Flood

The creation accounts, the Garden of Eden, the innovations and life spans of early humans, and the flood story are best understood as an Axial Age critique of polytheistic, mythical cosmology.

Clue: Seven pairs of kosher animals are brought to the ark so that Noah can sacrifice to YHWH after the flood.

Before the flood story was added, the primeval history focused on human mortality, family relationships, and etiological explanations for human behaviors and professions. Only later did this primeval history develop into a broader narrative that included stories of the flood and the Tower of Babel.

In the Gilgamesh epic, Utanapishti tells Gilgamesh the story of the great flood and how he survived it. Scholars have often held that this story lies behind the biblical account of Noah and the flood. However, a good case can be made that an even more ancient tale, the Atrahasis epic, on which the flood story in Gilgamesh draws, is the source of the biblical flood story.

When YHWH sees the evil ways of humanity, he initially decides to wipe them out, but then determines to save Noah’s family. After the flood and Noah’s sacrifice, YHWH promises that He will never again destroy the earth and all life, even though humanity will continue in its evil ways. Thus, the story chronicles not the moral and emotional advancement of humanity but of YHWH.

Noah’s name expresses his father’s hope that Noah will bring comfort from the pain of the curse of the land, and before he plants his vineyard, he is called “a man of the land” (איש האדמה). These and other verses point to an older core narrative which spoke not of a flood but of a primeval famine that Noah brings to an end.

Unlike Adam, Noah is born like a regular human. Unlike Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian flood hero, and Noah’s great-grandfather Enoch, Noah is mortal. In Second Temple times, new retellings of his story present Noah as something more than human, but in rabbinic tradition, the biblical image of the all too human Noah prevails.

A closer look at the thematic and verbal parallels between the accounts of the flood and the destruction of Sodom, as well as comparison with other ANE flood/destruction stories, helps us better understand the genre and function of the Sodom story.

Whose knowledge is the most ancient? In the Hellenistic period, Egyptians and Babylonians, among others, debated the antiquity of their wisdom. Second Temple Jews claimed that their own knowledge dated from before the Flood. But how did it survive the destruction of the flood?

Before Noah became the protagonist of the Israelite flood story, his original place in Israelite historiography was as the ancient farmer who discovered wine, bringing the world relief from the toil of work caused by God’s cursing the soil.

The ancient Near East had many versions of the flood story, such as Atrahasis, Ziusudra, Utnapishtim, etc., most of which predate the Torah’s account of Noah’s flood. But what is the earliest extant version of the releasing birds motif?