herubim.

CHAPTER III

THE STORY OF THE DELUGE

Beside the narrative of the Flood given to us in Genesis, and the
pictorial representation of it preserved in the star figures, we have
Deluge stories from many parts of the world. But in particular we have a
very striking one from Babylonia. In the _Epic of Gilgamesh_, already
alluded to, the eleventh tablet is devoted to an interview between the
hero and Pir-napistim, the Babylonian Noah, who recounts to him how he
and his family were saved at the time of the great flood.

This Babylonian story of the Deluge stands in quite a different relation
from the Babylonian story of Creation in its bearing on the account
given in Genesis. As we have already seen, the stories of Creation have
practically nothing in common; the stories of the Deluge have many most
striking points of resemblance, and may reasonably be supposed to have
had a common origin.

Prof. Friedrich Delitzsch, in his celebrated lectures _Babel and Bible_,
refers to this Babylonian Deluge story in the following terms:--

"The Babylonians divided their history into two great periods:
the one before, the other after the Flood. Babylon was in
quite a peculiar sense the land of deluges. The alluvial
lowlands along the course of all great rivers discharging into
the sea are, of course, exposed to terrible floods of a
special kind--cyclones and tornadoes accompanied by
earthquakes and tremendous downpours of rain."

After referring to the great cyclone and tidal wave which wrecked the
Sunderbunds at the mouths of the Ganges in 1876, when 215,000 persons
met their death by drowning, Prof. Delitzsch goes on--

"It is the merit of the celebrated Viennese geologist, Eduard
Suess, to have shown that there is an accurate description of
such a cyclone, line for line, in the Babylonian Deluge
story. . . . The whole story, precisely as it was written
down, travelled to Canaan. But, owing to the new and entirely
different local conditions, it was forgotten that the sea was
the chief factor, and so we find in the Bible two accounts of
the Deluge, which are not only scientifically impossible, but,
furthermore, mutually contradictory--the one assigning to it a
duration of 365 days, the other of [40 + (3 x 7)] = 61 days.
Science is indebted to Jean Astruc, that strictly orthodox
Catholic physician of Louis XIV., for reco