I read an ancient Sumerian story of Gilgamesh last night that sounded eerily like the Quranic tale of Solomon who sent a jinn to retrieve the throne of Bilqis (queen of Sheba). The Epic of Gilgamesh not only predates the Quran by at least 3000 years, but also the historical Solomon by at least a thousand years. This can mean only one thing: neither are the original tale and the tale’s origin is ephemeral. Of all the Mesopotamian heroes, Gilgamesh appears to be the funnel through which all these ancient tales pass into the Abrahamic traditions. He is a repository of older legends – a super hero.

The lesson is not to root your faith in history. History is a cognitive construct at best, even if you were there for the event, at worst a distraction from what your aql is intended for. History is never a legitimate source of faith.

So how do you read these tales? I used to teach this in my university course “Reading the Quran” at Santa Clara University and found it very effective when interpreting stories of prophets/heroes in scripture. Consider this absolute legend, John Sudano a.k.a. Smash Mouth Cover Guy.

John is a modern day Gilgamesh whose own heroic feat – singing “All Star” to any melody – is a repository of reinterpretations of earlier musical legends, like Nirvana, Radiohead, Oasis, Drake, and more. Here, John’s performing his musical interpretation of Wonderwall by singing the lyrics of Smash Mouth’s famous “All Star” over the famous melody.

Now consider John’s predecessor, Ryan Adams who covered a much darker Wonderwall in 2003.

For those familiar with the genre, whose is more “accurate” to the original version by the legendary British rock band Oasis? Ryan Adams captures Oasis’s same lyrical composition, while John captures the original melody. Which part of Oasis’s Wonderwall shook up the world? What was the moral lesson? And what is a wonder wall anyway?

Here’s the purported original by Oasis for posterity (a fantastic song by any standard).

Now Wonderwall’s fame is nothing short of monumental. This song skyrocketed the success of Oasis to that of the Beatles, a comparison seen as sacrilege by some. Like the Smash Mouth Cover Guy, both bands are heroes in their own right, in their own community. But the origins of the Wonderwall myth doesn’t begin with Oasis at all. It begins in an unremarkable 1968 psychedelic movie about a peeping tom watching a woman through a hole in the wall. His wonder wall. “Who was the woman? What was she like?” he might ask. Readers of scripture also ask trivia around mythical events, often missing the forest for the trees, losing the message in the noise.

Another legend sequence emergese from this unremarkable fountainhead. The soundtrack to that film was written by George Harrison of the Beatles who had just recorded a hit song a year earlier before the film called “Penny Lane”. That’s right: the woman in the film. Now the actual origin of Penny Lane by The Beatles was of course a a street in Liverpool, England, and as a tribute to their upbringing in Liverpool, they wrote the song. And the street’s origins name? A slave trader named James Penny.

So what’s the original Wonderwall and which interpretations embody the original message today? Which interpretation of Penny Lane lives on today? The song, the film, or the slave trader?

We live next to a frozen yogurt shop called Penny Lane. I asked my daughter yesterday “do you know why it’s called Penny Lane?”She said “because it has all these penny-shaped candies!” I laughed, because it reminds me how most people interpret their scripture.

When I mentioned the story of Solomon in the Quran having precedence in the Epic of Gilgamesh, someone predictably countered “but it wasn’t a jinn who retrieved it in the Quran. It was a person!”, as if to affirm the originality of the Quranic interpretation of the myth. He’d really like this frozen yogurt place by my house.