[kstenerud]

Yup. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 18th century BC) caused quite a lot of controversy when it was translated in 1870 due to its striking similarity to many parts of the Hebrew Bible (which was written MUCH later).

Similar controversies erupted over the stories of Osiris (c. 25th century BC).

By the 10th century BC, almost all of the story themes that we ascribe to more modern authorship had already been written.

[InitialLastName]

The similarity between the EoG and Genesis flood stories can probably be laid to the fact that the first major human societies were built around flood plains of rivers in regions that have otherwise stable climates. When your society spends centuries in that situation, floods are the single most important natural event that happens to you. If would be shocking if they didn't feature prominently in your stories.

[giraffe_lady]

There are other similarities between the epic of gilgamesh and genesis beyond just the flood, it's a very interesting subject imo. Ultimately both were originally oral traditions long before they were written anywhere, both emerging out of the ancient east mediterranean/west asian cultural milieu.

IIRC the current scholarly consensus is that the shared parts represent two surviving variants of an even earlier story that was widely told across cultures in that region.

[DiogenesKynikos]

The similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Genesis flood story are far too extensive to be due to chance.

For example, compare the following passages, describing how Noah / Utnapishtim let out birds to search for dry land, after their boats get grounded on a tall mountain.

Genesis 8:6-12:

After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

Epic of Gilgamesh:

> When the seventh day dawned I loosed a dove and let her go. She flew away, but finding no resting-place she returned. Then I loosed a swallow, and she flew away but finding no resting-place she returned. I loosed a raven, she saw that the waters had retreated, she ate, she flew around, she cawed, and she did not come back.

Historically, much of Genesis was likely written during the Babylonian exile. It's not surprising at all that the authors of Genesis borrowed a story that was extremely well known in Babylon.

[ars]

> Historically, much of Genesis was likely written during the Babylonian exile.

That's very very unlikely, there's too much other stuff linked with it that is older than that. You might be able to claim that when it was set to paper, but there's no way Genesis itself is only from then.

According to Genesis Abraham lived at the time that Gilgamesh was recorded, with Noah living a little before then. It's quote possible Gilgamesh was written down from their stories, rather than the other way around. Genesis records how Abraham traveled widely telling his story, including to kings.

[DiogenesKynikos]

There are many linguistic and historical hints that the early chapters of Genesis were written during or after the Babylonian captivity: things like mentions of "great" cities that only became great during that era, borrowed Babylonian phrases, various stories borrowed from the Babylonians, etc.

There were certainly earlier stories that were included in Genesis, but the actual writing occurred long after those stories supposedly took place.

> It's quote possible Gilgamesh was written down from their stories, rather than the other way around.

The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down long before there was even a Hebrew language. It's one of the most ancient written works.

[Amezarak]

At least portions of the Pentateuch certainly date prior to the Exile, because we have direct archeological evidence in the form of dated, physical scrolls.

At any rate both the Babylonians and the ancient Israelites were Semitic peoples, so obviously they had a shared background long before the Exile.

There are also many references in early Genesis that do suggest it originates in traditions much older, including references to great cities and powers that were long, long gone by the Exile. This actually sent me quite recently down some rabbit holes.

[DiogenesKynikos]

I wrote specifically that the early chapters of Genesis date to the exile.

The Bible is not a single book. It's really a collection of different works, written over the course of centuries by different people. Different parts date from different eras (and then were subsequently edited over the centuries).

> we have direct archeological evidence in the form of dated, physical scrolls.

From what I know, only very short fragments of a few prayers survive from before the exile.

[whatwhaaaaat]

Why do we think peoples of the past would be unable to distinguish between a normal river flooding and a “world ending” flood? What about the ~450 feet of sea level rise in the last 15k years?

[jcranmer]

At the most accelerated rate of sea level rise, meltwater pulse 1A, sea levels rose at about 1-2 inches per year (about 10 times current sea-level rise rates, FWIW).

While it's commonly used as an explanation for the prevalence of flood myths throughout the world, I just don't buy it. That level of sea level rise just isn't going to come across as world-ending flood; it's going to be noticeable over time, but even sedentary cultures along the coastlines who are the most impacted by the rise are going to easily capable of dealing with it.

To me, the more parsimonious explanation is... it's just extending the metaphor of a flash flood. There's already a pretty consistent metaphor of ritual cleansing among multiple cultures. Flash floods are pretty common in many climates, and especially in an alluvial flood plain, the utter devastation of a major flood is readily apparent. Combine the two of them with a metaphorical story of the world being so wrong that everybody needs to be swept away and... why not use a flood to explain the destruction of the entire world? What other disaster would you choose instead?

[kibwen]

> That level of sea level rise just isn't going to come across as world-ending flood

I'm entirely open to being skeptical about meltwater pulse 1A being responsible for the universal flood myth, but I don't agree with this refutation.

