Genesis flood narrative

The Genesis flood narrative (chapters 6–9 of the Book of Genesis) is a Hebrew flood myth. It tells of God's decision to return the universe to its pre-creation state of watery chaos and remake it through the microcosm of Noah's Ark.

The Book of Genesis was probably composed around the 5th century BCE; although some scholars believe that primeval history (chapters 1–11), including the flood narrative, may have been composed and added as late as the 3rd century BCE. It draws on two sources, called the Priestly source and the non-Priestly or Yahwist, and although many of its details are contradictory, the story forms a unified whole.

A global flood as described in this myth is inconsistent with the physical findings of geology, archeology, paleontology, and the global distribution of species.^{[page needed][page needed]} A branch of creationism known as flood geology is a pseudoscientific attempt to argue that such a global flood actually occurred. Some Christians have preferred to interpret the narrative as describing a local flood instead of a global event. Still others prefer to interpret the narrative as allegorical rather than historical.

The story of the flood occurs in chapters 6–9 of the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. Ten generations after the creation of Adam, God saw that the earth was corrupt and filled with violence, and he decided to destroy what he had created. But God found one righteous man, Noah, and to him he confided his intention: "I am about to bring on the Flood ... to eliminate everywhere all flesh in which there is the breath of life ... ." So God instructed him to build an ark (in Hebrew, a chest or box), and Noah entered the Ark in his six hundredth year [of life], and on the 17th day of the second month of that year "the fountains of the Great Deep burst apart and the floodgates of heaven broke open" and rain fell for forty days and forty nights until the highest mountains were covered to a depth of 15 cubits, and all life perished except Noah and those with him in the Ark. After 150 days, "God remembered Noah ... and the waters subsided" until the Ark rested on the mountains of Ararat, and on the 27th day of the second month of Noah's six hundred and first year the earth was dry. Then Noah built an altar and made a sacrifice, and God made a covenant with Noah that man would be allowed to eat every living thing but not its blood, and that God would never again destroy all life by a flood.

The consensus of modern scholars is that Genesis was composed around the 5th century BCE, but as the first eleven chapters show little relationship to the rest of the book, some scholars believe that this section (the so-called primeval history) may have been composed as late as the 3rd century BCE.

It is generally agreed that the history draws on two sources, one called the Priestly source, the other non-Priestly or Yahwist, and their interweaving is evidenced in the doublets (i.e., repetitions) contained within the final story. Many of these are contradictory, such as how long the flood lasted (40 days according to Genesis 7:17, 150 according to 7:24), how many animals were to be taken aboard the ark (one pair of each in 6:19, one pair of the unclean animals and seven pairs of the clean in 7:2), and whether Noah released a raven which "went to and fro until the waters were dried up" or a dove which on the third occasion "did not return to him again," or possibly both. But despite this disagreement on details the story forms a unified whole (some scholars see in it a "chiasm", a literary structure in which the first item matches the last, the second the second-last, and so on), and many efforts have been made to explain this unity, including attempts to identify which of the two sources was earlier and therefore influenced the other. Some scholars have even questioned whether the story is actually based on two different sources, noting that some of the doublets (such as the dove and raven) are not actually contradictory and in fact appear as linked motifs in other biblical and non-biblical sources, that the method of doublets is inconsistently applied in that the alleged sources themselves contain doublets, and that the theory assumes a redactor who combined the sources inconsistently (in some cases extensively editing together the text and in some cases faithfully preserving contradictory versions) for unclear reasons. Similarly, the complete Genesis flood story matches the parallel Gilgamesh flood story in a way which neither of the proposed biblical sources does.

The following table compares the proposed Yahwist and Priestly sources. Each provides a complete story-line, with introductions and conclusions, reasons for the flood, and theologies.

Scholars believe that the flood myth originated in Mesopotamia during the Old Babylonian Period (c. 1880–1595 BCE) and reached Syro-Palestine in the latter half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Extant texts show three distinct versions, the Sumerian Epic of Ziusudra, (the oldest, found in very fragmentary form on a single tablet dating from about 1600 BCE, although the story itself is older), and as episodes in two Akkadian language epics, the Atrahasis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The name of the hero, according to the version concerned, was Ziusudra, Atrahasis, or Utnapishtim, all of which are variations of each other, and it is just possible that an abbreviation of Utnapishtim/Utna'ishtim as "na'ish" was pronounced "Noah" in Palestine.