The waters prevailed upon Earth 150 days, when the Deity
caused a wind to pass upon the Earth,
and the waters were calmed.
And the fountains of the deep were dammed,
as were the sluices of the heavens;
and the rain from the skies was arrested.
And the waters began to go back from upon the Earth,
coming and going back.
And after one hundred and fifty days,
the waters were less;
and the ark rested on the Mounts of Ararat.
According to the biblical version, Mankind's ordeal began "in the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month." The ark rested on the Mounts of Ararat "in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month." The surge of the waters and their gradual "going back" - enough to lower the water level so that the ark rested on the peaks of Ararat - lasted, then, a full five months. Then "the waters continued to diminish, until the peaks of the mountains" - and not just the towering Ararats - "could be seen on the eleventh day of the tenth month," nearly three months later. Noah waited another forty days. Then he sent out a raven and a dove "to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground." On the third try, the dove came back holding an olive leaf in her mouth, indicating that the waters had receded enough to enable treetops to be seen. After a while, Noah sent out the dove once more, "but she returned not again." The Deluge was over.
And Noah removed the covering of the Ark and looked, and behold: the face of the ground was dry.
"In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, did the earth dry up." It was the six hundred and first year of Noah. The ordeal had lasted a year and ten days.
Then Noah and all that were with him in the ark came out. And he built an altar and offered burnt sacrifices to the Deity.
And the Deity smelled the enticing smell
and said in his heart:
"I shall no longer curse the dry land
on account of the Earthling;
for his heart's desire is evil from his youth."
The "happy ending" is as full of contradictions as the Deluge story itself. It begins with a long indictment of Mankind for various abominations, including defilement of the purity of the younger gods. A momentous decision to have all flesh perish is reached and appears fully justified. Then the very same Deity rushes in a mere seven days to make sure that the seed of Mankind and other creatures shall not perish. When the trauma is over, the Deity is enticed by the smell of roasting meat and, forgetting his original determination to put an end to Mankind, dismisses the whole thing with an excuse, blaming Man's evil desires on his youth.
These nagging doubts of the story's veracity disperse, however, when we realize that the biblical account is an edited version of the original Sumerian account. As in the other instances, the monotheistic Bible has compressed into one Deity the roles played by several gods who were not always in accord.
Until the archaeological discoveries of the Mesopotamian civilization and the decipherment of the Akkadian and Sumerian literature, the biblical story of the Deluge stood alone, supported only by scattered primitive mythologies around the world. The discovery of the Akkadian "Epic of Gilgamesh" placed the Genesis Deluge tale in older and venerable company, further enhanced by later discoveries of older texts and fragments of the Sumerian original.
The hero of the Mesopotamian Deluge account was Ziusudra in Sumerian (Utnapishtim in Akkadian), who was taken after the Deluge to the Celestial Abode of the Gods to live there happily ever after. When, in his search for immortality, Gilgamesh finally reached the place, he sought Utnapishtim's advice on the subject of life and death. Utnapishtim disclosed to Gilgamesh - and through him to all post-Diluvial Mankind - the secret of his survival, "a hidden matter, a secret of the gods" - the true story (one might say) of the Great Flood.
The secret revealed by Utnapishtim was that before the onslaught of the Deluge the gods held a council and voted on the
destruction of Mankind. The vote and the decision were kept secret. But Enki searched out Utnapishtim, the ruler of Shuruppak,
to inform him of the approaching calamity. Adopting clandestine methods, Enki spoke to Utnapishtim from behind a reed screen.
At first his disclosures were cryptic. Then his warning and advice were clearly stated:
Man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu:
Tear down the house, build a ship!
Give up possessions, seek thou life!
Forswear belongings, keep soul alive!
Aboard ship take thou the seed of all living things;
That ship thou shalt build -
her dimensions shall be to measure.
The parallels with the biblical story are obvious: A Deluge is about to come; one Man is forewarned; he is to save himself by preparing a specially constructed boat; he is to take with him and save "the seed of all living things." Yet the Babylonian version is more plausible. The decision to destroy and the effort to save are not contradictory acts of the same single Deity, but the acts of different deities. Moreover, the decision to forewarn and save the seed of Man is the defiant act of one god (Enki), acting in secret and contrary to the joint decision of the other Great Gods.
