Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/67

Rh of the birds is mentioned. At last the ship (as it is called) grounded &quot;on a certain mountain,&quot; where Xisuthrus erected an altar and sacrificed ; after which both he and his companions disappeared cf. the &quot; translation &quot; of Enoch]. The duration of the deluge is not stated, and its cause is left to be inferred from the special commendation of Xisuthrus for his piety. Berosus has evidently drawn from cuneiform sources, but those sources have not yet been discovered. Our most valuable authority for the Babylonian deluge-story is the portion of the llth lay of the great mythological epic, discovered by Mr George Smith. It came from the library of King Assurbanipal, and dates from about 660 B.C., but the Accadian original from which it was translated may well (says the cautious Assyriologue, Dr Schrader) have been composed between lOOOand 2000 B.C., while the myths the in selves will of course be much older. The hero of the deluge bears the name of Tam-zi (&quot; the sun of life, &quot; cf. Tammuz), for so, with Mr Sayce, the signs should most probably be read. He is called the son of Ubara-tutu, an Accadian name meaning &quot; the splendour of sunset &quot; (Lenormant, Sayce). This version of the story differs in several respects from that of Berosus. The deity who warns Tamzi is Hea (god of know ledge and of the waters), who orders him to build a ship, and to put into it his household and his wealth and the beasts of the fieli. All this is related by Tamzi to the (solar) hero &quot; Izdabar.&quot; He tells how he coated the ship within and without with bitumen (cf. Gen. vi. 14), how he intrusted all to a &quot; seaman,&quot; how Samas, the sun-god, and other gods (Hea is not now mentioned) sent rain, and how the rain-flood &quot; destroyed all life from the face of the earth.&quot; (Why the deluge was sent is a little uncertain, owing to the mutilated condition of the tablets.) On the seventh day there was a calm, and the ship stranded on the mountain Nizir. Another seven days, and Tamzi let out &quot; a dove &quot; (?), than a swallow, both of which returned, and a raven which did not return. Then he left the ship and made a libation ; Mr Smith s &quot; altar &quot; is uncertain. Finally, Hea intercedes with Bal that there be no second deluge, after which &quot; Tamzi and his wife, and the people, were carried away to be like the gods.&quot; Such are the leading authentic features of the Babylonian narrative, or rather narratives, for its inconsistencies and repetitions are such as to force upon us the hypothesis that two documents originally existed, which have besn welded together by an editor.

II. The Jewish narrative, like the Babylonian, has been thought to consist of two documents, an Elohistic and a Yahvistic, which have been connected by an editor. They appear to differ in various details, e.g., in the duration of the flood (the Elohist extends it to a whole solar year), and in the description of the introduction of the animals into the ark (the Elohist alludes to the legal distinction between clean and unclean). But they have certainly the same origin, for they entirely coincide in the main outlines (e.g., in ascribing the flood to the depravity of mankind, in the mode of Noah s rescue, and in the promise that the catastrophe should not recur), and even in not a few ex pressions, among which are the names for the flood and the ark. They agree, further, in this important point, that some expressions point to a universal deluge, others to one which only affected a level inland region like that of Mesopotamia. We naturally ask, therefore, are the former involuntary exaggerations ? or &quot; survivals &quot; of a primeval myth 1 Both views are held by respectable critics ; but the latter is more favoured by analogy and by the remark able parallelism between both the biblical narratives (especially the Yahvistic) and the Babylonian. These two the Babylonian and the Jewish are the only fully developed deluge-stories told by any of the Semitic nations. In. what relation, then, do they stand to each other 1 Was the Babylonian borrowed from the Jewish (or from some earlier form of the story, of which the Jewish is an abridgment), or vice versa ? On the ono hand, the Babylonian story as a whole perhaps produces an impression of greater originality than the Jewish ; for (not to mention other points) in the former the order in which the birds are sent out is much more natural. On the other, the &quot;ark,&quot; or rather &quot;chest,&quot; of the Jewish narrative sounds more archaic than the &quot; ship &quot; of the Babylonian. The word for &quot; deluge &quot; in Genesis is also evidently archaic, as appears from the facts that it only occurs once again (Psalm xxix. 3), and that the editor in Genesis needed to explain it by the word &quot;water&quot; (Gen. vi. 17, &quot;the flood, viz., water&quot;). It is possible, therefore, to hold that the Jewish story is a distinct offshoot of a common Semitic tradition. Bolder critics will maintain that the account in Genesis must be taken in connection with the other narratives which can be explained by, and are therefore possibly dependent upon, parallel Babylonian narratives. (See BABYLONIA and COSMOGONY). They will urge that &quot; chest &quot; may have been substituted for &quot; ship &quot; to avoid an anachronism, mankind in Noah s time not having perhaps reached the sea ; and that the archaic word for &quot; deluge &quot; does not prove the antiquity of a developed deluge-story ; also that there are traces in Genesis (see iv. 17-24, vi. 1-3) of another and presumably native Hebrew view, according to which the moral degenera tion of man was explained without a deluge. The question is a large one, but may perhaps be reduced to this Can the Yahvistic narrative in Genesis be safely broken up into several ] There is some evidence, both internal and (see the prophetic references to Genesis) external to show that it can, but it would be premature in this place to pro nounce whether the evidence is sufficient. It will hardly be possible, however, to derive the Yahvistic flood-story from Babylonia, and not the Elohistic, as has been suggested ; for though the former is nearest to the Babylonian story (e.g., it ascribes the flood entirely to a rain-storm, whereas the latter introduces also the waters below the firmament), the latter agrees with it in all essential points, and even in the minor point of the bitumen. Let it be remarked in pass ing that, even if the material of the biblical narratives be taken from the Babylonian, the former have received a peculiar and original stamp ; both by their monotheism and by the moral significance so emphatically given to the catas trophe, just as by the addition of the lovely story of the rainbow the Elohist has produced a conclusion far superior, artistically speaking, to that of his Babylonian prede cessor.

III. Another of the great countries by which the Israelites might have been influenced was Egypt ; but in this, even more than in a former, case a direct Egyptian influence is out of the question. The deluge- story was entirely unknown in the Nile-valley. It is commonly said, but erroneously, that this was owing to the absence of sudden catastrophes of the nature of an in undation. But if the terrestrial deluge is really (see below) only a transformation of the celestial, there is no reason why the story should not have grown up in Egypt, if the imagination of its inhabitants had invited such a develop ment ; for the germs of the deluge-story certainly existed in Egypt. The Book of the Dead constantly refers to the sun-god, Ra, as voyaging in a boat on the celestial ocean ; and a story in an inscription of the archaic period (Seti I.) embodies a conception altogether analogous to that of the narrative in Genesis. According to this myth which is described by M. Naville Ra, the creator, being disgusted with the insolence of mankind, resolves to exterminate them. The massacre causes human blood to flow to Heliopolis, 