The Flood of Babylon

The stories of the Flood (tufan) that were written in Babylon closely resemble the one written in 'Bereshit' (Genesis), though with many differences.

There are some three different writings about the FLOOD: the legend of the Sumerians, the epic of Gilgamesh, the legend of Atrahasis, and what is written in 'Bereshit'. Among the Sumerian legends the best known is the epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first texts written in cuneiform (çivi yazısı), discovered in 1872 by George Smith in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh (today next to Mosul in Iraq). Apart from this tablet, Nineveh yielded other tablets written 1,000 years before the one we are speaking of. These were written in the language of the Sumerians, who lived in the second millennium before our era.

The other Babylonian epic, that of Atrahasis, is the most recently discovered. It was compiled in full in 1956, and it is not well known whether the story of the Flood in this epic was influenced by the Sumerians or was written directly in Akkadian (the lingua franca of that period), the Semitic language of Babylon, in the years 1650/1600 before our era.

Let us not forget that we have a similar text in Bereshit (3/15), but we should not compare the epic of Gilgamesh with the parasha of Bereshit. The Flood described in Gilgamesh is built on the search for immortality. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that he became immortal because the gods chose him to build an ark (a boat), and explains that the god Ea asked him to put inside the ark seeds of every living thing; and a week after the Flood, when everything had been destroyed, he sent out a dove, a swallow and a raven. The dove and the swallow returned to the ark, but the raven, sent out later, did not come back. That is how Utnapishtim understood that he was near land.

Utnapishtim does not say why the Flood happened. What he wants to show is that one does not reach immortality the way he did.

In the epic of Atrahasis, the hero, called Ziusudra, became immortal after surviving the Flood. Comparing the reasons for the Flood with those in Bereshit, the ones in this epic are very similar, contrary to what is told in Gilgamesh.

The solution is to punish man for behaviour contrary to morality. This epic of Atrahasis makes us think about how the world changed. What is very clear in the case of Noah is that the blessed God told Noah and his sons not to kill human beings. This is repeated in the Ten Commandments. A human life is sacred. Whoever saves one human being saves the whole world.

Adapted from an article by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, professor at the University of Chicago.