Nonetheless, a thorough critical analysis of the Mesopotamian poems significantly weakens this view. Under this view, Genesis, including the Flood, is merely a “compiled” collection of Hebraised Mesopotamian histories (Barton 1913, 249). Mark takes as granted that Hebrew scribes merely borrowed Assyrian versions of the accounts recorded (Mark 2018a, 2018b). The Assyriologist William Hallo, for example, says that Genesis is best understood only as describing what the Israelites thought or believed happened in history (2020, 36), while the philosopher Joshua J. The scholarly effect of the discovery of these poems has been to produce the prevalent idea that Genesis is not a historical record, and consists merely of borrowed and extended Babylonian myths. After a short duration-six or seven days-the vessel settles and the hero comes out. He takes some animals aboard, and as the waters subside, he releases birds. They feature a man who is saved from a Flood by constructing an ark-like vessel. These deluge accounts in some points bear a striking resemblance to the account of Noah recorded in Genesis. Nonetheless, due to its fragmentary nature and limited scholarly attention, it is not one of the texts this paper addresses. This small fragment has been dubbed “the Ark Tablet”. More recently, Irving Finkel, resident Assyriologist at the British Museum, has deciphered another cuneiform tablet containing instructions for the construction of a coracle-style ark built from bitumised rope (Finkel 2014). Younger than either of these is the Epic of Gilgamesh. The oldest known text is the Atrahasis poem, which is practically contemporaneous with another poem, the Eridu Genesis. Keywords: Mesopotamia, Flood Literature, archaeology, cuneiform, Atrahasis, Eridu Genesis, Epic of Gilgamesh, Genesis, higher criticism IntroductionĪt least three major accounts of a great Flood have been discovered in Mesopotamian literature and are well known to scholars. It is untenable to argue that Hebrew scribal tradition based their sacred history on a foreign text that not only had a hostile religious worldview to that of the monotheistic Israelite one, but was not regarded as historical and sacred by those who circulated them. Its primary interest was in medicine and omen reading rather than preserving the orations of their gods.įor these and other reasons, the long-held higher critical argument about an alleged textual exchange is now outdated.
Lastly, Babylonian and Assyrian religion was not dependent on a preserved text. The way these stories are listed in ancient library inventories also demonstrates that the scribal tradition in Mesopotamian had neither a developed idea of canonicity nor a notional idea that these stories were sacred and set apart from other texts.
The dating of the famous Gilgamesh epic rules out the possibility that it could have been used in a textual interchange and the existence of different versions of the poetic stories about the Flood strongly militates against these being regarded as history. This thesis, however, can be seriously challenged based on recent archaeological work that expands both our understanding as to how ancient Mesopotamian religion functioned, and how their scribes related to their texts. For a long time, the discovery of Flood literature in Mesopotamia outside of the Genesis account has prompted a higher critical argument that the Genesis account must have borrowed from the Babylonian and Assyrian versions of the Flood story.
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