The Epic of Gilgamesh
Ashurbanipal was the king of the Assyrian Empire from 669 BC to his death in 631 BC. He considered his library in Nineveh his greatest achievement. Nineveh (near modern day Mosul, Iraq), being the capital city, contained a library that was stocked with 30,000 clay tablets that weren’t easily destroyed during the destruction of the city. Nineveh was located at a commercial crossroads right between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers where humanity itself may have originated.
Being at a crossroads, Nineveh received it’s wealth and it’s library tablets from many countries. Of course ancient clay tablets hold up better under fire and under ground than our modern paper books do. The Epic of Gilgamesh was among the 30,000 tablets unearthed in the mid-19th century, from the ruins of Nineveh, near modern day Mosul. This Mesopotamian epic about ‘human’ relationships was translated for us to read in our modern day languages. It contains divergent accounts of The Garden of Eden and Noah’s flood and the failure of a god/man/king to do right and obtain immortality for himself and his people.
The city of Nineveh was once warned to repent by a reluctant Hebrew named Jonah. Jonah warned the people (people of his own Assyrian origin) of their failure to maintain a proper humanity. Nineveh famously turned around for a while after hearing the heartless Hebrew preacher offer five words about their impending destruction, “Forty days, and Nineveh will be overthrown!” It only took 5 words in Hebrew. They weren’t actually told to repent. They were told destruction was coming in 40 days, but Jonah didn’t want to warn them because he knew God was gracious and might be merciful if they repented.
Jonah lived around 786–746 BC. Over a hundred years after Jonah, in 612 BC, the city of Nineveh was sacked and burned by the allied forces of the Babylonians and the Medes and Persians. Is it any wonder that Nineveh held a variant version of humanity in it’s library at the time of it’s destruction? That the clay tablets with the Mesopotamian version of humanity are older than the LXX scrolls with the Jewish version of humanity doesn’t prove better fidelity to the story of humanity.
In fact the earliest complete copy we currently have of the Old Testament was not written in Hebrew. It was written in Greek. Does that mean the older Hebrew versions never existed or were more or less true? The Septuagint obviously came after the Hebrew, yet surviving scrolls in Greek are a thousand years older than any complete Hebrew version we have found. I don’t think we ever found a complete Hebrew version. The unbelievers eventually put one together. That doesn’t mean the Greek spoken version came first any more than the older clay tablets of Gilgamesh prove it was the first epic story of humanity. Superior veracity doesn’t somehow render clay tablets or leather scrolls indestructible, so we can’t say the oldest complete record that exists is automatically the more accurate one, especially when held by the inhumane Ninevites.
Conversely, the Septuagint was created by the people who were most recently given God’s Word concerning humanity. It was their written account of the humanity that they received from Yahweh at Sinai that first formed them into a human nation, when they were still Hebrew speaking rather than Greek speaking. We can safely assume that God wrote the ten commandments in Hebrew, written in stone in their spoken language by the finger of God Himself. God’s Word was eventually written down in Greek to preserve and propagate the truth of humanity during the time of the 4 kingdoms.
Both Jerusalem and Nineveh were destroyed during the Babylonian era. Jerusalem was destroyed twice during Daniel’s 4 kingdoms’ prophecy: once to begin the first of the 4 kingdoms era (while they predominately spoke Hebrew) and again during the 4th kingdom era prophesied by Daniel (when they predominately spoke Greek). The second destruction consummated the beginning of the 5th and never-ending era: the kingdom of God that lives within your heart. Jerusalem was destroyed the first time around 587 BC during the reign of the Babylonians. The second death of Jerusalem occurred in 70 AD during the reign of Rome. The era of the third kingdom is when Alexander the Great made his Greek language the most common language of the day.
The Septuagint translation made the Hebrew scriptures available to the Jews who no longer spoke their original language and to the entire Greek-speaking world. The Septuagint was the Bible of the Greek-speaking early Church, even as the post-resurrection portion of our Bible was still being spoken into existence and recorded in the international language of the day. The Greek Septuagint was frequently quoted during the New Covenant transition period, allowing the old covenant and the new covenant to overlap and merge in the common language of the day. God kept what He merged. His replacement was of the firstborn son of humanity. Under the new firstborn inheritance He saved all of His chosen people. He did not replace His chosen ones with other people. Taking the place of the firstborn on the Cross made the way for God’s people to transition.
Wouldn’t the faithful Jews be expected to translate God’s Hebrew words into the new language of the day? The mission of humanity from the very beginning was to humanize the nations with God’s revealed Word. It was the continued use of the Septuagint by the early Jewish Church that was the biggest factor in its eventual abandonment by the unbelieving ‘Jews’ in the centuries to follow. It was not a concern for evangelism that moved them to compile a complete Hebrew version. It was in fact an anti-evangelistic move on the part of the unfaithful. I have never heard of faithful missionaries who wanted to translate God’s word into a dead language.
