The Greatly Epic Flood of Noah’s Boat-Ark with Utnapishtim in Mesopotamia Many ancient cultures have flood stories, thus there are many similarities and differences among them all, which makes it easy to confuse them. Both flood Stories, The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Great Flood are religious stories that address God or the god’s loss of hope in humanity. The chronological order of these two stories is very similar, and there are countless parallels between the two.
The flood stories are meant to be a lesson to all people to not anger a higher power, for different reasons in both stories.In these two stories, there are clear similarities, they debatably have similar origins. The characters, Noah and Utnapishtim are both good men that obey God. In both stories, gods are tired of human disobedience, corruption, and immoral actions “And God saw the wickedness of man was great” (47), thus the gods decide to eliminate the human race by means of a flood. Gods in both stories chose one man to survive the flood, and the gods directed this man to bring all his family and friends, and all the animals of the earth on a boat.The result of the flood after both stories was a great love and appreciation for God.
While the stories express evident similarities there are distinguishes differences as well. The gods grant the gift of immortality to Utnapishtim, whereas Noah dies at 950 years of age, which is a long life, but not “immortal”. The floods in each story happen for far different amounts of time, The Epic of Gilgamesh has a flood story that lasts a few days, and The Bible has a flood that lasts 40 years.The result of The Bible’s flood story is the covenant, otherwise known as the rainbow; The Epic of Gilgamesh didn’t have any kind of agreement among the gods and Utnapishtim. Humans should consider the flood stories to be a lesson in learning from other’s mistakes.
The flood stories are relative to people today because no one is inherently perfect, thus the flood should be seen as a symbol of repentance and that repentance has been practiced all throughout history.The flood teaches us an obvious lesson: If you are good, good things will happen to you. The flood stories are good to learn from, but are not necessarily fact, and should not be looked at as fact. The in both stories, the flood was detrimental to humans, and in all actuality, something similar could occur at any time, and humans never regard this fact. Works Cited Beers, Burton, et al.
Prentice Hall Literature, World Masterpieces. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2003. Print.
