The Flood

Last year, my family and I went on a whale watching trip which was operated by the Quandamooka mob, who are the traditional owners of Moreton Island and the Stradbroke Islands in Moreton Bay.  Local lore man, Uncle Josh Walker, told stories of his country; the people, the wildlife, the land and the ocean.  I was fascinated to hear him tell of a story of the inundation of Moreton Bay and how the flooding of the bay was verified by scientists who indicated that it happened thousands of years ago as the sea level rose when the last ice age came to an end.  

The idea that an oral tradition dating back thousands of years could have its roots in an actual event piqued my curiosity.  I never would have thought that an oral tradition could preserve a memory for so long.  But, there seems to be some evidence that this story really does capture an ancient memory of coastal inundation.  At least that's what Patrick Nunn and Nicholas Reid argue in a 2016 paper in Australian Geographer titled, "Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago."  They highlight 21 dreamtime stories from all around the country that seem to make reference to the inundation of the Australian coast.  The Quandamooka story mentioned in their paper is different to the story shared by Uncle Josh Walker, but they both mention how the landscape changed as a result of rising sea level.

I was raised in a Christian tradition that interpreted the Bible as a literal true account of history.  The Aboriginal stories of inundation, interpreted through such a lens, would have been seen as a regional corruption of the flood of Noah.  I remember many times throughout my childhood that church folk would often reference the prevalence of flood myths around the world as evidence in support of an actual flood of global proportions.

My perspective has since changed.  In short, evidence is what changed my mind about the stories in the Bible.  The story of Noah's flood is one of those Bible stories I investigated deeply.

What follows is my research into the topic about five years ago.

TLDR:  The biblical Noah story is actually two stories woven together from earlier stories of a major flood on the Euphrates River.  Remarkably, we can trace the story textually back to three stories that predate the biblical narrative: "The Gilgamesh Epic," "The Atrahasis Epic," and "The Sumerian Deluge."  The name of the hero in each of these stories is different, but many of the details of the story are the same.  The hero of the Sumerian Deluge story is named Ziusudra, a name which also appears in the ancient Sumerian King List as the last King of the city of Shuruppak on the Euphrates River before the "flood swept over."  Archaeology of the city of Shuruppak reveals that there was a substantial flood event ~2900 BCE which is consistent with all the data.

Noah's Flood

The book of Genesis tells us that, within the space of a mere ten generations since the Garden of Eden was closed to humanity, the descendants of Adam and Eve had become so wicked that God rued the day He had created the human species.  God resolved to end the wickedness by wiping all of humanity from the face of the earth.  
Only one man was loved by God.  That man was Noah, meaning “rest”.  God decided to save Noah and his family, as well as a sampling of animals, from the coming catastrophe.  God warned Noah that he would destroy the earth with a flood.  He told Noah to build a huge boat out of gopher wood.  The boat would be 135m long x 22.5m wide x 13.5m high and it would have three decks inside.

As promised, God sent a flood of truly enormous proportions that covered the earth completely.  After forty days of non-stop rain, even the highest mountains were covered over.  There was so much water that it took five months for the water to drain away, leaving the boat stranded on the slopes of the Ararat mountains.  It took another six months for the earth to dry out enough for Noah and his entourage to leave the boat.

Is this story fact, fiction or legend?  Let’s look at the evidence.

Ararat / Urartu

Genesis 8:4 “And the ark came to rest in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the mountains of ’ă·rā·rāṭ.”

The Hebrew word ’ă·rā·rāṭ occurs four times in the Old Testament. Two of these occurrences refer to the land of ’ă·rā·rāṭ (2 Kings 19:37 and Isaiah 37:38) and one of them refers to the kingdom of ’ă·rā·rāṭ (Jeremiah 51:27). The King James Version interprets two of these as Armenia.

It is worth noting that there was a Kingdom of Urartu that existed about 860 BCE – 590 BCE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urartu), although the name could have originated many centuries earlier to describe the geographical region (named Urartri by Shalmaneser I of Assyria who claimed to have conquered the territory in the 13th century BCE).

There was a region in old Armenia called Ayrarat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrarat) in which the present day Mt. Ararat rises up to an elevation of 5,137m. Mt. Ararat seems to have been given its English name in modern times. Viscount James Bryce pointed out, in his 1876 address to the Royal Geographical Society of London, that Mt. Ararat was known to local Armenians as Massis and to the Turks as Aghri Dagh. Bryce points out that Jewish and Muslim scholars believed Noah’s ark came to rest on a mountain range in Kurdish territory much further to the south “among the lofty mountains which overhang the valley of the Tigris and the Zab.” (Bryce, J. (1877). On Armenia and Mount Ararat. Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 22(3), 169–186. http://doi.org/10.2307/1799899).

It would seem that a plain reading of the Bible text indicates a geographical region named Ararat in Hebrew and Urartu in Assyrian. Anyone searching for the final resting place of a 4,400 year old timber boat is facing a very difficult challenge. That hasn’t discouraged people from looking, though.


