Texts in conversation

Compare Eridu Genesis V and Genesis 7:10

Ancient Near East, Sumerian · Hebrew Bible

Summary

In Eridu Genesis, the storm lasts seven days and nights, while in Genesis seven days pass before the flood begins and rain then falls for forty days and nights.

Passages

Eridu Genesis V

Ancient Near East, Sumerian · The Sumerian Deluge

1 [Section missing] All the immensely powerful windstorms came together, 2 The rainstorm [...] raged with them. 3 When, for seven days and seven nights, 4 the rainstorm had raged across the land, 5 the windstorms had carried away the huge boat on the vast waters, 6 Shamash came out again, spreading light over heaven and earth. 7 Ziugiddu opened a window in the huge boat, 8 He let (or: you let) the light of the hero Shamash enter the inside of the huge boat. 9 Ziugiddu, the king, bowed down in front of Shamash, 10 The king sacrificed an ox and slaughtered a sheep.

1600 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in the Eridu Genesis

Genesis 7:10

Hebrew Bible

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.

750–400 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Genesis

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 ..."

David M. Carr, The Formation of Genesis 1–11: Biblical and Other Precursors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 153–154.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

The Flood and the Return of Sunlight

The Survivor Offers a Sacrifice

Eridu Genesis6 columns

Compare Eridu Genesis V and Genesis 7:10

Summary

Passages

Eridu Genesis V

Genesis 7:10

References

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