e land shall be
desolate.
Or if I bring a _sword_ upon
that land, and say, Sword, go
through the land; so that I
cut off from it man and beast;
though these three men were in
it, as I live, saith the Lord
God, they shall deliver
neither sons nor daughters,
but they only shall be
delivered themselves.
Or if I send a _pestilence_ into
that land, and pour out my
fury upon it in blood, to cut
off from it man and beast;
though Noah, Daniel, and Job,
were in it, as I live, saith
the Lord God, they shall
deliver neither son nor
daughter; they shall but
deliver their own souls by
their righteousness.

(1) Both Babylonian words are in the singular, but probably
used collectively, as is the case with their Hebrew
equivalent in Ezek. xiv. 15.

It will be seen that, of the four kinds of divine punishment mentioned,
three accurately correspond in both compositions. Famine and pestilence
occur in both, while the lions and leopards of the Epic find an
equivalent in "noisome beasts". The sword is not referred to in the
Epic, but as this had already threatened Jerusalem at the time of the
prophecy's utterance its inclusion by Ezekiel was inevitable. Moreover,
the fact that Noah should be named in the refrain, as the first of the
three proverbial examples of righteousness, shows that Ezekiel had the
Deluge in his mind, and increases the significance of the underlying
parallel between his argument and that of the Babylonian poet.(1) It may
be added that Ezekiel has thrown his prophecy into poetical form, and
the metre of the two passages in the Babylonian and Hebrew is, as Dr.
Daiches points out, not dissimilar.

(1) This suggestion is in some measure confirmed by the
_Biblical Antiquities of Philo_, ascribed by Dr. James to
the closing years of the first century A.D.; for its writer,
in his account of the Flood, has actually used Ezek. xiv. 12
ff. in order to elaborate the divine speech in Gen. viii. 21
f. This will be seen from the following extract, in which
the passage interpolated between verses 21 and 22 of Gen.
viii is enclosed within brackets: "And God said: I will not
again curse the earth for man's sake, for the guise of man's
heart hath left off (sic) from his youth. And therefore I
will not again destroy together all living as I have d