Let’s have a look at the list of candidates discovered so far …

Early Expeditions by Parrot and Bryce

Dr. Parrot is credited with the first ascent of Mt. Ararat in 1829. He wrote a rather long book about his expedition to Mt. Ararat, the climb up, and his own convictions that the ark had rested on a flat spot well below the summit. Although he reported that the Armenians believed the ark rested on the mountain, Parrot did not find any evidence himself.

The image here is a sketch by Friedrich Parrot of the monastery at Aghri, with Mt. Ararat in the background.

Dr. Parrot’s book is titled “Journey to Ararat” and can be read at the following link … https://books.google.com.au/books?id=9pYLAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA15#v=onepage&q&f=false

Viscount James Bryce wrote an even bigger book about his 1876 expedition to Ararat titled “Transcaucasia and Ararat”.  You can read it here ... https://archive.org/details/transcaucasiaan02brycgoog.  Bryce writes enthusiastically, "I saw at a height of over 13,000 feet, lying on the loose blocks, a piece of wood about four feet long and five inches thick, evidently cut by some tool and so far above the limit of the trees that it could by no possibility be a natural fragment of one.  Darting on it with a glee that astonished the Cossack and the Kurd, I held it up to them, made them look at it, and repeated several times the word, 'Noah.'"

While James Bryce seemed convinced he had found evidence of Noah's ark, neither of these early expeditions can provide evidence of an actual boat on Mt. Ararat. The only evidence they can present is that the Armenian locals had a tradition that this mountain was the resting place of the ark. Given that the Armenian tradition contradicts the Jewish and Muslim tradition of a mountain range closer to the ancient city of Nineveh, we cannot grant any weight to the opinions of Parrot and Bryce.

Ron Wyatt's Ark

Ron Wyatt was an Adventist nurse who claimed that the pictured rock formation was Noah’s ark. This rock formation is located about 25km south of Mt. Ararat.

Wyatt was an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist who claimed to have discovered a long list of biblically significant archaeological finds including, Noah’s ark, Sodom and Gomorrah, Joseph’s grain stores (you guessed it, pyramids), the Tower of Babel, relics of Pharoah’s army in the Red Sea, Mt. Sinai, the Ark of the Covenant with the blood of Christ on the Mercy seat, other artefacts from Solomon’s Temple, and the crucifixion site of Jesus (directly above the site of the Ark of the Covenant).

I’ve got to admit at the outset that Ron Wyatt’s palmares are impressive, if they can be believed. I think it far more likely, however, that Wyatt was either mistaken in his beliefs or a fraud. The Israel Antiquities Authority, who have tried to obtain samples of Ron’s finds, seem to think he is a charlatan (http://www.tentmaker.org/WAR/Zias.html). Even other creationists have denounced Ron Wyatt’s ark as a fraud (http://creation.com/special-report-amazing-ark-expose; https://answersingenesis.org/noahs-ark/noahs-ark-found/ark-discovered-again/).

Ron Wyatt’s ark has also been branded a fake by the snopes.com team (http://www.snopes.com/religion/noahsark.asp).
I think Adventists all around the world should be ashamed to consider this man as one of their own.


So, what made the boat shape? It turns out that this formation of basalt and limestone lies on a fault line and was uplifted during two earthquakes, forming the scarp that looks like the hull of a boat. The surrounding material is mudflow material that flows around the harder rock formation.

Other Expeditions

There are a number of other expeditions to find the ark that are listed in Eric Cline’s 2007 book titled “From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible,” (https://books.google.com.au/books?id=bJW-zhffwk4C&lpg=PP1&dq=From%20Eden%20to%20Exile%3A%20Unraveling%20Mysteries%20of%20the%20Bible&pg=PA17#v=onepage&q=From%20Eden%20to%20Exile:%20Unraveling%20Mysteries%20of%20the%20Bible&f=false) and on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searches_for_Noah%27s_Ark.

These expeditions include:

• 1856 Armenian Seventh Day Adventist, Haji Yearam, his father and three unnamed British scientists ascended Mt. Ararat. Apparently, the scientists became angry when they saw the ark poking out through the ice. They tried to destroy it and vowed to murder anybody who spoke of the find. This account is overly melodramatic hearsay and cannot be verified.
• 1902 – 1910 ?? Armenian Georgie Hagopian claimed to have visited the ark on two occasions during the first decade of the 20th century with his uncle. His story is inconsistent having variously claimed dates of 1902, 1906, 1908 and 1910. Hagopian claimed to have climbed onto the roof of the ark with his young friends.
• 1943 Ed Davis, an American army officer claimed to have climbed Mt. Ararat with his driver’s family. After three days of climbing, he was able to look at the ark from a vantage point 100 feet above it. Ed’s description matched Hagopian’s description, however, the two accounts are very different in terms of the level of difficulty reaching the ark.
• 1955 French explorer, Fernand Navarra, claimed to have found a piece of wood on Mt. Ararat. The wood, originally dated to 5,000 years old, was C14 dated by a number of laboratories to be less than 2,000 years old. In any case, Navarra’s guide claimed that the wood had been purchased in a nearby village and carried up the mountain by the Frenchman.
• 2006 Bob Cornuke and the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute (BASE Institute) led an expedition to Mt. Suleiman, just north of Tehran, Iran, to inspect a rock formation that looked like a boat (image shown). Other creationists are critical of Cornuke's claim (https://answersingenesis.org/noahs-ark/noahs-ark-found/hark-the-ark/) and even Bob Cornuke doesn’t claim to have found the ark. “The BASE Institute does not make the claim that we have found Noah's Ark. We'll let you draw your own conclusions.” (https://baseinstitute.org/pages/noahs-ark).
• 2007 by a joint Turkish-Hong Kong expedition including members of Noah’s Ark Ministries International (NAMI) claimed to have found evidence of Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat at 4,000m elevation. They made a movie about the expedition, which screened in 2011. Unfortunately for NAMI, a former member of their group, theologian Prof. Randall Price, has accused NAMI of fraud. Sadly, an attempt by a lone Scottish explorer to verify NAMI’s claim has ended in his disappearance.

All of these expeditions fall into one of two categories. Either, they are unverifiable, or they have been verified as frauds.

The search for Noah’s Ark has been mocked, with good reason I might add, by many people as pseudoscientific nonsense, earning the moniker “arkeology”. We are going to leave the arkeology behind and look into the reasons why such expeditions are doomed to fail before they even begin.


Let’s go back to the Bible and apply some critical thinking to the text.

The Two Floods of Noah

I think Professor Eric Cline says it best in his book, “From Eden to Exile: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Bible.”

"Long ago, biblical scholars demonstrated that there are at least two versions of the creation story within the Book of Genesis. Similarly, scholars have long noted that the biblical account of Noah and his ark actually consist of two different stories that have been woven together. As a result, details within the Bible’s account contradict themselves, as many scholars have pointed out, including Richard Elliott Friedman, professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at San Diego and author of “Who Wrote the Bible?”

"For instance, we are told that the flood lasted for 40 days (Genesis 7:17) but also that the floodwaters covered the earth for 150 days (7:24). Which was it – 40 or 150 days? Or did it rain for 40 days but then take an additional 110 days for dry land to appear? And how many animals was Noah told to take into the ark? One pair of each kind of animal (6:19)? Or seven pairs of each kind of clean animal and one pair of each kind of unclean animal (7:2)? And did he release a raven which “went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth” (8:7), or did he release a dove three times before “it did not return to him ever again” (8:8-12)? Or was it both?

"There are additional examples as well, as other scholars have demonstrated in great detail, which show that whoever put the Hebrew Bible together in the form we know it today was using at least two versions of the Flood story."

You can read Cline’s book here … https://books.google.com.au/books?id=bJW-zhffwk4C&lpg=PA17&pg=PA19#v=onepage&q&f=false

Aside from the internal contradictions that alert us to the fact that there are two flood stories, there are two very different versions of God.

The God of the J (Jahwist) source, named Yahweh, is anthropomorphic. Yahweh is grieved by the evil of humanity. Yahweh has regrets about ever creating humans. Yahweh closes the door of the ark for Noah. Yahweh feels pleasure at the smell of burning animals. Yahweh comes to the realisation that humanity cannot be blamed for their evildoings because the “inclination of the human heart is evil from their youth” and so he promises to never again destroy all life.

The God of the P (Priestly) source is never named. P’s God is stern, austere and distant. P’s God doesn’t seem to have any human emotions at all and his only communication with Noah is to issue commands and edicts.

You can compare the two flood stories side by side here … http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/cflood.htm

Notice how different the flood is in the J source compared to the P source. J’s flood is a result of rain; whereas, P’s flood is the result of a great cataclysm of water erupting from the deep and rushing in through the heavenly firmament. J’s flood lasted 40 days plus a fortnight of waiting for the water to subside. P’s flood lasted six months plus a six month wait for the water to subside.

The most important thing to note about these two stories is the simple fact that there are two stories. If there are two stories woven together, then it is clear that whoever blended the stories into one narrative had two versions of the same tale as their sources (which we call the J and P source).

The question that immediately comes to mind is whether J and P had their own sources and, if so, what would those stories look like? Would the names of the characters be the same? Would the events be the same? Would there be extra elements that are not mentioned in the Pentateuch? Would we expect an earlier source to have more supernatural elements or less?


Let’s find out …

The Flood of Utnapishtim

A young apprentice banknote engraver named George Smith, who had an interest in Assyriology and cuneiform, made an extraordinary discovery in 1872 while translating clay tablets in the British Museum. He translated a section of cuneiform that sounded remarkably like the flood story in Genesis. He realised that an important part of the story was missing so, with the financial backing of the Daily Telegraph, Smith embarked on an expedition to Nineveh where he began digging through the refuse piles from earlier archaeological digs. Within days, he had uncovered hundreds of fragments of clay tablets and was able to piece together the missing part of the flood story.

