Genesis Flood of the Christian Bible and the Flood of Gilgamesh :: Epic of Gilgamesh

The Flood of Noah and the Flood of Gilgamesh The Epic of Gilgamesh has been of interest to Christians ever since its discovery in the mid-nineteenth century in the ruins of the great library at Nineveh, with its account of a universal runoff with significant parallels to the Flood of Noahs day.1, 2 The rest of the Epic, which employments lynchpin to possibly third millennium B.C., contains little of value for Christians, since it concerns typical polytheistic myths associated with the pagan peoples of the m. However, some Christians have studied the ideas of creation and the afterlife presented in the Epic. Even secular scholars have recognized the parallels between the Babylonian, Phoenician, and Hebrew accounts, although non all are willing to label the connections as anything more than share mythology.3 There have been numerous flood stories identified from ancient sources divide around the world.4 The stories that were discovered on cuneiform tablets, which comprise some of the soonest surviving writing, have obvious similarities. Cuneiform writing was invented by the Sumerians and carried on by the Akkadians. Babylonian and Assyrian are two dialects of the Akkadian, and both contain a flood account. While there are differences between the original Sumerian and later Babylonian and Assyrian flood accounts, many of the similarities are strikingly pen up to the Genesis flood account.5 The Babylonian account is the most intact, with only vii of 205 lines missing.6 It was also the first discovered, making it the most studied of the early flood accounts. The Epic of Gilgamesh is contained on twelve large tablets, and since the original discovery, it has been found on others, as well as having been translated into other early languages.7 The actual tablets date corroborate to around 650 B.C. and are obviously not originals since fragments of the flood invention have been found on tablets dated around 2,000 B.C.8 Linguistic experts rely that the stor y was composed well before 2,000 B.C. compiled from material that was much sr. than that date.9 The Sumerian cuneiform writing has been estimated to go as far back as 3,300 B.C.10 The Story The Epic was composed in the form of a poem. The main figure is Gilgamesh, who actually may have been an historical person. The Sumerian King List shows Gilgamesh in the first dynasty of Uruk reigning for 126 years.11 This length of time is not a problem when compared with the age of the pre-flood patriarchs of the Bible.