It is on these grounds that I venture, at the risk of being called an atheist by the ghosts of all the principals of all the colleges of Babylonia, or by their living successors among the Neo-Chaldaeans, if that sect should arise, to express my utter disbelief in the gods of Hasisadra. Hence, it follows, that Ifind Hasisadra's account of their share in his adventure incredible; and, as the physical details of the flood are inseparable from its theophanic accompaniments, and are guaranteed by the same authority, I must let them go with the rest. The consistency of such details with probability counts for nothing. The inhabitants of Chaldaea must always have been familiar with inundations; probably no generation failed to witness an inundation which rose unusually high, or was rendered serious by coincident atmospheric or other disturbances. And the memory of the general features of any exceptionally severe and devastating flood, would be preserved by popular tradition for long ages. What, then, could be more natural than that a Chaldaean poet should seek for the incidents of a great catastrophe among such phenomena? In what other way than by such an appeal to their experience could he so surely awaken in his audience the tragic pity and terror? What possible ground is there for insisting that he must have had some individual good in view, and that his history is historical, in the sense that the account of the effects of a hurricane in the Bay of Bengal, in the year 1875, is historical?
More than three centuries after the time of Assurbanipal, Berosus of Babylon, born in the reign of Alexander the Great, wrote an account of the history of his country in Greek.
The work of Berosus has vanished; but extracts from it--how far faithful is uncertain--have been preserved by later writers.
Among these occurs the well-known story of the Deluge of Xisuthros, which is evidently built upon the same foundation as that of Hasisadra. The incidents of the divine warning, the building of the ship, the sending out of birds, the ascension of the hero, betray their common origin. But stories, like Madeira, acquire a heightened flavour with time and travel; and the version of Berosus is characterised by those circumstantial improbabilities which habitually gather round the legend of a legend. The later narrator knows the exact day of the month on which the flood began. The dimensions of the ship are stated with Munchausenian precision at five stadia by two--say, half by one-fifth of an English mile. The ship runs aground among the "Gordaean mountains" to the south of Lake Van, in Armenia, beyond the limits of any imaginable real inundation of the Euphrates valley; and, by way of climax, we have the assertion, worthy of the sailor who said that he had brought up one of Pharaoh's chariot wheels on the fluke of his anchor in the Red Sea, that pilgrims visited the locality and made amulets of the bitumen which they scraped off from the still extant remains of the mighty ship of Xisuthros.
Suppose that some later polyhistor, as devoid of critical faculty as most of his tribe, had found the version of Berosus, as well as another much nearer the original story; that, having too much respect for his authorities to make up a <i>tertium quid</i> of his own, out of the materials offered, he followed a practice, common enough among ancient and, particularly, among Semitic historians, of dividing, both into fragments and piecing these together, without troubling himself very much about those resulting repetitions and inconsistencies; the product of such a primitive editorial operation would be a narrative analogous to that which treats of the Noachian deluge in the book of Genesis.
For the Pentateuchal story is indubitably a patchwork, composed of fragments of at least two, different and partly discrepant, narratives, quilted together in such an inartistic fashion that the seams remain conspicuous. And, in the matter of circumstantial exaggeration, it in some respects excels even the second-hand legend of Berosus.
There is a certain practicality about the notion of taking refuge from floods and storms in a ship provided with a steersman; but, surely, no one who had ever seen more water than he could wade through would dream of facing even a moderate breeze, in a huge three-storied coffer, or box, three hundred cubits long, fifty wide and thirty high, left to drift without rudder or pilot.<8> Not content with giving the exact year of Noah's age in which the flood began, the Pentateuchal story adds the month and the day of the month. It is the Deity himself who "shuts in" Noah. The modest week assigned to the full deluge in Hasisadra's story becomes forty days, in one of the Pentateuchal accounts, and a hundred and fifty in the other. The flood, which, in the version of Berosus, has grown so high as to cast the ship among the mountains of Armenia, is improved upon in the Hebrew account until it covers "all the high hills that were under the whole heaven"; and, when it begins to subside, the ark is left stranded on the summit of the highest peak, commonly identified with Ararat itself.
While the details of Hasisadra's adventure are, at least, compatible with the physical conditions of the Euphrates valley, and, as we have seen, involve no catastrophe greater than such as might be brought under those conditions, many of the very precisely stated details of Noah's flood contradict some of the best established results of scientific inquiry.