Many of our stories do not exist to relate literal events, they exist to explain natural phenomenons. And there are many ways for humans to frame these explanations, but for whatever reason the human brain seems hardwired to prefer stories, so the explanations that survived to be transmitted through the ages were the ones that happened to take the form of stories.

So rather than saying "the pulse event wasn't rapid enough, therefore it can't explain the story" is IMO too hasty. Consider a sedentary people living on the coast, where a child asks her grandmother where their ancestors are buried, to which the grandmother responds by gesturing out at the Persian Gulf where, 60 miles from shore, their village once clung to the coast 500 years ago. It only takes one curious child asking "why?" and one bored grandmother willing to come up with a story to get the ball rolling on a tale that still gets told 10,000 years later (a tale that, indeed, would likely also have been informed by the experience of annual river flooding).

[TeaBrain]

These people's "world" would have been a relatively small area.

[rcxdude]

They almost certainly could, but also they would also almost certainly be prone to the same kind of embellishments of such stories as they are passed on.

[neffy]

The other quite reasonable hypothesis is that these are tales of the fairly rapid sea level rises that accompanied the end of the last ice age as the breaking of ice dams in the north released massive glacial floods into the North Atlantic and Pacific.

[rcxdude]

This is less reasonable: the sea rise was rapid by geological timescales, but hardly something you would notice as a massive change during a human lifetime.

[mistercheph]

The whole premise of our present civilization is that every one before us was a nose picking drooler, and that we have more to say to the past then the past has to tell us about ourselves.

We lack the collective self consciousness to see ourselves through the eyes of the people of other times, thinking through what it means to be understood through artifact, and the distortions it produces.

The closest we come is prophesying that future generations will blame us for the destruction of the natural world and climate of earth. That is a thin mask for our age's narcissistic fixation with producing myths of its own apocalyptic world-ending power.

The people of the future probably won't think of us as bad, evil doers, that destroyed the natural world for future generations with no care but for ourselves and our consumption, if they are anything like us, they will more likely think of us as having one hand digging for gold where the sun don't shine while the other stuffs hot, fresh cheeseburgers into mouth, unibrow freshly dripping with sweat.

[lawlessone]

Theres a lot to unpack here...

[IncreasePosts]

But if the floods are a yearly phenomenon, why would you necessarily write about a single big flood?

[griffzhowl]

If it's based on a real flood, they presumably follow a power law distribution, where you have relatively frequent "normal" floods, and progressively larger floods are rarer and rarer, till you get an occasional gargantuan one.

My guess though is it's probably a plot device where the storyteller takes a known phenomenon and just exaggerates it to magical-mythical proportions, which may contribute to the story being repeated as it strikes the balance between the relatability of the real phenomenon and the attention-grabbing otherworldliness of its exaggerated version.

[InitialLastName]

For the same reason people in places where it snows every year still remember the really big blizzards: some floods are worse than others. Any given generation will have a flood they recall that set the (ahem) high water mark for comparison to future floods.

[IncreasePosts]

I don't know, if I know it floods every year, and there is a really big flood, I don't think I would act like the flood was something completely out of the blue. I would probably mention how it was much bigger than the normal floods.

For that reason, I think an event completely different from the yearly flooding is more likely, for example the Minoan eruption or Black Sea deluge hypothesis.

[anthk]

Hint: end of the Ice Age.

[lebuffon]

I have often wondered if these flood stories document something much larger that might have occurred as the major ice sheets collapsed and raised the sea levels to unseen heights.

But the one that is most intriguing IMHO is the mediterranean sea event that happened but it is 6M years ago. Could ancestors of genus Homo have passed that story long for all that time even across speciation???

https://www.uu.nl/en/news/first-direct-proof-of-mega-flood-i...

[brightball]

You’d love watching Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix. It essentially tracks this experience globally.

[Ar-Curunir]

And is completely made up nonsense pseudoscience

[willy_k]

The show itself sure, but Graham Hancock just happens to be the loudest proponent of this theory, there is solid evidence to support it, from Randall Carlson and a few other people I’m not remembering atm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothe...

“Although initially sceptical, Wallace Broecker—the scientist who proposed the conveyor shutdown hypothesis—eventually agreed with the idea of an extraterrestrial impact at the Younger Dryas boundary, and thought that it had acted as a trigger on top of a system that was already approaching instability.”

[ars]

You would be interested to know that Abraham lived at the time of the Gilgamesh epic, and he traveled widely telling his story.

I'm aware there is no direct archeological evidence of Abraham, except for Gilgamesh, so now you need to decide which direction the knowledge flowed.

[kstenerud]

> You would be interested to know that Abraham lived at the time of the Gilgamesh epic, and he traveled widely telling his story.

Did he, though? There is archeological and contemporary written historical evidence of an actual Gilgamesh. Not so with Abraham.

The Abrahamic tradition was orally transmitted by a people who for generations lived in Babylonian captivity (1300 years after the earliest surviving copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Old Balylonian, with the earliest partial texts appearing 1600 years before), and was finally written down 3 generations after they left Babylon.