Examining False Charges of Deluge Story Copying

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Hopefully, I can move to a replacement for this awful Google-owned Blogger platform by the end of the year. Like Facebook, they force changes on its users that are dreadful.

Atheists and tinhorn "Christian scholars" level charges at the narrative of the Genesis Flood for being a copy of similar pagan stories. If so-called scholars actually did complete research instead of arguing from superficialities and anti-Bible presuppositions, they would not be making such foolish assertions.

Enemies of the Genesis Flood have fabricated the idea that the Hebrews copied pagan stories. This is easily refuted.
Library of Ashurbanipal / The Flood Tablet / The Gilgamesh Tablet / Wikimedia Commons / Fæ (CC BY-SA 3.0)

As we know, there are global deluge story all over the world. Creationists believe that after the dispersal at Babel, the people took the historical account with them, but they deteriorated. One of the main problems with the idea of the Hebrews copying from pagan sources is that such a thing would be unthinkable to those Hebrews. The cultures of the ancient peoples in question were extremely different, and even a cursory comparison between the plagiarized novel-like approach on one side compared to the sacred trust and desire for historical accuracy on the other side should be obvious — the Mesopotamians were considering it literature or entertainment. There are other major factors to consider.

For a long time, the discovery of Flood literature in Mesopotamia outside of the Genesis account has prompted a higher critical argument that the Genesis account must have borrowed from the Babylonian and Assyrian versions of the Flood story. This thesis, however, can be seriously challenged based on recent archaeological work that expands both our understanding as to how ancient Mesopotamian religion functioned, and how their scribes related to their texts.

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For these and other reasons, the long-held higher critical argument about an alleged textual exchange is now outdated. It is untenable to argue that Hebrew scribal tradition based their sacred history on a foreign text that not only had a hostile religious worldview to that of the monotheistic Israelite one, but was not regarded as historical and sacred by those who circulated them.

Although rather long, this interesting analysis should prove valuable to people who desire historical accuracy and useful information in defense of the Bible. To read all of it, click on "The Mesopotamian Deluge Accounts: Neither History Nor Revelation". You may also be interested in "Gilgamesh, Genesis and Myths". Also, "Another Gilgamesh Great Flood Pretender" deals with a fantasy of one of the sidewinders discussed in the "Mesopotamian Deluge" link, above.