101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

xxii 101 Myths of the Bible
the biblical account of Noah, is such an unusually detailed coincidence that one can’t
help but conclude that the two stories shared a common source.
However, the two stories also have many differences. The duration of the flood is
shorter in the Assyrian story, the ark’s dimensions differ, the number of people and animals
brought on the boat are significantly inconsistent, the boats do not land on the
same mountain, the heroes have different names, and the god who sends the flood is
not the same god who tells Utnapishtim to build an ark. Most importantly, though,
the biblical text doesn’t borrow any of the narrative passages of the Assyrian.
So, on the one hand we have a similarity of structure that seems to be beyond coincidence
and on the other we have a wide variation in story details that seem so far apart
that they appear to be from different sources altogether. Nevertheless, the discovery
touched off a frenzy of Assyriological studies directed at biblical comparisons. Over
time, other versions of the same flood story were found in other Mesopotamian texts
from other societies, some predating the biblical version. And, in one more remarkable
coincidence, a fourth century B.C. king list, which was a corruption of an earlier
Sumerian (early Mesopotamian) king list dating to about 2000 B.C., placed the worldwide
flood in the reign of the tenth king to rule over humanity, while the biblical flood
had occurred in the tenth generation after Creation.
Do the Mesopotamian flood stories, written down before the biblical account, corroborate
the biblical claim that there was a worldwide flood or do they show that biblical
authors borrowed and adapted pre-existing myths and legends for their own
purposes? This is a question that has to be raised over and over with other portions of
the Bible as we continue to discover other ancient literature with parallel stories.
Biblical Footnotes
While many people believe that the Bible was divinely inspired, several biblical
authors cite specific reference works that they relied upon in composing their work
and many also quote passages from other books of the Bible. In effect, these references
would be the equivalent of footnotes. Unfortunately, we have not yet found copies of
the non-biblical books cited, so we are unable to evaluate the quality of the research or
the reliability of the sources. A partial list of sources cited by biblical authors include: