flood myth

flood myth, any of numerous mythologies in which a flood destroys a typically disobedient original population. Myths of a great flood (the Deluge) are widespread over Eurasia and America. The flood, with a few exceptions, is an expiation by the water, after which a new type of world is created.

Biblical flood myth

The biblical account of the Deluge (Genesis 6:11–9:19) features Noah as the hero of the Flood story. In his account, Noah is represented as the patriarch who, because of his blameless piety, was chosen by God to perpetuate the human race after his wicked contemporaries had perished in the Flood. A righteous man, Noah “found favour in the eyes of the Lord” (Genesis 6:8). Thus, when God beheld the corruption of the earth and determined to destroy it, he gave Noah divine warning of the impending disaster and made a covenant with him, promising to save him and his family. Noah was instructed to build an ark, and in accordance with God’s instructions he took into the ark male and female specimens of all the world’s species of animals, from which the stocks might be replenished. Consequently, according to this narrative, the entire surviving human race descended from Noah’s three sons and their wives.

The religious meaning of the Flood is conveyed after Noah’s heroic survival, having safely landed on Mount Ararat. He then built an altar on which he offered burnt sacrifices to God, who then bound himself to a pact never again to curse the earth on humanity’s account. God then set a rainbow in the sky as a visible guarantee of his promise in this covenant. God also renewed his commands given at Creation but with two changes: humankind could now kill animals and eat meat, and murder would be punished by humans. Despite the tangible similarities of the Mesopotamian mythologies and the biblical Flood, the biblical story has a unique Hebraic perspective. In the Babylonian stories the destruction of the flood was the result of a disagreement among the gods, while in Genesis it resulted from the moral corruption of human history. The primitive polytheism of the Mesopotamian versions is transformed in the biblical story into an affirmation of the omnipotence and benevolence of the one righteous God.

Mesopotamian flood myths

According to Eridu Genesis, an ancient Sumerian religious epic, deities fashioned humankind from clay to cultivate the ground, care for flocks, and perpetuate the worship of the gods. Cities were soon built, but, for some reason, the gods determined to destroy humankind with a flood. Enki (Akkadian: Ea), who did not agree with the decree, revealed it to Ziusudra, a man well known for his humility and obedience. Ziusudra did as Enki commanded him and built a huge boat, in which he successfully rode out the flood. Afterward, he prostrated himself before the gods An (Anu) and Enlil, and, as a reward for living a godly life, Ziusudra was given immortality.

 In the related Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, Utnapishtim and his wife are the survivors of the mythological flood, having preserved human and animal life in the great boat he built. The couple were then deified by the god Enlil as a reward for heeding the divine instruction to build an ark.

Another Mesopotamian myth is the story of Atrahasis, a wise man who was saved from the flood after being warned by one of the gods to build a ship to save himself. This story is preserved in fragmentary Old Babylonian and Assyrian versions. 

These Babylonian mythologies have close affinities with the biblical story of the Flood and are the source of such features as the building and provisioning of the ark, its flotation, and the dispatch of the raven and dove, as well as the part played by the human protagonist in the biblical account.

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Other flood myths

In Greek legend, Deucalion, the son of Prometheus (the creator of humankind) is the equivalent of Noah. When Zeus, the king of the gods, resolved to destroy all humanity by a flood, Deucalion constructed an ark in which, according to one version, he and his wife rode out the flood and landed on Mount Parnassus. 

According to Indian flood mythology, the man Manu was the sole survivor of the great flood, combining the characteristics of the Hebrew Bible figures of Noah and Adam, the first man. The Shatapatha Brahmana recounts how Manu was warned by a fish, to whom he had done a kindness, that a flood would destroy the whole of humanity. He therefore built a boat, as the fish advised. When the flood came, he tied this boat to the fish’s horn and was safely steered to a resting place on a mountaintop. When the flood receded, Manu, the sole human survivor, performed a sacrifice, pouring oblations of butter and sour milk into the waters. After a year, there was born from the waters a woman who announced herself as “the daughter of Manu.” These two then became the ancestors of a new human race to replenish the earth. In the Mahabharata (“Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty”), the fish is identified with the god Brahma, while in the Puranas (“Ancient Lore”) it is Matsya, the fish incarnation of Lord Vishnu.

The Aztec believed that four worlds had existed before the present universe. Those worlds, or “suns,” had been destroyed by catastrophes, and humankind had been entirely wiped out at the end of each sun. The fourth sun, Nahui-Atl, “Four-Water,” ended in a gigantic flood that lasted 52 years. Only one man and one woman survived, sheltered in a huge cypress, but they were later turned to dogs.