Water; Water Everywhere
Read Genesis Chapters 6 - 9:20
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The Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet XI: Lines 1-203
What a great story - Noah and the ark. The seminal narrative is one of mankind’s oldest legends. Whether from the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, or any spoken - yet unwritten - telling of the tale - a flood story appears in most ancient tales of “before history”.
Did a flood ever cover the entire earth? Possibly - in the early-early times billions of years ago - but not in the remotest memory of human beings. We know that from countless archeological and geological surveys in the past century.
We do have a pretty good idea about the origins of the various legends however. Some 7,000 years ago - within human memory - the icecaps began to melt during a period of warmth after a mini ice age. The water from the ice made the sea levels rise and any culture near a body of water - especially a river - was flooded high enough and long enough to warrant a story about the great flood in their verbal history. Most accounts allow that the entire earth was flooded. Of course the entire earth is always defined as the known world. You can’t attest to a flood covering the mountains or valleys you have no idea even exist. AND if someone came to you in the midst of water everywhere saying that there was no flood where he came from - well, he’s just plain crazy - just look around you.
There are many and silly explanations for a world wide flood. None of them is intelligible - meaning none of them stand up to any logic - or miracle - whatsoever.
Back in the day - say while Abraham was wandering toward the promised land - scribes in Ur wrote in an alphabetic script called cuneiform. Cuneiform was the script of the Middle East - Mesopotamia - for thousands of years before Jesus was born.
Knowledge of cuneiform was lost until 1835, when Henry Rawlinson, an English army officer, found some inscriptions on a cliff at Behistun in Persia. He painstakingly translated the inscriptions and subsequently a - shall we say - flood - of documents were translated and shed new light on the ancient world.
Throughout the entire 19th century the new practice of archeology was usually the practice of proving the Bible to be true. That’s not science, but it was the driving force of most archeologists. So it’s no surprise when - in 1872 - George Smith achieved worldwide fame by his translation of the Chaldean account of the Great Flood which he read before the Society of Biblical Archaeology on December 3 - and whose audience included the Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone - the only known instance of a serving British Premier ever attending a lecture on Babylonian literature.
This work is better known today as a pivitol chapter of the Epic of Gilgamesh the oldest known work of semi-historical literature in the world, for which Smith is now popularly and justly famed as the discoverer.
Many pages of non-cuneiform print have been used up trying to compare the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the flood story from the Bible. There are many similarities, but - in a nutshell - all comparisons miss the point of both stories.
There was a massive flood in the world. It is most likely the origin of both the biblical and Sumerian stories. There are many different and many partial copies of both the biblical tale and the tale from Gilgamesh - exactly what you’d expect to find in such old documents. The Epic of Gilgamesh seems to be the older of the two because the first written Epic of Gilgamesh is on a tablet dated to 2150 BC - just a few years after Gilgamesh - a certified historical person - sat on the throne of Uruk in Sumer. The biblical story wasn’t written down until around 900 BC. We really have no idea how old the verbal tradition is - but - by it’s language and by it’s content - it is one of the oldest stories in the Bible.
Neither written story is as old as the flood itself. This flood of - as we say - biblical proportions - occurred in and around 5600 BC. That’s when the polar ice cap waters rose to the top of the channel we call the Bosporus - the channel which connects the Aegean Sea to the Black Sea beside modern day Istanbul. In 5600 BC the Black Sea was a fresh water lake - the size of - say - Lake Superior.
When the water of the Mediterranean rose atop the channel at first a trickle, and then a gush, and then a torrent of salt water began to inundate the fresh water Black Sea. We know all this from geological and archeological studies conducted in the late 1990's. Robert Ballard - using his robot submarine Argos - explored both the Mediterranean and Black Sea and found the remains of pre-flood wooden houses in the depths of the Black Sea beneath the salt water layer. These houses were near the ancient - pre-flood - shore of the Black Sea - houses preserved by a lack of oxygen in the depths of the ancient lake which covered them for centuries.
Okay we have a flood - was it Noah’s? Was it the flood described by Utanapishtim - the ancient - and immortal flood survivor who told the story to Gilgamesh?
Mebee. Well, probably. Floods like this don’t come around every day and from the legends told by people who scattered after the flood - traced by their languages - we can make a pretty certain guess that this flood is the origin of countless flood tales in Europe and Western Asia -including Mesopotamia AND the Gobi Desert!
Most likely - for many reasons - many of which are associated with the northwestern part of Turkey - the Deluge of 5600 BC was the flood to which both the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible refer. So what?
