The Celestial Code of Scripture by John McHugh

Author:John McHugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
Published: 2021-11-19T16:29:31+00:00

Overview of the Flood Myth

I had misgivings about the scholarly-accepted explanation for the Flood narratives. For me the most incriminating fact was the Flood story’s inception and transmission. Earlier we noted that writing was invented by the Sumerians in circa 3000 BC. Yet the first mention of the Flood originates as a terse, two-sentence statement of fact in a circa 2050 BC text known as the Sumerian King List, where it serves as a temporal marker separating time into two epochs: monarchs who reigned before and after the Flood.2 Intriguingly, the Sumerian King List’s Flood reference is entirely devoid of a storyline, plot, and denouement. Three centuries would pass before Babylonian scholars would compose the oldest, extant Flood story—one that recounts the familiar leitmotifs that appear later in Genesis, in which a pious flood-hero, his extended family, and the seed of all living creatures endure a universal flood in a huge boat—a text modern scholars refer to as The Tale of Atra-Ḫasīs.

Intriguingly, around 1600 BC (about two centuries after the Sumerian language ceased to be spoken as a mother tongue) a Sumerian version of the legend appears. This Sumerian Flood Story does not appear to be a copy of a Sumerian original text but was instead probably inscribed by Akkadian-speaking Babylonians in the dead language (Sumerian) that had been appropriated as their sacred script. According to W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, thematic similarities between the “Sumerian Deluge” and the slightly older Tale of Atra-Ḫasīs Flood story suggest the author of the Sumerian version had utilized Atra-Ḫasīs as a template. Lambert and Millard go on to demonstrate that Mesopotamian versions of the Deluge drama had been disseminated into Syria between 1500 and 1000 BC, and it was during the latter timeframe that the legend was being incorporated into The Epic of Gilgamesh, where it was canonized as tablet XI of that text.

Therefore, the textual evidence indicates that the Sumerians, the people who inhabited the flood-ridden Tigris-Euphrates River valley of southern Mesopotamia since circa 6000 BC, did not compose the earliest accounts of a Deluge. This crucial omission is noted by Sumerian scholar Miguel Civil, who writes:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.