Noah and the Flood
The earth was corrupt before God; it was filled with violence. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great, and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And…
Biblical Narrative
The earth was corrupt before God; it was filled with violence. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great, and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God.
The Lord told Noah to build an ark of gopher wood, three hundred cubits long, fifty wide, thirty high, with three decks and a single window. Of every clean beast he was to take seven pairs, and of unclean two; of the birds of the air seven pairs; for in seven days the rain would begin. And Noah did all that the Lord commanded him.
The fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. The rain fell forty days and forty nights. The waters prevailed and lifted the ark above the earth; the high mountains were covered. All flesh that moved on the earth perished — birds, cattle, beasts, and every man. Only Noah was left, and they that were with him in the ark.
The waters receded. The ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat. Noah sent a raven, then a dove; the dove returned with an olive leaf in her beak. When the earth was dry, Noah went forth and built an altar. And the Lord set His bow in the cloud, saying: never again will I curse the ground for man's sake; while the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest shall not cease.
I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between Me and the earth.Genesis 9:13
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The Genesis flood narrative belongs to a family of Mesopotamian flood stories that long precede the Bible. The earliest, the Sumerian Eridu Genesis, dates to c. 1600 BCE and survives only in fragments. The Akkadian Atrahasis epic (Old Babylonian, c. 1700 BCE) tells of the gods sending a flood because human noise disturbed their sleep, with the wise Atrahasis warned by the god Enki. The most famous version, the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, embeds the flood story on Tablet XI, where Utnapishtim recounts to Gilgamesh how he built a cube-shaped boat and survived a six-day deluge.
The literary parallels are precise enough to indicate direct dependence: a divine warning to one righteous man, the building of a vessel, the loading of animals, a release of birds to test for land, and a sacrifice on emerging that the gods 'smell as a sweet savor.' George Smith of the British Museum stunned Victorian Britain in 1872 when he announced his decipherment of the Gilgamesh flood tablet — predating Genesis by perhaps a thousand years.
The historical question of whether any real flood underlies the tradition has produced two competing hypotheses. The Black Sea deluge hypothesis of geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman (1998) proposes that around 5600 BCE, rising Mediterranean waters breached the Bosporus and catastrophically filled the Black Sea, displacing Neolithic populations. Critics, notably Aksu and Hiscott, argue the geological evidence points to a slower outflow, not a sudden flood.
The likelier source is more mundane: the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain has always been prone to catastrophic inundations, and excavations at Ur, Kish, and Shuruppak have revealed thick silt layers — most famously Leonard Woolley's 'flood layer' at Ur, eleven feet deep, dated to c. 3500 BCE. None of these is region-wide, but each could have generated, locally, the impression of a world destroyed by water.
The flood story is the most striking single instance of the literary continuity between Mesopotamia and the Hebrew Bible.Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (1949)