Review: The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

by Irving Finkel

Before 1872 everyone believed that the story of Noah and the Ark was unique to the Bible, a distinctive part of the story of the Jewish nation. That assumption crumbled one day when an assistant in the British Museum discovered a Babylonian version of the story from the city of Nineveh written on a clay tablet in wedge-shaped cuneiform, a full one thousand years older than the Bible version. It contained all the elements of the Genesis story: displeased by humans, the gods decide to drown everyone, acquiting only one man and his family from the deluge, enjoining him to build a mega-boat and fill it with plant seeds and a breeding pair of every species of animal. The museum assistant, overcome in his eureka moment, astonished his colleagues by running around the room and tearing off his clothes. During the next 113 years more small fragments of the Babylonian flood story were unearthed, and scholars peered at them, compared versions of the story, argued, and published their papers. In 1985 the world of ark studies was rocked again when a collector showed a cuneiform tablet to curator Irving Finkel at the British Museum. Not only did this tablet contain another thrilling version of the earliest Flood Story, but it also included detailed instructions for building an ark. Finkel dubbed it the Ark Tablet.

Rather than announcing his discovery modestly to the likes of Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie, Finkel wrote The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood for the general public as well as Assyriologists. It is written in such a pleasant, conversational style, always on the verge of humour or an outbreak boyish enthusiasm, that the sometimes arcane subject matter digests easily. The opening chapters on the rigors of learning cuneiform are so engaging (“Fellow students reading history or physics seemed to me frankly to be on a cushy ride”), and the pleasures of Babylonian scholarship are made so vivid that you wonder why you didn’t spend your life, too, squinting at clay tablets rather than doing other things.

Every possible implication is squeezed out of the Ark Tablet in The Ark Before Noah. All the cuneiform flood stories are scrutinized and compared, the subtlest contexts are unearthed, and words are held up to the light like diamonds. For each version of the story Finkel examines the shape and size of the ark, how it would have been built, what creatures were believed to have gone in to it, where it was thought to have landed. The boat in the earliest Sumerian story, for example, was shaped like a oversized reed boat from the marshes of southern Iraq, long and narrow, while in the later Ark Tablet the boat of Old Babylonian times was described as circular, a gigantic, basket-like coracle made of coiled rope smeared with bitumen for waterproofing. The ark in the Epic of Gilgamesh was cubic, it became oblong in the Bible and built of planks and nails in the Koran.

After proving that the Hebrew Bible story must have derived from its cuneiform predecessors, Finkel offers a fresh narrative of how the borrowing must have occurred. It happened, he says, during the Babylonian Exile, after Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Jerusalem, capital of the kingdom of Judah, in 587 B.C. and carried off every important or skilled Judaean to Babylon. For about 70 years the deportees  lived in the new land not as slaves but as foreign workers, some of them assimilating. With the loss of Jerusalem and the temple, and with all the best people living within a much more powerful civilization, Judaean identity was in danger of disappearing. There was even the threat of rivalry in Babylonian religion, which was moving toward a kind of monotheism. One way to help save Judaean  identity would be to compile a book of sacred texts. Part of that project would include a national history, which could be traced back through existing Judaean and Israelite annals; and, indeed, passages in Kings and Chronicles list several such sources. But what if there was a desire to go back even further? Then it would only be natural, argues Finkel, for the compilers to consult Babylonian texts. The  Book of Daniel tells us that a number of the best and brightest of the Judaeans were taken into the king’s palace and trained in Babylonian language and literature. From the many surviving tablets left behind by Babylonian students we know that the Flood Story was a standard part of the cuneiform curriculum, so there was an easy path of transmission from Babylonian texts to the Hebrew Bible. Incidentally, the  cuneiform curriculum also included the story of an infant named Sargon whose mother set him adrift on the river in a basket from which he was rescued and adopted, as well as the idea that humans in the era before the great flood lived wonderfully long lives, like Bible figures such as Methuselah, Mahalaleel, et al.

The Flood Story was undoubtedly part of an oral tradition long before the invention of writing; however, once cuneiform was developed in Mesopotamia, three separate versions appeared, the oldest, from about 1600 BC, in the Sumerian language, the later two in Akkadian. In the Akkadian Atrahasis Epic junior gods went on strike over their workload, so humans were created as substitute labourers. Unfortunately, they were created without mortality, and their penchant for reproduction increased their numbers inconveniently. This got on the nerves of some senior gods, especially the prickly Enlil, who decided to wipe them out, saying, “The noise of mankind has become too intense for me. With their uproar I am deprived of sleep.” Later Genesis replaced Enlil’s aural sensitivity with moral outrage as God decided to destroy humans because they were wicked, not merely noisy. When the story was taken up by the Koran, another motivation was added, Allah being incensed by unbelief as much as by bad behaviour.

Because the story of Noah, the flood, the ark, and the animals is so important in Judaeo-Christian-Islamic cultures, what is exciting in the world of clay tablets can be exciting to the person in the street. Luckily, the Ark Tablet was discovered by a scholar inclined to reach out past museum walls, someone capable of writing clearly, accessibly and with panache.