Well this is what - simply because it was written in stone 1100 years or so earlier than the Genesis account -as we have it - was written down - most people simply assume - with no basis in fact - that the story of Noah was copied from the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is not an intelligent assumption. It is the arrogant fallacy of literacy that the oral tradition of story telling is a myth and should be discounted as unenlightened.
The oral tradition has proven to be more accurate than not in countless uses of ancient sources - most notably Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Ignoring the distinctly mythological elements, both have been shown to accurately depict life in the Mycenaean Age around 1195 BC. Other ancient texts - initially from the verbal tradition- have also been proven factual. Therefore, there is no reason to suppose that a written account and a verbal account would vary significantly.
In fact the flood stories of western European tribes, southern Russian tribes, the Egyptians, and even the Tocharians of the Tarim Basin - which is located on Tibet’s northen border - contain some of the same details as Gilgamesh and the Bible. So, rather than the Biblical story of Noah being a myth, it is more likely that it is an account of a geological event remembered and told in a different sociological, anthropological, and - most importantly - theological context.
The reason I am recounting all this history is two fold. First, the history of the peoples of the Ancient Near East informs the authors of the Bible. The literature of the Ancient Near East also informs the Bible. History and literature were one and the same as far as the ancients are concerned. No one ever considered history to be as we define it until the Ancient Greeks came along.
Second, each group, tribe, or nation tells it’s story from within it’s view of the world. The story of Noah and the story of Utanapishtim are the same stories told from different perspectives. There was a massive flood. The known world - The Black Sea basin - was destroyed. When the water stopped rushing into the land people left their protective water craft and fled from the Black Sea basin to populate other parts of the world - including the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates and the hills and plains of Canaan.
All that being said, I want to explore the story of Noah as a story with it’s own antiquity and not as a part of a different legend from the same time. I think this is crucial to realizing who we are and where we came from as a people of God. Our intellectual and spiritual ancestors did not worship a whole slew of Gods. They worshiped the one true God which we worship today. Our intellectual and spiritual ancestors left the cities of Mesopotamia and became wandering Aramaeans who gathered their flocks by night. And our intellectual and spiritual ancestors remembered one thing which no other people who told the story of the flood remembered or - perhaps - learned, and that is that the God we worship is the God of grace and compassion.
I just went through a lot of ancient history and geology to conclude that the flood experienced by Noah was the same flood described in the Epic of Gilgamesh. I also maintain that the flood in question was the one which occurred in 5600 BC when the waters from the Mediterranean Sea spilled over the Bosporus and created a deluge which flooded the Black Sea. Genesis 6:11 alludes to this when it states: “In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.”
Floods come and go on this planet, but the ones we remember are the ones which are catastrophic. The Mississippi River has flooded innumerable times - in our lifetimes. The Nile floods regularly. Bangladesh is flooded often - with much loss of life. BUT the floods we talk about usually were cases of dams or dykes failing resulting in lives lost in the sheer terror of surprise. The Johnstown flood and the New Orleans flood come readily to mind. The breaching of the Bosporus would certainly be remembered as the most catastrophic event in ancient times - at least until the island of Santorini exploded.
Much has been written concerning the flood of 5600 BC. Much more has been written about the biblical flood. A not insignificant amount has been written about the flood in the epic of Gilgamesh. AND quite a bit has been written comparing the two flood stories to each other - textually, linguistically, and culturally.
Not much of any paper OR clay has been used comparing the theological points of the stories. That’s odd in my view because both the biblical flood of Noah and the Epic of Gilgamesh flood of Utanapishtim are nothing more than theological stories explaining the cause and effect of the flood of the Black Sea. I want to compare the stories theologically, then I’ll expand on why all this matters to us 21st Century Christians anyway.
Our spiritual and intellectual ancestor Abraham was born in Ur- not of the Chaldees since they came later - but in Ur of the Akkadians. The breakdown of the ecology in the southern Tigris-Euphrates valley around 2100 BC - one effect of which changed the main crop from wheat to the more salt-tolerant barley - may be what caused Abraham and others to travel northwest to find better pasture.
Nevertheless during his sojourn between Ur - one of the two southernmost cities of Sumer - and Haran the northwestern most city of the Akkad Empire - Abraham met YHWH. From Haran YHWH commanded Abraham to travel to Canaan where Abraham stopped at Sechem.
At Sechem YHWH made the divine covenant with Abraham - still called Abram at this point - which gave Abraham and his descendants ownership of the land. That covenant assumes physical descendants - the Hebrews - not us, who are Abraham’s intellectual and spiritual descendants.
