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.
Noise or violence
In Atrahasis the god Ellil cannot sleep for the noise of mankind and sends plague, drought and then the flood. In Genesis the Lord sees violence and corruption. Is that the same complaint in different words?
Genesis 6:11-13, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: why did the flood come? The neighbors called the police because of the noise next door. The noise might be a party, or it might be a fight with someone getting hurt. The same complaint can cover very different things. Is the noise in Atrahasis the same thing as the violence in Genesis 6?
The noise of mankind has become too much
Both stories give a cause in humankind for the flood, and in both the decision comes from heaven after a long build-up. In Atrahasis the people multiply, the land grows loud, and Ellil tries plague and drought before the flood. In Gilgamesh, as Sandars translates it, Enlil tells the council "The uproar of mankind is intolerable". The IVP Bible Background Commentary argues the two causes are not necessarily different, since noise can be the result of violence: Abel's blood cries out from the ground, and the outcry against Sodom is great.
Genesis gives a moral cause. The Lord sees that the wickedness of humankind is great and that the earth is filled with violence. Ellil gives a personal one: "I am losing sleep over their racket." The IVP commentary notes that the Mesopotamian gods sent the flood because the human world kept them from rest, so the flood brought rest to the gods, and that Noah's name means rest, a rest that comes to people. In Genesis God is grieved. In Atrahasis the god is tired.
The IVP reading of noise as the cry of the wronged is a suggestion, offered as possible, not shown from the tablet. The Atrahasis lines read here tie the noise to numbers: the country became too wide and the people too numerous, each time before the noise is mentioned. Nothing in the Dalley text names wrongdoing as the cause. So the gap between noise and violence is wider than the commentary's sentence allows, and the entry is graded as a shared motif with a real difference in what drives it.
Not a claim that Atrahasis has no moral world. Ea's later speech in Gilgamesh, "Lay upon the sinner his sin", shows the Babylonian tradition could think about guilt. It just does not give guilt as the reason for the flood.
- Stephanie Dalley, trans., Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford), Atrahasis, Tablet I, column vii, and Tablet II, columns i, iii and iv
- N. K. Sandars, trans., The Epic of Gilgamesh, ch. 5, The Story of the Flood
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews and Mark W. Chavalas, IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (InterVarsity Press), on Genesis 5:29, 2:1-3 and 6:13, and the sidebar Ancient Near Eastern Flood Accounts
