Note 1 — Chapter VII · DR. JENSEN

yet a Jew may have possessed some imagination of his own This undoubted occurrence of Babylonian myths in the Book of Genesis has provided some less critical and cautious cuneiform scholars with a clue, as they imagine, to the entire contents of the Bible from beginning to end. It is as if the Jews, all through their literary history of a thousand years, could not possibly have invented any myths of their own, still less have picked a few up elsewhere than in Babylon. Accordingly, in a volume of 1,030 enormous pages, P. Jensen has undertaken to show1 that the New Testament, no less than the Old, was derived from this single well-spring. Moses and Aaron, Joshua, Jeroboam, Rehoboam, Hadad, Jacob and Esau, Saul, David and Jonathan, Joseph and his brethren, Potiphar, Rachel and Leah, Laban, Zipporah, Miriam sister of Moses, Dinah, Simeon and Levi, Jethro and the Gibeonites and Sichemites, Sarah and Hagar, Gilgamesch, Eabani, and the holy harlot, protagonists of the entire Old TestamentAbraham and Isaac, Samson, Uriah and Nathan, Naboth, Elijah and Elisha, Naaman, Benhadad and Hazael, Gideon, Jerubbaal, Abimelech, Jephthah, Tobit, Jehu, and pretty well any other personage in the Old Testament, are duplicates, according to him, of Gilgamesch or his companion the shepherd Eabani (son of Ea), or of the Hierodule or sacred prostitute, and of a few more leading figures in the Babylonian epic. There is hardly a story in the whole of Jewish literature which is not, according to Jensen, an echo of the Gilgamesch legend; and every personage, every incident, is freely manipulated to make them fit this Procrustean bed. No combinations of elements separated in the Biblical texts, no separations of elements united therein, no recasting of the fabric of a narrative, no modifications of any kind, are so violent as to deter Dr. Jensen. At the top of every page is an abstract of its argument, usually of this type: “Der Hirte Eabani, die Hierodule und Gilgamesch. Der Hirte Moses, sein Weib und Aaron.” In other words, as Moses was one shepherd and Eabani another, Moses is no other than Eabani. As there is a sacred prostitute in the Gilgamesch story, and a wife in the legend of Moses, therefore wife and prostitute are one and the same. As Gilgamesch was companion of Eabani, and Aaron of Moses, therefore Aaron was an alias of Gilgamesch. Dr. Jensen is quite content with points of contact between the stories so few and slight as the above, and pursues this sort of loose argument over a thousand pages. Here is another such rubric: “Simson-Gilgamesch’s Leiche und Saul-Gilgamesch’s Gebeine wieder ausgegraben, Elisa-Gilgamesch’s Grab geöffnet.” In other words, Simson, or Samson, left a corpse behind him (who does not?); Saul’s bones were piously looked after by the Jabeshites; Elisha’s bones raised a dead Moabite by mere contact to fresh life. These three figures are, therefore, ultimately one, and that one is Gilgamesch; and their three stories, which have no discernible features in common, are so many disguises of the Gilgamesch epos.