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Deluge

The scriptural deluge is regarded by historians and critical exegetes
as a legendary product. "The legend of a universal deluge is in itself
a myth and cannot be anything else." ^[4](1) It is "most nakedly and
unreservedly mythological."

The tradition of a universal deluge is told by all ancient
civilizations, and also by races that never reached the ability to
express themselves in the written symbols of a language. It is found
all over the world, on all continents, on the islands of the Pacific
and Atlantic, everywhere. Usually it is explained as a local
experience carried from race to race by word of mouth. The work of
collating such material has repeatedly been done, and it would only
fatigue the reader were I to repeat these stories as told in all parts
of the world, even in places never visited by missionaries.^[5](2)

The rest of the collected traditions are also not identical in detail,
and are sometimes very different in their setting from the Noah story,
but all agree that the earth was covered to the mountain tops by the
water of the deluge coming from above, and that only a few human
beings escaped death in the flood. The stories are often accompanied
by details about a simultaneous cleavage of the earth.^[6](3)

In pre-Columbian America the story of a universal flood was very
persistent; the first world-age was called Atonatiuh, or the age that
was brought to its end by a universal deluge. This is written and
illustrated in the ancient codices of the Mexicans and was narrated to
the Spaniards who came to the New Continent.^[7](4) The natives of
Australia, Polynesia, and Tasmania, discovered in the seventeenth
century, related almost identical traditions.^[8](5)

Clay tablets with inscriptions concerning the early ages and the
deluge were found in Mesopotamia. Their similarity to the biblical
account, and to the story of the Chaldean priest Berosus^[9](6) who
lived in the Hellenistic age, caused a great sensation at the end of
the last century and the beginning of the current one. On this
sensational discovery was based the sensational pamphlet Babel und
Bibel by Friedrich Delitsch (1902) who tried to show in it that the
Hebrews had simply borrowed this story, along with many others, from
the Babylonian store of legends.

But if here and there the story of the flood could be said to have
been borrowed by the scriptural writer from the Babylonians, and by
some natives from the missionaries, in other cases no such explanation
could be offered. The indigenous character of the stories in many
regions of the world makes the borrowing theory seem very fragile.

Geologists see vestiges of diluvial rains all over the world;
folklorists hear the story of a universal flood wherever folklore is
collected; historians read of a universal flood in American
manuscripts, in Babylonian clay tablets and in the annals of
practically all cultured peoples. But the climatologists make it very
clear that even should the entire water content of the atmosphere pour
down as rain, the resulting flood could not have covered even the
lowland slopes, far less the peaks of the mountains, as all accounts
insist that this deluge did.

References

1. A. Loisy, Les mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la
genese (Paris, 1901).
2. R. Andree, Die Flutsagen (1891); Sir J.G. Frazer, Folk-lore in the
Old Testament (London, 1918); M. Winternitz, Die Flutsagen des
Alterthums und des Natuervoelker
3. E.g., the Malaya story in Andree, Die Flutsagen, p. 29. s
4. [Cf. the Vatican Codex, first published by Humboldt, and the
accounts of Ixtlilxochitl and Veytia among others.]
5. [Cf. A. C. Caillot, Mythes, legendes, et traditions des
Polynesiens (Paris, 1914); H. H. Howorth, The Mammoth and the
Flood (London, 1887), pp. 455ff.]
6. Berosus' story of the Deluge is quoted in Eusebius' Praeparatio
Evangelica Bk. IX, ch. 12, and in Cyril's Contra Julianum, Bk. I.
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