Note 834 — Chapter XLVIII

Very similar is the story in the Gilgamesh epic, a work “far more ancient than Genesis,” of a serpent stealing a life-giving plant from Gilgamesh while he was bathing in a well or brook. The plant, which had been revealed to Gilgamesh by the deified Utnapishtim, “had the miraculous power of renewing youth and bore the name, ‘the old man becomes young.’” Sir James Frazer (1918), I, 50-51, follows Rabbi Julian Morgenstern (“On Gilgamesh Epic, XI, 274-320,” in Zeitschrift f. Assyriologie, XXIX, 1915, p. 284ff.) in connecting this incident with the serpent and the tree of life in the Biblical account of the fall of man, and gives further examples from primitive folk-lore of other jealous animals, such as the dog, frog, duck, and lizard, perverting divine gifts or good tidings to man to their own profit.