Why did Enki risk defying the other gods? Was he solely concerned with the preservation of his "wondrous works of art," or did he act against the background of a rising rivalry or enmity between him and his brother Enlil? The existence of such a conflict between the two brothers is highlighted in the Deluge story.
Utnapishtim asked Enki the obvious question: How could he, Utnapishtim, explain to the other citizens of Shuruppak the
construction of an oddly shaped vessel and the abandonment of all possessions? Enki advised him:
Thou shalt thus speak unto them:
"I have learnt that Enlil is hostile to me,
so that I cannot reside in your city,
nor set my foot in Enid's territory.
To the Apsu I will therefore go down,
to dwell with my Lord Ea."
The excuse was thus to be that, as Enki's follower, Utnapishtim could no longer dwell in Mesopotamia, and that he was building a boat in which he intended to sail to the Lower World (southern Africa, by our findings) to dwell there with his Lord, Ea/Enki. Verses that follow suggest that the area was suffering from a drought or a famine; Utnapishtim (on Enki's advice) was to assure the residents of the city that if Enlil saw him depart, "the land shall [again] have its fill of harvest riches." This excuse made sense to the other residents of the city.
Thus misled, the people of the city did not question, but actually lent a hand in, the construction of the ark. By killing and serving them bullocks and sheep "every day" and by lavishing upon them "must, red wine, oil and white wine," Utnapishtim encouraged them to work faster. Even children were pressed to carry bitumen for waterproofing. ;
"On the seventh day the ship was completed. The launching was very difficult, so they had to shift the floor '. planks above and below, until two-thirds of the structure had gone into the water" of the Euphrates. Then Utnapishtim put all his family and kin aboard the ship, taking along "whatever I had of all the living creatures" as well as "the animals of the field, the wild beasts of the field." The parallels with the biblical tale - even down to the seven days of construction - are clear. Going a step beyond Noah, however, Utnapishtim also sneaked aboard all the craftsmen who had helped him build the ship.
He himself was to go aboard only upon a certain signal, whose nature Enki had also revealed to him: a "stated time" to be set by Shamash, the deity in charge of the fiery rockets. This was Enki's order:
"When Shamash who orders a trembling at dusk will shower down a rain of eruptions - board thou the ship, batten up the entrance!"
We are left guessing at the connection between this apparent firing of a space rocket by Shamash and the arrival of the moment for Utnapishtim to board his ark and s
eal himself inside it. But the moment did arrive; the space rocket did cause a "trembling at dusk"; there was a shower of eruptions. And Utnapishtim "battened down the whole ship" and "handed over the structure together with its contents" to "Puzur-Amurri, the Boatman."
The storm came "with the first glow of dawn." There was awesome thunder. A black cloud rose up from the horizon. The storm
tore out the posts of buildings and piers; then the dikes gave. Darkness followed, "turning to blackness all that had been light;"
and "the wide land was shattered like a pot."
For six days and six nights the "south-storm" blew.
Gathering speed as it blew,
submerging the mountains,
overtaking the people like a battle. . . .
When the seventh day arrived,
the flood-carrying south-storm
subsided in the battle
which it had fought like an army.
The sea grew quiet,
the tempest was still,
the flood ceased.
I looked at the weather.
Stillness had set in.
And all of Mankind had returned to clay.
The will of Enlil and the Assembly of Gods was done.
But, unknown to them, the scheme of Enki had also worked: Floating in the stormy waters was a vessel carrying men, women, children, and other living creatures.
With the storm over, Utnapishtim "opened a hatch; light fell upon my face." He looked around; "the landscape was as level as a flat roof." Bowing low, he sat and wept, "tears running down on my face." He looked about for a coastline in the expanse of the sea; he saw none. Then:
There emerged a mountain region; On the Mount of Salvation the ship came to a halt; Mount Nisir ["salvation"] held the ship fast, allowing no motion.
