THE MYTH OF NOAH'S ARK

According to the Book of Genesis (chapters 6-9) and the Quran (surah hud), Noah built a ship or large boat (called an ark) at God’s command to save himself, his family, and the world’s animals from a worldwide flood. The Ark features in the traditions of a number of Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and others.

God, seeing the wickedness of man, is grieved by his creation and resolves to send a great flood. He sees that Noah is a man "righteous in his generation," and gives him detailed instructions for the Ark. When the animals are safe on board God sends the Flood, which rises until all the mountains are covered and all life is destroyed. At the height of the flood the Ark rests on the mountains, the waters abate, and dry land reappears. Noah, his family, and the animals leave the Ark, and God vows to never again send a flood to destroy the Earth.

Although traditionally accepted as historical, by the 19th century growing impact of science and biblical scholarship had led most people to abandon a literal interpretation of the Ark story. Nevertheless, there are still some people who think that everything written in the Bible is absolutely true.

Although biblical literalists continue to explore the mountains of Ararat, the place named in the book of Genesis (chapter 8, verse 4) where the Ark came to rest, this is just another myth. A typical flood myth (also called a deluge myth) is a mythical story of a great flood sent by a deity or deities to destroy civilization as an act of divine retribution. It is a theme widespread among many cultures, though it is perhaps best known in modern times through the Biblical and Quranic account of Noah's Ark, the Hindu puranic story of Manu, through Deucalion in Greek mythology or Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

According to N. K. Sandars translation of the Utnapishtim (1960), Gilgamesh, in Babylonian legend, was king of Uruk. He is the hero of the Gilgamesh epic, a work of some 3,000 lines, written on 12 tablets c.2000 b.c. and discovered among the ruins at Nineveh. It tells of the adventures of the warlike and imperious Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu. When Enkidu suddenly sickened and died, Gilgamesh became obsessed by a fear of death. His ancestor Ut-napishtim (who with his wife had been the only survivor of a great flood) told him of a plant that gave eternal life. After obtaining the plant, however, Gilgamesh left it unguarded and a serpent carried it off. The hero then turned to the ghost of Enkidu for consoling knowledge of the afterlife, only to be told by his friend that a gloomy future awaited the dead.

The Biblical story of Noah's Ark actually has two, slightly different stories woven together to appear to be one complex and slightly confusing story. The first of these was written by the Yahwist source, who lived around 800-900 BCE, while the second story was written by the Priestly source, who probably lived during the sixth century BCE.

The stories of Noah's Ark have much in common with the story of the great flood in the much older Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as several other Near Eastern epics. However, it was probably not a copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh, but rather they probably had a more ancient common source of oral stories told long before the Babylonian or the Hebrew people were writing. Ian Wilson (in his book, Before the Flood,) has written that there once was a great flood that to its survivors must have seemed like a world-wide event sent by the gods. 

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Sumerian city of Ur "was founded ...at some time in the 4th millennium BC ... by settlers thought to have been from northern Mesopotamia, farmers still in the Chalcolithic phase of culture. There is evidence that their occupation was ended by a flood, formerly thought to be the one described in Genesis."


This occurred in 5600 BCE, when the Mediterranean Sea broke through the narrow Bosporus land-bridge and inundated the lush farmland where the Black Sea now lies. Epic stories of this event and its survivors would have been passed on orally until the development of writing at least one thousand years later, when the legend predecessor to Noah's Ark was committed to writing.