Download Study Notes on TGOJ Chapter ONE

Study Notes on The Gifts of the Jews:
Chapter One: The Temple in the Moonlight – the Primeval Religious Experience
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First written word ever recorded: in Sumer, in a warehouse of Uruk – the first “city.”
o Uruk was along the Euphrates River in ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) – the
“Fertile Crescent”.
o These words were used for account records – way of recording shipments and
transactions.
o Writing: a memory assist. First words incised on small clay tablets in cuneiform.
In ancient Mesopotamia – expansion of farming communities. Sumerians were the first to hit
upon methods of construction that allowed them to build larger buildings than simple
comfortable shelters.
They began to build monumental structures for business and ritual.
o They invented the arch, the vault, and the dome for these purposes.
Sumer was a collection of some 25 city-states.
Outside Sumerian civilization were wandering hoards of Amorites – Sematic nomads who
wandered the mountains and deserts outside Sumer.
o Sumerian description of typical Amorite: tent-dweller “buffeted by wind and
rain…[who] knows not prayers”…who with their weapons were “contentious to excess”
and ate uncooked meat and died unburied – almost a description of an animal, which
indicates a Sumerian imperial sense of superiority.
Sumerians – world’s first civilization.
o Sophisticated farming techniques and mathematics (square and cube roots).
o Practical (not magical) medicine.
o Wrote instruction manuals.
o Many gods who helped mankind (Ninkilim – goddess of field mice, etc.)
o They were practical, down-to-earth businessmen. Wandering Semites actually tell the
story of the Sumerian imagination.
Sumerian society and values:
o They had no real sense of history, stories all begin and end in the middle.
o Most important Sumerian work: Epic of Gilgamesh: see pp. 20-39.
o Most important points:
 Gilgamesh = fierce, strong, and practical: lover and bully.
 Sumerian society was intensely competitive;
 men were swaggerers of the worst kind who engaged in constant self-praise.
 They love “the contest.”
 “Their society was full of contentiousness and aggression, in which the “good”
man – the ideal – was imagined as ambitious to the extreme, animated by a
drive for worldly prestige, victory, success, with scant regard to …ethical norms.
 Theirs was a society that despised poverty.
Epic of Gilgamesh:
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Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the natural man, set out to slay the monster Humbaba to
establish “fame for their future.”
o They succeed but Enkidu later dies and goes to Kur.
o Gilgamesh goes in search of the secret of immortality –
o he will ask Ut-napishtim (the model for Noah), the only man granted immortality, but
Ut-napishtim tells him that the great gods, the Anunnaki, appoint life and death.
o Inventions too are “the property of the gods – as are human beings, who have been
created to be the servants of the gods and to offer them assuaging sacrifices.”
o There can be no permanent victory for either city or warrior.
o Sooner or later humans will trespass against one or the many gods and incur doom. And
even if one escapes “such a fate, Death, the end of happiness, is inevitable.”
o Gilgamesh and the Bible share the story of the flood and the ark.
o Ut-napishtim and his wife have become “as gods” in the garden paradise of Dilmun.
o Other echoes in Bible –
 the “council of heaven” – God and angels in heavenly royal court.
 The realm of the dead (Kur) reminiscent of Greek Hades and Jewish Sheol.
 One theme found in Gilgamesh that is nowhere in the Bible is fertility (temple of
Ishtar with its sacred sexual rites involving prostitutes both male and female).
Deepest level of Sumerian psyche – ultimate beliefs that held society together – the spiritual
matrix that created the Sumerian worldview.
o On the acropolis of the city of Ur, the ancient imperial capital of Sumer, was the Temple
of the Moon – set at the place nearest the sky, which is seen as infinite and
transcendent. “
o When man ceremonially ascends the steps of a sanctuary – the ritual ladder leading to
the sky – he ceases to be man.”
The cosmology of the Sumerians built on ideas of society of people who preceded them and
many who followed them:
o Earth was a flat circle attached at its edges to the dome of Heaven.
o Between Earth and Heaven was Air (with the stars).
o Just beneath Earth, was the realm of Death – Hades, Sheol, etc. and
o at the base of this was the Sea of Chaos that surrounded the Earth-Heaven on all sides
from whence came rain and floods.
o Heaven was father; Earth was mother; Air was the mediator between Heaven and Earth
– and the most important god in the Sumerian pantheon; Sea was an unpredictable
ally/foe.
o The Moon (luna in Latin) was sacred, for its awesome power of attraction controlled the
tides.
o Sanctuary of Nanna-Sin, Moon god of the Sumerians (surrounded by sacred snakes and
spiders). Temple = stepped pyramid called a ziggurat.
 Services conducted according to the phases of the moon. Moon cult centered at
Ur, and sacred “couplings” were part of the Sumerian ritual. Since Nanna-Sin
was male, his temple was staffed by priestesses. (At Uruk where Ishtar, the
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goddess of love, was especially worshipped, her temple was staffed by male
priests.)
 Services may have involved human sacrifice and copulation of priestesses with
kings.
The moon represented the heavenly image of earthly life, which was born, waxed, waned, and
died, and then returned to life, as on Earth.
o But man cannot return, like the grain.
o So, the perception of life on earth was as a fleeting reflection of the eternal life in
heaven where moon mirrors our earthly condition.
o What primitive man saw were correspondences:
 women (with cycles) are like the moon, and both are like Earth.
 But unlike women, the Moon lasts forever.
 Heaven is the realm of the father god whose rain fertilizes like sperm.
 Heaven = realm of the eternal; Earth – realm of death.
 Language itself is a metaphorical enterprise. The thrill of metaphor is language
at its most concentrated.
 The sky is still our principal metaphor for limitlessness and transcendence.