Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/281



and transform in such a manner the most uncongenial and repugnant features" of the pagan myth (ib.); and, further, that "the Flood-story of Genesis retains to this day the power to waken the conscience of the world, and was written by the biblical narrator with this pædagogic and ethical purpose" (ATLO$2$, p. 252).

4. Of other ancient legends in which some traces of the Chaldean influence may be suspected, only a very brief account can here be given. The Indian story, to which there is a single allusion in the Vedas, is first fully recorded in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa, i. 8. 1-10. It relates how Manu, the first man, found one day in the water with which he performed his morning ablution a small fish, which begged him to take care of it till it should attain its full growth, and then put it in the sea. Manu did so, and in gratitude for its deliverance the fish warned him of the year in which the Flood would come, promising, if he would build a ship, to return at the appointed time and save him. When the Flood came the fish appeared with it; Manu attached the cable of his ship to the fish's horn, and was thus towed to the mountain of the north, where he landed, and whence he gradually descended as the waters fell. In a year's time a woman came to him, announcing herself as his daughter, produced from the offerings he had cast into the water; and from this pair the human race sprang. In a later form of the tradition (Mahābhārata, iii. 187. 2 ff.), the Babylonian affinities are somewhat more obvious; but even in the oldest version they are not altogether negligible, especially when we remember that the fish (which in the Mahābhārata is an incarnation of Brahma) was the symbol of the god Ea. —The Greeks had several Flood-legends, of which the most widely diffused was that of Deukalion, best known from the account of Apollodorus (i. 7. 2 ff.). Zeus, resolved to destroy the brazen race, sends a heavy rain, which floods the greater part of Greece, and drowns all men except a few who escape to the mountain tops. But Deukalion, on the advice of his father Prometheus, had prepared a chest, loaded it with provisions, and taken refuge in it with his wife Pyrrha. After 9 days and nights they land on Parnassus; Deukalion sacrifices to Zeus and prays for a new race of men: these are produced from stones which he and his wife, at the command of the god, throw over their shoulders. The incident of the ark seems here incongruous, since other human beings were saved without it. It is perhaps an