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Flood Legends 

Alan Feuerbacher

Many cultures around the world have Flood legends. Most of them
contain the basic elements that the earth was flooded, and that only a
small number of people were saved. The Society claims that

[dropped 8 boring pages]   

Historians attribute the earliest Flood legends to the Sumerians. The
generally accepted idea is summarized in _In The Beginning_:[[7]256]

Sumeria was a flat land between two large rivers. As is true of any
large river...., unusual rises will bring about flooding
conditions. In a land as flat as Sumeria, it would not take much of
a flood to cover large portions of the entire region.

A particularly bad flood would live on in the memory of later
generations, and particularly bad floods undoubtedly occurred. In
1929, the English archaeologist Sir Charles Woolley reported
finding water-deposited layers as much as ten feet thick in
excavations near the Euphrates, and Sumerian records speak of
events as happening "before the Flood" and "since the Flood." [This
was later dated to about 2800 B.C.]

Naturally, a particularly bad flood would destroy records,
especially in a primitive situation where writing had, at best,
barely come into use. For that reason, events "before the Flood"
would quickly take on a legendary and, very likely, highly
exaggerated nature. The Sumerians listed kings who reigned for tens
of thousands of years before the Flood; they made no such reports
of kings who reigned after the Flood. And, of course, this
reflected itself in the ages given of the antediluvian patriarchs
in the Bible.

The dramatic tale of the Sumerian Flood was included in the epic of
Gilgamesh, which must have been popular all over the ancient world
and which couldnt help but influence the myths of other nations.

.... there is no sign of.... a universal deluge in the third
millennium B.C. Egyptian history, for instance, carries right
through the entire third millennium B.C. without any sign of a
break or any mention of a flood.

On the other hand, if we consider the flatness of the
Tigris-Euphrates valley, and consider the Flood to have been a
local phenomenon of the region, we might well imagine twenty-two
feet to be a sober estimate of the depth to which the elevations of
the region were covered.

Isnt it remarkable that a local flood happened in Sumeria at just
about the time the Bible says there was an earthwide Flood? Its
deposits cover an area of thousands of square miles in the
Tigris-Euphrates valley, but are not evident beyond the valley. If
there was a Flood, why are such deposits not continuous throughout the
earth? Jacquetta Hawkes said in _The First Great
Civilizations_:[[8]257]

.... although silt deposits have been discovered at Ur and several
other Sumerian cities they belong to different dates and it has
proved impossible to establish a single great inundation affecting
the whole land. Presumably floods were a familiar dread that
produced in mens minds the myth of the great flood.

I am well aware of everything the Society has written about the
improbability of the Sumerian flood legend being incorporated into the
Genesis account. The above is presented, not to prove any particular
point of view, but to show that archaeologists and Bible scholars have
a variety of opinions about the Flood legends, and that explanations
other than the Societys are reasonable. Note that what I have said
about the possible spread of the Flood story is very nearly the same
as what the Bible and the Society say that this is the way false
religion spread. The major difference is in whether the Flood was
local or global. The geological evidence Ive presented shows this is
not unreasonable.

Is the fact that the Flood tradition is widespread significant in
itself? Not necessarily. Perhaps at least as widespread as Flood
traditions are creation stories. Often they incorporate the idea that
the earth rests on some large animal, or is supported by a god.
Obviously these are not based on some common observation. Why should
the Flood story be different?

Another fact which escapes the notice of some Bible commentators is
that floods are universal phenomena. As _Legends of the Earth_
explains:[[9]258]

.... the universality of flood traditions can be explained very
easily without requiring a widespread flood of cosmic or any other
origin, if we bear in mind that _floods, plural, are a universal
geologic phenomenon...._ [In a previous chapter we] have seen how
volcano legends of peoples widely separated in time and place have
many features in common. If active volcanoes were found everywhere,
volcano legends no doubt would be so common that someone would look
for a universal eruption as the underlying cause. As it is, active
volcanoes, and with them volcano legends, are restricted to certain
belts on the face of the earth. On the other hand, there is
virtually no part of the globe where there could not at some time
have been a flood potentially dangerous to humans in the vicinity.
A river anywhere can overflow if its waters are rapidly augmented
by heavy rains, or even more suddenly augmented by the bursting of
a natural dam. Even the deserts have their floods, for when the
infrequent rains do fall, they commonly come as cloudbursts and
there is no vegetation to retard run-off. (However, desert dwellers
are too knowing to be caught in one of these very temporary but
incredibly awesome "flash floods.") . . .

At all times up to and including the present, there has been one
source of frightful flooding of coastal areas in all parts of the
world but particularly on all Pacific shores which would be
particularly memorable to those fortunate enough to survive:
tsunamis, or seismic sea waves [commonly referred to in English as
"tidal waves"]. Although by no means universal individually,
tsunamis can and often do wreak havoc in very widely separated
places, within hours. Since tsunamis are important not only as
possible sources of flood legends but also in connection with
matters of paramount importance in the chapters yet to come, a
detailed look at these formidable waves is necessary at this point.

Tsunamis as a rule are associated with submarine earthquakes. They
are generated either directly, if earthquake faulting displaces the
sea floor, or indirectly, by submarine landslides, mudflows, or
slumping triggered by an earthquake. Occasionally they can result
from a submarine eruption, if an underwater explosion displaces
substantial amounts of water. Sea-floor displacements involved when
a caldera collapses on the sea floor likewise can produce tsunamis,
and if the caldera is a large one and its collapse sudden, as in
the case of the Krakatau eruption of 1883, the resulting tsunami
may be of stupendous proportions. Also in Krakatau-like eruptions,
huge waves may be generated when incalculable amounts of volcanic
tephra suddenly fall on the sea surface after a major explosion.

