Was it a true story?

The story of Noah, the Flood and his extraordinary ark was once the best known story in the world. More than 200 Flood legends in one form or another have been recorded, and they occur on every continent. Modern ideas about the Flood, nonetheless, assume that the disaster affected only a limited region. During the last century two theories were proposed: one that the Flood 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. We can draw a number of conclusions from this. First, the ark was a real vessel, not a fanciful addition to the story. Second, the righteous man in the story 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 so that the earth thereafter could be recolonised.

The Flood stories which are best known to the western world are those in the book of Genesis and in the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Genesis 6-8 preserves the most detailed version. A comparison with any other Flood legend also confirms that it is the least fanciful. In sober terms it records a disaster of world-shattering power and world-wide extent, as borne out by:

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 no longer being cursed (8:21, 3:17), implying that there was now a new earth
11. the repetition (9:1-3) of the blessings and injunctions given when man was created (1:28-29)
12. the re-peopling of whole earth from the sons of Noah (9:19).

By contrast, the flood 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. It is not internally consistent.

It is inconsistent because Gilgamesh represents a corruption of a tradition that was common to both Gilgamesh and Genesis. The disaster in the original tradition was a global flood. However, long after that deluge, when the whole earth was re-populated and some people were again living in cities, Mesopotamia experienced a particularly devastating local flood. The priests and bards of Mesopotamia deliberately confused the two events. With their polytheistic religion, based on worshipping spirits and manipulating them through magic, they wanted to suppress the tradition that the Creator had once destroyed the earth because of man’s wickedness. Certain elements of the original story, nonetheless, persisted. Again we see this in relation to the ark. Onboard this gigantic cube of a boat Utnapishti, the hero of the story, has to take ‘the seed of all living creatures’. The building of the ark, its size and its purpose all make no sense in relation to a merely regional flood. 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 Flood occurred are likewise consistent. 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 in the narrative as a bridge between the Flood and the story 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 sufficient time passed between the Flood and the next historical event (the confusion of language at Babel) for the whole earth to be re-peopled from the sons of Noah. When men were settling Mesopotamia and building such historically familiar cities as Erech (Uruk) and Babel (Babylon), the whole earth was already inhabited (11:1). That point in time is 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 thousands of years – quite possibly many thousands of years.

The primeval tradition of all mankind

The tradition in ancient Sumer