Before Noah: Myths of the Flood Are Far Older Than the Bible (2024)
Darren Aronofsky’s Noah dominated the U.S. box office on its opening weekend and won critical acclaim, but not without controversy. The film, based on the biblical story in Genesis of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood, arrived amid a deluge of outrage from religious groups. Some Christians fumed at the film’s straying from biblical Scripture. Meanwhile, a host of Muslim-majority countries banned Noah from screening in theaters because representations of Noah, a prophet of God in the Koran, are considered blasphemous. Such images “provoke the feelings of believers and are forbidden in Islam and a clear violation of Islamic law,” read a fatwa issued by Cairo’s al-Azhar University, one of the foremost institutions of Sunni Islam. Egypt has not banned the film, but Indonesia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have. “It is important to respect these religions and not show the film,” lectured the main censors of the UAE.
Aronofsky, an atheist, has no interest in defending his film’s scriptural authenticity. Indeed, the director has described Noah as “the least biblical film ever made” and thinks of its chief protagonist in secular terms as the world’s “first environmentalist.” Noah is as much a parable for the modern threat of climate change as it is an Old Testament morality play.
But there’s another reason why the angry religious crowd ought to check their outrage. The story of Noah may be part of the Abrahamic canon, but the legend of the Great Flood almost certainly has prebiblical origins, rooted in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh dates back nearly 5,000 years and is thought to be perhaps the oldest written tale on the planet. In it, there is an account of the great sage Utnapishtim, who is warned of an imminent flood to be unleashed by wrathful gods. He builds a vast circular-shaped boat, reinforced with tar and pitch, that carries his relatives, grains and animals. After enduring days of storms, Utnapishtim, like Noah in Genesis, releases a bird in search of dry land.
Various archaeologists suggest there was a historical deluge between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago that hit lands ranging from the Black Sea to what many call the cradle of civilization, the flood plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The translation of ancient cuneiform tablets in the 19th century confirmed the Mesopotamian flood myth as an antecedent of the Noah story in the Bible. In an interview with the London Telegraph, Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum and author of the recent book The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood, described one way the tradition may have emerged:
There must have been a heritage memory of the destructive power of flood water, based on various terrible floods. And the people who survived would have been people in boats. You can imagine someone sunbathing in a canoe, half asleep, and waking up however long later and they’re in the middle of the Persian Gulf, and that’s the beginning of the flood story.
Yet tales of the Flood spring from many sources. Myriad ancient cultures have their own legends of watery cataclysm and salvation. According to Vedic lore, a fish tells the mythic Indian king Manu of a flood that will wipe out humanity; Manu then builds a ship to withstand the epic rains and is later led to a mountaintop by the same fish. An Aztec story sees a devout couple hide in the hollow of a vast tree with two ears of corn as divine storms drown the wicked of the land. Creation myths from Egypt to Scandinavia involve tidal floods of all sorts of substances — including the blood of deities — purging and remaking the earth.
Flood myths are so universal that the Hungarian psychoanalyst Geza Roheim thought their origins were physiological, not historical — hypothesizing that dreams of the Flood came when humans were asleep with full bladders. The religious purists now upset with Hollywood probably don’t want to hear that it’s really just all about drinking too much water before bedtime.
The accepted view is that the archetypal account originated in Mesopotamia. The earliest extant Mesopotamian version is far older than the biblical account, and the Flood story
Flood story
The Genesis flood narrative (chapters 6–9 of the Book of Genesis) is a Hebrew flood myth. It tells of God's decision to return the universe to its pre-creation state of watery chaos and remake it through the microcosm of Noah's ark.
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Genesis_flood_narrative
Perhaps the oldest flood story is one of the earliest stories known to man, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Recorded on 12 stone tablets this is among the first pieces of literature in history. According to the poem, Gilgamesh was a Sumerian king who reigned for 126 years.
The story of Noah may be part of the Abrahamic canon, but the legend of the Great Flood almost certainly has prebiblical origins, rooted in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh dates back nearly 5,000 years and is thought to be perhaps the oldest written tale on the planet.
The antediluvian (alternatively pre-diluvian or pre-flood) period is the time period chronicled in the Bible between the fall of man and the Genesis flood narrative in biblical cosmology. The term was coined by Thomas Browne. The narrative takes up chapters 1–6 (excluding the flood narrative) of the Book of Genesis.
In this way, Bishop Ussher computed that the earth had been created in 4004 BC and that the flood occurred in 2350 BC which was henceforth accepted as the "traditional" biblical date,( though there is rival literal interpretation similarly inspired, setting the date at 2459 BC).
The Flood. The oldest written copy of the Sumerian Flood Myth dates to 2150 BC, while the oldest written copy of the The Epic Of Gilgamesh dates to c. 2000 BC.
Long before the Bible was written, The Flood was a blockbuster of the ancient Mesopotamian and Mediterranean worlds. It originated in Sumer over 4000 years ago. New versions were deposited in the greatest imperial libraries of the Mesopotamian empires (Babylonia and Assyria).
Regional Evidence for the Noachian and Similar Floods
There are several layers in exposed rocks near these two rivers in southeastern Mesopotamia (Iraq) that are likely flood deposits. Most are about a foot (0.3 m) thick, but one is as much as 3 meters thick (MacDonald 1988).
Concerning the age of the Earth, the Bible's genealogical records combined with the Genesis 1 account of creation are used to estimate an age for the Earth and universe of about 6000 years, with a bit of uncertainty on the completeness of the genealogical records, allowing for a few thousand years more.
In biology, the most recent common ancestors of humans, when traced back using the Y chromosome for the male lineage and mitochondrial DNA for the female lineage, are commonly called the Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve, respectively. Anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago.
day of October 4004 BCE, according to the Julian calendar. The time from Adam to Noah, at the time of the flood, is 1,656 years. Add subsequent genealogies found in Genesis chapters 10 and 11 and then the time from Jesus to the present equals approximately 6,000 years.
Proved by the Scriptures, from the Collection of divers Authors. The sum of the years of the First Age. From Adam unto Noah's flood are years 1656. For when Adam was 130 years old he begat Seth.
Noah not only served as one of God's prophets but was also a ministering angel after he died and brought heavenly messages before the birth of Christ and during the Restoration.
Archaeologists believe they may have discovered the final location of Noah's Ark on Turkey's Mount Ararat. Soil samples from atop the highest peaks in Turkey reveal human activity and marine materials. Dating of the rock and soil from the location match with Biblical timing of Noah's Ark.
May God extend the territory of Japheth ; may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be his slave." After the flood Noah lived 350 years. Altogether, Noah lived 950 years, and then he died.
Genesis 8:3–4 says the waters abated after 150 days (5 months) and in the seventh month the Ark rested on the mountains of Ararat. Genesis 8:5 says that the tops of the mountains were seen in the tenth month. The mountains were created before the flood.
Scholars believe that the flood myth originated in Mesopotamia during the Old Babylonian Period (c.1880–1595 BCE) and reached Syro-Palestine in the latter half of the 2nd millennium BCE.
The flood in the time of Deucalion was caused by the anger of Zeus, ignited by the hubris of Lycaon and his sons, descendants of Pelasgus. According to this story, King Lycaon of Arcadia had sacrificed a boy to Zeus, who, appalled by this offering, decided to put an end to the "Bronze" Age by unleashing a deluge.
Floods were seen as beneficial in Ancient Egypt, and similar to the case with Japan, Ancient Egypt did not have any cataclysmic flood myths picturing it as destructive rather than fertile force. One "flood myth" in Egyptian mythology involves the god Ra and his daughter Sekhmet.
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