Flood Tales | thebereancall.org

TBC Staff

[TBC: The biblical account of the flood has been attacked by many critics.

Yet, in their attacks the critics are often hopelessly careless with facts as this essay originally written in 1902 notes. Excerpts:]

I now take up what Professor Willett has to say through the Chicago daily paper about the relation between the Babylonian account of creation and that in the Book of Genesis. After mentioning several nations of antiquity that had traditions respecting the origin of the world, and last in the list, the Babylonians, he says:

"Among the latter people there is found a narrative of creation so strikingly like that of Genesis that its relationship can not be questioned. Yet the differences are great, consisting for the most part in grotesque, polytheistic and immoral elements, which are entirely absent in the Genesis narrative. This suggests the explanation of the problem. The narratives which first found their way into Hebrew life from the common Semitic stock had the same general form and features which we see in them today. But the religious life of Israel demanded the purification of this material at the hands of the prophetic teachers, whose task it was to prepare the nation for its great vocation of a prophetic people and a spiritual teacher of the world. No vehicle of instruction was so familiar and important as these narratives of creation. To purify them by subtraction of their grosser elements, and to make them the vehicle for teaching the emphatic and impressive truths of God's personality, unity and relationship to Israel, of man's supremacy in the moral order and his probationary position--this was the task to which the inspired teachers of Israel gave their attention at a most important stage of the national education."

Here it is distinctly assumed that these Babylonian narratives existed prior to the one in Genesis, and that the latter was derived from the former by "subtraction of their grosser elements;" that is, by leaving out what is said of the heathen gods, and ascribing the whole work of creation to the God of Israel. This was done, not by Moses, for the crooked critics all deny that Moses had anything to do with the composition of Genesis, but, in the verbose style of the Professor, by "the prophetic teachers whose task it was to prepare the nation for its great vocation of a prophetic people, and a spiritual teacher of the world." He might just as well have said what he meant, that this was done by the hypothetical J, who wrote about six or seven hundred years after Moses, and P, who wrote three or four centuries later. To these two imaginary writers are expressly ascribed the first and second chapters of Genesis. These two writers had no revelation on the subject, and what they wrote is not to be taken as matter of fact. They had nothing to go by but the Babylonian narrative, and they did nothing with this except to subtract from it its polytheistic elements.

I scarcely think that the craziest of the critics would claim that this satire on the Babylonian gods was written before the days of Moses. It is only after robbing Moses of all connection with the Bible account of creation, and relegating it to unknown authors of later centuries, that they can claim priority for the Babylonian account. For, be it remembered, this account was found on clay tablets dug out of the ruins of Asurbanipal's library at Nineveh. But Asurbanipal reigned from 667 to 625 B. C., and within this period his library building was erected and his tablets collected or written. There is no historical evidence that these creation tablets had been in existence for any considerable period prior to this. But Moses lived at least seven hundred years earlier, and if he wrote the Book of Genesis, his account preceded by a long interval this Babylonian satire. And if, as is highly probable, Moses received the account of creation either from oral tradition or in a written form, this carries the origin of it back to a still earlier fate. The critical theory on the subject, then, although it has been adopted by men who ought to have more judgment, is but a wild and groundless conjecture resulting from their equally groundless analytical theory of the Pentateuch (J. W. McGarvey, "Short Essays in Biblical Criticism," 1910).