Comparing Gilgamesh, Noah And The Great Flood

The three tyrannical tides of The Epic of Gilgamesh, Noah and the Flood, and The Great Flood end with humanity in a watery grave, yet they share more than that and differ just as much. Each includes, obviously, a flood, a reason for the flood, gods, survivors, and how the survivors persevered through the ordeal. While these elements are the same, the details are widely varied and give each story its own personality.
There is a motivation behind all the floods and each was delivered on the whim of the gods. In Gilgamesh, the world had become overpopulated and the clamor grew too loud for the gods to bear. Sleep deprived and furious with the humans, Enlil brought up the idea to exterminate humanity and so it was done. Both The Great Flood

and Noah and the Flood, state the motivation being that humanity has become foul and evil. The Great Flood came about when the Grecian gods and goddesses believed humans had become wicked and decided to purge them from the Earth. Finally, in the story Noah and the Flood, God wanted to cleanse the world from sin and punish the evil humans, similar to The Great Flood.
Predictably, all these stories contain a devastating flood, yet they have slight differences in length of time and how the water engulfed the land.

The flood in Gilgamesh and The Great Flood happens almost instantaneously. The god of the storm broke the dams and ripped apart the land causing an abundance of water to cover the land and encompass the Earth for six days and night. The Great Flood occurs when Poseidon strikes the Earth with his trident and the seas rip the land asunder, covering it for nine days and nights. The longest flood transpires in Noah and Flood. God allows it to rain 40 days and nights to flood the world, yet leaves the survivors for over 150 days to float aimlessly in the flood

waters.
Every flood story comes with its own set of gods. Both Gilgamesh and The Great Flood are polytheistic myths while Noah and the Flood is a monotheistic tale. They share many qualities, one being that it is ultimately the gods’ decisions to flood the land. All of the gods have a dim view of most humans and deem them unfit to walk the Earth, excluding the ones who are warned or chosen to live. The gods in The Great Flood decimated the human race using the excuse that the Earth was overpopulated, the clamor was too much, and they could not sleep. In Gilgamesh and Noah and the Flood, the gods decided to destroy humanity because of their wickedness and cleanse the world of sin, very similar reasons.
Without survivors, the human race could not have been replenished.

All of the stories had varying number of survivors and they all endured the floods in a different way. In Gilgamesh, the god Ea warned Utnapishtim of the upcoming flood and told him to build a colossal boat to carry with him the seed of each living thing, his family, and possessions. Noah and The Flood and Gilgamesh are similar because the ones cautioned of the flood were allowed to bring their families, animals (seed of animal), and possessions on a vessel that the Gods specified the dimensions of. God warned Noah in Noah and the Flood, thus allowing him to build an arc and sail atop the carnage. Unlike Noah and The Flood, The Great Flood only had two survivors, an old couple named Deucalion and Pyrrha, whom been notified of the flood by Prometheus. Upon their ship they floated for 9 days before landing on Mt. Parnassus. Since they could not bear any more children due to their age, the goddess Themis gave them the hint of throwing the bones of their mother behind them. They interpreted the statement as mother being the Earth and the bone as rocks, thus throwing rocks over their shoulders was their solution. Astonishingly it worked, Deucalion’s rock became a man and Pyrrha’s a

woman.
All of these tales may seem fantasy now, but they all have a significant impact on religion in history. One of the most prominent examples is Noah and the Flood, which is an important part of the popular Christian faith. . Gilgamesh, Noah and the Flood, and The Great Flood all contain a flood, a reason for the flood, gods, survivors, and how the survivors persevered. These exquisite pieces all incorporate similar elements in different ways, making them individualistic, yet something relatable across all of history.