Tsunamis can travel thousands of miles from their source, sweep miles
inland, and can reach heights up to several hundred feet. Japan has
many times in recorded history experienced tsunamis up to 120 feet
high, which killed tens of thousands of people at a time. The Krakatau
eruption in 1883 caused tsunamis up to 130 feet, with 36,000 deaths in
Indonesia. Hawaii regularly gets tsunamis up to forty feet.[[10]259]
Earthquakes can trigger landslides that can locally produce water
surges in lakes or estuaries up to more than a thousand feet
high.[[11]260]

So floods themselves are essentially universal occurrences. But what
about the question of how flood traditions having so many features in
common could arise? _Legends of the Earth_ explains:[[12]261]

All in all, then, from the purely geologic point of view we should
_expect_ independent flood traditions to have arisen almost
anywhere in the world at almost any time, engendered by flood
catastrophes stemming from perfectly natural causes, and of all the
possible causes of floods, only tsunamis are capable of giving rise
to flood legends in widely separated places at the same time.
Although many different floods are required to account for the many
traditions known, there is no reason to be surprised that flood
traditions from all over the world may bear notable resemblances to
one another. For when we come right down to it, _there are only two
basic ways in which people can survive a flood:_ [italics added] by
getting above it, or by riding it out on some floating object. Thus
there are legends in which the survivors take to high ground or
climb exaggeratedly tall trees, and there are legends in which the
survivors float to safety in an ark, a canoe, a chest, or what have
you. In most flood traditions a vessel is the means of salvation,
and that too is not surprising, in view of the fact that the water
depth is often exaggerated to the point where everything is
submerged and there would be no other way to account for anyones
being saved to carry on the human race. Exaggeration likewise tends
to reduce the number of survivors toward the apparently irreducible
minimum of the one man and one woman needed to repopulate the world
(but some legends manage to get by with even less). And finally,
need we be surprised if some independently generated legends lay
the blame for the disaster on somebodys misbehavior? Remember, in
the preceding chapter, how the Maoris attributed the Tarawera
eruption to the breaking of tabu by the victims? Nevertheless it is
undeniable that many flood traditions in widely separated parts of
the world do show similarities in detail, highly reminiscent of the
biblical deluge, which cannot be explained entirely by the general
similarity of floods and the general similarity of human reactions
to floods.

There are only two ways in which the story of Noahs flood, whatever
its local source, could have been spread around the world: by
diffusion, as the people to whose culture it originally belonged
migrated to new lands, or by transmission, which requires contact
between at least one narrator and one listener from different
cultures. Flood traditions are found throughout the western
hemisphere from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. In the extreme
diffusionist point of view this constitutes evidence that the
Indians of North and South America are descendants of one of the
lost tribes of Israel, who brought the story of Noah with them as
they migrated across Asia and into North America via Bering Strait
and on down through South America. But while anthropologists do
believe that man reached the Americas by way of Bering Strait, the
waves of migration took place long before Noahs prototype existed.
So that brings us to transmission and its corollary, syncretism
(the fusion of elements from independent traditions). If all the
biblical parallels in New World flood traditions are the result of
cultural contact, then either that contact was somehow established
long before the first missionaries are known to have reached the
western hemisphere, which is unlikely, or else all such parallels
must date from after the time of the first missionaries.

A highly illuminating example of how a legend can be transferred
from one culture to another literally overnight was related by
Alice Lee Marriott in a _New Yorker_ article some years ago
[Dorson, Richard M. "The debate over the trustworthiness of oral
traditional history." _Volksuberlieferung,_ Kurt Ranke Festschrift
(1968), 19-35] When she was collecting the folklore of a South
Dakota tribe, she was challenged one day by the old Indian who was
her informant to tell him one of the tales of her people. She
thereupon related the story of "the Brave Warrior and the Water
Monsters" Beowulf. Few changes were necessary; it was "all within
the patterns of legendary behavior, which the old man could
understand, and I reflected that there might be more to this
universal-distribution-of-folklore than I had realized." A little
later she heard him relate the story to an audience of his people,
"and I must admit the old man made a better story of it than I did.
A born, creative story teller, he added bits here and there to
round the tale out and make it richer. So must the story of Beowulf
have gone, many centuries ago, from hearer to hearer, improved and
embellished until at last it was written down." The punch line of
her article told how a few years later in an ethnological journal
she came across a paper entitled "Occurrence of a Beowulf-like myth
among North American Indians," published by a graduate student who,
in violation of an unwritten law among ethnologists, had been using
the same informant.

With this illustration in mind, it seems quite natural that certain
details of the biblical flood story should turn up all over the
world. For more than nineteen centuries missionaries have been
carrying it to every corner of the earth. The story of Noah is one
of the most colorful of all the Bible stories, and it is also one
whose moral is particularly obvious and therefore most likely to be
emphasized. Moreover, it should have made the most impression
precisely among those peoples who already had a flood tradition
with which it could be fused. Missionaries have always been among
the first to brave the wilderness to bring the Gospel to primitive
people, and in many instances they were the first to take down the
legends of the people among whom they worked. In other cases,
however, the legends were collected by ethnologists and others who
came well after the missionaries. Because it often was the
missionaries who first devised written forms of obscure languages,
it is impossible to prove whether a flood story really predates the
missionary influence or whether it is just Noah being given back
with local color, like Beowulf in South Dakota. Only one very
equivocal instance of pre-missionary documentation is known (which
will will be discussed subsequently), but at least one instance has
been confirmed where Noah was given back in the same way as
Beowulf: A missionary named Moffat related, in a book published in
1842...., how he had never found a flood legend among the South
Africans until one day a Namaqua Hottentot told him one. Suspecting
possible missionary influence, he questioned the man closely but
was assured that it was a tale of his forefathers, and that the
Hottentot had never even met a missionary before. But later, when
Moffat was comparing notes with another missionary, he learned that
the other had indeed told the story of Noah to the very same
Hottentot.

