The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (23 page)

The Babylonian flood story was even known to the ancient Greeks. The obscure historian Alexander Polyhistor attributed an account of a great flood to the Babylonian priest Berossus, who lived in the time of Alexander the Great several hundred years after the Jews were exiled to Babylon. Writing in the first century
BC
, Polyhistor recounted how the god Kronos ordered Xisuthros (likely a phonetic transliteration of Ziusudra, the original Sumerian flood hero) to build a boat that could carry his family and friends through a flood sent to destroy the rest of mankind. He was to stow provisions, animals, and birds on board and then sail off as the flood rose. Later, as the flood receded, Xisuthros set the birds free, only to have them return, unable to find land to rest on. The second time he sent them out, the birds returned with muddy feet. The third time they did not return at all. Finally, the boat ran aground. There, on a mountain, Xisuthros built an altar and offered a sacrifice to the gods for delivering him through the ordeal. The similarities between Polyhistor’s story and both the Sumerian and biblical flood stories are clear.

The Greeks also had a flood story, although theirs evolved to parallel the Old Testament story. In the ninth Olympian ode of Pindar, Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha, come down from Mount Parnassus (the highest point in southern Greece) to populate the world after Zeus drained the floodwaters, revealing the fertile lowlands where humanity might thrive. In the fourth century
BC
, Plato taught that Deucalion’s flood was a local affair that only covered the plains, allowing those who fled to the hills to save themselves. In both traditions, Deucalion and Pyrrha were the ancestors of all Greeks.

The best-known version of Deucalion’s story is found in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, a Roman elaboration of Greek myths in which Prometheus warned righteous Deucalion and Pyrrha of a great flood the gods were sending to punish mankind. The pious pair built a ship, loaded it with provisions, and rode the rising floodwaters to the only unsubmerged peak. As the flood receded, they disembarked on Mount Parnassus and thanked the gods for delivering them from the deluge. Finding themselves alone in a devastated world, they went to Themis’s shrine to ask how mankind might be restored. Advised to throw the bones of the great mother (Earth) behind them, the lonely couple tossed stones over their shoulders. Deucalion’s stones became men and Pyrrha’s became women.

The satirist Lucian’s second-century retelling of the story expanded to include a great ark onto which Deucalion loaded pairs of every kind of creature on Earth. The Greek flood story was evolving to track the increasingly popular Old Testament story. Whether or not they originally represented different versions of the same event, ancient flood stories were transmitted from one culture to the next, demonstrating the attraction this story held for succeeding Middle Eastern societies.

Thousands of miles to the east, on the far side of Mesopotamia, Hindu society also had flood traditions. In the earliest version, recorded in the
Satapatha Brahmana
sometime between the fourth and second centuries
BC
, a tiny fish swam into the hands of a man named Manu as he was washing himself. The fish called out, “Rear me, and I will save you.” When Manu asked what it would save him from, the fish replied that one day a great flood would carry away everything. So Manu raised the fish in a jar, and then a pit, until the fish grew large enough to avoid predators. He then returned it to the sea. The grateful fish told Manu when to build a boat, and as the flood came the now very large fish towed Manu to a Himalayan peak and helped him fasten his boat to a tree. When the floodwaters receded, Manu found himself alone in the world and began to pray. His prayers were answered within a year when a woman grew from his offerings of butter and sour milk. The new couple enthusiastically set about repopulating the world.

Later iterations of this story demonstrate its evolution, but could it originally have come from the Babylonian flood story? Possibly. Indian seals and jewelry found in Mesopotamian excavations document exchange between the two cultures as early as 2500
BC
. Sea trade routes provided for cultural exchange in later times. Such links led some to argue that the Mesopotamian flood story spawned Hindu flood stories. Advocates of this view point to the basic plot as paralleling the broad outline of the biblical flood.

There are striking differences, however. Foremost among these is that in Hindu cosmology a great flood ends each era of the world, repeatedly wiping out humanity. Unlike Noah’s Flood, Manu’s flood is not a unique event. It was just one of many world-destroying floods. Other Indian flood myths variously invoked a rain of fire or food shortages that tempted people to desecrate sacred trees holding the proverbial forbidden fruit. These causes are quite different from those in the Hebraic tradition, in which debauchery and wickedness become the root causes of the flood, and the Mesopotamian tradition, in which humankind is destroyed for being a general nuisance. Perhaps these differences reflect local embellishments as the flood story traveled beyond Mesopotamia.

While the origins of these differences are unknown, what is certain is that flood stories evolved over centuries in the retelling, regardless of how or why they originated.

As geologists abandoned Noah’s Flood as an explanation for the world’s topography and archaeologists kept digging for Mesopotamian flood deposits, literary scholars professionalized the study of the history of the Bible itself. Paralleling the emergence of geology as a secular profession, historians began to formalize Bible studies, approaching the study of the Old Testament with the same independence and intensity geologists used to study rocks. Traditional interpretations of the Bible faced new trials as literary scholars concluded that Genesis was compiled from older sources.

