ff from other men; in the storied picture, he who issues from the ship
is a centaur: his upper part is the head and body of a man, his lower
part is the body of a horse.

As before, there is no doubt that we can best explain the agreement in
circumstance of all the narratives by presuming that they are
independent accounts of the same historical occurrence. We can, at the
same time, explain the differences in style and detail between the
narratives by presuming that the originals were by men of different
qualities of mind who each wrote as the occurrence most appealed to him.
The Babylonian narrator laid hold of the promise that, though beast, or
famine, or pestilence might diminish men, a flood should not again sweep
away every living thing, and connected the promise with the signets--the
lapis necklace of the goddess Sirtu that she touched as a remembrancer.
The picturer of the constellations saw the pledge in the smoke of the
sacrifice, in the spirit of the words of the Lord as given by Asaph,
"Gather My saints together unto me; those that have made a covenant with
Me by sacrifice." The writer in Genesis saw the promise in the
rain-cloud, for the rainbow can only appear with the shining of the sun.
The writer in Genesis saw in Noah a righteous man, worthy to escape the
flood of desolation that swept away the wickedness around; there is no
explanation apparent, at least on the surface, as to why the designer of
the constellations made him, who issued from the ship and offered the
sacrifice, a centaur--one who partook of two natures.

The comparison of the Deluge narratives from Genesis, from the
constellations, and from Babylonia, presents a clear issue. If all the
accounts are independent, and if there are two accounts intermingled
into one in Genesis, then the chief facts presented in both parts of
that dual narrative must have been so intermingled at an earlier date
than 2700 B.C. The editor who first united the two stories into one must
have done his work before that date.

But if the accounts are not independent histories, and the narrative as
we have it in Genesis is derived either in whole or in part from
Babylonia or from the constellations--if, in short, the Genesis story
came from a Babylonian or a stellar myth--then we cannot escape from
this conclusion: that the narrative in Genesis is not, and never has
been, two separable portions; that the scholars who have so divided it
have been entirely in error. B