Fear Of Death In The Epic Of Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh, who’s 2/3 divine and 1/3 human(P.71) is a king of the city named Uruk. He is quite arrogant and naïve “He is King, he can do whatever he wants” (P72) . After losing Enkida who was like a brother to him “my double, my second self” (P83) Gilgamesh was really saddened. After his death, Gilgamesh mourned for six days and seven nights , while mourning he sees a maggot coming out of Enkidu’s noise and became terrified of death (p167). He tries to find meet Utnapishtim who is an immortal to try to find the secret of eternal life (p159) And there, Utnapishtim says that gods assemble life and death for u. (p179) To resolve his fear of death he tries to find a plant which is said to be the secret of youth (p196), however it is stolen by a snake (p197) and realizes that whatever he does, can’t escape death itself.

Gilgamesh bears the fear of death by accepting his faith. After going through all these hardships so he could have eternal life like trying to stay awake for 7 days

For example people might decide to quite there job and travel around the world because of the fear of not living life at its fullest without dying, like I previously mentioned non religious people might think you only live once and that death can happen randomly. This is what motivates them to do these activities without thinking about consequences . As religious people, the fear of death motivates us to do good on earth so that we can be pleasing to God. This means for example we will think about others first, we’ll donate our time and money to charity etc… because we want to live a life pleasing to God because for religious people, our time on earth is precious and small compared to eternal life we are going to get in the afterlife and our time on earth is going to be what decides our destination. This is what drives us