Did the Bible copy the Flood account from other myths and legends?

The Akkadian-Sumerian and Assyrian-Babylonian "creation and flood myths" (for example the "Gilgamesh-Epic") have often been compared with the corresponding reports of the Bible, and are often considered to be their "template". But these human poetic writings, full of various "gods", are in great contrast to the simple, clear words of Holy Scripture. But they do show that these heathen peoples kept a small memory of the beginnings of the world which, in their imagination and under the influence of their idolatry, they wrote down in the form we have today. The worship of snakes, which was, and still is, spread in many idolatrous cultures in the whole world, is another example of how Satan succeeded in getting people to turn away from worshipping the one true God and draw them after himself (compare Genesis 3:1, Revelation 12:9).

I have some doubt of this. Oral tradition may be vague, of course, but written accounts of this kind are not sober history but myths, and arranged by priests in connection with their false gods, ancestral worship and what ministers to their influence. Take the written accounts in Cory's Ancient Fragments, the Vedas and Puranas, or even G. Smith's account of the flood, one of the most striking of these legends, or Deucalion's, or the history of the Titans; and see whether written accounts secure accuracy. I shall be told that these are poetry and myths. All of them are not, save (which is the very point I insist on) that these ancient accounts always seek the marvellous. Accounts are handed down, and when by men left to themselves, they make myths of them in every country, whilst Scripture gives the divine account of events which in man's hands were made myths of.

We are told that the heathen religions of India, China, Japan, Mexico, etc. have much in common with the Bible as to details. We are told there were virgin births, sacrificial deaths, and the like, before ever the Bible story was known, that the heathen have stories about our first parents, about the flood, etc. We are not surprised at this. As to stories of our first parents and the flood, seeing those were events in the early history of the world, we should expect that the account of them would be handed down from earliest times. We should be surprised if it were not so. Nor are we surprised at the garbled way they come down to us, as they are only the traditions of men. The reason why they have come to us in the Bible so vividly, so full of detail in their verisimilitude, in so great contrast to the stories of the heathen, where fable is plainly mixed up with fact, is because the account the Bible gives is God-inspired. And as to the virgin births and sacrificial deaths before the Bible story came, we know that the devil is a great imitator, and doubtless originated these things so as to bring into discredit the gospel story. They were foretold in the Old Testament Scriptures, and Satan could anticipate them for his own evil ends.

He finds the Bible stories of the fall and the deluge are more or less common to the sacred writings of the heathen religions but he forgets they come from same source, that is, from the knowledge men possessed of God in the beginning of the world’s history and their acquaintance with events of such far reaching consequence and magnitude as the fall and the deluge. Indeed, if the account of these things were only in the Bible it would be held as a great proof of the unveracity of the Scriptures, for it would be rightly asked, How is it that these great facts of history are unknown outside the records of a small nation, and in no wise mentioned by the Hindu or the Chinese with their ancient histories? But it is remarkable how much more fully they are placed on record in the Hebrew writings, “undisfigured by the puerilites” and impossibilities that accompany the scanty records of heathen peoples. But there is one vital difference between Christianity and heathen religions the writer has not pointed out. That he could have overlooked it I cannot believe, for it is such a manifest, essential difference. The writer is on the horns of a dilemma. If he overlooked the fact, it says exceedingly little for his perception; if he noticed it, and did not give the full weight of evidence to it, it says less for his honesty.

What we say is borne out by the insistence with which legends, in mutilated and depraved forms, have come down from pre-historic times, of a tree, a serpent, a man and a woman, in which we have reproduced the story of the fall. Also there are persistent legends of a flood and a family saved through it, the very name of Noah, though mutilated, is near enough to the original to be easily recognized.

