During this semester, our class have read several texts from different times and cultures. Even though those texts were from different cultures, it was quite easy to find the illustration of God from those readings. The interesting part was that based on different culture and time period, the illustration of gods forcing their wills slightly differ from each other and appears to have their own characteristics . In this blog post, I’ll be covering gods from 3 of the readings we’ve covered in class- obviously, the God from the Hebrew bible , the gods in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the gods from the Iliad, who were slightly different from the gods of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Among all kinds of writings in the history of human race, the Hebrew bible would be the most well known text to people, which is closely describing about the god. [There’s a Guiness record “The Best selling book of non-fiction” in http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/best-selling-book-of-non-fiction ,just for your interest.] As we read the Hebrew bible, it was quite easy to find how the God in the Bible forcing his will to people. In my own interpretation, the God in the Bible forces his will mostly through two methods.
Firstly, the God uses dreams and messages to force his will to people. From Genesis 6-9 (p. 163-167), God gives a message to Noah that he will rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights to wipe out every existing thing he has created. By giving Noah his detailed message, he forces his will of wiping out the whole world except for Noah who the God loved the most.
Secondly, the God in bible tests his people to see how people react to his test and hoping them to behave in the way he wishes. From Genesis 22 (p. 169-170), we can see how the God tested Abraham to see his willingness to test Abraham’s faith upon him. The god told Abraham to give his only son as an offering. However, it turned that the god was not going to accept Issac, the son of Abraham, as an offering. He was just testing on Abraham’s faith to see if Abraham values god’s word over his only son’s life and behave in a way the God willed. To me, the God in the Bible wasn’t really forceful and that’s why I felt he is more rational than those gods in other texts.
Sacrifice of Isaac, by Adi Holzer, 1997.
Abraham and Isaac (oil on canvas), Rembrandt, 1634
[This is the scene when The God made Abraham to sacrific e his son, Issac to test Abraham’s belief on the God and what he values the most- The god or his only son. Then the God sent an angel to stop Abraham from sacrificing Issac.]
Compared to those evidences we read in the Hebrew bible, the force of the God’s will is shown quite differently in the Epic of Gilgamesh. [The Epic of Gigamesh is known to be the oldest epic in the history of literature. It’s an epic about the life of semi-mythic king of the Uruk.] In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the force of the God’s will is based on emotions and shown through the rage and punishment toward main characters. In Page 126, Ishtar, the goddess of love was harshly treated by Gilgamesh, which made her really angry. So, what she did was to tell Anu to send the Bull of Heaven to punish Gilgamesh. [The Bull of Heaven is a constellation called Taurus and controlled by the God Anu, the father of Ishtar.] This scene is really emotionally described as Ishtar’s use of language such as “Gilgamesh has said outrageous things about me, Insults and curses against me!” or “Well then, Father, pretty please, the Bull of Heaven, So I can kill Gilgamesh on his home ground.” As we can see, the force of the will of the God is mostly emotional and done through punishing people.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull of Heaven as Ishtar looks on
(after a drawing by Joanna Richards)
Lastly, the Illiad is an ancient Greek epic poem by Homer.
A Homeric Geography estimating the places mentioned in the Illiad and Odyssey. (Greek in purple, Trojan in red)
In the Iliad, the force of the will of the God is shown somewhat similar to the one we read in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it’s more focusing on the relationship that those gods have with humans. This means, gods show their forces in emotional and personal way to achieve those humans’ will who are closely related to them. For example, in p.231 line 61, when Agamemnon dishonored Chryses, who was a priest of the God Apollo by taking his daughter, Apollo cursed on the Greek camp for nine days to revenge for him. Behind the use of this kind of force, we can find how personal emotions and relationship that the God has with a human affecting the will of the God.
Overall, all three of them have slightly different illustration of Gods in their own ways. It is quite interesting to see how they differ from each other and I could clearly see how people perceived the god of their own cultures. I feel like people from the time period of Hebrew bible believed the God as a father, and the people from the Epic of Gilgamesh might feared gods, and people lived in the era of the Iliad might thought gods were their helpers.
Images used from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_of_Isaac#/media/File:Rembrandt_Abraham_en_Isaac,_1634.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_of_Isaac#/media/File:Adi_Holzer_Werksverzeichnis_835_Abrahams_Opfer.jpg
http://people.clarkson.edu/~smelvill/ls195/gwork6.html
http://www.reed.edu/humanities/110Tech/Iliad.html#Basic