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What the Babylonian Flood Stories Can and Cannot Teach Us About the Genesis Flood, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Biblical Archaeology Review (4:04), Nov/Dec 1978.

Noah's Flood

Noah’s Flood, Uriel Vidal

The Babylonian flood stories are similar to the Genesis flood story in many ways, but they are also very different. If we look deeply enough into those Babylonian flood stories, they teach us how to understand the structure of the Genesis flood story. At the same time such a comparison also emphasizes how different the Genesis flood story is from anything that preceded it.

Three different Babylonian stories of the flood have survived- the Sumerian Flood Story, the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic, and the Atrahasis Epic. Of these, the best known is Gilgamesh XI, which was one of the earliest cuneiform texts to be discovered and published. In 1872 George Smith read a paper called “The Chaldean Account of the Deluge” in which he presented fragments of the flood story from the Gilgamesh Epic. These fragments, dating from the seventh century B.C., were discovered in the library of King Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. However, other examples of tablets of this epic date from about 1000 years earlier than the fragments from Nineveh.

Read the rest of What the Babylonian Flood Stories Can and Cannot Teach Us About the Genesis Flood in the online Biblical Archaeology Society Library.

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