Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Power of Monotheism and Polytheism

I believe the biggest different between the two authors in terms of Gods were that in Genesis, the authors wanted to convey the point that there is one God who is all knowing and created the world in seven days. In Gilgamesh, there was a God for every single noun almost. Gilgamesh had the Sun god, the god of Love and Fertility, the Corn God, God of earth, wind and air. In the opening chapters of Gilgamesh, the thing that jumped out at me was the identification of power and the only identification of power. It is a story of a man who has already been working on some things and started to create man and woman, day and night, heaven and hell in just seven days. There was no hint that there might have been anyone else who created the earth and all of these things, just God himself. When God was upset with his people, he simply just wiped them off the face of the earth, except Noah. In Gilgamesh, if they upset a God, they would deal with that God’s consequences. To me, Polytheism and Monotheism is the biggest difference between the authors. This leads me to believe that if the authors of Gilgamesh and Genesis met during the creation of these stories, they two groups would have a long disagreement about how things were done. It also leads me to believe that the two were not created during the same time period. If they were created during the same time period, there must have been a huge debate about Polytheism and Monotheism.

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