The Flood Tablet from Nineveh

"I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion." George Smith reportedly said so after translating a clay tablet in 1872.

Scripture: Make a ship of gopher wood. You shall make rooms in the ship, and shall seal it inside and outside with pitch.

Smith was an assistant at the British Museum. Hormuzd Rassam had found the tablet at Nineveh, in Iraq, but it lay untranslated until Smith read its seventh-century BC Akkadian.

In Genesis 6, Noah is told to build a ship three hundred cubits long, fifty wide and thirty high. A cubit is an ancient unit of length.

Tablet XI was not the first flood story. Sumerian Gilgamesh poems from as early as 2100 BC include one that mentions a flood, and the Atra-Hasis tablet, believed to date to about 1646 to 1626 BC, describes a great flood.

This is Tablet XI, the Flood Tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the British Museum in London. The flood is told by Utnapishtim, who was granted immortality.

In his tale, the god Ea repeats the gods' secret plan through a reed wall, in the old city of Shuruppak on the Euphrates. Utnapishtim must pull down his house and build a covered boat to keep living beings alive.

On 7 May 1873, on a later expedition to Nineveh, Smith found a portion of tablet with the missing part of the flood story, describing the provisioning of the ark.

Scripture: It includes the line: the animals of the field all, I will gather and I will send to thee.

Both accounts have a divine instruction to build a vessel. The details differ: Genesis gives three hundred by fifty by thirty cubits, while the tablet describes a boat of equal length and width.

A clay tablet gave an ancient story its voice back, and it still raises careful questions. Follow Bible Evidence to keep exploring what lies beneath the stories. May the Lord Jesus Christ be with you today.