The Flood, Moses in the Basket, and Half of Proverbs Were Already Ancient When the Bible Came Along
Gilgamesh, Sargon of Akkad, and an Egyptian scribe named Amenemope got there first, sometimes by a thousand years
In December 1872, a museum assistant named George Smith was sorting broken clay tablets from Nineveh when he read a line about a ship coming to rest on a mountain and a dove sent out to find land. He knew his Bible well enough to understand what he was holding, and according to a colleague’s account, he jumped up, ran around the room, and began tearing off his clothes. Smith had found Noah’s flood on a pagan tablet written centuries before a word of Genesis existed. The Victorian public assumed the tablet confirmed the Bible. It took a few more decades of archaeology to admit the awkward part: the tablet came first.
A Flood with a Familiar Plot
In Genesis, God decides humanity has gone rotten, picks one righteous man, tells him to build a boat, load it with animals, and ride out a world-drowning flood. Afterward the man releases birds to test for dry land, exits the boat, and offers a sacrifice that pleases the deity.
Every beat of that plot appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet XI, where the flood hero is named Utnapishtim. He gets divine warning, builds a boat, loads animals, releases a dove, a swallow, and a raven, lands on a mountain, and burns a sacrifice so fragrant that the gods “gathered like flies” around it. The Gilgamesh version drew on an even older poem, Atrahasis, composed around the 18th century BCE. That puts the Mesopotamian flood story roughly a thousand years ahead of the earliest plausible date for the Genesis text.
The overlap runs too deep for coincidence, and scholars stopped arguing about this in the 19th century, when George Smith translated the Gilgamesh flood tablet at the British Museum in 1872 and reportedly got so excited he started undressing in the reading room. He understood immediately what he was holding: proof that the Bible’s flood had a literary ancestor.
The Genesis writers changed things, and the changes matter. Mesopotamian gods send the flood because humans are noisy and annoying. The God of Genesis sends it as moral judgment. That shift from divine irritation to divine justice is the Israelite contribution. The boat, the birds, and the sacrifice were borrowed furniture.
Moses in the Basket, Sargon in the Basket
Noah’s Ark isn’t alone.
Exodus opens with a baby placed in a reed basket sealed with bitumen, set adrift on a river, rescued, and raised to greatness. By the time the Exodus author wrote that scene, it was a rerun.
The Legend of Sargon, which tells the birth story of Sargon of Akkad, runs like this in the king’s own voice: his mother, a priestess, bore him in secret, placed him in a basket of rushes, sealed the lid with bitumen, and cast him on the river. The river carried him to Aqqi, a water-drawer, who raised him as his own son. Sargon went on to rule the known world.
Sargon reigned around 2300 BCE, and the surviving copies of his legend date to the Neo-Assyrian period, the 8th to 7th centuries BCE, which happens to be exactly when many scholars place the shaping of the Exodus story. The exposed-infant-who-becomes-great motif shows up across the ancient world (Romulus and Remus got a wolf instead of a princess), but the reed basket sealed with bitumen and floated on a river is specific enough to point at borrowing rather than parallel invention. The writers gave Israel’s founding hero the birth story of the emperor every scribe in the region had copied in school, and their audience would have caught the reference.
The Psalm That Sounds Egyptian
Psalm 104 praises God as the one who makes darkness in which the beasts of the forest creep, who sends the sun so man goes out to his work, who made the sea where ships sail and Leviathan plays, who gives all creatures their food in due season.
The Great Hymn to the Aten, on the other hand, composed in Egypt during the reign of Akhenaten in the 14th century BCE. Darkness falls and lions come out of their dens. The sun rises and people go to work. Ships sail the river, fish leap before the sun’s face, and the deity provides every creature with sustenance. The sequence of images matches closely enough that most scholars see a literary relationship, whether direct borrowing or transmission through intermediary texts over the centuries between Akhenaten and the psalmist.
Proverbs further support the Egyptian connection.
Proverbs 22:17 through 24:22 tracks the Instruction of Amenemope, an Egyptian wisdom text from roughly the 12th to 11th century BCE, section by section. Both open with an appeal to hear the words of the wise, both warn against robbing the poor, both advise against befriending the hot-tempered man, and Proverbs 22:20 even asks “Have I not written for you thirty sayings?” which puzzled translators for centuries until Amenemope turned up with exactly thirty numbered chapters. The Hebrew text had preserved a reference to the structure of its Egyptian source.
Free posts give you the argument, and paid subscriptions fund the digging that produces it: the tablets, the manuscripts, the scholarship most people never see. If a few more readers upgrade, I can spend more hours in the sources and bring back more stories like this one. If you can afford it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
What Borrowing Tells You
The usual defense at this point is that borrowing doesn't disprove inspiration, and that's true as far as it goes. God could inspire a writer to adapt Gilgamesh as easily as to compose from scratch. But that defense concedes that the text everyone was told descended from heaven turns out to have a bibliography, and that bibliography is older than the religion.
Whatever you decide that means for faith, it settles one thing: The Bible has a history, and that history is longer than the Bible. These texts grew out of a shared ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian culture, written by authors who read, remembered, and repurposed. The stories were already old when the Bible was young, and knowing that changes how you read every page.
Sources and Further Reading
Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford University Press)
Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation (Penguin Classics)
Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume II: The New Kingdom (University of California Press)
John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (Baker Academic)
Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (Picador)
Christopher B. Hays, Hidden Riches: A Sourcebook for the Comparative Study of the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East (Westminster John Knox)
Tags: Bible, Biblical Criticism, Ancient History, Religion, Old Testament, Mythology, History of Christianity
Considering that Abram, later Abraham, was from the Sumerian city of Ur. He no doubt knew these stories and passed these stories along to his heirs and they passed them on to theirs.
I don’t believe that the stories that were passed down orally at camp fires from one generation to the other were ever meant to be taken literally. They were sagas, meant to commemorate their leaders, to transform them into heroes whose deeds were bigger than life.
Clearly, the first hearers knew the contrivance, understood it as such, and thought nothing of this. It went with their appreciation of the genre, which was never about recording things as they happened, with all the specificities of inerrancy that seemed to evolve in some sects of our times. And of course, anyone who would question the literal truth of these stories and treat them as anything but fact is branded a heretic.
This approach has proven Voltaire right, time and time again— and indeed, we are witnessing this maxim in our own times: Who has the power to make people believe absurdities, also has the power to make them commit atrocities.