Cicero’s Aenid, New Testament, and the Book of Mormon – to get a sense of the evolution of the omniscient or omnipotent gods/G-d within and through civilizations.
March 13, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Although I haven’t read Mitchell’s version of Gilgamesh, I have read others, and his expanding of the text – being true to the spirit of it – brings to mind the pseudoepigrapha works of 1 Enoch (Ethiopian), 2 Enoch (Slavonic), and 3 Enoch. In each, the writer has obviously drawn from written and oral traditions to produce an expanded work. In particular, 2 Enoch has the hero sitting among the council of God and touring through the 10 heavens. Fascinating stuff.
March 13, 2007 at 4:38 pm
14/R: I agree: the differences are instructive, and I agree that this analogy does illuminate Smith as exegete (apropos Kevin’s post, there’s a fascinating essay on Smith as pseudepigraphist within the last five years or so in Dialogue).
March 13, 2007 at 4:41 pm
ack. Cicero and Virgil’s Aenid
March 13, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Ronan: I doubt that a verse in Genesis on Enoch is sufficient to constitute a scholarly text of the Book of Enoch and certainly not enough to suggest Moses 6-7. That is what I meant. You are undoubtedly correct that the KJV is the scholarly text for the JST outside of what I have called textual revelations. Do you have some explanation for these textual revelations outside of sheer audacity and perhaps revelation? It seems to me that there was not enough in Joseph’s environment to suggest either the Book of Moses or the Book of Abraham notwithstanding their remarkable similarities to the Enochic material and the pseudepigraphic Abrahamic material (the Apocalypse and Testament of Abraham respectively).
March 13, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Ronan, ask and ye shall receive:
1. “A More Responsible Critique,” FARMS Review 15/1, here. Scroll a little more than halfway down to the caption “Shepherd on Pseudotranslation,” and read from their to the end.
2. “The Joseph Smith Translation and Ancient Texts of the Bible,” Dialogue 19/3 (Fall 1986), here.
Anyone interested in this topic should also read Blake’s enormously influential “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source,” Dialogue 20/1 (Spring 1987), here.
March 13, 2007 at 7:43 pm
I think that Blake’s comment in #19 is correct–especially when one considers how very early in Joseph Smith’s career the Moses material was produced. I doubt that he could have come up with it on his own if he had lived to be 500, but the fact that he produced it in 1830(ish) makes it that much more impressive, IMHO.
March 14, 2007 at 4:35 am
Ronan, I think the value of this study is more in the parallel up to but not including Mitchell and Smith. That is, people should know about the evolution of the Bible, as you have described it, with the steps you laid out, i.e. from history to mythology to written versions (JEDP) to edited version (Redactor) to earliest texts to translations. It does not seem necessary to conclude from this process, however, that Joseph Smith was doing what Mitchell was doing when he translated the BoM; that is, we do not have to conclude that JS was filling in gaps with fiction of his own creation that seemed to fit into the whole.
March 14, 2007 at 4:39 am
In other words, we can already conclude — as you love to do! — that there was a lot of embellishment that occured in the text as we now have it by virtue of this process even assuming that Joseph Smith translated ancient characters word-for-word in a literal translation. We have to look no further than Mormon and Moroni, who fit nicely into your process as either the Redactors (which we know they were, because they were merely summarizing large passages from other records, e.g. most of the material in Alma); or they might have even played the role of creating a single combined text from material already redacted by others.
March 14, 2007 at 4:49 am
(But I realize the BoM is only tangential to your focus here, which is the JST. As SMB put it, JS was up to more than just filling in gaps in his work with the JST; he was joining the seers as a peer to restore what had been lost. Since this is what JS apparently really believed he was doing, even a non-believer should be able to acknowledge the fundamental difference between his efforts and Mitchell’s.)
March 14, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Ronan,
Thanks for the shout out.