Each time that the angry god sought to exterminate the human pests he regretted releasing upon the land, Enki had thwarted his superior’s genocidal plan by tipping off the mortal King Atrahasis in time for some people to survive. Enlil finally realized that a lesser god was leaking his plans, so he swore them all to secrecy about the coming flood. This time, Enki loudly told the plan to the wall of Atrahasis’s reed hut. Atrahasis overheard the warning and converted his home into a boat, which he loaded with his family, possessions, animals, birds, and grains—everything he would need to re-create human society after the flood.
The makeshift boat rode out the storm for seven days and seven nights and then ran aground on a mountainside. After another seven days passed, Atrahasis sent out a dove to seek land. The dove returned unsuccessful. Atrahasis then sent out a swallow, also unsuccessfully. Finally, with the waters receding, he sent out a raven, which, finding land, did not return. The story ends with Atrahasis disembarking and sacrificing a sheep and burning incense offerings to the gods.
While the original Sumerian story shares striking details with that of Noah’s Flood, the parallels to the biblical story are even more apparent in the later elaborately detailed Babylonian flood story of Gilgamesh. Fearing death, Gilgamesh sought the secret of eternal life from Utnapishtim, the great king who saved mankind from the flood. Passages that are virtually identical show that the tale of Atrahasis was spliced into the Gilgamesh epic, with the name of the heroic flood savior changed to Utnapishtim (which some consider an old Babylonian translation of “Ziusudra”). One version of the Gilgamesh epic even refers to Utnapishtim as “Atrahasis.”
As Smith and others continued to find and translate more versions of the flood story, its historical background grew increasingly complicated. Each period and region possessed its own version, with no master version against which to compare all other versions. There were many versions of the Mesopotamian flood story. Societies throughout the region adopted the tale, adapting it to their language and culture.
The story of a great flood became widely known across the Middle East because Akkadian, the language of Babylon, served as the language of diplomacy until the first millennium BC. Novice scribes helped spread the story from one culture to another as they practiced their Akkadian by copying classic texts. It has even been argued that an abbreviation of Utnapishtim, with emphasis on its second syllable, was pronounced as “Noah” in early Palestine. As a foundational piece of regional lore, it’s a story the Jews would have been exposed to as they wept in captivity by the rivers of Babylon after their exile from Judea.
On the whole, the exile of the Jews to Babylon was a period of political banishment rather than outright enslavement. The Jews were treated well enough in their temporary home so that significant numbers chose not to return to Judea when their captivity ended. We know that at least some Jews rose in Babylonian society, if only because the Bible says that those who returned to the Holy Land dragged their own slaves with them. That they also took the Mesopotamian flood story fits the expected pattern in which a well-treated conquered people are more likely to assimilate their captor’s culture.
Still, the Genesis stories differ from Babylonian precursors in a very fundamental way. The contrasts between monotheistic and polytheistic culture is striking, and reading Genesis as literature intended to promote monotheism is illuminating. Genesis lists the pantheistic gods and says that one true God created them all. It is an epic poem with a purpose. Earth, sky, sun, moon, plants, and animals—they are not gods. According to Genesis, sea monsters were created on the fifth day.2 This explicitly refutes the Mesopotamian creation story in which the patron god of Babylon subdued the forces of chaos, slaying the angry goddess that ruled the cosmic sea to create the world and everything in it. Here, perhaps, we find the original aim of the opening chapters of the Hebrew Bible: refuting the account of Creation posed by the polytheistic Mesopotamian culture.
The Babylonian flood story was even known to the ancient Greeks. The obscure historian Alexander Polyhistor attributed an account of a great flood to the Babylonian priest Berossus, who lived in the time of Alexander the Great several hundred years after the Jews were exiled to Babylon. Writing in the first century BC, Polyhistor recounted how the god Kronos ordered Xisuthros (likely a phonetic transliteration of Ziusudra, the original Sumerian flood hero) to build a boat that could carry his family and friends through a flood sent to destroy the rest of mankind. He was to stow provisions, animals, and birds on board and then sail off as the flood rose. Later, as the flood receded, Xisuthros set the birds free, only to have them return, unable to find land to rest on. The second time he sent them out, the birds returned with muddy feet. The third time they did not return at all. Finally, the boat ran aground. There, on a mountain, Xisuthros built an altar and offered a sacrifice to the gods for delivering him through the ordeal. The similarities between Polyhistor’s story and both the Sumerian and biblical flood stories are clear.
The Greeks also had a flood story, although theirs evolved to parallel the Old Testament story. In the ninth Olympian ode of Pindar, Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha, come down from Mount Parnassus (the highest point in southern Greece) to populate the world after Zeus drained the floodwaters, revealing the fertile lowlands where humanity might thrive. In the fourth century BC, Plato taught that Deucalion’s flood was a local affair that only covered the plains, allowing those who fled to the hills to save themselves. In both traditions, Deucalion and Pyrrha were the ancestors of all Greeks.
The best-known version of Deucalion’s story is found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a Roman elaboration of Greek myths in which Prometheus warned righteous Deucalion and Pyrrha of a great flood the gods were sending to punish mankind. The pious pair built a ship, loaded it with provisions, and rode the rising floodwaters to the only unsubmerged peak. As the flood receded, they disembarked on Mount Parnassus and thanked the gods for delivering them from the deluge. Finding themselves alone in a devastated world, they went to Themis’s shrine to ask how mankind might be restored. Advised to throw the bones of the great mother (Earth) behind them, the lonely couple tossed stones over their shoulders. Deucalion’s stones became men and Pyrrha’s became women.
The satirist Lucian’s second-century retelling of the story expanded to include a great ark onto which Deucalion loaded pairs of every kind of creature on Earth. The Greek flood story was evolving to track the increasingly popular Old Testament story. Whether or not they originally represented different versions of the same event, ancient flood stories were transmitted from one culture to the next, demonstrating the attraction this story held for succeeding Middle Eastern societies.
Thousands of miles to the east, on the far side of Mesopotamia, Hindu society also had flood traditions. In the earliest version, recorded in the Satapatha Brahmana sometime between the fourth and second centuries BC, a tiny fish swam into the hands of a man named Manu as he was washing himself. The fish called out, “Rear me, and I will save you.” When Manu asked what it would save him from, the fish replied that one day a great flood would carry away everything. So Manu raised the fish in a jar, and then a pit, until the fish grew large enough to avoid predators. He then returned it to the sea. The grateful fish told Manu when to build a boat, and as the flood came the now very large fish towed Manu to a Himalayan peak and helped him fasten his boat to a tree. When the floodwaters receded, Manu found himself alone in the world and began to pray. His prayers were answered within a year when a woman grew from his offerings of butter and sour milk. The new couple enthusiastically set about repopulating the world.
Later iterations of this story demonstrate its evolution, but could it originally have come from the Babylonian flood story? Possibly. Indian seals and jewelry found in Mesopotamian excavations document exchange between the two cultures as early as 2500 BC. Sea trade routes provided for cultural exchange in later times. Such links led some to argue that the Mesopotamian flood story spawned Hindu flood stories. Advocates o
f this view point to the basic plot as paralleling the broad outline of the biblical flood.
There are striking differences, however. Foremost among these is that in Hindu cosmology a great flood ends each era of the world, repeatedly wiping out humanity. Unlike Noah’s Flood, Manu’s flood is not a unique event. It was just one of many world-destroying floods. Other Indian flood myths variously invoked a rain of fire or food shortages that tempted people to desecrate sacred trees holding the proverbial forbidden fruit. These causes are quite different from those in the Hebraic tradition, in which debauchery and wickedness become the root causes of the flood, and the Mesopotamian tradition, in which humankind is destroyed for being a general nuisance. Perhaps these differences reflect local embellishments as the flood story traveled beyond Mesopotamia.
While the origins of these differences are unknown, what is certain is that flood stories evolved over centuries in the retelling, regardless of how or why they originated.
As geologists abandoned Noah’s Flood as an explanation for the world’s topography and archaeologists kept digging for Mesopotamian flood deposits, literary scholars professionalized the study of the history of the Bible itself. Paralleling the emergence of geology as a secular profession, historians began to formalize Bible studies, approaching the study of the Old Testament with the same independence and intensity geologists used to study rocks. Traditional interpretations of the Bible faced new trials as literary scholars concluded that Genesis was compiled from older sources.
9
Recycled Tales
CENTURIES BEFORE GEORGE SMITH discovered that the opening chapters of the Bible were reworked Babylonian tales, controversy over the authorship of the Bible centered on how to interpret it as the literal word of God. The original Hebrew version had no vowels, leaving room for interpretation as to the specific wording when the Bible was translated into Greek. In 1538, the Jewish scholar Elijah ben Asher Levita demonstrated that the accents and points indicating where to insert vowels, add punctuation, and divide Hebrew words were invented by rabbis long after the translation of the Jewish Bible. Before the adoption of modern written Hebrew, the Jewish Bible consisted of a string of consonants. Meanings could vary depending upon how one inserted the missing vowels and where one divided words. Biblical translators like Saint Jerome had to use their judgment, which could introduce varying shades of meaning and complicate literal interpretations. Concern over potential human influence and errors came to a head in 1650, when Louis Cappel, a French Calvinist professor of biblical studies, painstakingly compared biblical translations in his massive Critica Sacra (Sacred Criticism) to demonstrate that the Bible was a book with a history, rather than the word of God delivered directly from the source.
Even before the Renaissance, it was well known that there were striking differences between the Greek and Hebrew Bibles. Arguments over which Bible was the true word of God led some scholars to argue that the Hebrew text was corrupt, or had even been intentionally altered to deceive Christians. Others argued that the Greek Bible was a hodgepodge of inferior translations, or that the Latin Bible was full of errors. This presented Christians with the awkward challenge of which version to believe.
Grappling with this controversy, Martin Luther emphatically labeled the Latin Bible a flawed text and devoted himself to sorting through the different wordings of the Greek and Hebrew texts. His efforts led him to dismiss the books of James and Jude as true scripture and relegate them to the end of his Bible. About the Book of Revelation, he wrote that every man could make up his own mind, but he “cannot find that it was inspired by the Holy Spirit.”1 In his view, the Latin Bible was so filled with errors that to confidently discern the meaning of scripture, one had to go back and read the original texts. Even Luther acknowledged that scriptural interpretation required care to avoid potentially flawed plain-sense understanding.