So there exist plausible mechanisms for generating widely distributed
flood legends, and there are examples of these mechanisms at work. Now
lets look at some examples of ancient legends. _Legends of the Earth_
describes one well known Greek flood legend, Deukalions
deluge:[[13]262]

Best known to most of us after the Babylonian-Hebrew flood
tradition is that of classical mythology, Deukalions deluge. Of the
several Greek flood traditions, it is the only one in which the
flood is said to have been worldwide.... Deukalions flood was
accepted as historical fact by the Greeks, including Aristotle.
There apparently was at least one king by that name. A marble
pillar found on the island of Paros gives a list of the kings of
Greece and the dates of their reigns, and according to this
chronicle, Deukalions deluge occurred in about 1539 B.C.... About
the middle of the fifteenth century B.C., or possibly earlier,
there was a Krakatau-like eruption of the volcano
Santorin[[14]262a] in the Aegean Sea.... At the end of that
eruption the volcano collapsed to form a caldera, and that collapse
could have generated one or more tsunamis, possibly far bigger than
any ever generated in the Mediterranean area in the more normal way
by earthquakes. The possible dates for Deukalion and for the
eruption are sufficiently close, in our present state of knowledge,
that the proposal.... that the legend or myth of Deukalions deluge
was a consequence of that catastrophe appears very plausible. In
this light it appears particularly significant that [Richard]
Andree.... states that in an early version of the myth the flood is
said to have come from the sea.... and what else could that mean
but a tsunami?

Later versions of the Deukalion story include details that closely
parallel the Hebrew-Babylonian flood story. In the course of time
the sea flood became nine days and nights of rain, the chest became
an ark, animals were included in the passenger list, and Deukalion
sent out a dove on successive occasions to see if the waters had
receded.... Thus the traditions of two different places, based on
floods centuries apart, merged into what is essentially the same
story.... There is considerable lack of agreement concerning
Deukalion and the characters associated with other Greek flood
traditions.

In view of the above, the _Watchtowers_ description[[15]263] of one
Greek legend is seen to be a gross simplification of the history of
the several Greek flood legends. It is similar with a flood legend
from India, in which a man named Manu is saved with the help of a
small fish. Concerning this legends development, _Legends of the Earth_
said:

The legend of Manu is post-Vedic, there being only obscure
references in the Vedas that might relate to it. It first appears
in the Satapatha Brahmana, which goes back to about 600 B.C..... It
has been suggested that in view of the geographic setting, the
bursting of a landslide-dammed lake in the Himalayas could be a
possible factual basis for the flood tradition in Sanskrit
literature.

In later versions Manu is not merely a common man, but a great seer
or a king. As in the case of the Deukalion myth, possibly Semitic
elements appear after a while. In the Matsya Purana, dating from
320 A.D., Manu takes all living creatures and the seeds of plants
into his "ark."

The _Watchtower_ article also described legends from the South Pacific
and the Americas. _Legends of the Earth_ describes a number of South
Pacific legends, and summarizes some interesting points:[[16]264]

The South Seas also provide abundant flood traditions in very
diverse forms. Aside from some biblical parallels, which can easily
be attributed to missionary influence, many of these traditions are
remarkably consistent with the local geologic setting. Very often
the flood is said to have come from the sea, as would be expected
in islands frequently subjected to earthquake-generated tsunamis or
typhoon-lashed waves.

_Legends of the Earth_ describes some American flood traditions, and
comments that:

North American Indian lore contains abundant evidence of the way in
which primitive mythologies absorb later elements. For instance,
Old Coyote Man, the culture-hero of the Crow legends, is supposed
to have invented horses but horses were unknown to the Indians
until the Conquistadores introduced them in the sixteenth century.
The general resemblance of many of the American Indian flood
traditions to each other can readily be explained in terms of
migration or contacts between tribes, and frequent resemblances to
the Bible story are not at all difficult to attribute to the
efforts of missionaries.[[17]265]

Flood traditions are prolific throughout Latin America. There are
numerous legends in which the survivors of the deluge, either a
couple or a family, escape in a calabash, a canoe, or a raft, or
climb mountains or trees. Biblical overtones are very recognizable
in some cases.[[18]266]

Next are described some legends of purely local origin, as well as
ones with biblical overtones. The last example is one from the Aztecs,
and was referred to earlier on page 205 as one equivocal instance of
pre-missionary documentation:[[19]267]

The story of Coxcox is the one and only flood legend with possibly
biblical elements for which there seems to be pre-missionary
documentation in the form of pictographs. Or is there? According to
Andree.... none of the early writers concerned with Mexican
mythology, who could have heard the tale at the time of the
Conquistadores or shortly after, ever mentioned a Bible-like flood
legend, and he doubted that the interpretation of the pictographs
was the correct one. In this he followed Don Jose Fernando Ramirez,
conservator of the National Museum in Mexico City, who showed that
the descriptions of the pictographs as given by Clavigero,
Humboldt, Kingsborough, and others were all based on the same
source, a picture map published by Gemilli Careri in Churchills _A
Collection of Voyages and Travels,_ volume 4 [written in 1732].
Gemelli Careri had read into this picture the story of the Flood,
and Humboldt and all the rest followed suit and accepted his
interpretation. But according to Ramirez the "dove" was intended to
be the bird known as the Tihuitochan, which calls "Ti-hui," and the
picture actually represented the story of the migration of the
Aztecs to the Valley of Mexico. The Aztecs are believed to have
come into Mexico from farther to the north. Their traditions told
how a little bird kept repeating "Ti-hui, ti-hui," which in their
language meant "Lets go!" and their priests interpreted this as a
divine command to seek a new home. Seven subtribes set out, six of
whom established themselves more or less quickly in various parts
of Mexico, while the seventh wandered for some time, looking for a
sign in the form of an eagle sitting on a rock holding a serpent in
its mouth. The promised sign was encountered at Lake Texcoco, and
accordingly the city now known as Mexico City was founded on its
shores in 1325. This, then, is the tradition historians believe is
embodied in the picture writing in question; it was Gemilli Careri
alone who decided that the bird in the picture was the dove giving
out tongues. He himself admitted that the chronology was "not so
exact as it should be, there being too few years allowd between the
flood and the founding of Mexico".... for the picture includes
symbols telling the number of years spent in various places during
the wanderings.

Gemilli Careri heard the story of Coxcox during his sojourn in
Mexico in 1667, well over a hundred years after the first
missionaries had arrived with Cortez and ample time for biblical
details to have become superposed on indigenous Aztec myths and
traditions. Other Mexican flood stories are quite obviously the
Bible story transplanted to a more familiar local setting.

The above should be enough to establish that the problem of how Flood
traditions arose is not nearly so black-and-white as Watchtower
publications would have it. Here are a few more things to consider.

