Did the Bible Borrow the Flood Story From the Epic of Gilgamesh?

In 1872 a man by the name of George Smith was sifting through a collection of un-translated cuneiform tablets sitting in a British museum and discovered an ancient Babylonian story that would wind up making history. That story was The Epic of Gilgamesh. While the author of the Epic is unknown, the story itself contains a piece of history that many of us are very familiar with: the historical account of the Noahic Flood that is recorded in the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Holy Bible. At first glance, this might seem like a wonderful archeological discovery that would confirm biblical history, but if we take a closer look we will see that it raises some serious questions about the origin of the flood account within the Book of Genesis.

The similarities between the two accounts are too numerous to simply be coincidence. For example, both accounts share the story of an angry god who decides to wipe out all of life from the earth. Both accounts have a man who is spared from the flood in a boat. Both accounts also have these men taking their families on board as well as many animals so that they too can be spared from the flood. Both boats settled on top of a mountain. Both accounts have a raven and a dove that were sent out to see if the waters had subsided, and both men made a sacrifice to a god after they got off the boat. It is quite apparent that both of these stories are being affected by the same influence, but which one came first, the Bible or the Epic?

It is well known that Moses is the man that God chose to record the early history of the world. He is credited for writing the first five books of the Bible known as the Pentateuch. The flood account is found in the first book of the Bible called Genesis which Moses would have written sometime around 1500 BC. On the other hand, the story of The Epic of Gilgamesh is believed to have been in existence sometime around 2500 BC to 2000 BC. So the question arises, did the Bible take the story from the Epic, or is there some other logical explanation for the amazing similarities? How Do We Know How Old the Epic Is?

As we have mentioned before, it is believed that The Epic of Gilgamesh was handed down from approximately 2500BC – 2000 BC. The exact date that this story came into existence and the authorship is unknown. The reason that it is believed that this story originated around that time is because of an ancient clay prism known as the Sumerian Kings List. On this list we have the names of all the kings that ruled in Sumeria, both before and after the flood. There are fifteen known lists of the kings in existence. Interestingly enough, one of the pre-flood kings listed is Gilgamesh. However, can these lists of the kings be trusted? After all, none of these clay lists are in agreement with one another. In their book Lost Treasures of the Bible, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Clyde E. Fant and Professor of Religious Studies, Mitchell G. Reddish state,

Some of the copies of the Sumerian King List do not contain the list of the pre-flood kings. This portion of the list is usually considered to be a secondary addition and may have originated from a different source….The various copies of the Sumerian King List not only differ in whether or not they contain the pre-flood kings, but also in the order of the dynasties, the lengths of the reigns of certain kings, the names of the kings, and the number of the kings.

In describing the Sumerian King Lists they go on to mention that “the length of the reign of each king is given, which in many cases is unrealistically long. The reigns of the pre-flood kings range from 36,000 years to 18,600 years, whereas the post-flood reigns are much lower, ranging from 1500 years to 2 years.” It is these lists of kings that are used to determine that Gilgamesh and the story originated sometime around 2500 BC – 2000 BC. However, with all the unrealistic life spans and the discrepancies of the times that the kings ruled, can these lists of the kings be trusted to date the ancient Babylonian dynasties with any accuracy? If this were a court of law the evidence would be thrown out because of the lack of harmony and blatant inconsistencies, and the date of the Epic would remain an unanswered archeological mystery.

Where Did the Epic Come From?

In his book The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels, Alexander Heidel, an expert in Semitics and ancient Near Eastern history, has observed that the Epic is actually a collection of previously “unrelated sources” that were “put together” to make one large epic story. That is to say that the Epic as we know it today is far more complex than it used to be. The Epic itself has evolved over the many centuries that have gone by, being added to by each passing generation. As a matter of fact, the flood story may not have even been a part of the original stories of Gilgamesh. It is believed that it was inserted at a much later date. An excellent book on this topic is The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic written by Jeffrey H. Tigay, the Associate Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures in the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. After listing several good evidences to support his claim he comes to the conclusion that the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh was taken from another epic known as the Atra-hasis Epic. According to Tigay, the source of the flood material that is mentioned in much ancient Babylonian literature is found in the Atra-hasis Epic. So what do we know about the Atra-hasis Epic? Fant and Reddish record that,

The best preserved edition of the Epic of Atrahasis comes from the Old Babylonian period, written around 1635 B.C.E. This version of the tale was written on three tablets, with a total of approximately 1245 lines of text. These tablets can be dated rather precisely because each tablet bears the name of the scribe who wrote it (Ku-Aya) and the time of its composition during the reign of the Babylonian king Ammisaduqa. It very interesting to note that the flood story as it is found in the Atra-hasis Epic does not contain all the similarities that we find with The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible.

