Dr. Dylan Johnson

And clothing is an important one, actually.

Really?

Yes.

Yes, it is.

And so one of the places I turn, and before I'll preface all of this, is all of these stories.

Ancient Near Eastern stories, creation stories I'll mention, they're not the Eden narrative.

They share in the same visual repertoire and conceptual world as the authors of the Eden narrative, but it's not like the authors of the Eden narrative

read these ancient myths and then just wrote it down in Hebrew.

There's enough differences that they are distinct traditions.

Especially with my students, the one place I usually turn is to the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is not a creation story, by the way.

It's really our first narrative story in the world that we have.

And in that story, we have a creation episode of a strange entity known as Enkidu.

And Enkidu is this hairy wild man creature.

He's incredibly powerful.

The only being who can really challenge the great King Gilgamesh in terms of feats of strength.

And he's created directly by the gods.

So like...

man and Eve.

He's created from clay, like man is created from the dust of the ground.

We don't get it here, but we also get an echo of the divine breath that's breathed into man that makes him a living entity.