The ring of truth

The story of Noah’s Flood was once the best known story in the world. In one form or another more than 200 flood legends have been recorded, and they occur on every inhabited continent. Modern ideas about the Flood, nonetheless, assume that it affected only a limited region. During the last century two theories were proposed: one that it took place in Mesopotamia, as indicated in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the other that it took place in the Black Sea area.

Among the various weaknesses of these theories perhaps the greatest is that they do not account for the building of the ark. Some kind of vessel in which a righteous man kept representatives of every animal kind occurs in nearly all flood legends. From this we can draw a number of conclusions. First, the ark was a real vessel, not a fanciful addition to the story. Second, the righteous man must have been forewarned, or he would not have thought of building an ark. And third, the flood was a global event. At least two of every animal kind had to be preserved in order that the earth – having been destroyed and wiped clean of animal life – could be recolonised.

The best known of the flood legends are those in the book of Genesis and the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Genesis 6-8 preserves both the most detailed and the least fanciful. In sober terms it records a disaster of world-shattering power and world-wide extent. Note especially:

1. the preceding context, telling the story of the whole earth
2. the events that triggered the Flood: all the fountains of the great deep under the earth erupted (7:11)
3. the depth of the waters (7:19)
4. the emphasis on universality (7:19, 21, 22, 23)
5. the 'blotting out' of all flesh (6:13, 9:11)
6. the need for an ark
7. the size of the ark (6:15)
8. the duration of the flood - about a year
9. the promise to Noah (9:11), confirmed by the rainbow
10. the ground is no longer cursed (8:21, 3:17), implying that there was now a new earth
11. the repetition (9:1-3) of the universal blessings and injunctions given when man was created (1:28-29)
12. the re-peopling of the whole earth from the sons of Noah (9:19).

By contrast, the story in Gilgamesh has a mixture of features, some suggesting that the flood was confined to historical Mesopotamia, others that it was a global event.

Gilgamesh is internally inconsistent because it represents a corruption of a primeval tradition common to both Gilgamesh and Genesis. The disaster thus remembered was a global flood. However, long afterwards, when the whole earth was re-populated and some people were again living in cities, Mesopotamia experienced an exceptionally devastating local flood. The priests and bards of Mesopotamia deliberately confused the two events. Inspired by a polytheistic religion that worshipped spirits and manipulated them through magic, they suppressed the tradition that the Creator had once destroyed the earth because of man’s wickedness. Certain elements of the original story nonetheless persisted, as the ark element again illustrates. Onboard this gigantic cube of a boat Utnapishti, the hero of the story, had to take ‘the seed of all living creatures’. The building of an ark at all, the huge size of the vessel, and the taking of wild animals on board make no sense in relation to a merely regional inundation. Animals and birds could have escaped to higher ground, and beyond the flooded area there would have been other animals to take their place. It is Genesis which makes clear the reason for the ark: all life was to be blotted out, and from the preserved animals the earth after the flood was to be restocked. Even birds would not survive the deluge.

The clues Genesis gives about when the cataclysm occurred also tell us that this was not a recent flood. An exact date is not given. Despite giving the ages of the fathers of the next generation mentioned, the genealogies spanning the time between Noah and Abraham do not function as a chronology. They function as a bridge between the cataclysm and the narrative of Israel’s beginnings and as a record of the ancestors who defined the tribe. The Hebrew word for ‘begot’ or ‘became the father of’ simply means ‘became the ancestor of’. Immediate paternity cannot be assumed. As in other societies, a genealogy told an individual member of the tribe where he and his generation came from in relation to the larger scheme of things, it was part of the oral tradition, and to keep it manageable and easily memorised, it rarely exceeded ten generations – it did not need to be any longer.

What Genesis does tell us is that by the time of the next historical event the sons of Noah had spread out across the whole earth. Men were settling Mesopotamia and building such historically familiar cities as Erech (Uruk) and Babel (Babylon) – a point in time dateable to the fourth millennium BC. How long it took to reach that stage we can only estimate, but at a minimum it must have been tens of thousands of years.

The primeval tradition of all mankind

The tradition in ancient Sumer