Younger than either of these is the Epic of Gilgamesh. The oldest known text is the Atrahasis poem, which is practically contemporaneous with another poem, the Eridu Genesis. Keywords: Mesopotamia, Flood Literature, archaeology, cuneiform, Atrahasis, Eridu Genesis, Epic of Gilgamesh, Genesis, higher criticism IntroductionĪt least three major accounts of a great Flood have been discovered in Mesopotamian literature and are well known to scholars. It is untenable to argue that Hebrew scribal tradition based their sacred history on a foreign text that not only had a hostile religious worldview to that of the monotheistic Israelite one, but was not regarded as historical and sacred by those who circulated them. Its primary interest was in medicine and omen reading rather than preserving the orations of their gods.įor these and other reasons, the long-held higher critical argument about an alleged textual exchange is now outdated. Lastly, Babylonian and Assyrian religion was not dependent on a preserved text. The way these stories are listed in ancient library inventories also demonstrates that the scribal tradition in Mesopotamian had neither a developed idea of canonicity nor a notional idea that these stories were sacred and set apart from other texts. The dating of the famous Gilgamesh epic rules out the possibility that it could have been used in a textual interchange and the existence of different versions of the poetic stories about the Flood strongly militates against these being regarded as history. This thesis, however, can be seriously challenged based on recent archaeological work that expands both our understanding as to how ancient Mesopotamian religion functioned, and how their scribes related to their texts.
For a long time, the discovery of Flood literature in Mesopotamia outside of the Genesis account has prompted a higher critical argument that the Genesis account must have borrowed from the Babylonian and Assyrian versions of the Flood story.
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