A problem with putting too much stock in the supposed universality of
Flood traditions is that they are not universal, but simply
widespread. As significant as is the fact that many cultures have
Flood traditions is the fact that many lack such traditions. According
to _Legends of the Earth,_[[20]268]

Flood traditions are lacking in semi-arid Central Asia, which is
hardly surprising....

Very conspicuous by its absence is an Egyptian flood legend; but
likewise conspicuous by their absence in Egypt are disastrous
floods. Every year the Nile overflowed its banks gently and
predictably, leaving behind a life-giving deposit of fine silt to
replenish the soil. Lean years might have ensued when the waters
fell short of the average, and extra-high waters might conceivably
have caused some inconvenience, but the annual flood could never
have been anything but benign on the whole. Its _failure_ to
materialize would have been the disaster to commemorate in legend.
The other main rivers of Africa also have an annual rise which,
being predictable, is not calamitous.

The only legend from southern Africa involving any sort of
inundation is not a typical deluge tradition at all, but one which
seeks to explain the origin of a particular lake.... This tale was
collected by Livingstone, and was the only one he encountered in
all his years of missionary work which had any resemblance to a
flood tradition.

A good summary of the issues surrounding Flood legends is in the final
paragraphs of _Legends of the Earth_.[[21]269]

To cite further examples of flood traditions would become tedious,
if it has not done so already. Enough instances have been given, I
hope, to demonstrate that when viewed from their geologic context,
many flood traditions obviously have originated on the spot. I can
see no reason to assume that in explaining the ubiquity of flood
traditions we are limited to a choice between two extreme
alternatives. [Immanuel] Velikovsky, for instance states:

The answer to the problem of the similarity of the motifs in the
folklore of various peoples is, in my view, as follows: A great
many ideas reflect real historical content. There is a legend,
found all over the world, that a deluge swept the earth and covered
hills and even mountains. We have a poor opinion of the mental
abilities of our ancestors if we think that merely an extraordinary
overflow of the Euphrates so impressed the nomads of the desert
that they thought the entire world was flooded, and that the legend
so born wandered from people to people. [_Worlds in Collision,_
Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1950; New York: Dell
Publishing Company, 1967]

To which one might reply: Of course many ideas reflect real
historic content. However, there is not _one_ deluge legend, but
rather a collection of traditions which are so diverse that they
can be explained neither by one general catastrophe alone, nor by
the dissemination of one local tradition alone. Some are highly
imaginative but very wide-of-the-mark attempts to explain local
topographic features or the presence of fossil shells high above
sea level. A large number are recollections vastly distorted and
exaggerated, as is the rule in folklore of real local disasters,
often demonstrably consistent with special local geologic
conditions. Surely it is not accidental, for instance, that in many
flood traditions from the Pacific coast of the Americas and from
Pacific islands, the flood is attributed to a rise of the sea; more
than 90 percent of the earthquake energy released annually in the
world is released in the Pacific area, and consequently tsunamis
are most likely to be generated there. One of the oldest of the
remembered flood disasters occurred a long, long time ago in
Mesopotamia, and it made such an impression on the dwellers in the
city of Ur that the tale was handed down from generation to
generation and carried with the Patriarchs when they migrated
toward the Mediterranean. The legend born of that long-ago flood
might never have wandered very much farther from its source were it
not for the fact that it became a part of the Scriptures, and thus
in later ages was zealously carried to every corner of the world by
Christian missionaries, often to become merged with pre-existing
traditions indigenous to their localities. Flood traditions are
nearly universal, partly because of the efforts of these
missionaries, but mainly because floods _in the plural_ are the
most nearly universal of all geologic catastrophes.

Keep in mind the above material when reading the following conclusions
from the _Watchtower_ article on Flood legends, page 9.[[22]270] It
contains a number of inaccuracies and unwarranted conclusions.

What can we conclude from these many Flood legends? Though they
differ greatly in details, they have some common features. These
indicate an origin in some gigantic and unforgettable cataclysm.
Despite vivid colorations over the centuries, their underlying
theme is like a thread that ties them to one great event the global
Deluge related in the simple, uncolored Bible account.

Since the Flood legends are generally found among people who did
not come in touch with the Bible until recent centuries, it would
be a mistake to contend that the Scriptural account influenced
them.... So we can confidently conclude that the Flood legends
confirm the reality of the Biblical account.

This _Watchtower_ article quoted from _The International Standard
Bible Encyclopedia,_ as does the article on the Deluge in the _Insight_
book. Here is the one from _Insight_.[[23]271] Again note the
inaccuracies:

The universality of the flood accounts is usually taken as evidence
for the universal destruction of humanity by a flood and the spread
of the human race from one locale and even from one family. Though
the traditions may not all refer to the same flood, apparently the
vast majority do. The assertion that many of these flood stories
came from contacts with missionaries will not stand up because most
of them were gathered by anthropologists not interested in
vindicating the Bible,

What does who gathered the stories have to do with whether they came
from missionary contacts?

and they are filled with fanciful and pagan elements evidently the
result of transmission for extended periods of time in a pagan
society. Moreover, some of the ancient accounts were written by
people very much in opposition to the Hebrew-Christian tradition.

Opposition to the Hebrew-Christian tradition apparently did not matter
in the case of the Greek Deukalion story or the Indian Manu story they
gradually took on more and more biblical elements over time.

What about the Genesis Flood account itself? Is it self-consistent?
Does it really bear the mark of inspiration by God? The general
consensus among non-fundamentalist biblical scholars is that it is
self-contradictory and is actually the result of two earlier accounts
being merged and reworked by Jewish priests of the fifth century B.C.
Isaac Asimovs _In The Beginning_[[24]272] contains much commentary on
this material. _The Noahs Ark Nonsense_[[25]273] explains the problems
clearly:

The Flood story in Genesis is more complex than the other Flood
accounts. Unlike them, it contains significant contradictions and
inconsistencies. Here are some examples.

CONTRADICTIONS AND INCONSISTENCIES

1a. Then the Lord said to Noah, ". . . Take with you seven pairs of
all clean animals, the male and his mate; and a pair of the animals
that are not clean, the male and his mate; and seven pairs of the
birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive
upon the face of all the earth" (7:1a, 2-3).

