The description of the planting of the garden is very suggestive of a tract of bare land to which irrigation has been brought. "And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight." The garden, too, is watered, not by rainfall, but by a river which parts into different heads, as do the Tigris and Euphrates when they spread out upon the flat alluvial land below Baghdad.
Compare the "scenery" in St. John's Revelation with that of the writer of Genesis when the kings of the earth and the great men sought to hide from the wrath of God. They "hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us and hide us."
Adam and Eve could hide themselves only "amongst the trees" of the garden.
SHEIK SAAD AND THE PERSIAN MOUNTAINS
The story of Noah and the flood has a very close parallel in a record of Berosus, the Babylonian priest Xisuthros had a dream in which the deity announced to him that on a certain day all men should perish in a deluge of water, and ordered him to take all the sacred writings and bury them at Sippar, the City of the Sun, then to build a ship, provide it with ample stores of food and drink and enter it with his family and his dearest friends, also animals, both birds and quadrupeds of every kind. Xisuthros did as he had been bidden. When the flood began to abate, on the third day after the rain had ceased to fall, he sent out some birds to see whether they would find any land, but the birds, having found neither food nor place to rest upon, returned to the ship. A few days later Xisuthros once more sent the birds out; but they again came back to him, this time with muddy feet. On being sent out again a third time they did not return at all. Xisuthros then knew that the land was uncovered, made an opening in the roof of the ship, and saw that it was stranded on the top of a mountain. He came out of the ship with his wife, daughter, and pilot, built an altar, and sacrificed to the gods, after which he disappeared together with them. When his companions came out to seek him they did not see him, but a voice from Heaven informed them that he had been translated among the gods to live for ever, as a reward for his piety and righteousness. The voice went on to command the survivors to return to Babylonia, unearth the sacred writings, and make them known to men. They obeyed, and, moreover, built many cities and restored Babylon.[3]
An eminent authority on the history of Mesopotamia told me that he considered the deluge to have been a purely local catastrophe in the flat land of Babylonia. The Arabs use the same word alternately for mountain or desert. If such a use has come down from long ago the extraordinary statements in Genesis vii. 20: "Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered," may be easily reconciled. It has always seemed to me that mountains which were covered by 24 feet of water must have looked very insignificant even in the flat land of Chaldea. If, however, the word "desert" will serve equally well for the word "mountain" we have an account of a flood that could easily destroy the "world" of Mesopotamia. The annual flood from which the nomadic inhabitants were used to escaping (as they do now by moving up to the higher ground) became a wide-spread inundation till the highest "desert" was covered and the population drowned.
The Biblical account of the Ark suggests to any dweller in Mesopotamia that it was a gigantic mahaila. The pitching inside and out is still practised in putting together some of the Euphrates boats, and the method of making a goufa, covering it on both sides with bitumen, has a strong family likeness to the method of boat-building used in those primitive times.
The Jew, however, was always a typical landlubber, and one would expect a specification for the building of a ship would lack nautical details. Not so, however, the Assyrian tablet relating to the Ark. It was, we are told, a true ship. It was decked in. It was well caulked in all its seams. It was handed over to a pilot. It was navigated in proper style. "I steered about the sea. The corpses drifted about like logs. I opened a port-hole.... I steered over countries which were now a terrible sea." The pilot made the land at Nizir and let her go aground.