Flood of Noah

The Genesis flood narrative (chapters 6–9 in the Book of Genesis) is the Hebrew version of the universal flood myth.. The story tells of God's decision to return the Earth to its pre-creation state of watery chaos and then remake it in a reversal of creation.

The flood is part of what scholars call the Primeval history, the first 11 chapters of Genesis. These chapters, fable-like and legendary, form a preface to the patriarchal narratives which follow but show little relationship to them. For example, the names of its characters and its geography - Adam ("Man") and Eve ("Life"), the Land of Nod ("Wandering"), and so on - are symbolic rather than real, and much of the narratives consist of lists of "firsts" - the first murder, the first wine, the first empire-builder. Most notably, almost none of the persons, places and stories in it are ever mentioned anywhere else in the Bible. This has led scholars to suppose that the History forms a late composition attached to Genesis to serve as an introduction. Just how late is a subject for debate: at one extreme are those who see it as a product of the Hellenistic period, in which case it cannot be earlier than the first decades of the 4th century BCE; on the other hand the Yahwist source has been dated by others, notably John Van Seters, to the exilic pre-Persian period (the 6th century BCE) precisely because the Primeval History contains so much Babylonian influence in the form of myth.

The flood narrative is made up of two stories woven together. As a result many details 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 on board 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. 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.

The flood myth originated in Mesopotamia The Mesopotamian story has three distinct versions, the Sumerian Epic of Ziasudra, and as episodes in two works in Akkadian (the language of Babylon), the Atrahasis Epic and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The oldest written text is the Ziasudra epic, dating from about 1600 BCE,

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