Irving Finkel

and everybody floating, and even to the point that when the rain stopped and the ark came to rest on a mountain, that the hero of this thing in Gilgamesh, who was called Utnapishtim, released a bird three times to see whether the trees had come up.

And the first one came back, and the second one, and the third one didn't, so he knew that.

So this was not only in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it was also in the Book of Genesis.

So what it meant was that you couldn't have two stories.

It wasn't two stories about the same thing.

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.