1b. And God said to Noah, ". . . And of every living thing of all
flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them
alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds
according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their
kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind,
two of every sort shall come in to you, to keep them alive" (6:13a,
19-20).

These two passages clearly disagree on the number of birds and of
clean animals that should be taken aboard the ark (clean animals
are those fit to eat; see Leviticus 11): seven pair in 1a, and one
pair in 1b. The passages also disagree on the term for deity: "the
Lord" vs. "God."

2a. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. . . .
At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark which he
had made, . . . He waited another seven days, . . . Then he waited
another seven days (7:12; 8:6, 10a, 12a).

2b. In the six hundredth year of Noahs life, in the second month,
on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains
of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were
opened. . . . In the six hundred and first year, in the first
month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off
the earth; . . . In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of
the month, the earth was dry. Then God said to Noah, "Go forth from
the ark" (7:11; 8:13a, 14-16a).

These two sets of passages disagree on the duration of the Flood.
In 2a a total of only 54 days (40 plus 7 plus 7) passed from the
time that the Flood began until Noah left the ark. In 2b, however,
the period was the equivalent of a solar year. The period appears
to be more than a year (a year and ten days), but that is because
time here is stated in terms of the old Near Eastern lunar year.28

28. As stated in these passages in Genesis, the period of time is
from the 600th year of Noahs life, 2d month, 17th day, to the 601st
year, 2d month, 27th day. The "year" is a lunar year (12 months of
29 1/2 days each), with 11 days added (according to the ancient
custom of counting both the first and last days [17th and 27th]).
This adds up to 365 days, a solar year. See Cassuto, vol. 2, p. 113
[Umberto Cassuto, _A Commentary on the Book of Genesis_].

Biblical fundamentalists invariably either ignore these differences
or try to interpret the verses to eliminate the differences and to
harmonize the passages. Such procedure fails because it distorts
the evidence. Either device ignoring parts of the text or
reinterpreting parts of the text usually leads to misinterpretation
of the text.

THE DISCOVERY OF SOURCES

The only way to understand the cause of the inconsistencies is to
recognize that we have before us an example of ancient composite
literature. Two separate written sources have been conflated; that
is, two sources, or extracts from two sources, have been interwoven
into one account, without rewriting them to make their vocabulary,
style, and ideas agree with each other. Conflation invariably
produces contradictions and inconsistencies, and sometimes
duplications. Ancient Near Eastern literature, including that of
the Hebrews, often repeated ideas, however, so duplication of
thought does not _necessarily_ indicate several writers. On the
other hand, duplication of an incident in a story is usually caused
by conflation. Composite literature was very prevalent in the
ancient world, and a major contribution of modern biblical
scholarship is the recognition that much of both the Old Testament
and the New Testament is composite.

The same two sources that are used in the Genesis Flood story run
through the Pentateuch, where they are combined with other source
material. The presence of written sources in the Creation accounts
was first observed when H. B. Witter in 1711 recognized the
significance of the different terms for God. Gradually biblical
scholars discovered more and more evidence of earlier sources and
later editing in the Pentateuch. The famous Graf-Wellhausen
hypothesis assigned letters to the main sources: J, E, P, and D.
Although the hypothesis has had to be revised and refined, it is
basically sound. Orthodox Jews and Christians attack it because it
upsets the traditional view that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, but
the evidence for written sources is quite decisive. The
contradictions, duplications, and linguistic inconsistencies cannot
be sensibly explained as the composition of a single
writer.[[26]273a]

The passages quoted above in the "a" category (1a, 2a) are from the
J source, in which the term for God is "the Lord." The passages in
the "b" category are from the P source, in which the term is "God."
J was written in the tenth or possibly ninth century B.C., but the
date of P is sixth century and later P was written over a period of
time. J was a narrative document in which stories were arranged in
a chronological framework. P was produced by Hebrew priests to
promote their religion.

Duplication is another type of evidence that there are two sources
in the Genesis Flood story. Three instances are quite plain. (1)
Noah is told who and what to take aboard (7:1-5, J; 6:18-22, P).
(2) The Flood begins (7:10, J; 7:11, P). (3) The deity promises not
to do it again (8:21-22, J; 9:8-11, P).

The evidence forms a pattern: the same passage that is a
duplication, or a contradiction, or causes a break in the flow of
thought, usually displays a difference in vocabulary, especially
the word for God.

If we are to understand the Flood story in the Bible in relation to
other Deluge stories, we must first separate it into its two
accounts and let each speak for itself. The traditional practice of
treating them as a single account, on the other hand, conceals the
distinguishing characteristics of each, and presents a distorted
picture of the Hebrews treatment of the story.

Below is a reconstruction of the two sources, in the Revised
Standard Version, according to the analysis made by Professor
Speiser.29 "R" indicates either an insertion made by a redactor
(editor) or a later gloss made by a scribe.

29. E. A. Speiser, _Genesis,_ pp. 47-50. [Vol. 1, _Anchor Bible_
series]

THE FLOOD STORY IN J

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and
that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil
continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the
earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, "I will
blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man
and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry
that I have made them." But Noah found favor in the eyes of the
Lord (6:5-8).

Then the Lord said to Noah, "Go into the ark, you and all your
household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this
generation. Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the
male and his mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean,
the male and his mate; and seven pairs of the birds of the air
also, male and female, to keep their kind alive upon the face of
all the earth. For in seven days I will send rain upon the earth
forty days and forty nights; and every living thing that I have
made I will blot out from the face of the ground." And Noah did all
that the Lord had commanded him. (7:1-5).

And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons wives with him went
into the ark, to escape the waters of the flood. (Of clean animals,
and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything
that creeps on the ground, (two and two, [R]) male and female, went
into the ark with Noah [R; Speiser overlooked this gloss, suggested
by 6:22 and 7:16]). And after seven days the waters of the flood
came upon the earth (7:7-10).

And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights (7:12).

And the Lord shut him in. The flood continued forty days upon the
earth [Speiser assigns part of this clause to P]; and the waters
increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth
(7:16c-17).

Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life
died. He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of
the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the
air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and
those that were with him in the ark (7:22-23).

The rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters receded
from the earth continually (8:2b-3a).

At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark which he
had made, and sent forth a raven; and it went to and fro until the
waters were dried up from the earth. Then he sent forth a dove from
him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground;
but the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to
him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole
earth. So he put forth his hand and took her and brought her into
the ark with him. He waited another seven days, and again he sent
forth the dove out of the ark; and the dove came back to him in the
evening, and lo, in her mouth a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah
knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. Then he waited
another seven days, and sent forth the dove; and she did not return
to him any more (8:6-12).

And Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold,
the face of the ground was dry (8:13b).

Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean
animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the
altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor, the Lord said
in his heart, "I will never again curse the ground because of man,
for the imagination of mans heart is evil from his youth; neither
will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.
While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease" (8:20-22).

THE FLOOD STORY IN P

These are the generations of Noah. (Noah was a righteous man,
blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God [R].) And Noah
had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now the earth was corrupt
in Gods sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw
the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted
their way upon the earth. And God said to Noah, "I have determined
to make an end of all flesh; for the earth is filled with violence
through them; behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make
yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it
inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the
length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits,
and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof [Speiser: sky light] for
the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and set the door of the
ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks. For
behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy
all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven;
everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish my
covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons,
your wife, and your sons wives with you. And of every living thing
of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to
keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the
birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to
their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its
kind, two of every sort shall come in to you to keep them alive.
Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten, and store it
up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them." Noah did
this; he did all that God commanded him (6:9-22).

Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon
the earth (7:6).

In the six hundredth year of Noahs life, in the second month, on
the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of
the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were
opened (7:11).

On the very same day Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth,
and Noahs wife and the three wives of his sons with them entered
the ark, they and every beast according to its kind, and all the
cattle according to their kinds, and every creeping thing that
creeps on the earth according to its kind, and every bird according
to its kind, every bird of every sort. They went into the ark with
Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of
life. And they that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in
as God had commanded him (7:13-16b).

The waters prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth; and the
ark floated on the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed so
mightily upon the earth that all the high mountains under the whole
heaven were covered; the waters prevailed above the mountains,
covering them fifteen cubits deep. And all flesh died that moved
upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that
swarm upon the earth, and every man (7:18-21).

And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days.
But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that
were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth,
and the waters subsided; the fountains of the deep and the windows
of the heavens were closed (7:24-8:2a).

At the end of a hundred and fifty days the waters had abated; and
in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark
came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat. And the waters continued
to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first
day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen (8:3b-5).

In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first
day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth (8:13a).

In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the
earth was dry. Then God said to Noah, "Go forth from the ark, you
and your wife, your sons and your sons wives with you. Bring forth
with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh (birds
and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth [R;
Speiser assigns this to P]) that they may breed abundantly on the
earth, and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth." So Noah went
forth, and his sons and his wife and his sons wives with him. And
every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that
moves upon the earth, went forth by families out of the ark
(8:14-19).

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, "Be fruitful
and multiply, and fill the earth" (9:1).

. . . .

CHARACTERISTICS OF J

Two of the most obvious features of J, which are not in P, have
been mentioned: "the Lord" as the name for God, and the distinction
between clean and unclean animals, an old distinction in Hebrew and
other religions. Also the numbers seven and forty are
characteristic of J. Seven was a popular number in the Near East
because of interest in the seven planets and the seven days of the
week. "Forty days" occurs often in the Bible. The Hebrew word
_geshem,_ "heavy rain," is another linguistic feature of Js Flood
story. In J, Noah sent forth birds after the rains ceased. The ark
apparently had no window, and in order to see that the ground was
dry, Noah had to remove the covering over the ark. Afterwards, Noah
built an altar and offered up a tremendous burnt offering, which
consisted of some of every kind of clean animal and every kind of
clean bird. This feature demonstrates that Js author or authors
sought to promote Hebrew ritualistic law....

CHARACTERISTICS OF P

Ps priestly authors were very much interested in composing
genealogies; therefore the term "generations" occurs often in P.
The word occurs in the Flood story in Genesis 6:9.

Only P gives details of the arks construction. The dimensions are
given in Hebrew cubits: approximately 450 feet long, 75 feet wide,
and 45 feet high....

It is P which gives a landing site for the ark: "the mountains of
Ararat." As we have observed, this indicates some connection with
the Hurrian version of the Flood story. Considering the late date
of P, however, its priestly writers may have learned of it
indirectly through some other group.

The covenant idea was very characteristic of Hebrew religion.
Accordingly, the priestly writers interpreted Gods promise (not to
send such a flood again) as a covenant between God and Noah and his
descendants. They made the rainbow the sign of this covenant.

The situation after the Flood was similar to that after the
Creation: only a very few people were on earth to reproduce the
human race. Therefore the priestly writers portrayed God as giving
the same instruction in both situations. He told Noah and his sons
(9:1), as well as Adam and Eve (1:28), "Be fruitful and multiply,
and fill the earth." The same writers used the expression,
"according to its kind," in both the Creation and Flood accounts
(1:25; 7:14).

The author of _The Noahs Ark Nonsense_ next shows the parallels in the
two Genesis accounts with those in the early Sumerian account, the
Gilgamesh Epic, and various other ancient flood stories.

For many years I noted breaks in the flow of thought in the Genesis
account (usually using the _New World Translation_), the needless
duplication of the description of events, the places where the account
says clearly that two of each of _every_ sort of animal went into the
ark, as opposed to the places where it says seven clean and two
unclean went in, and other problems. As is apparent from reading of
the above J and P accounts, it is clear why these problems occur there
are two accounts in Genesis that have not been made consistent with
one another. Note how much more smoothly each account flows than does
the composite account.

Here are a few more problems. Why, for example, does Gen. 8:6 say
(_New World Translation_):

So it occurred that at the end of forty days Noah proceeded to open
the window of the ark that he had made.

The composite account in Genesis does not make clear at the end of
forty days of _what._ The verse only makes sense in terms of the above
explanation it is part of the J document, which pegs the length of the
Flood at 54 days total, and the forty days were the end of forty days
of rain. Another translation of Genesis, in _The Book of J_,[[27]274]
presents the entire J document and further makes these things clear.

