>Well then you have to assume that God told the Babylonians too! Moses
>was about 1,500 BC whereas the Gilgamesh Epic dates from 2,500 BC:
Perhaps God did tell the Babylonians. The Old Testament records instances
of people outside of Israel who were God-fearing. Babylon doesn't seem
like a good place to look for God-fearing people, but all it would take
would be a single God-fearing prophet. The aspects of the Gilgamesh Epic
that contradict the Genesis story then might be the result of
interpolations introduced by the Babylonians. I'm certainly no expert on
this, and I don't have any particular emotional commitment to defending
this position -- it just seems like a possibility.
>
>"The [Flood] story was widespread in the ancient Near East and
>excavations have yielded quite a number of texts or fragments which
>refer to the story of the Flood, although these differ in detail...
>Of special interest to Bible readers is a Gilgamesh fragment from the
>middle of the second millennium B.C., that is, from the Middle Bronze
>Age, found in level VIII at Megiddo." (Thompson J. A., "The Bible and
>Archaeology", Third Edition, 1982, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan,
>p15)
They never seem to mention the fact that Egyptian records cover the period
of the flood and don't mention it. I have also heard that Akkadian records
record a drought at that time. Chinese records going back something like
9000 years don't mention anythng that would correspond to Noah's flood. I
don't have the sources for these statements, although I would be willing to
try and get them from the talk.origins folks if there is interest. I'm not
saying that the flood didn't occur, only that correlating extrabiblical
evidence with a literal reading of the genealogies is quite difficult.
>
>I do not rule out that Genesis 1 might have been revealed, but Genesis
>itself indicates it is made up of several written sources with the
>footer "These are the generations (ie. family histories)..." (Gn
>2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 10:32; 11:10; 11:27; 25:12; 25:19; 36:1; 36:9;
>37:2). This suggests that the "generations of the sons of Noah" Gn
>6:10-10:1, which includes the Flood story, was a written tradition,
>probably on tablets (P.J. Wiseman, R.K. Harrison).
>
And I agree that there is a great deal of historical material. I just get
a bit impatient with those whose claims seem to imply that Moses had to get
everything he wrote from historical records.
Bill Hamilton | Vehicle Systems Research
GM R&D Center | Warren, MI 48090-9055
810 986 1474 (voice) | 810 986 3003 (FAX)
hamilton@gmr.com (office) | whamilto@mich.com (home)