Along the same lines, the Geneva Bible was an English translation made for the most common language of the 16th century, while the less faithful to God’s mission tried to keep the Bible out of the new common language of the day, claiming ‘higher ground’ for themselves, even as Latin had faded as the international language. Jerome’s 4th century Latin version was called the Biblia vulgata, the ‘Bible in the common tongue’. Latin became the common language of Western Europe during the Middle Ages before being superseded by English. In the name of unity, the non-mission minded part of the Catholic church didn’t really want the Latin Bible translated into the new ‘vulgar’ language of the masses. The Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome is still today the ‘authoritative’ Bible of the Catholic Church.
Language itself doesn’t make God’s Word more or less holy, just more or less accessible. In fact, when the Holy Spirit came to speak to the hearts of the scattered 12 tribes at Pentecost, He miraculously spoke to them in all of their national languages. We have a copy of what was said that day in the Greek language. The only disunity caused by the Holy Spirit by speaking to the masses in all their native tongues was between the believing and unbelieving Jews. The Holy Spirit came down to speak to the people and to raise them up from where they lived. God didn’t require them to learn a new language. He gave them all good translations.
Jesus directly quotes from the Septuagint about 90 times and 80 more times with some altered wording. No doubt Jesus conveyed the truth accurately whatever language or wording He spoke. He was the Word made flesh regardless of the language of the day or His paraphrases. When Jesus spoke and altered the already written word, which version was actually older? When Jesus spoke it was 100% accurate scripture even if He rephrased the Septuagint version. Consider the eternal sources.
Gilgamesh was 2/3 god and 1/3 man. I don’t know how that math works. Maybe he had 3 parents and two of them were gods or maybe the carrier DNA from the god parent was more dominant. I joke. Jesus being 100% God and 100% human makes more sense. I would never say Jesus is half human and half God because His mother was human and His Father was God. Because humanity came from God to Adam to form His image in His people, making the descendents of Adam the family of God. Humanity properly defined is the image of God in His family. The homosapien body is not by itself formed in God’s image. That is the typical picture of the formation of Adam from the dust of the earth but it’s not the grown-up picture.
The Word was made flesh in the first century when He was given a human body. He was given a homo sapiens body in the family of humanity called Israel, in order to save the fallen human nation from it’s impending destruction, because Israel took God’s name in vain. They didn’t carry His image so well irrespective of the national language. Jesus fully carried God’s name and so their covenant death could not hold Him. He returned to the glory He had before He took on that human body.
All nations of homo sapiens were not God’s human nation. Israel was. Jesus was born into the human nation into one of the 12 tribes. He was technically the first 100% human. He Himself said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Nobody else could honestly say that. He conveyed God’s image 100% which is to say He is 100% humanity. The human family was formed in God’s image but human images were not allowed to be worshipped. Jesus is the only image of God that stood in a Jewish temple who is allowed to be worshipped as God.
Gilgamesh conscripted the sons of his kingdom for his projects and consummated with all the virgins after each or their weddings, presumably to make more sons and daughters in his typical image. That doesn’t even begin to compete as an epic story of human salvation. That is an epic story that propagated the typical animal behavior of the nations. That epic story of injustice was told long before Jesus arrived, further proving the need for 100% humanity to head up a new creation that can’t be corrupted or destroyed. The original human commission was not only to keep the place of one’s self but to tame all the ethnics as well.
The biblical scrolls of the corruption-funded temple humanity in first century Jerusalem were burned in AD 70 along with their tribal genealogies. Meanwhile, the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Greek Septuagint along with over 200 Hebrew texts were being preserved in clay pots in the Qumran (man-made) caves. Currently the complete Tanakh in Greek outdates any complete Hebrew version by a thousand years. A completed Hebrew version wasn’t compiled until the 3rd century when the unbelievers resorted to a 500-years-dead language. The international language of Greek was most used by the mission minded Jews in their transition of covenants, since most of them couldn’t speak the dead Hebrew language and they had a synagogue in every foreign city preparing the nations for their made new humanity, as was their sovereign mission.
It is the unbelievers who held onto their Hebrew descent as some kind of covenant authority. They pushed for a return to the Hebrew manuscript in the centuries after AD 70; incomplete as it was. That alone makes their motives suspect, since they rejected the common language transition phase of their world mission.
The Jews weren’t replaced by the Christians in the first century of our new creation calendar. They became the people of the new creation when they transitioned out of their old and into their new. Humanity was being saved by the 100% human 100% God/man when He laid down His old covenant human life for the new. The covenant transition was not from the Roman kingdom but during the Roman kingdom. Jesus laid down His old covenant Jewish soul not His Roman soul. He was resurrected to reign from heaven which is a different kingdom realm.
After His resurrection, Jesus’ faithful Jewish brethren made their most epic story known to the world and they did it in Greek more than any other language. The unbelievers continued to go backwards in time and exhumed a dead language in hopes of another old covenant resurrection. They wanted the kingdom to be military. Of course Jesus’ resurrection story is the 100% true and epic history of humanity. The Hebrew language resurrection won’t somehow make their old covenant new again.