The great Flood: the story from the Bible

The  'flood tablet' from 

the Epic of Gilhameš (British Museum)

The Great Flood: mythological story about a great destruction that once befell the earth. There are several variants; the Biblical version is the most famous. The possibility that there is a historical event behind the story (a local flood in southern Babylonia in the twenty-eighth century BCE) can not be excluded.

Introduction

The famous story about the Great Flood is best known from the Bible (Genesis 6-9). It has always been known that there were similar stories from Greece and Rome (like the ones by Apollodorus, Ovid, and Hyginus), but in the nineteenth century, several texts from ancient Iraq were added. The first discovery was Tablet XI of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgameš (in 1872), the second the Sumerian original, now called the Eridu Genesis (1914), and the third the Epic of Atrahasis (1956). It is now clear that the Biblical account stays close to a Babylonian model.

The antediluvian world

Although various ancient traditions refer to a lost antediluvian world, the one that stands out is the tradition in the early chapters of Genesis, because of its geographical detail, its monotheism (which has been shown to predate polytheism) and its historical (rather than epic) style of narration. These chapters describe a world very different from our own, either because the world really was different or because a later pre-scientific culture speculated about it in error. So what source of information did they draw upon?

Cartea lui Enoch

În secolul trecut, datorită unor împrejurări exceptionale, interesul pentru studiile de cercetare în ceea ce priveşte cunoaşterea şi aprofundarea tuturor cărţilor Sfintei Scripturi a crescut din ce in ce mai mult.

Descoperirea celor mai vechi manuscrise biblice (manuscrisele de la Marea Moarta), caracterizată drept cea mai importantă şi preţioasă descoperire ce s-a făcut până acum în domeniul studiilor biblice, a generat şi impulsionat cercetări şi studii ample şi speciale, mai ales în ceea ce priveşte cărţile Vechiului Testament.