of the flood begins with this passage, and the story itself is considered to be an interweaving of the J and P versions, both of which derive from Mesopotamian originals. Laymon notes that the fullest Babylonian version is preserved on the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, where the context is man's vain search for immortality (The Epic of Gilgamesh is a cycle of poems preserved on 12 incomplete Akkadian-language tablets found at Nineveh in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, with the tablets being found in the nineteenth century. The tablets date from the seventh century B.C. The time of the tale is one in which human beings felt close to the gods and felt that the gods intervened in their lives. Gilgamesh is a ruler who is seen as too devoted to war, and the gods hear the lament of the people and send their own created hero, Enkidu, to do battle with Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh defeats Enkidu, after which they are friends. They set out together against Humbaba to do battle. When Gilgamesh refuses the marriage proposal of the goddess of love, Ishtar, she sends a divine bull against him, and he and Enkidu kill it. Enkidu dreams that he must die for his role in killing the bull, and he does die. Gilgamesh seeks a way to see that his friend is granted eternal life and sets out on a journey to meet the one man who survived the Great Flood [Freedman 1124]). However, the proper context for the Babylonian flood story is found in the epic of Atrahasis in which the flood is the climax of a series of punishments inflicted on mankind. The biblical story shows how the Hebrews used traditional mythological material to illustrate and reinforce their conceptions of God's judgment and mercy on the one hand and of human dignity and recalcitrance on the other (Laymon 7).
In the Atrahasis version of the story, the Flood portion of the text is quite damaged, but it presents a narrative account of the Mesopotamian primeval history ...