cpollett

These questions were inspired by watching the Nova show recently on the authorship of the bible. I was wondering if anyone could briefly say if there was (and if so what) any textual evidence that the flood stories in Gilgamesh and the bible are in any way related? Gilgamesh was written down probably 1500 years before the bible was written down. So by default I would guess that they were talking about different events or the latter borrowed from stories similar to the former. My second question is looking at Wikipedia on Abraham's family tree it looks like there are 11 generations between Noah and Abraham and 14 from Abraham to David for which there is some archeological evidence. If you guess at 20-25 years or so/generation assuming the ages given in the bible were miscopied/translated. This would put Noah around 600 years earlier around 1600 BC. So my second question is why people try to connect Exodus with the explosion at Santorini rather than Noah? Is it mainly just because of the seven plaugues stuff?

Sheshbazzar

You could line up the two flood stories and do your own point by point comparison. It has been done many times before, but your conclusions will likely be reflective of your religious predilections, or lack of them.
As for your second question, Why? because the desperate to believe are inclined to "grasp at straws", and if it gives them something to hang onto for a season, they are content, take away whatever straw it is that they are hanging onto, and they will just grab for another, perhaps no more substantial than the former.

bacht

The story of Abraham claims he sojourned from Ur of the Chaldees to Canaan. Whether true or not, it does suggest the desire to claim a cultural connection with ancient Mesopotamia.

The Exodus seems to be a different cycle of stories, I don't see how this connects with Sumerian or Babylonian roots. There are more prosaic ways of explaining movements of peoples around the Eastern Mediterranean, such as the coming of the Sea Peoples at the end of the Bronze Age, or the loss of the iron monopoly by the Hittites.

(are you trying to connect Noah with Atlantis? haven't heard that one before)

cpollett

So I dug up my copy of Gilgamesh. The introduction seemed to clarify a few things I was confused about. I guess in my original post I was confused on the dating of the earliest extant copy of Gilgamesh. I guess the earliest versions date to around 2000 B.C. not 2500 B.C; however, according to it there is historical evidence of some of the figures mentioned in Gilgamesh that date to 2500 B.C. Correct me if I have this screwed up. In any case, this is still much earlier than when it is likely that the first versions of the bible were written down (around 1000 B.C). Given garblings like Arthurian legends which were first put down about 500 years after the events were supposedly to have taken place, it seems to me that Gilgamesh and Noah could be talking about two different flood events (if they are talking about anything real). On the other hand, supposedly there is a Megiddo version of the Gilgamesh story that dates to 1400 B.C., so maybe the Gilgamesh story did influence the Noah story. I was mainly interested if someone who knows how to actually read the original texts and is up on these kind of comparisons could comment on the state of the art as far as thinking on these kind of things go. I have no comment on Atlantis. The volcano at Santorini did explode about 1500-1600 B.C. and it did effect the coastline around what is present day Israel. It also probably happened before the events of Exodus if the latter are connected with Ramses II. So I don't understand why people would try to find a connection between Exodus and Santorini? As I said in my original post just going by the number of generations and assuming human length reproduction cycles Noah would be more the correct time frame. Or is it generally assumed that the generations listed in the Bible have big gaps between the major stories listed in the first five books? If the tie between Mount Ararat and Noah's Ark is non-bogus that would probably place the story more where the flood story in Gilgamesh occurred, if so, there is probably no connection between Santorini and anything in the bible.

bacht

There are also old king lists from Sumeria with fantastically long reigns indicated before the flood. The Genesis list could be copying these too.

gdeering

A wise person on these boards once posted that cultures who live near water might tend to tell flood stories. It's a great simple premise to start with and one that leaves room for several thousand years worth of embellishment by creative storytellers.

I'd suggest that people are "pre-primed' to explain a cataclysm in terms of stories they already had.


Gregg

Analyst

There's a motive to tell stories which have some basis in fact but are actually fiction. Urban legends are a case in point. Often these speak to our fears or hopes.

Newfie

You have to go earlier than Gilgamesh, to the 17th century BC Sumerian Eridu Genesis to get the earliest extant Great Deluge myth.

Going back even further Manu was warned by a fish in Indian mythology that a deluge would come in a week which would destroy all life. He also built a boat which the fish towed to a mountaintop filled with all the "seeds" needed to reestablish life after the flood.

Flood stories are pretty common. The Chinese, aborigines, Aztecs, Maya, Mi'kmaq, Inca and a few others all have similar myths. The Greeks have a bunch of flood stories all their own.

vid

The guy at http://www.bibleorigins.net/ had written more than you probably with on the subject. Give it a read.

cpollett

Yeah, that site seems kinda cool. The stuff on how Eden might be derived from the Sumerian notion of garden outside of a city is interesting. He seems to quote Joseph Campbell a lot. As someone who is generally clueless about the status of mythologists, etc from the 40s, what do modern academics think of his theories?