These tablets form a small part of a much larger work of ancient literature known as the Epic of Gilgamesh. In this epic tale, Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, a city on the Euphrates, goes on a quest to find Utnapishtim, the Faraway. Gilgamesh is distraught at the death of his companion, Enkidu, and wants to learn the secret of eternal life from Utnapishtim, whose name means “he who found life.” You can pick up the story from tablet XI here … http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab11.htm

Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh the following story:

“Shuruppak, a city that you surely know, situated on the banks of the Euphrates, that city was very old, and there were gods inside it. The hearts of the Great Gods moved them to inflict the Flood.”

The gods are sworn to secrecy by the father of the gods, Anu. But, one of the gods, Ea, finds a way to bypass the oath by shouting to a reed house, clearly within earshot of Utnapishtim.

“O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubartutu: Tear down the house and build a boat! Abandon wealth and seek living beings! Spurn possessions and keep alive living beings! Make all living beings go up into the boat. The boat which you are to build, its dimensions must measure equal to each other: its length must correspond to its width. Roof it over like the Apsu.” 

The Apsu is a reference to the primordial waters of the deep covered by land.

Utnapishtim follows Ea’s instructions for building the boat and enlists the aid of the people of Shuruppak. The boat was 120 cubits in width, length and height (i.e., a cube). It had six internal decks and nine compartments. They filled it with Utnapishtim’s wealth, his family and kinsmen, his livestock, as well as provisions for the trip and launched the boat, with great difficulty, into the river. Utnapishtim gifts his palace (including its contents) to the folk who provided him with the caulking for the boat.

Utnapishtim describes a seven day storm and flood so powerful that it made the gods fearful. The goddess Ishtar wept for all the people who had been killed in the flood and regretted having ordered such a terrible catastrophe. The boat comes to ground on Mt. Nimush (also known as Mt. Nisir, located on the border of modern-day Iraq and Iran).

“When a seventh day arrived I sent forth a dove and released it. The dove went off, but came back to me; no perch was visible so it circled back to me. I sent forth a swallow and released it. The swallow went off, but came back to me; no perch was visible so it circled back to me. I sent forth a raven and released it. The raven went off, and saw the waters slither back. It eats, it scratches, it bobs, but does not circle back to me. Then I sent out everything in all directions and sacrificed (a sheep). I offered incense in front of the mountain-ziggurat. Seven and seven cult vessels I put in place, and (into the fire) underneath (or: into their bowls) I poured reeds, cedar, and myrtle. The gods smelled the savor, the gods smelled the sweet savor, and collected like flies over a (sheep) sacrifice.”

The gods become angry that humans survived the flood and they figure out that it must have been Ea who warned them. Ea bemoans the fact that the gods chose a flood instead of some lesser tragedy and ends up blaming Utnapishtim whom he calls Atrahasis (meaning “exceedingly wise”). Here Ea is trying to weasel his way out of trouble:

“’I (only) made a dream appear to Atrahasis, and (thus) he heard the secret of the gods. Now then! The deliberation should be about him!' Enlil went up inside the boat and, grasping my hand, made me go up. He had my wife go up and kneel by my side. He touched our forehead and, standing between us, he blessed us: 'Previously Utanapishtim was a human being. But now let Utanapishtim and his wife become like us, the gods! Let Utanapishtim reside far away, at the Mouth of the Rivers.' They took us far away and settled us at the Mouth of the Rivers.”

The Epic of Gilgamesh continues, but this is really the end of the flood story.

This story bears an uncanny resemblance to the story of Noah’s flood, such as the warning of a flood and the instruction to build a boat, the grand size of the boat, the use of birds to check if the flood had ended, and the sacrifice to God / gods. Even the meaning of the names of the heroes is similar.

There are some important differences, though. This story relates a local flood, not a global flood. There is a lot more mundane detail about the building and launching of the boat. There are many gods instead of just one god. The mountain top on which the boat lands is different. The location of the hero is specified as Shuruppak, a city on the Euphrates River.


The version of the Gilgamesh Epic related here comes from tablet XI of Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh, dated approximately 13th – 11th century BCE. Versions of the Gilgamesh Epic from the Old Babylonian Period (19th – 16th century BCE) also refer to Utnapishtim, but not the flood.

The Flood of Atrahasis

Do you recall the fleeting mention of Atrahasis in the Utnapishtim version of the flood story when the god Ea is trying to get out of trouble? Well, there is another version of the flood story in which the flood hero is named Atrahasis, meaning “exceedingly wise”. The most complete version of the Atrahasis epic was recorded on tablets during the reign of King Ammisaduqa of the first Babylonian Dynasty (circa 1646 – 1626 BCE).  
https://www.livius.org/sources/content/anet/104-106-the-epic-of-atrahasis/

The earlier part of the Atrahasis epic relates the creation of humankind by a bunch of lazy gods who want slaves to do their work for them. Unfortunately, the humans multiply and make so much noise that it irritates the gods who then decide to destroy them with a flood. The god Enki decides to warn Atrahasis of Shuruppak of the impending catastrophe in a dream.

