The story of the Deluge had been the subject of many poems. Fragments of some of them we possess, and the details of the story were not always the same. But the version preserved in the epic of Gilgames became what we may term the standard one; the very fact that it was embodied in the most famous of the epics made it widely known. When it was discovered by Mr. George Smith in 1872, its striking resemblance to the story of the Flood in Genesis was at once apparent to every one. In details as well as in general outline the two accounts agreed; even in the moral cause assigned to the Deluge—the sin of man—the Babylonian story alone among traditions of a Deluge was at one with the Biblical narrative.
A comparison of the Chaldæan and Biblical accounts leads to the following results. The resemblances between them extend equally to the Elohistic and the Yahvistic portions of the Hebrew narrative. Like the Elohist, the epic ascribes the Deluge to the sins of mankind, and the preservation of Xisuthros, the Chaldæan Noah, and his family to the piety of the hero; all living things, moreover, are involved in the calamity, except such as are preserved in the ark; its approach is revealed to Xisuthros by the god Ea, who instructs him how to build ‘the ship’; Ea also, like Elohim, prescribes the dimensions of the ark, which is divided into rooms and stories, and pitched within and without; ‘the seed of life of all kinds’ is taken into it, together with the family of Xisuthros; the waters of the Flood are said to cover ‘all the high mountains,’ and to destroy all living creatures except those that were in the ark; this latter, too, had a window; and when the Deluge had subsided and Xisuthros had offered a sacrifice on the peak of the mountain, Bel blessed him and declared that he would never again destroy the world by a flood while Istar ‘lifted up’ the rainbow, which an old Babylonian hymn calls ‘the bow of the Deluge.’[[135]]
Like the Yahvist, on the other hand, the Babylonian poet sees in the Flood a punishment for sin, and makes it destroy all living things except those that were in the ark. He also states that Xisuthros sent forth three birds, one after the other, in order to discover whether the waters were subsiding, two of them being a dove and a raven, and that while the dove turned back to the ark, the raven flew away. After the descent from the ark, moreover, Xisuthros, we are told, built an altar and offered sacrifice on the summit of the mountain whereon it had rested, and there ‘the gods smelled the sweet savour’ of the offering. In certain cases the epic even explains what is doubtful or obscure in the Hebrew text. Thus it shows that in the account of the sending forth of the birds one of the birds has been omitted; and that consequently, in order to complete the number of times the birds were despatched from the ark, the dove is sent forth twice, while the raven, instead of being the last to leave the ark, has been made the first to do so. In the Babylonian story the order is natural. First, the dove flies forth, then the swallow or ‘bird of destiny,’ and lastly the raven who feeds on the corpses that float upon the water, and accordingly does not return. But the ‘bird of destiny’ carried with it heathen and mythological associations. It has therefore been omitted by the Biblical writer, the result being to throw the narrative into confusion.[[136]]
The Babylonian origin of the Flood, again, alone explains the statement that it was partly caused by ‘the fountains of the great deep’ being broken up. The ‘great deep,’ called Tiamat in Babylonian mythology, had been placed under guard at the Creation, according to Chaldæan belief, and so prevented from gushing forth and destroying mankind. The whole conception takes us back to the alluvial plain of Babylonia, liable at any time to be inundated by the waters of the Persian Gulf, and is wholly inapplicable to a mountainous country like Palestine, where rain only could have produced a flood.[[137]]
There are even indications that in the Biblical narrative the mythological ideas and polytheistic phraseology of the Babylonian story have been intentionally contradicted or suppressed. Thus, not only is the whole colouring of the narrative sternly monotheistic, but God Himself is made to reveal the approach of the Deluge to Noah, in contrast with the Babylonian version, according to which the god Ea announced the coming catastrophe to the Chaldæan Noah without the knowledge of the supreme god Bel. And when the Flood was past, Bel was enraged that any should have escaped living from it, and the other deities had to intercede before he could be pacified. So, too, whereas the Babylonian poet tells us that the Chaldæan Noah closed the door of his ship, in the book of Genesis it is Yahveh Himself who does so. In the view of the Biblical writer, nothing was to be allowed to lessen the omnipotence of the God of Israel.
