Tool Alpha
The ANE Desk
Old Testament passages beside the ancient Near Eastern texts they are compared with, and what Israel does with what it shares.
Be fruitful, or be fewer
Atrahasis ends its flood with rules to keep the human population down. Genesis ends its flood by repeating the blessing: be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth.
Genesis 9:1-7, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: after the disaster, does heaven want more people or fewer? After the flood the town rebuilt, and the mayor set a limit on new houses. Another mayor might have said build as many as you can. Both are responses to the same disaster. Which response does Genesis 9 give?
Among the people the woman who gives birth yet does / Not give birth (successfully);
Both flood stories close with a ruling about human life and birth. Atrahasis sets limits: a share of the people who will not give birth successfully, a demon to snatch babies, and classes of temple women who are not to bear children. Dalley notes that at this point the gods replace primeval man, who had no natural life span, with mortal man. Ronald Hendel cites W. G. Lambert's restoration of the closing lines, in which Enki tells the birth goddess to create death for the peoples. K. van der Toorn reads it the same way: on Lambert's restoration, death itself is set in place after the flood.
Genesis goes the other way. God blesses Noah and his sons with the words of creation: be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth. The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible makes the contrast at Genesis 1:28: against the overpopulation worries of early Mesopotamian literature, God wants people to multiply without restriction. Genesis does have a limit on human life, the 120 years of Genesis 6:3, but it comes before the flood and is not a check on numbers.
The contrast is clear in the texts read here and is drawn directly by the NIV Cultural Backgrounds note. Two cautions. The Atrahasis passage is broken: the lines just before the quoted ones are restored in brackets, and 26 lines are missing after them. And the create-death line is Lambert's restoration of a broken passage, which Hendel and van der Toorn follow; the words for death are supplied in brackets, not preserved on the tablet.
Not a claim that Genesis ignores death. Genesis 5 and 9 are full of death. The difference is that the flood does not end with heaven trying to keep the numbers down.
- Stephanie Dalley, trans., Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford), Atrahasis, Tablet III, columns vi-vii, and Notes to Atrahasis, nn. 44-45
- Ronald S. Hendel, "Of Demigods and the Deluge: Toward an Interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4," Journal of Biblical Literature 106 (1987): 17-18, citing W. G. Lambert, "The Theology of Death," in Death in Mesopotamia (Copenhagen: Akademisk forlag, 1980), 52-66
- K. van der Toorn, DDD s.v. "God (I)," 360
- John Day, From Creation to Babel: Studies in Genesis 1-11 (Bloomsbury, 2013), 203
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, ed. John H. Walton and Craig S. Keener (Zondervan, 2016), note on Genesis 1:28