For six days Utnapishtim watched from the motionless ark, caught in the peaks of the Mount of Salvation - the biblical peaks of Ararat. Then, like Noah, he sent out a dove to look for a resting place, but it came back. A swallow flew out and came back. Then a raven was set free - and flew off, finding a resting place. Utnapishtim then released all the birds and animals that were with him, and stepped out himself. He built an altar "and offered a sacrifice" - just as Noah had.
But here again the single Deity - multideity difference crops up. When Noah offered a burnt sacrifice, "Yahweh smelled the enticing smell"; but when Utnapishtim offered a sacrifice, "the gods smelled the savor, the gods smelled the sweet savor. The gods crowded like flies about a sacrificer."
In the Genesis version, it was Yahweh who vowed never again to destroy Mankind. In the Babylonian version it was the Great Goddess who vowed: "I shall not forget. . . . I shall be mindful of these days, forgetting them never."
That, however, was not the immediate problem. For when Enlil finally arrived on the scene, he had little mind for food. He was hopping mad to discover that some had survived. "Has some living soul escaped? No man was to survive the destruction!" Ninurta, his son and heir, immediately pointed a suspecting finger at Enki. "Who, other than Ea, can devise plans? It is Ea alone who knows every matter." Far from denying the charge, Enki launched one of the world's most eloquent defense summations. Praising Enlil for his own wisdom, and suggesting that Enlil could not possibly be "unreasoning" - a realist - Enki mixed denial with confession. "It was not I who disclosed the secret of the gods"; I merely let one Man, an "exceedingly wise" one, perceive by his own wisdom what the gods' secret was. And if indeed this Earthling is so wise, Enki suggested to Enlil, let's not ignore his abilities. "Now then, take counsel in regard to him!"
All this, the "Epic of Gilgamesh" relates, was the "secret of the gods" that Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh. He then told Gilgamesh of
the final event. Having been influenced by Enki's argument,
Enlil thereupon went aboard the ship.
Holding me by the hand, he took me aboard.
He took my wife aboard,
made her kneel by my side.
Standing between us,
he touched our foreheads to bless us:
"Hitherto Utnapishtim has been but human;
henceforth Utnapishtim and his wife
shall be unto us like gods.
Utnapishtim shall reside in the Far Away,
at the Mouth of the Waters!"
And Utnapishtim concluded his story to Gilgamesh. After he was taken to reside in the Far Away, Anu and Enlil
Gave him life, like a god,
Elevated him to eternal life, like a god.
But what happened to Mankind in general? The biblical tale ends with an assertion that the Deity then permitted and blessed
Mankind to "be fruitful and multiply." Mesopotamian versions of the Deluge story also end with verses that deal with Mankind's
procreation. The partly mutilated texts speak of the establishment of human "categories":
. . . Let there be a third category among the Humans:
Let there be among the Humans
Women who bear, and women who do not bear.
There were, apparently, new guidelines for sexual intercourse:
Regulations for the human race:
Let the male ... to the young maiden. . . .
Let the young maiden. . . .
The young man to the young maiden . . .
When the bed is laid,
let the spouse and her husband lie together.
Enlil was outmaneuvered. Mankind was saved and allowed to procreate. The gods opened up Earth to Man. WHEN THE GODS FLED FROM EARTH
WHAT WAS THIS DKLUGE, whose raging waters swept over Earth?
Some explain the Flood in terms of the annual inundations of the Tigris-Euphrates plain. One such inundation, it is surmised, must have been particularly severe. Fields and cities, men and beasts were swept away by the rising waters; and primitive peoples, seeing the event as a punishment by the gods, began to propagate the legend of a Deluge.