It will be noticed that the coincidences between the Babylonian and Hebrew narratives are quite as much in details as in general outlines, and these coincidences cover the Hebrew narrative as a whole. It is not with the Elohist or with the Yahvist alone that the Babylonian poet agrees, but with the supposed combination of their two documents as we now find it in the book of Genesis. If the documentary hypothesis were right, there would be only two ways of accounting for this fact. Either the Babylonian poet had before him the present ‘redacted’ text of Genesis, or else the Elohist and Yahvist must have copied the Babylonian story upon the mutual understanding that the one should insert what the other omitted. There is no third alternative.
As the Babylonian epic was composed in the age of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel, neither of the two alternatives is likely to be accepted by the advocates of the Hexateuchal theory, and the whole theory, consequently, must be ruled out of court. It breaks down in the first test case to which the results of archæological discovery can be applied, a case, moreover, in which its plausibility is unusually great. Henceforth the historian who pursues a scientific method may safely disregard the whole fabric of Hexateuchal criticism.
The story of the Deluge itself suggests what may be put in place of it. With all its likeness to the Babylonian story, the Biblical narrative has nevertheless undergone a change. It has been clothed not only in a Hebrew, but also in a Palestinian dress. The ship of the Chaldæan Noah has become an ark, as was natural in a country where there were no great rivers or Persian Gulf; the period of the rainfall has been transferred from Sebet or January and February, when the winter rains fall in Babylonia, to ‘the second month’ of the Hebrew civil year, our October and November, the time of the autumn or ‘former rains’ in Canaan, while the subsidence of the waters is made to begin in the middle of ‘the seventh month,’ when the ‘latter rains’ of the Canaanitish spring are over; and the dove is said to have brought back in its mouth a leaf of the olive, a tree characteristic of the soil of Palestine. Though the Biblical narrative has been borrowed from Babylonia, it has been modified and coloured in the West. Even the hero of the Babylonian poem has become the Noah or Naham of Canaan.
We have learned from the Tel el-Amarna tablets how this could have come about. There was one period, and, so far as we know, one period only, in the history of Western Asia, when the literature of Babylonia was taught and studied there, and when the literary ideas and stories of Chaldæa were made familiar to the people of Canaan. This was the period of Babylonian influence which ended with the Mosaic age. With the Hittite conquests of the fourteenth century B.C., and the Israelitish invasion of Canaan, it all came to an end. The Babylonian story of the Deluge, adapted to Palestine as we find it in the Pentateuch, must belong to a pre-Mosaic epoch. And it is difficult to believe that the identity of the details in the Babylonian and Biblical versions could have remained so perfect, or that the Biblical writer could have exhibited such deliberate intention of controverting the polytheistic features of the original, if he had not still possessed a knowledge of the cuneiform script. It is difficult to believe that he belonged to an age when the Phœnician alphabet had taken the place of the syllabary of Babylonia, and the older literature of Canaan had become a sealed book.
But if so, a new light is shed on the sources of the historical narratives contained in the Pentateuch. Some of them at least have come down from the period when the literary culture of Babylonia was still dominant on the shores of the Mediterranean. So far from being popular traditions and myths first committed to writing after the disruption of Solomon’s kingdom, and amalgamated into their present form by a series of ‘redactors,’ they will have been derived from the pre-Mosaic literature of Palestine. Such of them as are Babylonian in origin will have made their way westwards like the Chaldæan legends found among the tablets of Tel el-Amarna, while others will be contemporaneous records of the events they describe. We must expect to discover in the Pentateuch not only Israelitish records, but Babylonian, Canaanitish, Egyptian, even Edomite records as well.