On this Utnapištim released all the animals; and, leaving the ship, offered a sacrifice:
"The gods smelt the savour,
The gods smelt the goodly savour
The gods gathered like flies over the sacrificer" (160 ff.).
The deities then begin to quarrel, Ištar and Ea reproaching Bel for his thoughtlessness in destroying mankind indiscriminately, and Bel accusing Ea of having connived at the escape of Utnapištim. Finally, Bel is appeased; and entering the ship blesses the hero and his wife:
"'Formerly Utnapištim was a man;
But now shall Utnapištim and his wife be like to us the gods:
Utnapištim shall dwell far hence at the mouth of the streams.'
Then they took me, and far away at the mouth of the streams they made me dwell" (202 ff.).[1]
3. The dependence of the biblical narrative on this ancient Babylonian legend hardly requires detailed proof. It is somewhat more obvious in the Yahwistic recension than in the Priestly; but there is enough in the common substratum of the two accounts to show that the Heb. tradition as a whole was derived from Babylonia. Thus both J and P agree with the Bab. story in the general conception of the Flood as a divine visitation, its universality (so far as the human race is concerned), the warnings conveyed to a favoured individual, and the final pacification of the deity who had caused the Deluge. J agrees with Bab. in the following particulars: the entry of the hero into the ark after the premonitory rain; the shutting of the door; the prominence of the number 7; the episode of the birds; the sacrifice; and the effect of its 'savour' on the gods. P has also its peculiar correspondences (though some of these may have been in J originally): e.g. the precise instructions for building the ark; the mention of bitumen (a distinctively Bab. touch); the grounding of the ark on a mountain; the blessing on the survivors.[2] By the side of this close and marked parallelism, the material differences on which Nickel (p. 185) lays stress—viz. as to (a) the chronology, (b) the landing-place of the ark, (c) the details of the
- ↑ Two fragments of another recension of the Flood-legend, in which
the hero is regularly named Atra-ḥasis, have also been deciphered.
One of them, being dated in the reign of Ammizaduga (c. 1980 B.C.),
is important as proving that this recension had been reduced to writing
at so early a time; but it is too mutilated to add anything substantial
to our knowledge of the history of the tradition (see KIB, 288-291).
The other is a mere scrap of twelve lines, containing Ea's instructions
to Atra-ḥasis regarding the building and entering of the ark, and the
latter's promise to comply (KIB, 256-259). See KAT3, 551 f.—The
extracts from Berossus preserved by Eus. present the Babylonian story
in a form substantially agreeing with that of the Gilgameš Tablets,
though with some important variations in detail. See Euseb. Chron. i.
(ed. Schoene, cols. 19-24, 32-34: cf. Müller, Fr. Hist. Gr. ii. 501 ff.). - ↑ See more fully Driver, p. 106.
