Another Gilgamesh Great Flood Pretender
There have been scoffers for many years who simply dismissed the Genesis Flood as a fanciful tale or a complete fabrication. (Worse, there have been liberal Christians who have agreed with atheistic interpretations of geology and said that the Flood never happened, that it was local, "tranquil", or some other nonsense.) Many flood legends exist around the world, and quite a few are only fit for jawing with folks to fill time while riding the lonely trail — nowhere near believable. Yet, many of the flood tales from around the world have elements in common with the Genesis account.
Some scoffing scholars insist that since the "Epic of Gilgamesh" is the oldest legend of a global flood that we have on record, it must be the original, and Genesis is a copy of it. Even a superficial reading of the Gilgamesh story (written as a fantastical poem) shows that it's another story that has some of the same elements of the Genesis record.
But some tinhorn came along and claimed to have the "real" Noah's Ark story, and insists (despite common sense, other possibilities, and reason) that not only is the Gilgamesh story the real one, but everybody else had it wrong for all these years: the ark in that story is not a cube, but circular. Mockers and odd scholars get attention when they attack the Bible, but knowledgeable people are able to show that their work is meadow muffins.
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| The Great Flood / Artist unknown / PD |
But some tinhorn came along and claimed to have the "real" Noah's Ark story, and insists (despite common sense, other possibilities, and reason) that not only is the Gilgamesh story the real one, but everybody else had it wrong for all these years: the ark in that story is not a cube, but circular. Mockers and odd scholars get attention when they attack the Bible, but knowledgeable people are able to show that their work is meadow muffins.
Dr Irving Finkel is an Assyriologist at the British Museum in London and an expert in ancient cuneiform scripts. In recent months he has become something of a celebrity, following the publication of his book, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood, and the Channel 4 documentary, The Real Noah’s Ark. The source of this media hype is his recent translation of a small Babylonian tablet, named the Ark Tablet. It is about the size of a mobile phone and has been dated to around 1750 BC.To finish reading the article (as well as seeing the illustrations and the math), click on "The real Noah’s Ark?" Some of the comments afterward are quite interesting as well.
In contrast, the Ark described in Genesis has been shown to be a design which would have been particularly stable in rough seas. According to Finkel, the Ark Tablet contains the original Flood story, upon which the biblical version was based centuries later. Moreover, he claims, this new tablet reveals that the real Noah’s Ark was not as described in Genesis.