When the sixteenth-century Council of Trent met to judge Protestant heresies and clarify church teachings, the assembled bishops were deeply concerned that if they upheld Luther’s critique the Latin Bible would lose all authority. The more they debated, the more authoritative Jerome’s Latin translation became. The council finally declared the Latin Bible superior to the Greek and Hebrew versions, a conclusion they considered to be inspired by God. The bishops disagreed with Luther’s claim that ordinary men could interpret the plain words of scripture for themselves. Fearing that freedom to interpret the Bible for oneself was the first step on the road to heresy, the Council moved to protect the church’s authority and, in a fit of brinkmanship, deemed the translation more authentic than the original.
Recognition that Moses did not write much of what was attributed to him caused quite a scandal in 1685 when French clergyman Richard Simon outraged both Protestants and Catholics alike with his Critical History of the Old Testament. He came to this conclusion when his superiors in the Catholic Order of the Oratory asked him to provide scholarly arguments for use against Calvinists who rejected the authority of the church and trusted the Bible alone for spiritual guidance. Critically dissecting the Bible, he turned his attention first to the opening chapters of the Old Testament. The contradictions and confusion attending various literal interpretations of scripture could be explained by recognizing the historical nature of Genesis as a compiled story. The conflicting styles, repetitions, and logical impossibility of Moses writing about his own death implied that Genesis was compiled by a series of scribes long after Moses died. Extending his analysis to the New Testament, Simon was able to demonstrate that no original version of the Bible survived; that variations and contradictions had crept into the text as vowels, words, and whole passages were lost, added, or modified over centuries of translation and transcription.
His attack on biblical inerrancy—the belief that the Bible held no errors whatsoever—shocked both the Calvinists it was supposed to shock and the Catholic Church that commissioned the work. Simon believed scripture to be divinely inspired. He just did not know which of the modern versions corresponded to the original one. As a reward for a job done too well, his book was banned and he was expelled from the Oratorians.
Half a century later, the censors of the Sorbonne ignored French physician Jean Astruc when he advanced the same argument. Noting the striking repetition of events in the biblical flood story and the use of two names for God, Astruc claimed that Moses compiled Genesis from even then ancient accounts handed down from the patriarchs. Astruc’s suspicions were based on several lines of evidence. First there were the unnecessary repetitions, like the two creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2. Then there was the story’s awkward jumping back and forth through time. Astruc saw these anomalies as originating when Moses merged several original versions into a single story. The Bible was starting to be seen as a book that had evolved.
In the late 1700s, German intellectuals introduced more formal literary scholarship into biblical criticism. Johann Eichhorn, the prominent professor of Oriental languages at Jena University, compared biblical narratives and concluded that many of the stories in Genesis were fanciful accounts of prehistoric events. Analyzing the style of different passages, he sorted through and disentangled a literary stratigraphy that revealed Genesis to be a composite story.
In revolutionary America, where conventional institutions were no longer sacred, Thomas Paine took up the implications of Eichhorn’s conclusion to attack the Bible in the name of the Enlightenment in his pamphlet The Age of Reason.
Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis, but an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of down-right lies. The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian Tales, without the merit of being entertaining.2
Paine’s radical argument shocked Christians who saw the credibility of Genesis as the foundation for the credibility of the Bible. Discrediting the storie
s of Noah’s Flood and the week of Creation threatened the authority of the Bible and its promise of salvation.
Still, people on either side of the Atlantic recognized that the Bible itself had evolved, if only because the New Testament was grafted onto the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Old Testament). Long before the creation of the New Testament, after the fall of the Kingdom of David, Jewish traditions were brought together into a single history that could be handed down to preserve the cultural identity of a vanquished people exiled into captivity. It was relatively easy to accept the proposition that Jewish scribes had merged several versions of an oral tradition into a coherent whole.
A defining achievement of nineteenth-century biblical criticism was teasing Genesis apart, verse by verse, to reveal two parallel narratives. Recently developed software that analyzes style and word choices to parse authorship of multiauthored texts has found the same thing. Both the low- and high-tech methods of analysis provide support for some kind of merging of stories as a reasonable explanation for contradictions such as that between Genesis 1, in which people were created after the animals, and Genesis 2, in which Adam was created first. Such dilemmas are problematic for the simplest of reasons. At most, only one version could be correct.
Did the Flood last 150 or 40 days? In Genesis 7:24 and 8:3, the Flood is described as lasting 150 days, whereas according to Genesis 8:6–12, the floodwaters receded from the earth in just two weeks after 40 days and nights of rain (for a grand a total of 54 days of flooding). Elsewhere, the Flood was projected to last ten and a half months between Genesis 7:11, which describes the Flood as beginning on the seventeenth day of the second month of Noah’s 600th year, and Genesis 8:13, which notes that the floodwaters receded enough for Noah to open up the ark on the first day of his 601st year. How can all of these things be true?
The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood Page 16
