Memories of the Deluge in Babylon

When George Smith uncovered the remains of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Babylon in the nineteenth century, it caused a sensation because the ancient tablets revealed a pagan account of Noah's Ark, complete in all its details. Some wondered whether this was independent confirmation of the truth of the Bible, while the more perceptive among the Victorians feared that the ancient cuneiform tablets contained an account that predated the Bible and undermined Scripture's claim to primacy.

The funny thing is, this never should have happened.

The Near Eastern flood myth was never completely lost, and it should not have surprised anyone when ancient versions of it showed up in the ruins of Babylon. The Babylonian priest Berossus, writing around 290 BCE, drew upon ancient Babylonian records to report the great flood, the hero Xisuthrus who built an ark on the orders of a god, and the result, which paralleled the Noah story to a remarkable extent:

After the flood had been upon the earth, and was in time abated, Xisuthrus sent out birds from the vessel; which, not finding any food, nor any place whereupon they might rest their feet, returned to him again. After an interval of some days, he sent them forth a second time; and they now returned with their feet tinged with mud. He made a trial a third time with these birds; but they returned to him no more: from whence he judged that the surface of the earth had appeared above the waters. He therefore made an opening in the vessel, and upon looking out found that it was stranded upon the side of some mountain; upon which he immediately quitted it with his wife, his daughter, and the pilot. Xisuthrus then paid his adoration to the earth: and having constructed an altar, offered sacrifices to the gods, and, with those who had come out of the vessel with him, disappeared.

Preserved in the unquestionably Christian writings of Eusebius of Caesaria, this text remained in circulation from Antiquity to the present day. But if this weren't enough, another version occurs in the writings of Flavius Josephus, in the nineteenth chapter of Against Apion, commenting on Berossus:

Berosus, therefore, following the most ancient records of that nation, gives us a history of the deluge of waters that then happened, and of the destruction of mankind thereby, and agrees with Moses's narration thereof.

Josephus' text indicates what went wrong. The ancients saw the similarities in the Biblical and Babylonian accounts as resulting from a historical event, an actual flood. Later, with Christianity supreme in the West, the order of events was reversed, and scholars, assuming the Bible to be the origin of all pagan legends and myths, believed that the Babylonians had merely copied Genesis. This was made possible by the fact that Berossus wrote in 290 BCE, much later than the (presumed) date when Moses allegedly wrote Genesis with his own hand (c. 1200 BCE), and therefore derivative of the "earlier" Biblical account. Only much later was the proper sequence of composition recognized. The understanding that the Gilgamesh epic was the oldest written story known to man, older by far than the earliest conjectured composition date for Genesis, proved conclusively that the Near Eastern flood myth, dating back to the Sumerians, was the original of the one later copied and adapted into the story of Noah.

Although academic publications routinely make reference to this, out of deference to religious sensibilities, to this day the Near Easter flood myth is called "Noah's flood" in most popular media, and even when acknowledged, ample caveats are inserted to preserve the illusion that the Bible's flood myth is somehow older, unique, or--God forbid--true.

[Click here for a correction of errors in this post.]