DID YOU KNOW?

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient poem from Mesopotamia, the hero gets a plant that would make him young again, then loses it on the way home. What takes it?

The answer

A snake. Utnapishtim, whom the gods had made immortal, tells Gilgamesh how to get a plant from the bottom of the sea that restores youth. Gilgamesh gets it. On the way home he stops for a swim, and a snake carries the plant off. The snake sheds its skin, its youth restored. Genesis 3 has a snake, a tree of life and a lost chance to live forever in one story (Genesis 3:22-24).

Why it’s interesting

Michael Coogan and Cynthia Chapman, two Bible scholars, list what the epic and the garden story share: a snake, a plant tied to a kind of immortality, and death that cannot be escaped. The epic is old. Its earliest surviving copies go back before 2000 BC, and a piece of it was found at Megiddo, in Israel.

Scholarly consensus

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