Noahs Flood

In the accidental discovery of Utnapishtim's "Story of the Flood," scholars were able to translate this work and find that it has a very close resemblance to the biblical story of Noah and the Great Flood. They are both similar and different in a number of ways.

One way they are obviously similar is that they each have a primary character that is given the job of building a boat so that God (or God's) can destroy every living thing on it. Another similar trait both stories have is the existence of a bird to see whether or not land is nearby.

Although both stories have the same central idea, they are very much different in many distinct ways. First of all, in Gilgamesh, the reason the God's wanted to destroy existence is because the human race was keeping the God's up at night while in the Hebrew version it is because human's have become corrupt and sinful in their ways. Also the length of time of the floods is different because it lasts for 40 days and 40 nights in the biblical version while only 7 days and nights in Gilgamesh. The biblical version gives exact dimensions of the boat while Gilgamesh is only a rough sketch and in the biblical version Noah is assigned the task of gathering a male and female of every animal while there was nothing on this subject in regards to Gilgamesh.

This discovery, I believe, is a very interesting one because now the biblical story no longer has the same effect because another story is written almost just like it. Both stories are very powerful and definitely portray a cataclysmic event that happened to the ancient world