"The Ark Before Noah"

Cultures around the world are awash with "great flood" myths.  Wikipedia has a list of flood myths that includes too many for me to count today.  It takes no leap of imagination to assume that ancient peoples traversing mountains and seeing fossilized obvious seashells on mountains used basic logic to accept that in ancient times a huge flood must have covered the world.

I have previous reviewed a very scholarly book discussing in details the great floods after the ice age and the submersion of Doggerland in the North Sea and Sundaland in southeast Asia.  Also related is my old post on The Black Sea Deluge as a source of ancient flood myths.

This post is about another book, published in 2014 (Doubleday) and recommended to me by a reader many years ago.  The author has the awesome title of "Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures" at the British Museum.  He is the person in charge of the gazillion cuneiform tablets stored at the museum, and he can read those nicks in the clay the way that I can read cursive.  This book focuses on an "ark tablet" in the museum holdings that presents in detail a myth of a world flood and the survival of mankind thanks to a man who builds an ark.   Here is the tablet (more pix at the link):

And here are some of my excerpts and thoughts after browsing the book...

Modern scholars generally agree that the ark described in Babylonian times was constructed of reeds (which are huge and plentiful in Mesopotamian wetlands).  Jewish scholars recognize that the word translated into the Hebrew Bible as "gopher wood" if pronounced slightly differently would also mean "reeds."

While I was pondering this problem, I was simultaneously reading about ancient Babylonian versions of the flood story. Of course, there are different approaches regarding how to reconcile these with the Torah's account, which are not our concern here. But I suddenly realized that they describe the ark as being made of reeds - which, in Hebrew, is kannim, the very word that our verse uses, albeit vocalized differently. And this was apparently the standard technique used for creating boats in ancient Mesopotamia - they were made of reeds, sometimes hybridized with a wooden frame for greater strength. (Note that this technique would have been unknown to later generations in other parts of the world, where boats were made exclusively from wood.)

It is also clear from three different cuneiform flood tablets that the ark was round like a circle (p 129).  And see this 2012 post.

There are two Hebrew sources for the description of the flood ("J" and "P").  The "J" says forty days of rain and everything dies.  The "P" source says flood rose for 150 days to cover  mountains, then takes 150 days to go down.  (217)

The kingdom of Judea was conquered in battle by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon in 597 BC, and the people of Jerusalem were taken into exile in Babylon -"all the officers and fighting men, and all the skilled workers and artisans - a total of ten thousand.  Only the poorest people of the land were left."  Those Judeans were then incorporated into Babylonian society, where they would have learned of the flood story. (227).  They would have seen the immense Tower (ziggurat) of Babel - seventy meters in height, way more than anything in Jerusalem.  It is incorporated into the 11th chapter of Genesis.

It is during this time of exile that two important shifts occur (pp 240s).  The Judeans incorporate the ark story into their own heritage, because all the intelligent young men of the society are being educated in Babel.  Conversely the Babylonian society, famously polytheistic, begins to view the gods in a more monotheistic arrangement (in accordance with the strictly monotheistic Jews).  The second commandment of the Judean Hebrew bible states "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" indicates a recognition of the existence of other gods.  But the Babylonians conversely start blending their various "gods" into Marduk - previously the "king of the gods" but now viewed as a single god with multiple manifestations:

The Judeans life in exile in Babylon is arguably the reason for their creation of their bible, nicely delineated on page 247:

"In the years before Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BC the Judeans certainly did more than sit about and weep.  They adjusted and settled.  In time they became Mesopotamian citizens.  By the time Cyrus arrived by no means all of Nebuchadnezzar's displaced persons wanted to go "home" to Jerusalem.  However, the Judeans' ancient and somewhat ramshackle religious identity had meanwhile been crystallising into permanence due to their encyclopaedia of history, custom, instruction and wisdom.  They became literally the people of the book.  From this angle it can be argued that the Babylonian Exile, far from being the disaster it is usually judged, was ultimately the process that forged what became modern Judaism."

And that eventually led to the formation of Christianity six centuries later.  A fascinating idea.

There is more in the book than the ark story, including some discussion of the Babylonian Map of the World (the earliest known map of the world):

Inside the inner circle are the great rivers and the major cities.  They are surrounded by a great sea, beyond which are huge mountains.  The resemblance to the famous T and O map of the world is compellling.

I'm going to stop here.  If you are interested, the book should be in most public library systems.  It's TMI regarding cuneiform lettering and texts, but fascinating in its overall scope.  I highly recommend Chapter 11 (excerpted at length above) and Chapter 14 ("Conclusions: Stories and Shapes") for the TL;DR readers.