Similarly, it is not clear what the 150 day time periods refer to.
From reading various translations, it is not clear whether there are
one or two. What is clear is that Gen. 7:24 to 8:2 says consistently
the same thing across many translations. The _New World Translation_
says:

And the waters continued overwhelming the earth a hundred and fifty
days. After that God remembered Noah.... and God caused a wind to
pass over the earth, and the waters began to subside. And the
springs of the watery deep and the floodgates of the heavens became
stopped up, and so the downpour from the heavens was restrained.

The _New English Bible_ says:

When the waters had increased over the earth for a hundred and
fifty days, God thought of Noah.... and he made a wind pass over
the earth, and the waters began to subside. The springs of the
abyss were stopped up, and so were the windows of the sky; the
downpour from the skies was checked.

_The Jerusalem Bible_ says:

The waters rose on the earth for a hundred and fifty days. But God
had Noah in mind.... God sent a wind across the earth and the
waters subsided. The springs of the deep and the sluices of heaven
were stopped. Rain ceased to fall from heaven....

The _Revised Standard Version_ says:

And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days.
But God remembered Noah.... And God made a wind blow over the
earth, and the waters subsided; the fountains of the deep and the
windows of the heavens were closed.

_The Bible in Living English_ says:

And the water swelled over the earth for a hundred and fifty days.
And God remembered Noah.... and God sent a wind across the earth,
and the water was checked; and the water-holes leading from the
deep and the hatches of the sky were blocked, and the rain was shut
off from the sky.

These quotations from the P document make it plain that the rain shut
off after _150 days,_ whereas according to Gen. 7:4, 12, which is from
the J document (_New World Translation_):

.... I am making it rain upon the earth forty days and forty
nights.... And the downpour upon the earth went on for forty days
and forty nights.

The Society makes no attempt, at least that I have been able to find,
to address any of the above problems. Gen. 8:6 is not referenced in
any Watchtower publications index from 1930 through 1989. It is
conspicuous by its absence. The various time periods mentioned in
Genesis the 40 day periods, the 150 day periods, and the dates of the
month all have a general disconnectedness out of which little sense
can be made, and the Society gives no hint of the difficulty. Even the
_Aid_ and _Insight_ books do not attempt to reconcile the time
periods, but present only the things that can be made sense of. Try to
decipher the time periods yourself. You will quickly see what I mean.
_________________________________________________________________

Footnotes

[250] _The Bible Gods Word or Mans?_, p. 116, Watchtower Bible and
Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1989.

[251] _Insight on the Scriptures_, Vol. 1, p. 611, Watchtower Bible
and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1988.

[252] _The Watchtower_, p. 8, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of
New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, January 15, 1992.

[253] _Awake!_, p. 8, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York,
Inc., Brooklyn, NY, May 8, 1968.

[254] Carl Sagan, _Brocas Brain_, pp. 89-91, Ballantine Books, New
York, 1979.

[255] _ibid_, pp. 81-88.

[256] Isaac Asimov, _In The Beginning_, pp. 153-154, 165, Crown
Publishers, Inc., New York, 1981.

[257] Steve Allen, _Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, & Morality_,
p. 154, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York, 1990.

[258] Dorothy B. Vitaliano, _Legends of the Earth_, pp. 144-148, The
Citadel Press, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1973, 1976.

[259] Bruce A. Bolt, _Earthquakes_, pp. 81-86, W. H. Freeman and
Company, New York, 1988.

[260] _ibid_, p. 84,185.

[261] Vitaliano, _op cit_, pp. 150-153.

[262] _ibid_, pp. 156-160.

[262a] This eruption has been variously dated at from about 1300 to
1650 B.C.

[263] _The Watchtower_, _op cit_, p. 7.

[264] Vitaliano, _op cit_, p. 166.

[265] _ibid_, p. 169.

[266] _ibid_, p. 172.

[267] _ibid_, pp. 176-177.

[268] _ibid_, pp. 163-164.

[269] _ibid_, pp. 177-178.

[270] _The Watchtower_, _op cit_, January 15, 1992.

[271] _Insight on the Scriptures_, _op cit_, Vol. 1, p. 611.

[272] Isaac Asimov, _op cit_.

[273] Howard M. Teeple, _The Noahs Ark Nonsense_, pp. 41-52, Religion
and Ethics Institute, Inc., Evanston, Illinois, 1978.
]

[273a] An interesting viewpoint on the J document is given in _The
Book of J,_ Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, Grove Weidenfeld, New
York, 1990. The following quotations from this book give a taste of
the authors ideas, and also shed light on the reasons many Biblical
scholars see several original sources interwoven in the five Bible
books ascribed to Moses.

"In Jerusalem, nearly three thousand years ago, an unknown author
composed a work that has formed the spiritual consciousness of much
of the world ever since. We possess only a fragmentary text of that
work, embedded within what we call Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers,
three of the divisions of Torah, or the Five Books of Moses. Since
we cannot know the circumstances under which the work was composed,
or for what purposes, ultimately we must rely upon our experience
as readers to justify our surmises as to what it is that we are
reading. [p. 9]

"My.... assumption is that J was not a professional scribe but
rather an immensely sophisticated, highly placed member of the
Solomonic elite, enlightened and ironic. But my primary surmise is
that J was a woman, and that she wrote for her contemporaries as a
woman, in friendly competition with her only strong rival among
those contemporaries, the male author of the court history
narrative in 2 Samuel.... I will be attempting to account, through
my years of reading experience, for my increasing sense of the
astonishing differences between J and every other biblical writer.
[pp. 9-10]

".... the Book of J, though fragmentary, is hardly Mr. David
Rosenbergs creation or my own. All I have done is to remove the
Book of J from its context in the Redactors Torah and then to read
what remains, which is the best and most profound writing in the
Hebrew Bible. What emerges is an author not so much lost as
barricaded from us by normative moralists and theologians, who had
and have designs upon us that are altogether incompatible with Js
vision.

