What killed Noah for me? It wasnt the formidable science problems, and it wasnt even the very compelling arguments that the story we have in our Bible is actually two different versions of the same event that have been woven together. No, none of that was the nail in Noahs coffin. What did him in, by my lights at least, are the words of Genesis 8:21 where we are told that God smelled the pleasing aroma of Noahs sacrifice and swore in His heart never again to drown the creation. The same expression appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a much older, though theologically different, account of a global flood. Why does this matter? Because it strongly suggests that the author of Noah based his story on an existing literary tradition, that is a tradition about how the flood story should be told. No author could have observed God smelling the sacrifices, so the fact that both versions of the story assert that he did smell the sacrifice, using the same phrase, tells us that one version is based on the other. Now, this literary borrowing would pose no problem if the Torah had been revealed before the Epic of Gilgamesh was written. Under those circumstances we could argue that the Torah tells us what actually happened, while the author of Gilgamesh borrowed those divinely authored details. Unfortunately, the dating of Gilgamesh does not support this. We have fragments that date to early in the second millennium BCE, which is earlier than the traditional dating of Matan Torah. Sorry.
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 16:10:38 +0000
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