The Sumerian Roots Of the Noah Story

http://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium-1.570484

The fact of the matter is that the story of Noah found in the Bible has its roots in Sumerian and Babylonian mythos. This may upset some Christians, but it doesn't bother me much at all. That is the beauty of not being a fundamentalist: one doesn't close one's mind to scientific discovery nor does one throw the Bible baby out with the certainty bathwater. I can hold fast to the truth found at the core of the Bible without needing every single detail to be true.

The simple fact of the matter is that the Biblical writer was led to rework this taken-for-granted story in a way that tells us a lot about the nature of God. If we compare the Biblical story to the original Sumerian texts then we can see in the changes that were made, a message about the nature of God. The Sumerian texts help us realize the degree to which the return of the waters was not just 'a flood' but a kind of attack by uncreation. The near-eastern identification of water with chaos or formlessness is made all the clearer by grasping the Sumerian versions of the story, and so we see in the Genesis story the way in which the evil of the earth, the sins of human beings, give the waters of chaos a kind of 'foothold' back in the world. God removes His grace, His protection, and the world is un-created.

The world in the Bible is formed out of a giant ocean of chaos called Formless or Void. The Noah story is not a story of God somehow 'making it rain' but rather the story of God allowing that ocean to reclaim the territory it once held. This is made all the more clearer by looking at the Sumerian roots. In fact, without that analysis the real message of the story may be lost. That the Hebrews moved the seat of the action to Yahweh rather than Marduk or some other pagan deity is simply a statement about who and what God really is: that God is one and that God is the God that the Hebrews encountered at Sinai.

This is just one example, and I could go on and on about how examination of these original texts, and they ways in which they were changed as they entered the Biblical record, has revelatory power. You get a clear view of what God is trying to say in the text of the Bible, by comparing the two. The message is the story, and the truth is in the telling, the facts of the story are not the revelation, the story itself is the revelation. For more on all this, I highly recommend Bernard Batto's book SLAYING THE DRAGON.