Utnapishtim preparing for the flood
I.
The story of a great flood or deluge, usually sent by a deity of some kind in order to punish humanity and cleanse the earth, is found within many cultures, not just the Judeo-Christian, whose famous flood narrative in Genesis featuring Noah and his ark was almost certainly adapted from an earlier Mesopotamian myth, a version of which can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1800 BC). [1]
In the Gilgamesh flood myth, the supreme god Enlil decides to destroy the world not because human beings have become violent and corrupt, but because they are simply too noisy. However, the god Ea, who created mankind out of clay and divine blood, secretly warns the culture hero Utnapishtim of the impending flood and gives him instructions for building a huge boat so that he and others may survive.
Of course, thanks to the fossil record etc., we know that a global flood such as the one described in these and other similar myths is incompatible with our modern understanding of the world and its natural history. Nevertheless, it remains a fascinating story and is one that clearly interests German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk ...
II.
In an interview with Manfed Osten [2], Sloterdijk discusses the libretto he wrote for the opera Babylon (2012), composed by Jörg Widmann. In the course of discussion, he says that one of the aims of the work was to appeal against traditional misunderstandings of the flood myth:
"We establish the fact that the Babylonian gods had nothing to do with the Flood at all. In the old accounts we read that they fled shivering to the mountaintops to await the end of the catastrophe. First and foremost, the God of Israel had no connection with the Flood - he was only associated with this Mesopotamian story later, in the post-exile period. It follows that he didn't send the Flood and that he had no powers to promise it would never return. In fact, he is completely outside the story - even though people might have perpetuated the false version of it for the past 2,500 years. The real point is that neither the gods of the Babylonians nor the God of Judaism were involved in causing the Flood. The Flood, with all its awe-inspiring astral drama, was an external cosmological event that was later internalized by means of religion and translated into the language of guilt and sacrificial duty."
If Sloterdijk is right, that means that there is no real need to torpedo the ark - for this act no longer signifies that we refuse the judgement of God. Similarly, there is no need for any act of sacrifice:
"If the gods weren't involved in the great disaster at all they couldn't have any interest in sacrifices being made to avoid a repetition. The heavens - as understood in cosmological and meteorological terms - constitute a factor beyond divine power. Because God and gods didn't cause the Flood, we don't need to beg them to protect us from another flood. The gods have nothing to do with the cosmic disaster. Consequently, after the end of the Flood there was no need for a new covenant between God and human beings. [...] The rainbow in the sky after the Flood does not mean that God, after venting his wrath on the sinful mob, returned to calm reflection, as the biblical narrative suggests. If we want to make a symbol out of the rainbow, it stands for people finding the courage to carry on after the worst has happened. It inspires them to unite with each other against blind fate."
In fact, it arguably does more than this: it inspires them to love fate and acknowledge that life always faces some kind of existential threat (be it a natural disaster or a man-made catastrophe) and that the only way we can live is to live with an awareness of ever-present danger; not to creep about in a state of semi-permanent lockdown wearing masks, but to realise, as Sloterdijk says, that the flood is never over ...
Notes
[1] Just before any Babylonian readers get too carried away and pride themselves on being the authors of this story, it should be noted that the Epic of Gilgamesh is thought to to have
originated in an even earlier Sumerian myth.
[2] Peter Sloterdijk, 'With the Babble of Babylon in the Background', interview with Manfred Osten, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 313-22. The lines quoted here can be found on pp. 317-19.
