RiverJordan
Inactive
Read this today...
Noah's Ark: the facts behind the Flood
IMO, this is further evidence that when the Israelites were captive in Babylon, they picked up this flood story, tweaked it a bit over time to fit their own culture, and it ended up being the story of Noah and the flood in Genesis.
I'm curious to see what other interpretations of this new information are.
Noah's Ark: the facts behind the Flood
Basically, in 1985 this guy comes across a newly-found Babylonian tablet. As he starts to translate it, he realizes it is related to the Babylonian flood story contained within the Epic of Gilgamesh.In the year 1872 one George Smith, a banknote engraver turned assistant in the British Museum, astounded the world by discovering the story of the Flood – much the same as that in the Book of Genesis – inscribed on a cuneiform tablet made of clay that had recently been excavated at far-distant Nineveh (in present-day Iraq). Human behaviour, according to this new discovery, prompted the gods of Babylon to wipe out mankind through death by water, and, as in the Bible, the survival of all living things was effected at the last minute by a single man...
In 1872 everyone knew their Bible backwards, and the announcement that the iconic story of the Ark and the Flood existed on a barbaric-looking document of clay in the British Museum that pre-dated the Bible and had been dug up somewhere in the East was indigestible.
A hundred and thirteen years after Smith’s breakthrough, a similar episode of British-Museum-curator-meets-amazing-cuneiform-flood-story befell me...
So it's definitely Babylonian and predates Genesis.The Ark Tablet, like many documents of its period, is designed to fit comfortably in the reader’s hand; it is much the same size and weight as a contemporary mobile phone.
The tablet was written during the Old Babylonian period, broadly 1900–1700BC. The document was not dated by the scribe, but from the shape and appearance of the tablet itself, the character and composition of the cuneiform and the grammatical forms and usages, we can be sure that this is the period in which it was written. It was composed in Semitic Babylonian (Akkadian) in a literary style. The hand is neat and that of a fully trained cuneiform scribe.
So the Babylonian flood story, which predates Genesis, includes animals being taken aboard "two by two".The most remarkable feature provided by the Ark Tablet is that the lifeboat built by Atra-hasıs – the Noah-like hero who receives his instructions from the god Enki – was definitely, unambiguously round. “Draw out the boat that you will make,” he is instructed, “on a circular plan.”...
For the first time we learn that the Babylonian animals, like those of Noah, went in two by two, a completely unsuspected Babylonian tradition that draws us ever closer to the familiar narrative of the Bible. (Another interesting matter: the Babylonian flood story in cuneiform is 1,000 years older than the Book of Genesis in Hebrew, but reading the two accounts together demonstrates their close, literary relationship. No firm explanation of how this might have really come about has previously been offered, but study of the circumstances in which the Judaeans exiled to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar II found themselves answers many crucial questions.)
IMO, this is further evidence that when the Israelites were captive in Babylon, they picked up this flood story, tweaked it a bit over time to fit their own culture, and it ended up being the story of Noah and the flood in Genesis.
I'm curious to see what other interpretations of this new information are.