From one of the earliest populated cities to a cleft in the hills, Abraham wandered following a hunch which became actual knowing and partial understanding - partial since no one can understand YHWH in total. Early on his hunch was that Sumer/Akkad worshiped too many gods for too many reasons and that the kings were - seriously - not gods.
It’s no surprise that a man from Ur would know and pass on the story of the great flood - the Utanapishtim story was one of several floating around - if you will - in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. That it would change as his understanding of his God changed is a given.
Let’s look at the similarities and differences in the two flood tales -
From the Epic of Gilgamesh:
“Shuruppak, a city that you know, situated on the banks of the Euphrates, that city was very old, and there were gods inside it.
“The hearts of the great gods moved them to inflict the flood.”
In the subsequent narrative Utanapishtim relates that Ea - one of the gods - was clever and told Utanapishtim to build a reed boat and put all living things inside saying, “The boat which you build, it’s dimensions must measure equal to each other: It’s length must correspond to it’s width.” That statement in itself is theological in that the dimensions related are an allusion to the block shaped levels of the ziggurat temples.
Then - in the midst of the roaring flood - the catastrophic annihilation - again to quote from Gilgamesh:
“The gods were frightened by the flood and retreated, ascending to the heaven of Anu. The gods were cowering like dogs, crouching by the outer wall. Ishtar shrieked like a woman in childbirth.”
Later, Enlil - the chief god - upbraids Ea for saving Utanapishtim and his wife. Ea - for his part - responds in anger that Enlil and the rest of the gods would flood the world saying that anything would be a better way to destroy people. Enlil was shamed by Ea and it seems that as an apology he made Utanapishtim and his wife immortal.
Now - THAT hardly parallels the story of Noah. YHWH - the God of Noah isn’t deceptive - or more than one for that matter. YHWH gives Noah explicit instructions which are not - build a cube OR take everything alive with you. Noah is to build a boat in the shape of a rectangle. He is to take with him either one pair of each kind of animal or seven pairs depending on the different accounts in Genesis 6 and our scripture reading from Genesis 7:
“‘Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive. Also take with you every kind of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them.’ Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.
“Then the LORD said to Noah, ‘Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation. Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and its mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and its mate; and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth.”
Even though these two different accounts of God’s instructions to Noah exist side by side they hardly contradict each other in the author’s eyes. And they hardly amount to the instructions given to Utanapishtim to take everything.
So. The while the story of Noah and the story of Utanapishtim may have similarities, they diverge in theology. YHWH intends to repopulate the earth after the catastrophe of the flood. The gods of Shuruppak have no such intention and while cowering like dogs during the deluge, they are angry that any people have survived when the waters recede and then are ashamed for what they did.
YHWH - in turn - is in total control at all times - as we expect from the creator of the universe. YHWH is saddened by His actions, but He is not sorry. He does make a covenant with Noah that He will never destroy the earth ever again - the covenant He alluded to before the waters rose:
“The LORD said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.’”
Notice YHWH never said - “I will not destroy the earth with water ever again". YHWH said: “I will never destroy the earth ever again.” Yet - for Noah’s sake - he is explicit about not allowing a flood to ever again wipe out the earth.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh Utanapishtim is given immortality. In the Bible Noah is given the entire world for himself and his descendants. Noah then becomes the first successful farmer.
Throughout the story of Noah YHWH is supreme and single-minded There are no other gods. There is no cowering by YHWH. YHWH is in control and all goes according to plan.
Throughout the story of Utanapishtim the gods are arbitrary, many and divided, fearful, and have little control of the situation. Theologically - and this is the only reason for the existence of either story - theologically - the stories are as far apart from each other as Abraham was from the gods of Ur.
The story of Noah traces itself back to the time before history when a great flood roared through the Black Sea and changed the known world. The theology of that story traces itself back through history and through Abraham who was the first to realize that there was one - and only one - God and that God - YHWH - was so full of grace that he wanted his people to survive the great flood - so full of grace that spared Lot and his daughters the destruction of Sodom - so full of grace that spared Isaac the point of a knife, and made Abraham’s descendants a people which number the grains of sand in the desert.
YHWH was and is nothing like the petty, silly and cowardly gods of ancient belief. YHWH was gracious enough to send His Son the next time the hopelessness in the world became too much for even YHWH to bear - sent His Son to convince us of his love and grace and care.
Our understanding of YHWH and His Son Jesus Christ are all we need to know that we are safe and ultimately beyond harm. We haven’t heard of Ea and Enlil outside of ancient cuneiform, but through the acts of the living God in history and in our lives, we can say with the apostle Paul:
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Thanks be to God and AMEN!