The Great Flood in Literature

Paper Summary:

The flood story recurs in many ancient civilizations, even in distant parts of the world, though the nature of the story may be very different in some cultures. The paper shows the links between the flood story as told in the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh and the flood story of Noah as told in Genesis. There is recent evidence that there may have been a great flood in the area of the Black Sea which may have become a continuing tribal memory that was eventually embodied in "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and reshaped to fit the theology of the Israelites for the tale told in Genesis. The paper shows that the two versions of the flood story have many points of agreement, suggesting that they are somehow connected, although in the Noah story, the role of God differs from the role of the gods in Gilgamesh.

From the Paper:

"In the Atrahasis version of the story, the Flood portion of the text, which is quite damaged, presents a narrative account of Mesopotamian primeval history that parallels the version in Genesis 1-11 inclusively. The Flood Story in Atrahasis is more than twice the length of the Gilgamesh version. While they seem to tell the same story, the function of the floods in the two epics is quite different. In Atrahasis, the flood is a means of population control and a divider of epochs, while in Gilgamesh, it explains how immortality was once granted to a mortal. The Atrahasis Epic begins with the creation of humankind because the labor-class gods are tired of the heavy tasks imposed on them by the management-class gods."

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