This story is .said by experts to be as old at least as 3000 years B.C. That the early Hebrews derived the story from Babylonia, and not riceversd, may be considered a practical certainty. While Babylonia from the days of the Patriarchs was highly ad- vanced in civilization, the Jews, even far down into their history, were comparatively simple and far less civilized even than the Canaanitish tribes, who themselves derived their culture from Babylon. The Babylonian language and script had already before the Exodus become naturalized in Palestine, and been made, as the Tel el-Amama tablets show, tlie ofticial means of communication between tlie BaV)ylonian court and the various Canaanitish tribes. Thus there was more than one channel by which a popular story of Babylonia might become part of Jewi.'-h folk-lore. At tlie .same time the variations in tlie storj- suggest that it is likely to have passed through many mouths before it reached its Bible form. Even the differences in Its religious character are more probably duo to gradual changen of thought and feeling than to a single literary process. It is, however, quite possible that if several variations of the story were, as is probable, current, some few particulars in the Bifile story may be actually more original than in the Accadian version. The sending out of the birds in the lattei
18
FLOOD
FLOOD
Is rather pointless, as the non-return of the raven, wliich fed upon the corpses, proved nothing. Both the J and P stories are derived from the Babylonian, each document selecting for the most part, and sometimes enlarging upon, those details which best accorded with its own character and aim.
ii. A very large number of Flood stories bear only a very general and probably accidental re- semblance to the biblical or Accadian Deluge. The mere fact that a legend has to do with a Hood, even though it be a universal one, is not enough to constitute any real relationship to the Bible Deluge-story, tor such legends can be proved to have arisen from several dillerent causes. These causes may be roughly divided into three classes : 1. Some tiieory ot Creation which connects it with water as perhaps a creative element. Flood stories dealing with Creation bear coniimrison with ' the deep ' of Gn 1' rather than with Noah's Flood. Thus the Binnas in the Malay Peninsula held that the earth was originally completely covered with a hard crust. God in early ages broke through the crust, so that the water covered the whole world. Out of the water He afterwards let rise Mt. Luluniet and other hills, as well as the plain on which the Binnas now live. This conception of the centre of the world as a vast body of water we find again in a Flood story of the Acawoio (British Guiana), and is probably to be understood in the biblical phrase ' the water under tlie earth ' (Ex 20^), the idea being that the land floated on the water.
2. Most frequently, however, the Flood story is the highly coloured tradition of some historical event or extraordinary natural phenoireaon ,
A. Among island and coastlanii peoples (a) the early settlement of their ancestors, who came in boats across the ocean. In such stories the par- ticular land in which they live was the land of refuge from the great Deluge. In the story of the Binnas this tradition is combined with the notion of Creation. The primeval man and woman were created in a boat, which moved over the waters until at last it stranded on dry land. (b) The appearance or disappearance of an island by a volcanic eruption. Thus the inhabitants of the Minahassa (the northern volcanic peninsula of Celebes) relate that the land originally rose out of a flood ; and the stories of the Fiji and Pelew islanders appear to have originated from the dis- appearance of islands by volcanic action, (c) A ticfal wave resulting from an earthquake. The Flood story current among the Eskimo in the Prince of Wales Peninsula is expressly connected with an earthquake. In a story of the Makah Indians (Washington Territory) it is related how the water flowed into the land from the Pacific, until Cape Flattery became an island. Similar features are found in the stories of some other Indian tribes — among them the Araucanians (in Chili), with whom the Flood is the result of an earthquake accompanied by volcanic eruptions.
B. Among inland peoples the causes of Flood stories are (a) very frequently the overflow of some river, especially where, by the bursting of its banks, a large plain is inundated. This is the case in China, where, however, the Flood stories have hardly passed out of the region of sober history into that of myth, and deal with floods similar to those which have been known to have taken place, — the last two during the 19th cent, in 1852 and 1881. In the second of these no fewer than two millions are said to have perislied. The Chinese Flood stories, tlipn, are evidently not derived from Babylonia, ind we sliould avoid yielding to the temptation of appealing to the early connexion in language and script between China and Baby-
lonia.* (6) The formation of a lake or inland sea, or its disappearance by the water eating out a channel for itself thro\igh soft rock, such as limestone. Livingstone tells a legend describ- ing how the Dilolo Lake in Central Africa (on the southern border of the Congo State) came into existence as the consequence of a woman> curse pronounced upon a native chieftain wlio refused hospitality. The inhabitants of Thibet relate how once a flood covered the whole country and destroyed the .•ii)e-like inhabitants. By the compassion of a god the waters were drained oil', and the new people taught civilization. In Santa F6 de Bogota in Colombia there is a story that there was once a hu"e flood brought about by the witchery of a wicked woman, who caused the Kio de Bogotil to overflow and till the basin-like plain of Cundinamarca. Her good husband changed her into the moon, and opened the present outlet through the limestone rock by which the water now flows down over the Falls of Tequendama (cf. Schwarz, Sintjluth, noticed in Expos. Times, viii., 1897, 271 f.). (c) The melting of the winter snows. In the district of the Indian tribe of the Chippewas there is a story telling how a mouse once gnawed througli the bag which held the heat, and this escaping, the melting snow became a flood, which covered the whole world.