The best preserved and most complete version of the Epic of Gilgamesh was the one that was discovered in the library of the last great Babylonian king, Ashurbanipal, who reigned from 685 BC to 627 BC. These were the tablets that George Smith translated. By the time that Moses wrote the Book of Genesis in 1500 BC, until the time of Ashurbanipal in 685 BC, there would have been over 800 years of the telling of the story of the Epic of Gilgamesh. This would have provided ample time for the Epic to gain the similarities of the historical flood account found in the Book of Genesis.

E.A. Wallis Budge from the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities quotes Ashurbanipal as saying, “I, Ashur-bani-pal, within it understood the wisdom of Nebo, all the art of writing of every craftsman, of every kind, I made myself master of them all.” From this, Budge deduces that Ashurbanipal was an expert in cuneiform text, which is what the Epic at his library was written in. He believes that Ashurbanipal went to great lengths to create a library of all the history of his people and that the Epic that was discovered in his library might very well have been revised by Ashurbanipal himself.

Are There Other Flood Stories

The question may come to mind that if there are ancient and varying versions of the flood story in ancient Mesopotamia, are there any others in the world? The answer is, yes. There are hundreds of ancient versions of flood stories from around the world. Some are close to what we find in the Bible while others are not. There are about twenty that have many similarities that we find in the Bible. They range anywhere from Ancient Babylon and Hawaii, all the way down to Australia and many places in between.

But where did all these stories of the flood come from? We know from the Bible that God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them and that everything God made was good, including Adam and Eve. God gave Adam and Eve only one rule, and that was to not eat from tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They chose to disobey God. God cast them out of the garden and sin and death entered the world as a result of their choice. They had children and their children’s children had more children. It was not long before mankind and sin were rampant. God was grieved at this and decided to destroy all life from the face of the earth, but He chose to spare His faithful servant, Noah. God flooded the world until the waters covered the highest mountains and all was destroyed except Noah and his three sons, their wives, and all the animals that were on board the ark.

It is interesting to note here that according to James Ussher’s The Annals of the World, the date that is given to when the flood may have occurred was 2349 BC. If that date sounds familiar, it is because it is the same time frame that is believed to be the origin of the flood story found in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is also interesting to note that beyond the time of the flood, the history is no longer reliable on the list of the Babylonian kings. If the flood story were true as we find it in the Book of Genesis, we would expect that to be the case. The only accurate history would have been the history from Noah and his family that was passed on.

After the flood, God promised that He would no longer destroy the world by means of another global flood. Noah and his family settled into the world and had children, and his children’s children had more children. Once again the world was populated. But this time the Bible tells us that they were consolidated to one area. They were prideful people and wanted to make a name for themselves, so they started to build a tower that would reach the heavens. We know this historical account as the Tower of Babel. Interestingly enough, the location of the tower was in Ancient Mesopotamia. It was not God’s will that the people stay in one area and elevate themselves, so God confused them by giving them different languages. As a result of this the building of the tower stopped, and the people dispersed throughout the world with each group of people taking with them the account of the flood. As would be expected, over the years the story would be tailored to the cultural differences of the people telling the story. As a result of this event, we would expect to find numerous flood stories from around the world.

Conclusion

There are three schools of thought about the flood story in the Bible in relation to the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh. According to Heidel, they are, “First, the Babylonians borrowed from the Hebrew account; second, the Hebrew account is dependent on the Babylonian; third, both are descended from a common original.” Out of these three accounts, an intelligent argument can be made for each. Those who do not wish to acknowledge God will adopt the second school of thought, but history, when understood from a proper perspective, favors a healthy combination of the first and third school of thought. Both accounts of the flood are records of an actual historical even that took place over 4,000 years ago, and the similarities in the accounts were not fully emulated until after the writing of the Book of Genesis. That is to say that the similarities in the Epic of Gilgamesh are dependent on the Bible. While it may be true that the Epic has evolved over the last few millennia, our God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and so is His Word. The Bible continues to withstand the test of time and proves itself to be historically accurate time and time again.

By: Stephen Lee

Bibliography Ahmed, Sami Said. Sothern Mesopotamia in the Time of Ashurbanipal. Netherlands: Mouton & Co., 1968.

Budge, E. A. Wallis, The Babylonian Story of the Deluge and the Epic of Gilgamish (1929)

  http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/gilgdelu.htm (Accessed April 26, 2013)

Fant, Clyde E., and Mitchell G. Reddish. Lost Treasures of the Bible: Understanding the Bible through Archaeological Artifacts in World Museums. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008.

Heidel, Alexander. The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1946.

Kriwaczek, Paul. Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birthplace of Civilization. New York: St. Martens Press. 2010.

Smith, George. “The Gilgamesh Epic is Found.” In Hands on the Past: Pioneer Archaeologists Tell Their Own Story. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. Tigay, Jeffrey H. The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1982.

White, A. J. Monty. “Flood Legends.” In Answers. Vol. 2 No. 2 (2007)

Pierce, Larry and Marion. James Usher’s: The Annals of the World. Forest: Master Books. 2004.