Irving Finkel

It was literary dependence.

It was literary dependence.

One was locked into the other.

The text of the Hebrew Bible from whenever it was written down, of course, nobody knows quite when, but whenever it was, it was about the same time as the one from Nineveh, about the 7th century, 6th, something like that.

The time interval between the

Gilgamesh version from Nineveh and the Hebrew Bible is not like a big expanse of time.

So there was an argument that one goes this way and one goes that way.

But then when this tablet came in a thousand years old, nobody believes the Bible was written in 1700 BC.

So the primacy of the Mesopotamian matter was established.

And it's important because you never get floods in Jerusalem.

You just don't.

But in Mesopotamia, they had floods.

The rivers, sometimes there wasn't enough water.

Sometimes it was too much.

Sometimes it was far too much water.

So the mechanism that the waters could be used as a destructive force by the powers that be is a plausible Mesopotamian mechanism.

And it's based in a sort of sense, in my opinion, in reality.

I think there must have been.

some tsunami once, most people were drowned, and those who survived were in boats, obviously, and then afterwards, nobody ever forgot it, and it went on and on and on.

Yeah.