“Atrahasis made ready to speak, and said to his lord: "Make me know the meaning of the dream. Let me know, that I may look out for its consequence." Enki made ready to speak, and said to his servant: "You might say, 'Am I to be looking out while in the bedroom?' Do you pay attention to the message that I speak for you: 'Wall, listen to me! Reed wall, pay attention to all my words! Flee the house, build a boat, forsake possessions, and save life. The boat which you build ... be equal ... Roof her over like the Apsu [i.e., firmament covering the waters of the deep], so that the sun shall not see inside her. Let her be roofed over fore and aft. The gear should be very strong, the pitch should be firm, and so give the boat strength. I will shower down upon you later a windfall of birds, a spate of fishes.'" He opened the water clock and filled it, he told it of the coming of the seven-day deluge.”

The boat is built.

“The carpenter carried his axe, the reedworker carried his stone, the rich man carried the pitch, the poor man brought the materials needed.”

Atrahasis slaughters some animals to use as food on the boat. He then brings his family and some livestock on board before cutting the mooring ropes. Then, the storm hits.

“Anzu rent the sky with his talons, He ... the land and broke its clamour like a pot. ... the flood came forth. Its power came upon the peoples like a battle, one person did not see another, they could not recognize each other in the catastrophe. The deluge bellowed like a bull. The wind resounded like a screaming eagle. The darkness was dense, the sun was gone.”

The gods end up regretting their impulsive destruction of humanity when they grow hungry from the lack of sacrifices. Luckily they discover that Atrahasis and his family survived and they decide to invent a means of keeping the human population under control in order to keep the noise from becoming too great.

Again, the resemblance to the flood stories of Noah and Utnapishtim is clear. God / gods decide to destroy humanity. One man is warned by God / a god that a flood is coming. This man is ordered to build a boat, which he does. The ensuing deluge is cataclysmic, but the hero survives. Afterwards, God / gods regret their decision to destroy humanity.

Jeffrey Tigay, in his 2002 book titled “The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic,” builds the argument that the Atrahasis Epic undoubtedly forms the basis of the Utnapishtim flood story in the Gilgamesh Epic. 

“In the case of the flood story there is no question but that Atrahasis served as the source for Tablet XI of the late version. This is crystal clear from the following considerations: 1) Certain lines in Gilgamesh and Atrahasis are virtually identical, and the two are therefore textually related. 2) The flood story is an integral part of the plot in Atrahasis, and it was already part of the plot of that epic in the Old Babylonian period. In Gilgamesh, the story is only incidental to the main theme, and, as we shall see, probably did not enter the epic until its late version was created. 3) In Tablet XI, 15-18, Utnapishtim opens his account of the flood with a list of gods (Anu, Enlil, Ninurta, and Ennugi) and their offices which also appears at the beginning of the Old Babylonian Atrahasis. In Tablet XI, the list, along with line 19 which may be based on the second tablet of Atrahasis, serves to identify the great gods who, according to line 14, decided to bring the flood, but it is really inappropriate for this purpose. Not only does it omit Ishtar, who is explicitly mentioned in lines 119 through 121 as having taken part in the decision, but it mentions Ennugi, who plays no role at all in Tablet XI, and Anu, who is mentioned only in passing, without being involved in the events. In Atrahasis, however, all of the gods mentioned in the list play a role in the events surrounding the creation of man, and three of them play a role in the flood as well. Therefore it appears that the editor of the Gilgamesh flood story simply took the list over bodily from Atrahasis, rather than composing a new one of his own. 4) Finally—and this is the giveaway—although Gilgamesh usually calls the survivor of the flood Utnapishtim, in the flood story he once calls him Atrahasis (XI, 187), the name he bears throughout The Atrahasis Epic.”

So, it seems as though the Atrahasis Epic was the basis of the Utnapishtim flood story in the Gilgamesh Epic.


If you thought this rabbit hole couldn’t get any deeper, you were wrong, there is an even earlier version of the flood story …

The Flood of Ziusudra

As far as I can tell, the oldest extant version of the Gilgamesh Epic is found on a tablet excavated at Tell Haddad, the ancient Meturan, dated to the 18th century BCE. This version mentions the flood in passing, but it does identify the hero of the flood as Ziudsura. http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.8.1.3#

“Enki answered An and Enlil: 'In those days, in those distant days, in those nights, in those distant nights, in those years, in those distant years, after the assembly had made the Flood sweep over to destroy the seed of mankind ……, among us I was the only one who was for life (?). He remained alive (?); Zi-ud-sura alone, although (?) a human being, remained alive (?). Then you made me swear by heaven and by earth, and I swore that no human will be allowed to live forever (?) any more. '”

The Sumerian translation of Ziusudra is “he who found long life”. Compare that to Utnapishtim which translates as “he who found life”. Tigay (2002) notes that “Utnapishtim, the faraway” is a literal translation of the Sumerian Ziusudra to the Akkadian language of Old Babylon. Interestingly, the later Noah story in the Pentateuch has neatly inverted the name of the main character.  Rather than finding 'long life', Noah's name means 'rest'.

