show
that we are dealing with a Sumerian Version of that story. And this
conclusion is further supported (a) by the occurrence throughout the
text of the attested Sumerian equivalent of the Semitic word, employed
in the Babylonian Versions, for the "Flood" or "Deluge", and (b) by the
use of precisely the same term for the hero's "great boat", which is
already familiar to us from an early Babylonian Version.

(ii) The close correspondence in language between portions of the
Sumerian legend and the Gilgamesh Epic suggest that the one version was
ultimately derived from the other. And this conclusion in its turn is
confirmed (a) by the identity in meaning of the Sumerian and Babylonian
names for the Deluge hero, which are actually found equated in a
late explanatory text, and (b) by small points of difference in the
Babylonian form of the story which correspond to later political and
religious developments and suggest the work of Semitic redactors.

The cumulative effect of such general and detailed evidence is
overwhelming, and we may dismiss all doubts as to the validity of Dr.
Poebel's claim. We have indeed recovered a very early, and in some of
its features a very primitive, form of the Deluge narrative which till
now has reached us only in Semitic and Greek renderings; and the stream
of tradition has been tapped at a point far above any at which we have
hitherto approached it. What evidence, we may ask, does this early
Sumerian Version offer with regard to the origin and literary history of
the Hebrew Versions?

The general dependence of the biblical Versions upon the Babylonian
legend as a whole has long been recognized, and needs no further
demonstration; and it has already been observed that the parallelisms
with the version in the Gilgamesh Epic are on the whole more detailed
and striking in the earlier than in the later Hebrew Version.(1) In the
course of our analysis of the Sumerian text its more striking points of
agreement or divergence, in relation to the Hebrew Versions, were noted
under the different sections of its narrative. It was also obvious that,
in many features in which the Hebrew Versions differ from the Gilgamesh
Epic, the latter finds Sumerian support. These facts confirm the
conclusion, which we should naturally base on grounds of historical
probability, that while the Semitic-Babylonian Versions were derived
from Sumer, the Hebrew accounts were equally clearly derived from
Babylon. But ther