It is a well-known fact that ancient nations such as the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hindus, possessed myths in which one can hear now and then a faint echo of a primeval revelation and knowledge, which must have been in possession of all mankind at one time. That such was the case Romans 1:21-23 fully confirms. All mankind knew God and was acquainted with the great facts of history, the events recorded in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. As they became vain, their foolish heart was darkened, they rushed into idolatry. Their traditions, however, here and there give glimpses of the truth they once knew. It is impossible to give here evidences of it as discovered in the Assyrian tablets, which have something to say of the creation and the deluge, known now as "the Chaldean Genesis." Other traces are found in ancient Phoenician sources as well as in India, among the Romans and the Greeks, Babylonians, Chinese and other nations. However, all these, including "the Chaldean Genesis" are miserable contortions.

First of all there is the tradition of a great flood, which in ancient times was firmly held by the great nations of classical antiquity, and is believed today by many savage and heathen races, while it was also held by the ancestors of these savages long before they were influenced by Christianity.

How did this tradition arise? There must have been a cause. It cannot have been an invention, because it is found everywhere and amongst all races. It cannot have been a rain myth, because it is held by barbarous races in lands where the rainfall is slight. Besides this, the tradition as it is held by savage races, and by ancient cultured nations generally, says that the flood was a punishment for man's sin; hence the story could not have originated from the mere fall of rain. The only way to account for the flood story is to believe that some great diluvial catastrophe occurred, the remembrance of which has been preserved by many races of mankind.

Besides this, the tradition of a deluge is universal all over the world. I may add, that the ablest naturalists, such as Cuvier, allege it to have been universal. Where does this universal tradition come from? Whence its connection with the author of the human race preserved in an ark, and beginning again the history of man, who had perished by a deluge?

I may add, that there is an ancient medal of a city in Asia Minor, called by the Greek name of the "ark," on the reverse of which you have an ark, with a man and woman in it: the top taken off and a bird flying with a small bough in its bill, and another resting on the ark. A man and woman are also outside, come down on the dry ground. All these, remark, are heathen notices of the deluge.*

Turning far back, the cuneiform inscription which Mr. G. Smith deciphered gives the legend as written of old in Erech (now the ruins of Warka), (Car. Müll. Frag. list. Gr. ii. 496 et seqq.), confirming what Berosus and Abydenus wrote (Müller's Frag. etc.) as cited by Eusebius (Praep. Ev. 414, ed. F. Viger, Col. 1688), and indeed Josephus (c. Apion. i. 19) only with greater detail. Xisuthrus i.e. Noah speaks of the world's wickedness, the command to build the ark, with its erection and filling, the deluge, the resting on a mountain, the sending out of the birds, etc.

The statements of ancient eastern writers, preserved for the most part in Josephus and Eusebius, are as clear and distinct as possible, confirming the account of Moses even to the sending forth of the birds. And the traditional mythology of Egypt, Greece, and all the neighbouring countries preserves the various facts and words connected with the flood, the ark, and Noah; tracing up their history each one to this same personage, making a god of him. And the eight became, in a remarkable manner, the sacred divine number in Egypt (the great converter of Mosaic history into fabular divinities); while he is in many fables represented as hid in an ark from the fury of a mythical representative of the deluge, and coming out by a new birth, and celebrated as the inventor of wine. A sacred ship was carried in procession in many places. The very word "ark" (in Hebrew, teba) having given its name to many of the places in which these superstitious memorials of it were preserved. The preservation of the ark on Ararat is recorded by the most ancient historical records in existence; and in various places, where temples connected with these events were erected, a vast cleft was shewn, through which the waters of the deluge are said to have retired.

117 In the East, the general historical account was preserved more clearly and fully — a very natural result of the fact that it was from thence, according to the Mosaic accounts, that the various colonies of the human race started: whereas in Greece and places connected by colonies with it, each (though stating it in a way which, even to their own serious writers, proved it a far earlier history) attributed it to the first king of their own colony and localized it. But they all agree in doing the same, each for his own colony, thus proving its universality, and in many instances acknowledging that their founder came from Egypt, and in one case in a very peculiar ship, thence held sacred — the very one which was carried in procession in the rites of Isis, in which the ark and the deluge were celebrated.