In one of his books, Excavations at Ur, Sir Leonard Woolley relates how, in 1929, as the work on the Royal Cemetery at Ur was drawing to a close, the workmen sank a small shaft at a nearby mound, digging through a mass of broken pottery and crumbled brick. Three feet down, they reached a level of hard-packed mud - usually soil marking the point where civilization had started. But could the millennia of urban life have left only three feet of archaeological strata? Sir Leonard directed the workmen to dig farther. They went down another three feet, then another five. They still brought up "virgin soil" - mud with no traces of human habitation. But after digging through eleven feet of silted, dry mud, the workmen reached a stratum containing pieces of broken green pottery and flint instruments. An earlier civilization had been buried under eleven feet of mud! Sir Leonard jumped into the pit and examined the excavation. He called in his aides, seeking their opinions. No one had a plausible theory. Then Sir Leonard's wife remarked almost casually, "Well, of course, it's the Flood!" Other archaeological delegations to Mesopotamia, however, cast doubt on this marvelous intuition. The stratum of mud containing no traces of habitation did indicate flooding; but while the deposits of Ur and al-'Ubaid suggested flooding sometime between 3500 and 4000 B.C., a similar deposit uncovered later at Kish was estimated to have occurred circa 2800 B.C. The same date (2800 B.C.) was estimated for mud strata found at Erech and at Shuruppak, the city of the Sumerian Noah. At Nineveh, excavators found, at a depth of some sixty feet, no less than thirteen alternate strata of mud and riverine sand, dating from 4000 to 3000 B.C.
Most scholars, therefore, believe that what Woolley found were traces of diverse local floodings - frequent occurrences in Mesopotamia, where occasional torrential rains and the swelling of the two great rivers and their frequent course changes cause such havoc. All the varying mud strata, scholars have concluded, were not the comprehensive calamity, the monumental
prehistoric event that the Deluge must have been.
The Old Testament is a masterpiece of literary brevity and precision. The words are always well chosen
to convey precise meanings; the verses are to the point; their order is purposeful; their length is no more than is absolutely needed. It is noteworthy that the whole story from Creation through the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is told in eighty verses. The complete record of Adam and his line, even when told separately for Cain and his line and Seth, Enosh, and their line, is managed in fifty-eight verses. But the story of the Great Flood merited no less than eighty-seven verses. It was, by any editorial standard, a "major story." No mere local event, it was a catastrophe affecting the whole of Earth, the whole of Mankind. The Mesopotamian texts clearly state that the "four corners of the Earth" were affected.
As such, it was a crucial point in the prehistory of Mesopotamia. There were the events and the cities and the people before the Deluge, and the events and cities and people after the Deluge. There were all the deeds of the gods and the Kingship that they lowered from Heaven before the Great Flood, and the course of godly and human events when Kingship was lowered again to Earth after the Great Flood. It was the great time divider.
Not only the comprehensive king lists but also texts relating to individual kings and their ancestries made mention of the Deluge. One, for example, pertaining to Ur-Ninurta, recalled the Deluge as an event remote in time:
On that day, on that remote day, On that night, on that remote night, In that year, in that remote year - When the Deluge had taken place.
The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, a patron of the sciences who amassed the huge library of clay tablets in Nineveh, professed in one of his commemorative inscriptions that he had found and was able to read "stone inscriptions from before the Deluge." An Akkadian text dealing with names and their origins explains that it lists names "of kings from after the Deluge." A king was exalted as "of seed preserved from before the Deluge." Various scientific texts quoted as their source "the olden sages, from before the Deluge."
No, the Deluge was no local occurrence or periodic inundation. It was by all counts an Earthshaking event of unparalleled magnitude, a catastrophe the likes of which neither Man nor gods experienced before or since.
The biblical and Mesopotamian texts that we have examined so far leave a few puzzles to be solved. What was the ordeal suffered by Mankind, in respect to which Noah was named "Respite" with the hope that his birth signaled an end to the hardships? What was the "secret" the gods swore to keep, and of whose disclosure Enki was accused? Why was the launching of a space vehicle from Sippar the signal to Utnapishtim to enter and seal the ark? Where were the gods while the waters covered even the highest mountains? And why did they so cherish the roasted meat sacrifice offered by Noah/Utnapishtim? As we proceed to find the answers to these and other questions, we shall find that the Deluge was not a premeditated punishment brought about by the gods at their exclusive will. We shall discover that though the Deluge
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