the evidence of the Flood traditions of different peoples, to wliich Professor Prestwich himself appeals to fortify his case. Had this view been correct, we should certainly have expected to find wide recollections of the Flood throughout the region where it occurred, and more faint traditions in other parts. Hut this is by no means the case, and the district of Babylonia, from which the most important and graphic Flood story originates, is, according to our ]>resent knowledge, wanting in those geological plienomena on which the Piofes.sor depends (indeed they have not yet been discovered even in the east of Europe), and thcicfore is ap])arently beyond the region of the sui>posed Deluge. On the otlier hand, in Europe Flood legends are comparatively scarce, and usually of a very mythical type (£(/r^'«, Lithuanians, etc.); in N.W. Africa they are altogether absent. Again, they are most frequent by far in Northern and Central America, regions far removed from the supposed localitj' of the Flood. The same objection, though not to the same extent, lies to the view that the Accadian Flood story is to be referred to geological changes in Thibet, by which what was once a great inland sea became a plain (see above, II. 2Bb).
Jud^'ing from the genesis of similar legends, this Accadian story is far more likely to have originated in Babylonia itself, and to be due to some local cause. The same analogy, if we take also into account the character of the country, suggests that our choice lies between a great overflow of the TigTis and Euphrates caused by an extraordinary rainfall, and the incursion of a tidal wave thiougli an earthquake somewhere in the south. Edward Siiss, whose views are mentioned by Andree, is inclined to think that both these causes were at work. He argues from the description of the Accadian story, which speaks not only of the earth trembling, and the breaking out of the floods below the earth, and the waves of the storm-god reaching up to heaven — expressions which point to an earthquake accompanied by a tidal wave — but also of the whirlwind, and the thunder, and the overflow of the canals. Del. (Gen. 1S87, p. 164), Haupt {Amer. Journ. Philol. ix. 423 f.), and esp. Huxley (Essays on Controverted Questions, 5S0rt'., 619), agree w^ith Siiss, and Dillm. (Gen.^ p. 175) in- clines to the same riew. Andree gives several instances, recorded in history, showing to wliat an enormous distance an earthquake affects the movement of the sea. For example, an earthquake which took place in Peru on the 13th of August 1868, caused a gieat wave which struck the Sand- wich Islands on the following day, and on the day after washed the coastlands of Australia and New Zealand. How terrible the destruction wrought by a local inundation may be, is shown by the cyclone which struck the coast of India on Nov. 1st, 1864, and involved the loss of 60,000 lives. It is not so very surprising that in Babjlonia, as in many other countries, such a flood should by long oral tradition have been magnified into a universal Deluge, from which only a few survived.
It lias been necessary in this article to lay con- siderable stress on points of resemblance between the Flood story of the Bible and the numerous Flood legends of other peoples. We have shown that, looked at from a merely historical point of view, they stand on a similar footing, and, in fact, that the Bible story is merely a later variant of one of them. Here, however, the resemblance ends. In tone and religious character the Bible story is immeasurably above all others. It is true, indeed, that the God of the Flood, Who took pleasure in the sweet smell of Noah's sacrifice, stands far below the God of the psalmist. Who deliglited not in burnt-ofl'erings and sacrifice, but in a broken and
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troubled spirit. But for all that, it ia a God who hated iniquity, traiisyressiou, and sin as utterly unwortliy of His own creation, not a deity avenging a merely personal insult, far less, as in the original story, a troop of gods wrangling with each other in jealous rivalry. Even though it be true that the Israelites found this Flood story handed down from the religious mists of a far distant past, a religious student of Scripture will have no difficulty in recognizing that divinely guided religious feeling and insight by which an ancient legend became the vehicle of religious and spiritual truth.
Literature. — George Smith, The Chaldean Account o/Genc^is, new ed. by Sayce ; KA 'f, 55-79 ; Sayce, UCM, 107 B. ; J. Prest- wich. On Certain Phenomena l/cluiu/ing to the close of the last Geological Period, and on their beariiuj upon the Tradition of the Flood, MacmiUoD, 1895 ; Andree, Dia FlutsaQen, ethno- graphisch betrachtet, Brunswick, 1891, — an excellent work giving a summary of the Flood le^'ends of a large number of races, and made much use of in this article ; Charles Hard- wick, Christ and other Masters, Cambridge, contains some Flood le{;rends, see esp. pt. ii. iii. 3, pt. ill. ii. pp. 162-1C4 ; F. Lenormant, Ori'jin^s de I'histoire d'aprH la Bible, Paris; Bee also in this DB the art. Basvlonu, p. 221.
F. H. Woods. FLOOD. — A flood ia a. flow of water. In early Eng. (as in late) it is used of the flow of the tide, as Trin. Coll. Horn. (1200) 177, 'For swiche flode, and for swich ebbinge the prophete nenimeth this woreld se.' But in the earliest quotation in Oxf. Enq. Diet, it is applied to a stream, — an application which has long since dropped out of prose, though it is still in use poetically. In this sense ' flood ' is of frequent occurrence in AV. The following is a complete list of the passages in which the word is found.