The above passage refers to the flood that swept over, but the flood itself is mentioned in an ancient Sumerian poem dubbed, “The Deluge.” The following excerpt, which includes the Sumerian Deluge, is taken from Samuel Kramer’s 1944 book titled, “Sumerian Mythology.” http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/sum/sum09.htm

“The first part of the poem deals with the creation of man and animals and with the founding of the five antediluvian cities: Eridu, Badtibira, Larak, Sippar, and Shuruppak. For some reason--the passage involved is completely destroyed--the flood was decreed to wipe out man. But at least some of the gods seemed to regret this decision. It was probably the water-god Enki, however, who contrived to save mankind. He informed Ziusudra, the Sumerian counterpart of the Biblical Noah, a pious, god-fearing, and humble king, of the dreadful decision of the gods and advised him to save himself by building a very large boat. The long passage giving the details of the construction of the boat is destroyed; when our text begins again it is in the midst of describing the flood:

“[Translation] All the windstorms, exceedingly powerful, attacked as one, the deluge raged over the surface of the earth. After, for seven days and seven nights, the deluge had raged in the land, and the huge boat had been tossed about on the great waters, Utu came forth, who sheds light on heaven and earth. Ziusudra opened a window of the huge boat, Ziusudra, the king, before Utu prostrated himself, the king kills an ox, slaughters a sheep.

“Again a long break follows; when our text becomes intelligible once more, it is describing the immortalizing of Ziusudra:

“[Translation] Ziusudra, the king, before An and Enlil prostrated himself; life like a god they give him, breath eternal like a god they bring down for him. In those days, Ziusudra, the king, the preserver of the name of . . . and man, in the mountain of crossing, the mountain of Dilmun, the place where the sun rises, they (An and Enlil) caused to dwell.

“The remainder of the poem is destroyed.”

This copy of “The Deluge” was found at Nippur and is dated to the 17th century BCE; however, according to Tigay (2002) it is thought that the poem itself dates back to the Ur III period (21st century BCE).

So far, we have looked at a series of very similar sounding stories about a flood in the Ancient Near East, all of which are written in the style of myth and legend (grand themes, gods, catastrophe, and human heroes). The remarkable similarities of the stories of Ziusudra, Atrahasis, Utnapishtim and Noah’s J and P sources cannot be ignored.

Ever since the discovery of these ancient texts, scholars and theologians have recognised that elements of the earlier stories have found their way into the later stories. It can also be recognised that the earlier versions of the story are less extravagant in scale (i.e., local flood, not global), shorter (both in the length of the story, but also in terms of the time scale of the flood), have fewer animals, and are less magical in scope.

It seems to me that when we are trying to determine the historicity of an event, we should place more weight on earlier sources, particularly if they have fewer extraordinary elements, and most particularly if they can be independently verified (i.e., by other contemporary literature and / or archaeology).


Let’s compare the five stories side by side ...

Comparing the Flood Stories

Clearly the story of a deluge by divine retribution was well known throughout the world of the Ancient Near East from at least the 3rd millennium BCE. Christian apologists like to claim that the existence of other flood stories supports their claim that Noah’s flood is an accurate telling of the tale. What they fail to acknowledge is that the writers of both the J source and the P source would have been aware of the Babylonian epics of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis and perhaps even the earlier Sumerian Deluge story. This is supported by the fact that a fragment of the Gilgamesh epic was found at Megiddo, located in modern day Israel not far from the Sea of Galilee, and dated to the Late Bronze Age (circa 13th century BCE). It is thought that this copy of Gilgamesh came from the scribal school at Gezer. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4754.2008.00437.x/epdf

The elements of the earlier stories that are reinterpreted and retold in the two Noah stories are evidence of the inspiration that these ancient stories provided for the Jahwist and Priestly scribes.

Adventists assert that the book of Genesis (including the story of Noah) was written by Moses under the inspiration of God. If biblical chronology can be trusted, then Moses would have lived in the 15th century BCE. Due to a total lack of archaeological evidence of Israelites in the region for at least two hundred years, many theologians prefer a different chronology that places Moses in the 13th century BCE. Archaeologists, on the other hand, have found no evidence to support an historical Moses.

On the question of authorship, I defer to the scholars who point out that the Jahwist writer (earlier than the Priestly source) knew of the writings of the prophets from the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, whereas the prophets did not know the works of the Jahwist. Based on this line of reasoning, the earliest possible date for the composition of the J source is the 7th century BCE, with the splicing of J and P occurring during the post-exilic period by scribes who most definitely were aware of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=cwhICpcHBsQC&lpg=PA10&vq=Yahwist&pg=PA10#v=onepage&q=Yahwist&f=false

Even if the story of Noah was written 800 years prior to the 7th century BCE date that scholars suggest, it would still have been composed by someone who had a knowledge of the earlier Sumerian and Akkadian flood stories.

