Most scholars, therefore, believe that what Woolley found were traces of diverse local floodings - frequent occurrences in Mesopotamia, where occasional torrential rains and the swelling of the two great rivers and their frequent course changes cause such havoc. All the varying mud strata, scholars have concluded, were not the comprehensive calamity, the monumental
prehistoric event that the Deluge must have been.
The Old Testament is a masterpiece of literary brevity and precision. The words are always well chosen to convey precise meanings; the verses are to the point; their order is purposeful; their length is no more than is absolutely needed. It is noteworthy that the whole story from Creation through the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is told in eighty verses. The complete record of Adam and his line, even when told separately for Cain and his line and Seth, Enosh, and their line, is managed in fifty-eight verses. But the story of the Great Flood merited no less than eighty-seven verses. It was, by any editorial standard, a "major story." No mere local event, it was a catastrophe affecting the whole of Earth, the whole of Mankind. The Mesopotamian texts clearly state that the "four corners of the Earth" were affected.
As such, it was a crucial point in the prehistory of Mesopotamia. There were the events and the cities and the people before the Deluge, and the events and cities and people after the Deluge. There were all the deeds of the gods and the Kingship that they lowered from Heaven before the Great Flood, and the course of godly and human events when Kingship was lowered again to Earth after the Great Flood. It was the great time divider.
Not only the comprehensive king lists but also texts relating to individual kings and their ancestries made mention of the Deluge. One, for example, pertaining to Ur-Ninurta, recalled the Deluge as an event remote in time:
On that day, on that remote day, On that night, on that remote night, In that year, in that remote year - When the Deluge had taken place.
The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, a patron of the sciences who amassed the huge library of clay tablets in Nineveh, professed in one of his commemorative inscriptions that he had found and was able to read "stone inscriptions from before the Deluge." An Akkadian text dealing with names and their origins explains that it lists names "of kings from after the Deluge." A king was exalted as "of seed preserved from before the Deluge." Various scientific texts quoted as their source "the olden sages, from before the Deluge."
No, the Deluge was no local occurrence or periodic inundation. It was by all counts an Earthshaking event of unparalleled magnitude, a catastrophe the likes of which neither Man nor gods experienced before or since.
The biblical and Mesopotamian texts that we have examined so far leave a few puzzles to be solved. What was the ordeal suffered by Mankind, in respect to which Noah was named "Respite" with the hope that his birth signaled an end to the hardships? What was the "secret" the gods swore to keep, and of whose disclosure Enki was accused? Why was the launching of a space vehicle from Sippar the signal to Utnapishtim to enter and seal the ark? Where were the gods while the waters covered even the highest mountains? And why did they so cherish the roasted meat sacrifice offered by Noah/Utnapishtim? As we proceed to find the answers to these and other questions, we shall find that the Deluge was not a premeditated punishment brought about by the gods at their exclusive will. We shall discover that though the Deluge
was a predictable event, it was an unavoidable one, a natural calamity in which the gods played not an active but a passive role. We will also show that the secret the gods swore to was a conspiracy against Mankind - to withhold from the Earthlings the information they had regarding the coming avalanche of water so that, while the Nefilim saved themselves, Mankind should perish.
Much of our greatly increased knowledge of the Deluge and the events preceding it comes from the text "When the gods as men." In it the hero of the Deluge is called Atra-Hasis. In the Deluge segment of the "Epic of Gilgamesh," Enki called Utnapishtim "the exceedingly wise" - which in Akkadian is atra-hasis.
Scholars theorized that the texts in which Atra-Hasis is the hero might be parts of an earlier, Sumerian Deluge story. In time, enough Babylonian, Assyrian, Canaanite, and even original Sumerian tablets were discovered to enable a major reassembly of the Atra-Hasis epic, a masterful work credited primarily to W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard (Atra-Hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood).
After describing the hard work of the Anunnaki, their mutiny, and the ensuing creation of the Primitive Worker, the epic relates
how Man (as we also know from the biblical version) began to procreate and multiply. In time, Mankind began to upset Enlil.
The land extended, the people multiplied;
In the land like wild bulls they lay.
The god got disturbed by their conjugations;
The god Enlil heard their pronouncements,
and said the great gods:
"Oppressive have become the pronouncements of Mankind; Their conjugations deprive me of sleep."
Enlil - once again cast as the prosecutor of Mankind - then ordered a punishment. We would expect to read now of the coming Deluge. But not so. Surprisingly, Enlil did not even mention a Deluge or any similar watery ordeal. Instead, he called for the decimation of Mankind through pestilence and sicknesses.
The Akkadian and Assyrian versions of the epic speak of "aches, dizziness, chills, fever" as well as "disease, sickness, plague, and pestilence" afflicting Mankind and its livestock following Enlil's call for punishment. But Enlil's scheme did not work. The "one who was exceedingly wise" - Atra-Hasis - happened to be especially close to the god Enki. Telling his own story in some of the versions, he says, "I am Atra-Hasis; I lived in the temple of Ea my lord." With "his mind alert to his Lord Enki," Atra-Hasis appealed to him to undo his brother Enlil's plan:
"Ea, O Lord, Mankind groans; the anger of the gods consumes the land. Yet it is thou who hast created us! Let there cease the aches, the dizziness, the chills, the fever!"
Until more pieces of the broken-off tablets are found, we shall not know what Enki's advice was. He said of something, ". . . let there appear in the land." Whatever it was, it worked. Soon thereafter, Enlil complained bitterly to the gods that "the people have not diminished; they are more numerous than before!"
He then proceeded to outline the extermination of Mankind through starvation. "Let supplies be cut off from the people; in their bellies, let fruit and vegetables be wanting!" The famine was to be achieved through natural forces, by a lack of rain and failing irrigation.
Let the rains of the rain god be withheld from above; Below, let the waters not rise from their sources. Let the wind blow and parch the ground; Let the clouds thicken, but hold back the downpour.
Even the sources of seafood were to disappear: Enki was ordered to "draw the bolt, bar the sea," and "guard" its food away from the people.
Soon the drought began to spread devastation.