Irving Finkel: belief

Transcript context

…So the full story is like this. Visitors used to come to the museum to ask questions of the experts who worked there, and one would be on duty periodically, and sometimes people would bring objects, sometimes they’d ask questions. And somebody once came in with a whole load of objects, including this tablet, which, to cut a long story short, I identified pretty much straight away as being part of the flood story. It was a tablet about eight inches by three. Not the whole flood story, which is a complex narrative which ended up in the Gilgamesh narrative much, much later, but this one was an early narrative in which the point was taken up where the gods in heaven had decided that the population of Mesopotamia needed to be wiped out because they were so noisy. This was the expression. And the gods couldn’t sleep after lunch, sort of thing. So they decided they would wipe them out and create something quieter that worked harder. So this was the basic mechanism, and they had different ways of doing it. And the most effective one was they were going to send a flood to wipe them all out. And one of the gods, the number three in the triumvirate, thought this was a deplorable idea. So he took it upon himself to warn this person called Atra-Hasis, who lived in Mesopotamia, to build a boat to rescue life when the waters came. And in it, he told him the shape of it and the materials he would need and how much he would need of the materials so he could do it safely. And in the 60 lines of the tablet, all this stuff was there. It was like a blueprint to build this boat. And it was just extraordinary because the boat was round. And everybody who knew their Bible, the ark’s a coffin-shape kind of affair. And nobody thought of it being a round boat. And the fact is that round boats were used in Mesopotamia on the rivers, coracles that’s to say, because for transporting things, and they would never sink. They were very appropriate. And so in this story, it was decided it was going to be a giant coracle, a really, really big one that would never sink, and the male and female animals could go in and Atra-Hasis’ wife and his three sons and so forth, could go in and everything would be there and it would float on the water. And when it came down, they said, “We’ll start all over again.” So it’s got very many points in common with the description of the flood in Genesis. And of course, so did the one in Gilgamesh. So in 1872, there was a Assyriologist in the British Museum called George Smith, and he was a very, very talented reader. And in 1872, he discovered that one of the tablets from the Nineveh library we were talking about before had on it a passage which ran in parallel with Gilgamesh about the waters coming and the boat and everybody floating. ered that one of the tablets from the Nineveh library we were talking about before had on it a passage which ran in parallel with Gilgamesh about the waters coming and the boat and everybody floating. And even to the point that when the rain stopped and the ark came to rest on a mountain, 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 it wasn’t… You couldn’t have two stories… It wasn’t two stories about the same thing. It was literary dependence. It was literary dependence. The 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 century, 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 older, 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 there was too much, sometimes there 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 is 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 afterward, nobody ever forgot it. It went on and on and on. So you mean there actually could have been a catastrophic event of a large scale?…

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