Eridu Genesis
The Sumerian DelugeNow ... What I have to say to you ... All the evil winds, all stormy winds gathered into one and with them, them, the Flood was sweeping over the cities of the half-bushel baskets, for seven days and seven nights. After the flood had swept over the country, after the evil wind had tossed the big boat about on the great waters, the sun came out spreading light over heaven and earth. Ziusudras sacrifice Ziusudra then drilled an opening in the big boat and the gallant Utu sent his light into the interior of the big boat. Ziusudra, being the king, stepped up before Utu kissing the ground before him. The king was butchering oxen, was being lavish with the sheep, barley cakes, crescents together with ...
Genesis 7:10
7 Noah entered the ark along with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives because of the floodwaters. 8 Pairs of clean animals, of unclean animals, of birds, and of everything that creeps along the ground, 9 male and female, came into the ark to Noah, just as God had commanded him. 10 And after seven days the floodwaters engulfed the earth. 11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month—on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And the rain fell on the earth 40 days and 40 nights.
Notes and References
"... This whole biblical description of a world-destroying flood represents a foreign element in Israelite tradition. The Levantine highlands in which Israel was situated are relatively arid and do not experience sustained, overwhelming floods. Rather, such floods are more typical of the river plains in Mesopotamia, especially in the wake of snowmelts in the mountain headlands of the Tigris and Euphrates in Turkey and Iran. It was in this Mesopotamian context, during the gradual collapse of the UR III order, that we see the development of several Mesopotamian narratives about the flood and the increasingly frequent use of the flood as the narrative backdrop for cosmological etiologies of Mesopotamian civilization. The three main Mesopotamian literary texts with narratives about the flood are the Atrahasis epic, the Sumerian Flood narrative (aka “Eridu Genesis,”), and the adaptation of a version of Atrahasis in the eleventh tablet of the standard edition of the Gilgamesh epic ... These stories, especially the versions of the Atrahasis flood story (including the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh), share an overall framework. The non-P flood narrative features a number of connections to these Mesopotamian flood stories, even as it diverges in crucial respects as well. To be sure, the non- P flood story is no longer a drama of interaction between gods, and there is no evidence that it ever featured several significant features of the Mesopotamian tradition, such as the address to the elders, convening of the people to construct the ark, or a correlate to the goddess memorializing the days of the flood. Nevertheless, the non- P flood story does follow a similar trajectory of movement in the Mesopotamian flood narratives ..."
Carr, David McLain The Formation of Genesis 1-11: Biblical and Other Precursors (pp. 153-154) Oxford University Press, 2020