Noah's flood beside Atrahasis and Gilgamesh

In December 1872, George Smith, a self-taught Assyriologist working at the British Museum, read a paper to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London. Among the clay tablets brought back from Nineveh he had found a Babylonian account of a great flood, with a man warned by a god, a boat, and birds sent out to look for dry land. The tablet belonged to what we now call the Epic of Gilgamesh, and its discovery changed how people read Genesis 6–9.

More flood stories have come to light since, among them the Babylonian epic of Atrahasis and a Sumerian account whose hero is called Ziusudra. Some readers of Genesis find this unsettling. The comparison is worth making anyway, because it shows both how much Genesis shares with its neighbors and where it parts company with them. Those points of difference are some of the clearest windows we have into what the biblical writers wanted to say.

The Mesopotamian flood stories

Atrahasis is known from copies made in the Old Babylonian period, in the first half of the second millennium BCE. It opens with the gods doing the hard labor of the world themselves, digging the rivers and canals, until the junior gods rebel. To relieve them, humans are created to take over the work. Humanity multiplies, and its noise disturbs the god Enlil. He sends plague, then drought and famine, and when these fail he resolves to wipe people out with a flood. The wise god Enki, bound by an oath not to reveal the plan, finds a way around it: he addresses the wall of a reed house so that the man Atrahasis can overhear. Atrahasis builds a boat and survives. After the flood the gods, who have gone hungry without human offerings, gather at his sacrifice, and new limits are placed on human birth.

The flood story in the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh is a later retelling of the same tradition. There the survivor, Utnapishtim, tells his story to Gilgamesh, who has come looking for the secret of eternal life. The god Ea warns him through the wall of his reed house. He builds a vast boat, as wide as it is long, loads it with his family, craftsmen and animals, and rides out a storm so violent that the gods themselves are terrified and cower like dogs. When the boat grounds on a mountain, he sends out a dove, then a swallow, then a raven, and the raven does not come back. He offers a sacrifice, and the gods smell the sweet savor and crowd around it like flies. Afterward Utnapishtim and his wife are made like the gods and granted a life that does not end.

What Genesis shares

The overlap with Genesis is extensive. In each, a divine decision is made to destroy humanity with a flood. One man is warned and told to build a great vessel and seal it with pitch. He brings his family and animals aboard. The waters cover the earth, the boat comes to rest on a mountain (in Genesis, "the mountains of Ararat," Genesis 8:4), birds are sent out to find land, and the survivor offers a sacrifice that the deity smells: "When the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma" (Genesis 8:21).

Few scholars think Genesis copied Gilgamesh directly. The more common view is that a flood tradition was widely known across Mesopotamia and the lands around it, and that Israel's own storytellers knew a version of it. STRATA's reading of Genesis 8 notes how close the birds and the sacrifice come to the Gilgamesh account.

What Genesis changes

The reason for the flood. In Atrahasis, the gods are disturbed by human noise, which scholars have read variously as overpopulation, unrest, or simply the din of a crowded world. Genesis gives a moral reason, and gives it twice: "Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and full of violence" (Genesis 6:11). The Hebrew word for violence, hamas, names the kind of brutality that began with Cain and spread from there. In Genesis the flood answers what people have done to one another and to the earth.

The feeling of God. The Mesopotamian gods regret the flood afterward, in part because they have lost the people who fed them. In Genesis the grief comes first: "And the LORD regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart" (Genesis 6:6). The verdict on humanity is severe, and it is spoken by a God who is wounded by what the world has become.

One God. In Mesopotamia the flood comes out of divine politics: one god decrees it, another works around it, a mother goddess laments it. In Genesis the same God judges, warns, saves and promises. There is no trick with a reed wall. God tells Noah plainly what is coming and speaks of a covenant before the rain begins: "But I will establish My covenant with you" (Genesis 6:18). It is the first time the word appears in the Bible.

The ending. Utnapishtim's reward is to be lifted out of the human condition. Noah's ending is more ordinary, and more hopeful for everyone else. He steps off the ark into the same world, with the blessing first given at creation: "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth" (Genesis 9:1). And God makes a promise that reaches far beyond Noah: "Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood" (Genesis 9:11).

The bow in the clouds

The sign of that promise is the rainbow, but the Hebrew word, qeshet, is the ordinary word for a bow, the weapon. Many interpreters have seen in it the picture of a warrior hanging up his bow, turned away from the earth. The covenant is made with "every living creature" as well as with Noah, it asks nothing in return, and the text says the sign is there so that God will remember: "I will remember My covenant between Me and you" (Genesis 9:15). STRATA's reading of Genesis 9 stays with that scene.

Two voices in one story

Genesis has seams of its own. Read Genesis 6–8 slowly and the story seems to tell some things twice. Noah is told to bring two of every creature (Genesis 6:19), and then "seven pairs of every kind of clean animal" (Genesis 7:2). The rain falls "for forty days and forty nights" (Genesis 7:12), and the waters prevail "for 150 days" (Genesis 7:24). God is called "God" in some verses and "the LORD" in others.

Since the nineteenth century, most critical scholars have explained this as two flood accounts, an older one usually assigned to the Yahwist and a later Priestly one, woven together by editors who kept both voices rather than choose between them. Other readers, including many traditional interpreters, read the details as one narrative with deliberate repetition, for example taking the extra clean animals as provision for the sacrifice at the end. Either way, the finished story has a careful shape. Gordon Wenham has argued that it is built as a mirror, rising to its midpoint at "But God remembered Noah" (Genesis 8:1) and then receding. STRATA's reading of Genesis 7 sets out the two strands.

The same heart

One detail in Genesis is easy to miss. Before the flood, the LORD sees "that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was altogether evil all the time" (Genesis 6:5). After the flood, God says almost the same thing, and this time it is the reason for mercy: "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from his youth" (Genesis 8:21). The water has left human nature as it was. What has changed is God's resolve. Interpreters such as Gerhard von Rad have pointed to this as the theological center of the story: the world goes on because God has decided to bear with it.

The next scene makes the point plainly. Noah plants a vineyard, gets drunk, and his family breaks apart (Genesis 9:20–27). It is an uncomfortable passage, and it was later misused to defend racial slavery through the so-called curse of Ham, a reading the text does not support: the curse falls on Canaan, and nothing in it concerns race. The flood washed the earth, and the human heart that came off the ark was the one that went on.

Reading the flood today

People read the flood story in different ways. Some take it as a record of an event, some as an inspired retelling of a shared ancient tradition, and many hold a view somewhere between. The comparison with Atrahasis and Gilgamesh is useful from any of those starting points, because it shows the choices Genesis made. Its neighbors told of gods who needed human labor and could not agree among themselves. Genesis told of one God who grieved, judged, saved, and then promised to hold the world up from his own side.

STRATA's free readings of Genesis 6, 7, 8 and 9 take the flood a scene at a time, with the history beneath each passage and a question to close it. They sit within the free readings of Genesis 1–11, which end at Babel.