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Adapa Reconsidered: Life and Death in Contextual Perspective

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Adapa Reconsidered: Life and Death in Contextual Perspective Scriptura 87 (2004), pp. 267-277 ADAPA RECONSIDERED: LIFE AND DEATH IN CONTEXTUAL PERSPECTIVE William W Hallo Yale University1 In all ages of civilization, men have challenged the brutal reality of death with two uncon- querable dreams: one the hope of longevity, long life, and the other the illusion of immortality, of eternal life. Let us see first what the Bible has to say on the second of these two subjects, and then try to retrace our steps to the older lands of the Fertile Crescent and their traditions. However, far be it from me to survey all the twenty-four books of the Bible or all the vast literature of the cuneiform and hieroglyphic sources. I will confine myself instead to a type of expression common to the whole ancient world, namely epic literature. Epics in the narrow sense are heroic tales of the mighty men of the past, set to poetry or, at least, written with a high degree of literary polish. They differ from myths only in that the latter are poems about gods, not men; they are quite different form legends, which are not poems at all but unsophisticated prose narratives of the popular imagination, or folklore. On this basis, the great classical masterpieces of Homer, Hesiod and Virgil are epics. So are those two most famous works of cuneiform literature, the “Epic (better: myth) of Creation” and the Epic of Gilgamesh. But the Israelites, too, had their epics. About the time that the Iliad and Odyssey were being written in Greece, a royal scribe of the United Monarchy was composing a Hebrew epic recounting the glorious exploits of Saul, Jonathan and David which later became a part of the books of Samuel. And some Biblical scholars find an epic substratum in the Book of Numbers or even regard all the historiographic portions of the Hebrew Bible leading up to this period as an epic created at the same approximate time, though others dispute this.2 But epics, like myths, frequently have a second purpose besides or behind the mere telling of a beguiling story – although that in itself is a perfectly meritorious aim. Very often they serve to “explain” some current phenomenon, or some eternal mystery. Where the scientist of today might prefer to furnish a causal analysis, they offer a “historical” analysis or “aetiology,” i.e., the explanation of a presently observed condition by appeal to an imaginary one-time event in the past. In other words they use the “punctual” to explain the “durative.”3 Here is an example from Mesopotamian mythology. Its point is simple: to explain the origin of that trifling but annoying natural phenomenon, the toothache. It begins grandilo- quently, but moves quickly from the sublime to the ridiculous. 1. The substance of this paper was delivered as a lecture in Cincinnati more than forty years ago, and alluded to in passing since then; cf. e.g. JCS 23 (1970) 60, n. 36. Its central conclusions remain valid and, as far as I am aware, original. They are here presented in tribute to Yehoshua Gitay. 2. See most recently Shemaryahu Talmon, “Did there exist a Hebrew National Epic?” Pp. 91-111 in idem, Literary Studies in the Hebrew Bible (Jerusalem/Leiden: Magnes/Brill, 1993); reprinted from pp. 41-61 in Proceedings of the Seventh World Congress of Jewish Studies: Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1981). 3. Hallo, William W, “Lugalbanda Excavated,” JAOS 103 (1984) 165-180, esp. p. 170; reprinted in Studies in Literature from the Ancient Near East ... dedicated to Samuel Noah Kramer, ed. Sasson, JM (New Haven: American oriental Society, 1984). 268 Adapa Reconsidered: Life and Death in Contextual Perspective After Anu (the supreme god) had created heaven, and heaven had created the earth, and the earth had created the rivers, and the rivers had created the canals, and the canals had created the marsh, and the marsh had created the worm: then the worm went, weeping, before Shamash (the sun god), his tears flowing before Ea (the water god), (saying:) what will you give me for my food? What will you give me for my sucking? (The god answered:) I will give you the ripe fig and the apricot. (The worm:) Of what use are they to me, the ripe fig and the apricot? Lift me up and among the teeth and the gums cause me to dwell. The blood of the tooth I will suck, and of the gum I will gnaw its roots. (There follows a prescription for dealing with the resulting toothache.) So by this little aetiological myth, the cause and origin of all toothaches is traced back to a kind of oversight in the creation of the world – the “worm” too had to have his niche in the scheme of things even if that niche was, unfortunately, hollowed out of men’s teeth.4 This kind of epic material, on a much grander scale, also forms a part of the Hebrew Bible. Some of the oldest material within it, sometimes identified as the J-source or “The Book of J,” can be described as an epic that begins with the origins of things.5 It is not obsessed with the origins of all things, for it does not aim at a systematic approach. But among the eternal questions that it takes up at the very outset are those of immortality and longevity. The first place in an epic is an important one; the subject of the whole epic is very likely announced there, as it clearly is in many Mesopotamian and classical epics. 6 Note, therefore, the great prominence given to the question of life and death in this, the second Biblical version of creation. I quote Genesis 2:4b-17, omitting the mysterious geographical insert constituted by verses 10-14, from the New Jewish Version (NJV): When the Lord God made heaven and earth – no shrub of the field being yet in the earth and no grains having yet sprouted, because the Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the soil, but a flow would well up from the ground and water the whole surface of the earth – the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth, and He blew into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man whom He had formed. And from the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and bad... The Lord God took 4. Translation adapted from Speiser, EA pp. 100f. in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old Testament, ed. Pritchard. JB (2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1955). For other incantations against the worm (tultu) see YOS 11 (1985) Nos. 3-5. 5. For a highly controversial translation and interpretation, see David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom, The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). 6. See in detail pp. 177-179 in Hallo, Origins: the Ancient Near Eastern Background of Some Modern Western Institutions (Leiden etc.: Brill, 1996); Streck, M “Die Prologe der sumerischen Epen,” Orientalia 71 (2002) 189- 266. Hallo 269 the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden, to till it and tend it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; but as for the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall be doomed to die. Let us consider this passage all by itself, without the overtones invariably associated with it when it is read in the light of that other creation which begins “In the beginning God created ...” (NJV: “When God began to create ...), and also without the benefit of later Rabbinic interpretations. Then we must admit that what the passage tells us about is the origin of life – human life first, and then, in the continuation, animal life, which is justified by the statement “It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18-20). Why was man created? Why did God cause human life to be on the earth? Because, we were told, when there was no man to till the soil then there could be no shrub of the field on the earth and no grain had yet sprouted. But as soon as God had created man, He also caused plants and trees to grow in the Garden of Eden, and placed the man there to till it and tend it. How does this objective exposition of this Biblical version of the creation of life compare with the treatment of the same theme in ancient Near Eastern epic literature? The Babylonian “Epic of Creation” goes through five of its seven chapters (tablets) before answering that question. When chapter six opens, we find Marduk addressing Ea, the wise old water god of “the Worm and the Toothache,” in the assembly of the gods. When Marduk heard the speech of the gods, He was resolving to do artful things: He would tell his ideas to Ea, What he thought of in his heart he proposes. “I shall compact blood, I shall cause bones to be, I shall make stand a human being, let ‘Man’ be its name.
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