In 1872, a self-taught assistant at the British Museum named George Smith was reading a cracked clay tablet from Nineveh. It told of a man warned by a god to build a boat, who took animals aboard, survived a flood, landed on a mountain, and sent out birds to find land. Smith is said to have become so excited that he began to undress in the reading room.
What the tablets say
The Gilgamesh flood tablet echoes an older story, Atrahasis, written down around 1700 BC. Here is how close the plots run.
A god warns one man in secret. He builds a huge boat and seals it with pitch. His family and animals come aboard. The rains come and everything drowns. The boat lands on a mountain. He sends out a dove, then a swallow, and then a raven, which does not come back. He makes a sacrifice, and the god smells the pleasing odor.
Anyone who has read Genesis 6-9 will recognize this. The Hebrew writers knew these stories, as almost everyone in the region did.
The difference is the point
So did Genesis just copy it? Look at what changed, because that is where the argument is.
In Atrahasis the gods send the flood because humans are too noisy, and they cannot sleep. Afterward they regret it because they have no one to feed them. They crowd around the sacrifice “like flies.”
In Genesis there is one God, and the flood comes because of violence. “The earth was filled with violence.” Afterward, God makes a promise to every living thing, and hangs up his bow in the sky.
Same plot, different God. That is the work of writers answering a story everyone already knew, and saying: here is what is really going on. It is a very old kind of argument, and one this website likes.
What about the rest of the world
You will see lists of flood stories from China, the Andes, Australia and elsewhere, and you will see them used as proof of a single worldwide event.
Slow down on that one. People have always settled beside rivers and coasts, and floods are among the worst things that happen to them. At the end of the last ice age, sea levels rose by over a hundred meters, and that drowned coastlines people lived on. It would be odder if cultures had no flood stories. Geologists have found no sign of a single global flood.
The Book of Giants, by the way, names Gilgamesh as one of the violent giants the flood was sent to destroy. So ancient Jewish writers saw the connection too, and they took a side.
Coincidence, memory, or argument
Sometimes it is memory, as with Mesopotamia and Genesis. Sometimes it is coincidence, because water is everywhere. And sometimes it is an argument, with one people retelling a neighbor’s story to say what they think God is really like. Read Andrew George’s Gilgamesh in a weekend and see what you think.
Common questions
Is the Noah story older than Genesis?
The Mesopotamian flood stories are older in written form. Atrahasis dates to around 1700 BC, and the flood tablet of Gilgamesh draws on it. Genesis reached its present form much later, though parts may rest on older traditions.
How similar are Gilgamesh and Noah?
Very, in plot: a divine warning, a boat sealed with pitch, animals aboard, a landing on a mountain, birds sent out, a sacrifice afterward. They differ sharply in why the flood happens and in what the gods are like.