It has been more than once suggested, and Prof. Hommel has stated the matter as his opinion, that the name of the god Aê or Ea, another possible reading of which is Aa, may be in some way connected with, and perhaps originated the Assyro-Babylonian divine name Ya'u, “God,” which is cognate with the Hebrew Yah or, as it is generally written, Jah. If this be the case, it would seem to imply that a large section of the people remained faithful to his worship, and the flood of the Babylonians may symbolize some persecution of them by the worshippers of the god Ellila, angry at the slight put upon him by their neglect or unwillingness to acknowledge him as the chief of the Pantheon. Some of the people may, indeed, have worshipped Ae or Aa alone, thus constituting a kind of monotheism. This, nevertheless, is very uncertain, and at present unprovable. It is worthy of note, however, that at a later date there was a tendency to identify all the deities of the Babylonian [pg 114] Pantheon with Merodach, and what in the “middle ages” of the Babylonians existed with regard to Merodach may very well have existed for the worship of Ae or Ea at an earlier date. The transfer, in the Semitic Babylonian Creation-story, of the name of Aê to his son Merodach may perhaps be a re-echo of the tendency to identify all the gods with Ae, when the latter was the supreme object of worship in the land. There is one thing that is certain, and that is, that the Chaldean Noah, Pir-napištim, was faithful in the worship of the older god, who therefore warned him, thus saving his life. Ae, the god who knew all things, knew also the design of his fellows to destroy mankind, and being “all and always eye,” to adopt a phrase used by John Bunyan, he bore, as a surname, that name Nin-igi-azaga, “Lord of the bright eye,” so well befitting one who, even among his divine peers, was the lord of unsearchable wisdom.
It is unfortunately a difficult thing to make a comparison of the ark as described in Genesis with a ship of the Babylonian story. It was thought, by the earlier translators of the Babylonian story of the Flood, that its size was indicated in the second paragraph of the story (p. [102], ll. 11, 12), but Dr. Haupt justly doubts that rendering. If the size of the vessel were indicated at all, it was probably in the next paragraph, where the building of the ship is described. This part, however, is so very mutilated, that very little clear sense can be made out of it. The Babylonian home-land of the story seems certainly to be indicated by the mention of two kinds of bitumen or pitch for caulking the vessel, Babylonia being the land of bitumen par excellence. Those who were to live on board were to sustain themselves with the flesh of oxen, and to all appearance they cheered the weary hours with the various kinds of drink of which they laid in store. They were not neglectful, [pg 115] either, of the oil that they used in preparing the various dishes, and with which they anointed their persons. All these points, though but little things in themselves, go to show that the story, in its Babylonian dress, was really written in the country of that luxury-loving people. The mention of holes for the cables, too, shows that the story is the production of maritime people, such as the Babylonians were.
Apparently the Babylonians found there was something inconsistent in the patriarch being saved without any of his relatives (except his sons), and the artificers who had helped him to build the ship which was to save him from the destruction that overwhelmed his countrymen and theirs. For this reason, and also because of the relationship that might be supposed to exist between master and servant, his relatives and the sons of the artificers[11] are saved along with his own family, which, of course, would not only include his sons, but their wives also. On this point, therefore, the two accounts may be regarded as in agreement.
When all was ready, the Sun-god, called by the usual Semitic name of Šamaš, appointed the time for the coming of the catastrophe. This would seem to be another confirmation of the statement already made, that the Babylonians, like the Hebrews (see Gen. i. 14-18), regarded one of the uses of the sun as being to indicate seasons and times. It was a great and terrible time, such as caused terror to the beholder, and the patriarch was smitten with fear. Here, as in other parts of the Babylonian version, there is a human interest that is to a large extent wanting in the precise and detailed Hebrew account. Again the maritime [pg 116] nation is in evidence, where the consigning of the ship into the care of a pilot is referred to. Of course such an official could do but little more than prevent disastrous misfortune from the vessel being the plaything of the waves. In the description of the storm, the terror of the gods, Ištar's grief, and Maḫ's anger at the destruction of mankind, we see the production of a nation steeped in idolatry, but there are but few Assyro-Babylonian documents in which this fact is not made evident.
We have a return to the Biblical story in the sending forth of the birds, and the sacrifice of odoriferous herbs, when the gods smelled a sweet savour, and gathered like flies over the sacrificer. In the signets of Maḫ, “the lady of the gods,” by which she swears, we may, perhaps, see a reflection of the covenant by means of the rainbow, which the Babylonians possibly explained as being the necklace of the goddess. Instead of the promise that a similar visitation to destroy the whole of mankind should not occur again, there is simply a kind of exhortation on the part of the god Ae, addressed to Ellila, not to destroy the world by means of a flood again. To punish mankind for sins and misdeeds committed, other means were to be employed that did not involve the destruction of the whole human race.
Noah died at the age of 950 years (Gen. ix. 29), but his Babylonian representative was translated to the abode of the blessed “at the mouths of the rivers,” with his wife, to all appearance immediately after the Flood. In this the Babylonian account differs, and the ultimate fate of the patriarch resembles that of the Biblical Enoch, he who “was not, for God took him” (Gen. v. 24).
Appendix. The Second Version Of The Flood-Story.
This was found by the late George Smith at Nineveh when excavating for the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph, and was at first supposed to belong to the text translated on pp. 101-109. This, however, is impossible, as the narrative is in the third person instead of the first, and in the form of a conversation between Atra-ḫasis (= Pir-napištim) and the god Aê—
Tablet D. T. 42.