"[There is] a profound reason for regarding the Bible as a library
of literary texts, which to me and many other readers it must be.
Yahweh, in transmogrified forms, remains the God of the Children of
Abraham, of believing Jews, Christians, and Muslims. But Yahweh, in
the Book of J, _is a literary character,_ just as [Shakespeares]
Hamlet is. If the history of religion is the process of choosing
forms of worship from poetic tales, in the West that history is
even more extravagant: it is the worship, in greatly modified and
revised forms, of an extraordinarily wayward and uncanny literary
character, Js Yahweh.... I am neither a believer nor a historian,
but the dilemma I cite seems to me as much theirs as mine. Why does
Yahweh attempt to murder Moses? How can God sit under the terebinth
trees at Mamre and devour roast calf and curds? What can we do with
a Supreme Being who goes nearly berserk at Sinai and warns us he
may break forth against the crowds, who clearly fill him with great
distaste? [p. 12]

"The largest assumption of nearly all writers on the Bible is that
it is a theological work, as well as historical and literary. J was
no theologian, and rather deliberately not a historian.... The Book
of J fits no genre, though it established whatever genre the
authors of the E, P, and D texts sought to follow. J tells stories,
portrays theomorphic men and women, links myth to history, and
implicitly utters the greatest of moral prophecies to
post-Solomonic Judah and Israel. Yet J is something other than a
storyteller, a creator of personalities (human and divine), a
national historian and prophet, or even an ancestor of the moral
fictions of Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Tolstoy. There is always
the other side of J: uncanny, tricky, sublime, ironic, a visionary
of incommensurates.... [p. 13]

"The God of the Jews and the Christians, of the Muslims, of the
secular scholars and critics, is not the Yahweh of J. What J
portrays, with loving irony, is an archaic Judaism now largely lost
to us, though to call it a Judaism at all is bound to be an
error.... [p. 14]

"Js Yahweh is.... an imp who behaves sometimes as though he is
rebelling against his Jewish mother, J. Like J herself, we ought
always to be prepared to be surprised by him, which is the only way
we can avoid being surprised. [p. 15]

"Embarrassment caused by the impishness of Js Yahweh presumably
began with the early revisionists, attaining a first culmination
with the work of the Redactor.... Jewish Hellenists rather
desperately sought to.... [allegorize] away a Yahweh who walked and
who argued, who ate and who rested, who possessed arms and hands,
face and legs. [p. 24]

"Js attitude toward Yahweh resembles nothing so much as a mothers
somewhat wary but still proudly amused stance toward a favorite son
who has grown up to be benignly powerful but also eccentrically
irascible. [p. 26]"

A reviewer said: "Fascinating.... _The Book of J_ clearly
highlights one of the major problems in Western culture: the fact
that the Jehovah of the Old Testament is not a theological god at
all but an intensely human character as violent and unpredictable
as King Lear."

Another author, Robert Alter, in _The Art of Biblical Narrative,_
extolled the literary qualities found in the Hebrew Scriptures as a
whole. Bloom said that Alter "reads a work of composite artistry,
in which the artist is the Redactor, masterfully blending his
somewhat incompatible sources. [_The Book of J,_ p. 14]"

The Society is aware of many of these points, although it sweeps the
conclusions under the rug. The original version of the Societys book
_All Scripture Is Inspired and Beneficial_ (pub. 1963, p. 13, para.
3-5) said: "Jehovah God is the Author of the Bible, but he inspired
Moses to compile and write the book of Genesis. We say compile because
it is evident that Moses possessed written documents preserved by his
forefathers as precious, valuable records of the origins of mankind.
The Bible refers to eleven of these, the Hebrew word being _toledoth_
(Greek, _genesis_), which, according to the noted Hebrew scholar
Gesenius, means history. A study of the writing style of ancient times
reveals that such historical documents were ended with a colophon or
conclusion, setting out the name of the writer or owner of the
document. Hence, we are able to identify the eleven histories in
Genesis by these colophons that conclude them.... Moses compiled these
documents under inspiration." The later edition of _All Scripture Is
Inspired_ (revised ed., 1990, p. 13, para. 3) completely revised this
interpretation and said: "Jehovah God is the Author of the Bible, but
he inspired Moses to write the book of Genesis. From where did Moses
get the information he recorded in Genesis? Some could have been
received directly by divine revelation and some, under the direction
of holy spirit, through oral transmission. It is also possible that
Moses possessed written documents preserved by his forefathers as
precious, valuable records of the origins of mankind." Both editions
go on to say that Moses is the single author of Genesis because: (1)
Tradition ascribes authorship to Moses. (2) Many references within the
rest of the Bible do so.

It is of note that the later edition of _All Scripture Is Inspired_
deletes mention of the compilation of Genesis. It is also interesting
to note the slant that the _Insight_ book gives to these points. Vol.
1, pp. 919-920, says that no "definite conclusion can be arrived at,
therefore, as to the immediate source from which Moses obtained the
information he recorded", but that, nevertheless, the writers believe
the "important point is that Jehovah God guided the prophet Moses so
that he wrote by divine inspiration." Vol. 2, p. 1212 explains the
reasons that the point of view in the earlier version of _All
Scripture Is Inspired_ has been changed. It should be obvious that
some of the Societys writers noted the clear division of Genesis into
sections and the evidence for compilation; otherwise why would they
bring the point up?

_Insight_ also discredits the "Documentary Theory," (the general
notions originated in the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis) saying: "If the
material attributed to each theoretical source is extricated portion
by portion, and sentence by sentence, from the Genesis account and
then reassembled, the result is a number of accounts each one of which
by itself is illogical and incoherent...." A careful reading of the
material here presented should convince the reader that the exact
opposite is true of the Flood accounts; they make far more sense
separately than merged into one.

[274] Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, _The Book of J_, pp. 68-72,
Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1990.
_________________________________________________________________

[28]Index

1

References

1. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n250
2. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n251
3. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n252
4. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n253
5. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n254
6. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n255
7. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n256
8. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n257
9. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n258
10. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n259
11. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n260
12. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n261
13. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n262
14. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n262a
15. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n263
16. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n264
17. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n265
18. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n266
19. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n267
20. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n268
21. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n269
22. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n270
23. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n271
24. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n272
25. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n273
26. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n273a
27. file://localhost/www/sat/files/flood20.htm#n274
28. file://localhost/www/sat/files/index2.htm