9

Recycled Tales

C
ENTURIES BEFORE
G
EORGE
S
MITH
discovered that the opening chapters of the Bible were reworked Babylonian tales, controversy over the authorship of the Bible centered on how to interpret it as the literal word of God. The original Hebrew version had no vowels, leaving room for interpretation as to the specific wording when the Bible was translated into Greek. In 1538, the Jewish scholar Elijah ben Asher Levita demonstrated that the accents and points indicating where to insert vowels, add punctuation, and divide Hebrew words were invented by rabbis long after the translation of the Jewish Bible. Before the adoption of modern written Hebrew, the Jewish Bible consisted of a string of consonants. Meanings could vary depending upon how one inserted the missing vowels and where one divided words. Biblical translators like Saint Jerome had to use their judgment, which could introduce varying shades of meaning and complicate literal interpretations. Concern over potential human influence and errors came to a head in 1650, when Louis Cappel, a French Calvinist professor of biblical studies, painstakingly compared biblical translations in his massive
Critica Sacra
(
Sacred Criticism
) to demonstrate that the Bible was a book with a history, rather than the word of God delivered directly from the source.

Even before the Renaissance, it was well known that there were striking differences between the Greek and Hebrew Bibles. Arguments over which Bible was the true word of God led some scholars to argue that the Hebrew text was corrupt, or had even been intentionally altered to deceive Christians. Others argued that the Greek Bible was a hodgepodge of inferior translations, or that the Latin Bible was full of errors. This presented Christians with the awkward challenge of which version to believe.

Grappling with this controversy, Martin Luther emphatically labeled the Latin Bible a flawed text and devoted himself to sorting through the different wordings of the Greek and Hebrew texts. His efforts led him to dismiss the books of James and Jude as true scripture and relegate them to the end of his Bible. About the Book of Revelation, he wrote that every man could make up his own mind, but he “cannot find that it was inspired by the Holy Spirit.”
¹
In his view, the Latin Bible was so filled with errors that to confidently discern the meaning of scripture, one had to go back and read the original texts. Even Luther acknowledged that scriptural interpretation required care to avoid potentially flawed plain-sense understanding.

When the sixteenth-century Council of Trent met to judge Protestant heresies and clarify church teachings, the assembled bishops were deeply concerned that if they upheld Luther’s critique the Latin Bible would lose all authority. The more they debated, the more authoritative Jerome’s Latin translation became. The council finally declared the Latin Bible superior to the Greek and Hebrew versions, a conclusion they considered to be inspired by God. The bishops disagreed with Luther’s claim that ordinary men could interpret the plain words of scripture for themselves. Fearing that freedom to interpret the Bible for oneself was the first step on the road to heresy, the Council moved to protect the church’s authority and, in a fit of brinkmanship, deemed the translation more authentic than the original.

Recognition that Moses did not write much of what was attributed to him caused quite a scandal in 1685 when French clergyman Richard Simon outraged both Protestants and Catholics alike with his
Critical History
of the Old Testament
. He came to this conclusion when his superiors in the Catholic Order of the Oratory asked him to provide scholarly arguments for use against Calvinists who rejected the authority of the church and trusted the Bible alone for spiritual guidance. Critically dissecting the Bible, he turned his attention first to the opening chapters of the Old Testament. The contradictions and confusion attending various literal interpretations of scripture could be explained by recognizing the historical nature of Genesis as a compiled story. The conflicting styles, repetitions, and logical impossibility of Moses writing about his own death implied that Genesis was compiled by a series of scribes long after Moses died. Extending his analysis to the New Testament, Simon was able to demonstrate that no original version of the Bible survived; that variations and contradictions had crept into the text as vowels, words, and whole passages were lost, added, or modified over centuries of translation and transcription.

His attack on biblical inerrancy—the belief that the Bible held no errors whatsoever—shocked both the Calvinists it was supposed to shock and the Catholic Church that commissioned the work. Simon believed scripture to be divinely inspired. He just did not know which of the modern versions corresponded to the original one. As a reward for a job done too well, his book was banned and he was expelled from the Oratorians.

Half a century later, the censors of the Sorbonne ignored French physician Jean Astruc when he advanced the same argument. Noting the striking repetition of events in the biblical flood story and the use of two names for God, Astruc claimed that Moses compiled Genesis from even then ancient accounts handed down from the patriarchs. Astruc’s suspicions were based on several lines of evidence. First there were the unnecessary repetitions, like the two creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2. Then there was the story’s awkward jumping back and forth through time. Astruc saw these anomalies as originating when Moses merged several original versions into a single story. The Bible was starting to be seen as a book that had evolved.

In the late 1700s, German intellectuals introduced more formal literary scholarship into biblical criticism. Johann Eichhorn, the prominent professor of Oriental languages at Jena University, compared biblical narratives and concluded that many of the stories in Genesis were fanciful accounts of prehistoric events. Analyzing the style of different passages, he sorted through and disentangled a literary stratigraphy that revealed Genesis to be a composite story.

In revolutionary America, where conventional institutions were no longer sacred, Thomas Paine
took up the implications of Eichhorn’s conclusion to attack the Bible in the name of the Enlightenment in his pamphlet
The Age of Reason
.

Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis, but an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of down-right lies. The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian Tales, without the merit of being entertaining.
²

Paine’s radical argument shocked Christians who saw the credibility of Genesis as the foundation for the credibility of the Bible. Discrediting the stories of Noah’s Flood and the week of Creation threatened the authority of the Bible and its promise of salvation.

Still, people on either side of the Atlantic recognized that the Bible itself had evolved, if only because the New Testament was grafted onto the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Old Testament). Long before the creation of the New Testament, after the fall of the Kingdom of David, Jewish traditions were brought together into a single history that could be handed down to preserve the cultural identity of a vanquished people exiled into captivity. It was relatively easy to accept the proposition that Jewish scribes had merged several versions of an oral tradition into a coherent whole.