How the flood story evolved over two thousand years (refer to table):

• The Hebrew version of the story has neatly inverted the name of their hero from someone who found life to someone who found rest. You see, it wouldn’t be appropriate for the Hebrew god to grant eternal life to someone after the Fall from Eden. So, Noah finds eternal rest instead.
• The means of warning the hero evolves from a vision in the Sumerian Deluge poem to a dream in the Atrahasis Epic to an indirect method (i.e., talking to a reed wall) in the Gilgamesh Epic to a direct command from the mouth of God / Yahweh to Noah.
• The boat gets bigger with each telling of the tale.
• The scale of animal rescue grows from Ziusudra saving small animals to Atrahasis saving his livestock and some of the grassland creatures to Utnapishtim saving all the local fauna to Noah saving a selection of all the global fauna.
• The cause of the flood and the duration of the flood is dramatically exaggerated in the Noah story, particularly the P source.
• Although the flood story of Ziusudra and Atrahasis do not mention where the boat came aground, the description of the flood is clearly a riverine flood, meaning that the boat would come aground downstream. Utnapishtim’s flood is clearly of a greater magnitude, because he comes aground upstream of Shuruppak. Noah’s flood is completely off the scale because he comes aground in the mountains of Armenia.

Having looked at the literature and established the links from Noah to Ziusudra, the next question to ask is whether this flood is a cultural memory of an actual flood in Ancient Mesopotamia …

The Sumerian King List

There have been a number of archaeological discoveries of tablets and prisms listing the Sumerian kings of ancient times. You can read the translations in Thorkild Jacobsen’s great work titled, “The Sumerian King List”. The two sections in the picture come from the Weld-Blundell collection at the Ashmolean Museum. 

Professor Langdon published translations of these sections in 1923. You can find these two sources in the following links:
https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/as11.pdf
http://www.etana.org/sites/default/files/coretexts/20340.pdf

Thorkild’s translation of the W-B 444 prism:

“When the kingship was lowered from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu. (In) Eridu Alulim (became) king and reigned 28,800 years; Alalgar reigned 36,000 years. Two kings reigned its 64,800 years. I drop (the topic) Eridu; its kingship to Badtibira was carried. (In) Badtibira Enmenluanna reigned 43,200 years; Enmengalanna reigned 28,800 years; divine Dumuzi, a shepherd, reigned 36,000 years. Three kings reigned its 108,000 years. I drop (the topic) Badtibira; its kingship to Larak was carried. (In) Larak Ensipazidanna reigned its 28,800 years. One king reigned its 28,800 years. I drop (the topic) Larak; its kingship to Sippar was carried. (In) Sippar Enmenduranna became king and reigned 21,000 years. One king reigned its 21,000 years. I drop (the topic) Sippar; its kingship to Shuruppak was carried. (In) Shuruppak Ubartutu became king and reigned 18,600 years. One king reigned its 18,600 years. Five cities were they; 8 kings reigned their 241,200 years. The Flood swept thereover. After the flood had swept thereover, when the kingship was lowered from heaven the kingship was in Kish. In Kish Ga … ur (?) became king and reigned 1,200 years; Destroyed! To the heavenly Nidaba is it clear! reigned 960 years;”

Notice the interjection of the scribe, crying out that the section he is copying has been destroyed? He invokes the name of the goddess of writing, Nidaba, whom he believes will know what was written.

Notice that the name of the king just prior to the flood is Ubartutu, meaning “protected of Tutu (Utu)”. Curiously, in the Enuma Elish, the god Tutu is said to have devised a spell by which the gods may rest (link to Noah, perhaps?). Tutu / Utu, the sun god, is an early version of the Babylonian god, Marduk (amar-utu = “bull calf of the sun god”).

So, Ubartutu is said to be the last king before the deluge, according to the king list of W-B 444. Other versions of the Sumerian King List, however, have ten kings prior to the flood. Given that there appears to have been missing sections in the source for the W-B 444 list, perhaps we should give some credence to the lists with ten antediluvian kings.

The W-B 62 list has ten kings. It mentions Ubartutu as the grandfather of the last king of Shuruppak before the flood swept over, King Ziusudra.

So, we have a link from the Gilgamesh epic (Utnapishtim, son of Ubartutu, also known as Atrahasis) to the Atrahasis epic to the Sumerian Deluge poem (Ziusudra) all the way back to a king mentioned on the ancient Sumerian King List (Ziusudra, grandson of Ubartutu).

Ziusudra is mentioned in another piece of Sumerian wisdom literature known as the Instructions of Shuruppak, dated to about 2500 BCE. The author of this piece of literature seems to have misinterpreted some of the old king lists in his/ her attempt to earn credibility for this wise counsel. The setting for this work is an old man named Shuruppak, son of Ubartutu, instructing his own son, Ziusudra, in various aspects of life.

