One version says Noah sent out a dove, three times. Another says it came from the opening of primordial floodgates both above and below the Earth. One version says the Flood lasted 40 days the other says 150. There are plenty of significant differences between the two Flood stories in the Bible, which are easily spotted if you try to read the narrative as it stands. This isn’t news - already in the 17th century scholars recognized that there must be two versions of the Flood intertwined in the canonical Bible. (This is important because at the end of the story, Noah offers sacrifices - which, if he only brought one pair of each animal, would mean that, after saving them all from the Flood, he then proceeded to relegate some of those species to extinction immediately thereafter.) More accurately, it’s one thing that the Bible says - but a few verses later, Noah is instructed to bring not one pair of each species, but seven pairs of all the “clean” animals and the birds, and one pair of the “unclean” animals. But not so fast.Īlthough most people, steeped in Sunday school tradition, will tell you without even thinking about it that “the animals, they came on, they came on by twosies twosies,” that’s not exactly what the Bible says. What, then, of the most striking parallel between this newly discovered text and Genesis: the phrase “two by two”? Here, it would seem, we have an identical conception of the animals entering the ark.
Neither version is right or wrong they are, rather, both appropriate to the culture that produced them. The Mesopotamian versions tell us that the Flood came because humans were too noisy for the gods the biblical account says it was because violence had spread over the Earth.
The Mesopotamian versions feature many gods the biblical account, of course, only one. This detail of engineering can and should stand for a larger array of themes and features in the flood stories. The ancient Israelites, on the other hand, would naturally have pictured a boat like those they were familiar with: which is to say, the boats that navigated not the rivers of Mesopotamia but the Mediterranean Sea.
In ancient Mesopotamia, a round vessel would have been perfectly reasonable - in fact, we know that this type of boat was in use, though perhaps not to such a gigantic scale, on the Mesopotamian rivers. The people who wrote down the Flood narrative, in any of its manifestations, weren’t reporting on a historical event for which they had to get their facts straight (like what shape the ark was).Įveryone reshapes the Flood story, and the ark itself, according to the norms of their own time and place. So, why does this new discovery matter? It matters because it serves as a reminder that the story of the Flood wasn’t set in stone from its earliest version all the way through to its latest incarnation. Good luck to them in trying to estimate the weight of its cargo. The newly discovered Mesopotamian text describes a large round vessel, made of woven rope, and coated (like the biblical ark) in pitch to keep it waterproof.Īrchaeologists are planning to design a prototype of the ark, built to the specifications of this text, to see if it would actually float. The length being six times the measure of the width, with three decks and an entrance on the side. The Bible presents a standard boat shape - long and narrow. What’s really intriguing scholars is the description of the ark itself. We have known for well over a century that there are flood stories from the ancient Near East that long predate the biblical account (even the most conservative biblical scholars wouldn’t date any earlier than the ninth century B.C). It even includes the famous phrase “two by two,” describing how the animals came onto the ark.īut there is one apparently major difference: The ark in this version is round. The newly decoded cuneiform tells of a divinely sent flood and a sole survivor on an ark, who takes all the animals on board to preserve them.
(CNN) - That faint humming sound you’ve heard recently is the scholarly world of the Bible and archaeology abuzz over the discovery of the oldest known Mesopotamian version of the famous Flood story.Ī British scholar has found that a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet from what is now Iraq contains a story similar to the biblical account of Noah’s Ark.