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.
The birds
The boat grounds on a mountain, and the hero sends out birds to see if the waters have gone down. Gilgamesh has a dove, a swallow and a raven. Genesis has a raven and a dove. The closest detail in any of these pairings.
Genesis 8:6-12, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: when two stories share a small, odd detail, what does that tell you? Two families both say Grandpa kept a goat on the roof. That is too odd to be chance. They might share a grandpa, or one family heard it from the other. Who told whom is a separate question. What does a shared bird scene tell us about Genesis and Gilgamesh?
When the seventh day dawned I loosed a dove and let her go.
In Gilgamesh the boat holds fast on the mountain of Nisir for six days. On the seventh the hero sends out a dove, which finds no resting place and comes back; then a swallow, which also comes back; then a raven, which sees the waters have gone down, eats, circles, caws and does not return. In Genesis the ark rests on the mountains of Ararat, a raven goes out and does not come back, and the dove goes out three times. King said the accounts tally even in minute details here, and that the differences in order only underline the likeness. The IVP commentary notes that neither text reads any omen from the birds.
The turn is smallest here. The bird scene is the one place where Genesis tells nearly the same story with little change. Its theology shows up in what comes just before and just after: who sent the flood and who smells the sacrifice. The mountains differ, Nisir in Gilgamesh and Ararat in Genesis, and King argued that the mountain itself was added as the story traveled, since the early Sumerian version seems to have the boat ground in Babylonia.
This is the strongest single detail tying Genesis to the Mesopotamian flood story. Two weak spots still need naming. First, the IVP commentary says Atrahasis also has a similar bird scene. The Dalley translation read here has a gap of about 58 lines in Tablet III just before the sacrifice, and no bird scene survives in it, so that claim could not be checked. Second, King's point that one Hebrew strand has the birds and the other does not rests on a source division of Genesis that the IVP commentary does not use. Neither weak spot touches the Gilgamesh likeness itself.
Not proof of which way the story traveled. A detail this close shows a connection. It does not show whether Genesis heard the Babylonian story or both kept a common memory.
- N. K. Sandars, trans., The Epic of Gilgamesh, ch. 5, The Story of the Flood
- L. W. King, Legends of Babylon and Egypt in Relation to Hebrew Tradition, Schweich Lectures 1916, Lecture II, introduction and section V
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews and Mark W. Chavalas, IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (InterVarsity Press), on Genesis 8:4 and 8:6-12
- Stephanie Dalley, trans., Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford), Atrahasis, Tablet III, columns iv-v
