Gilgamesh and Job

Sam Kriss, in an essay at The Lamp that is ostensibly a review of Sophus Helle’s new translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh but is really an extended meditation on death, summarizes the value of Gilgamesh’s 4,000-year old refusal to answer:

The Epic of Gilgamesh is here to confront you with the problem of death, not to solve it. It is not therapy. It was not written to make the world any less cruel. But this is precisely why, against myself, I do find it comforting.

This naturally brought to mind Chesterton’s most powerful and challenging paradox, from his “Introduction to the Book of Job,” the Old Testament book that is “chiefly remarkable . . . for the fact that it does not end in a way that is conventionally satisfactory”:

This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech; the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. . . . Job [is] suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

And I happened to read Kriss’s essay this morning before heading to church for a sermon from Ecclesiastes 3, part of an ongoing series about the book which, with Job, is my favorite in the Bible.

Less therapy. More ancient Near Eastern confrontation of enigmas.

Read both essays at the links above. They’re well worth your while.