“Curuppag gave instructions to his son; Curuppag, the son of Ubara-Tutu gave instructions to his son Zi-ud-sura: My son, let me give you instructions: you should pay attention! Zi-ud-sura, let me speak a word to you: you should pay attention! Do not neglect my instructions! Do not transgress the words I speak! The instructions of an old man are precious; you should comply with them!”

You can read the rest here … http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr561.htm

So, we now have a literary trail that takes us from Noah to Ziusudra and includes epic tales, wisdom literature and boring lists of long dead kings.


So, is Shuruppak a city or a wise man? Let’s find out …

Shuruppak on the Euphrates

J.J. Finkelstein wrote a 1963 paper in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies titled, “The Antediluvian Kings: A University of California Tablet”. Finkelstein’s paper provides a summary of the Sumerian King List from four sources (WB 444, WB 62, UCBC 9-1819 and Berossos). All four sources identify Shuruppak as the capital city just before the flood and Ziusudra is identified as the monarch in all of the sources except WB 444. It seems clear that Shuruppak was a Sumerian city.

Max Mallowan published a very detailed 1964 paper in the journal “Iraq” titled, “Noah’s Flood Reconsidered.” He looked at the evidence obtained from various excavations at the historic sites of Ur, Kish and Shuruppak (identified as modern day Fara) and concluded that a substantial flood event occurred around 2800 BCE to 2900 BCE.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/4199766?seq=1

Mallowan’s paper starts out with a review of the ancient literature in an effort to pinpoint the time period of Ziusudra’s flood. He establishes that it must have been about one or two centuries prior to the historical Gilgamesh who was noted on the Sumerian King List as the king of Uruk during the 27th century BCE. So Mallowan places Ziusudra’s flood approximately 2900 BCE, based on his analysis of the literature.

Mallowan’s review and analysis of the flood deposits at Ur and Kish are quite detailed. He dates the flood layers at Ur and Kish and dismisses them as being too early or too late for the flood of Ziusudra. When reviewing the excavations at Fara, however, Mallowan notes a flood stratum which dates to the end of the Jemdet Nasr period and the beginning of the Early Dynastic period (circa 2900 BCE). He concurs with the archaeologist, Schmidt, that this flood stratum correlates with the flood of the historical Ziusudra, king of Shuruppak. The flood layer was dated by pottery above and below the stratum as well as cuneiform tablets above it.
A key point to digest from Mallowan’s analysis is that: 

“no flood was ever of sufficient magnitude to interrupt the continuity of Mesopotamian civilisation, although as a direct consequence of the historic Flood we can observe evidence of a powerful impetus on the arts and crafts which underwent significant changes and developments after the Jamdat Nasr period.”

The Ark Tablet

A new archaeological find came to my attention when transcribing my research from a series of FaceBook posts to this blog.  It is known as the Ark Tablet (see below) and has been translated by Prof Irving Finkel, who published a book in 2014 titled, "The Ark Before Noah."  I can't find a free version of the book, but if you wish to read it, try your library or you can purchase a Kindle version for $13 at https://www.amazon.com.au/Ark-Before-Noah-Decoding-Story/dp/0385537115

Prof Finkel reports on an ancient tablet dating from the 19th - 20th century BCE, written in Akkadian.  The Ark Tablet is a version of the Atrahasis Epic except with some fascinating elements that are worth noting.  The first interesting point is that the ark in this story is circular:

"Atrahasis, pay heed to my advice, that you may live for ever!  Destroy your house, build a boat; spurn your property and save life! Draw out the boat that you will make on a circular plan.  Let her length and breadth be equal ..."

The other, frankly astonishing, discovery that Finkel came up with is the part of the story which talks about the animals entering the ark built by Atrahasis:

"[The moon god] Sin, from his throne, swore as to annihilation and desolation on (the) darkened [day (to come)].  But the wild animals from the steppe ... two by two the boat did [they enter] ..."

Here again we see another very clear textual dependency between an earlier text (the Ark Tablet version of the Atrahasis Epic) and the later Noah story.

Summary

So, it seems that we have uncovered the historic source of Noah’s flood: a riverine flood about 5,000 years ago that briefly disrupted the Sumerian civilisation that flourished on the banks of the Euphrates River. As for Noah, it seems most probable that he is merely the Hebrew version of King Ziusudra, who escaped the deluge on a boat. The story of Ziusudra’s escape from the flood seems to have taken root in the Sumerian culture and the magnitude of the tale grew with each retelling. From Ziusudra to Atrahasis to Utnapishtim and, finally, to Noah, the flood went from local deluge to global cataclysm.

At the top of this rather long blog post, I cited an academic paper which presented evidence that Aboriginal oral traditions may have preserved memories of coastal inundation at the end of the last ice age more than 7,000 years ago.  This makes the 1,000 year gap between the flood of Shuruppak and the earliest written tales of the event seem like a feasible period of time for an oral tradition to have preserved the main truth of the event; that is, that the Euphrates River experienced a spectacular flood and that some folk were lucky enough to have escaped with their lives.