The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

by Irving Finkel

The recent translation of a Babylonian tablet launches a groundbreaking investigation into one of the most famous stories in the world, challenging the way we look at ancient history.
 
Since the Victorian period, it has been understood that the story of Noah, iconic in the Book of Genesis, and a central motif in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, derives from a much older story that existed centuries before in ancient Babylon. But the relationship between the Babylonian and biblical traditions was shrouded in mystery. Then, in 2009, Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum and a world authority on ancient Mesopotamia, found himself playing detective when a member of the public arrived at the museum with an intriguing cuneiform tablet from a family collection. Not only did the tablet reveal a new version of the Babylonian Flood Story; the ancient poet described the size and completely unexpected shape of the ark, and gave detailed boat building specifications. Decoding this ancient message wedge by cuneiform wedge, Dr. Finkel discovered where the Babylonians believed the ark came to rest and developed a new explanation of how the old story ultimately found its way into the Bible. In The Ark Before Noah , Dr. Finkel takes us on an adventurous voyage of discovery, opening the door to an enthralling world of ancient voices and new meanings.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion, Ancient History, Mythology, Archaeology, Audiobook

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Irving Leonard Finkel, Ph.D. (Assyriology, University of Birmingham, 1976; B.A., Ancient
New Eastern Studies, University of Birmingham, 1969), is a British philologist and Assyriologist. He has served as Assistant Keeper in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum since 1979. As such, he is the curator in charge of cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia, of which the Middle East Department has the largest collection—some 130,000 pieces—of any modern museum. He also is an author of fiction for children, and in 2007 co-founded The Great Diary Project.

Reviews

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provides more information about the history of ancient Mesopotamian writing and the art of reading cuneiform texts than the average reader probably cares to learn. The author at one point claims that after 30 years of studying cuneiform texts he believes that he has a feel for the personalities of the ancient writers and the nature of their culture. After finishing this book I'm inclined to agree; at least I doubt there are many people who are more familiar with cuneiform. An extra bonus is that the author manages to let his sense of humor seep into his writing, thus the potentially dry esoteric subject is tolerable.

I was originally attracted to this book because I thought it might address some of my pet theories about why so many ancient cultures had flood myths. Unfortunately the author didn't address that subject other than to say that the myths existed long before writing was developed. Nevertheless, his discussion of the various versions of the flood story that preceded the Biblical version was fascinating.

The author did address one detail found from the Gilgamesh flood account that has always bothered me. He said the cubical shaped ark described in Gilgamesh is a mistranslation. He goes into extensive explanations as to why and how the mistranslation came to be. Instead the shape of the ark is circular in plan view and rectangular (near square) in vertical section. Structurally that makes more sense, and since the ark didn't have to do anything other than float (i.e. it wasn't going anywhere) the round shape is the most practical. I feel relieved to learn that the ancient writers weren't totally out of touch with reality when it came to structural shapes.

The author suggests that the Hebrew scriptures would not exist today if it weren't for the Babylonian captivity. He believes that most of the Old Testament writings were edited into existence from a scattering of scrolls brought from Judea in an effort of hold onto their religion/culture. In other words, Judaism originated in Babylon.

Another interesting idea I picked up from this book is that if it weren't for the dark ages that followed the late Bronze Age the alphabet system we use today might have an appearance similar to cuneiform. An alphabet system was developed in Ugarit based on symbols similar to cuneiform, but knowledge of its use was wiped out in the late Bronze Age collapse. Thus, the alphabet system we use today is based upon symbols developed later by the Phoenicians. If you want to learn more about the late Bronze Age collapse, read my review of the book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

Have you ever wondered why degrees are divided into 60 minutes? And how about a minute divided into 60 seconds? Where did that come from? Well it so happens that the Babylonians, who were famous for their astronomical observations and calculations (aided by their invention of the abacus), used a sexagesimal (base-60) positional numeral system inherited from the Sumerian and also Akkadian civilizations. The Greeks picked it up from the Persians who had picked it up from the Babylonians, and the rest is history.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wall, wall! Reed wall, reed wall!
Atra-hasîs, pay heed to my advice,
that you may live for ever!
Destroy your house; build a boat; spurn property
and save life!

After reading this book, I think I have a pretty good idea of how utterly exciting it must have been for the author when he first laid his eyes upon the above words, written on a small tablet of clay, in cuneiform, the world’s oldest writing system, used in Mesopotamia some 4000 years ago.

Irving Finkel is one of the few people on our planet who can still read cuneiform. He’s done that for over 40 years. He’s an Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum, specialised in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay (of which the BM owns a collection of around 130,000) and I cannot help thinking his physiognomy somehow fits his job:


[Irving Finkel presents the Ark Tablet in 2014; AP]

I think it’s fair to say that almost everyone knows the story of Noah and the Ark from the Hebrew Bible, even those, like me, who didn’t actually read “God’s words”. Many people probably also know that a rather similar story is depicted in the Koran where Noah is called Nuh. It’s also well known that there is a flood episode in the Epic of Gilgamesh (regarded as the earliest surviving great work of literature).

Now (in 2013) another piece is added to the epic puzzle of the deluge: Simply called the Ark tablet it dates back to 1750 BC and contains only 60 lines of text (written on the front and the back) and it’s really only just a handful of clay (11 x 6 x 2.7 centimetres).


[font view of the Ark tablet, taken from the BM picture gallery]

Nevertheless, there’s quite some fuss to be had about this fragmented, almost crumbled, piece of ancient rock, because among other things it contains a rather peculiar word in the context of the Ark: ki-[i]p-pa-tim, meaning “circular”.

Irving Finkle took this to mean that the ark built by Atra-hasîs (“Noah’s” name here) was actually a giant round boat, a so-called coracle or kuphar. This kind of boat, great or small, were in use in Irak (for instance on the Euphrates river) up until the early 20th century, so Finkel’s idea isn’t far fetched:


[a kuphar/quffa in Baghdad, 1914]

The Ark tablet also tells about the precise measurements of the boat, and pretty detailed building instructions, too. Those are perhaps not as easy to follow as an IKEA leaflet, but still, a skilled shipwright should be able to follow these instructions and actually build the ark (or an ark or at least a scaled-down model of it). But building an ark from age-old instructions isn’t the main point of this book, at least it wasn’t for me. Neither was the problem of how many and which animals to be taken unto the boat for rescue, or the precise mountain where the ark eventually “stranded” after the waters receded, although there are thoroughly researched and engaging chapters on all of these issues and more.

I see the point for reading books like this in turning one’s attention to ancient cultures, and there is no older culture than that of Mesopotamia, at least not one that has left well written testimonies about itself. I think Irving Finkle did a very fine job in delivering his view on this culture, turning the telescope the right way, so to speak, and let his readers (and listeners) experience more than just a glimpse on his favorite topics. The man is enticing, no doubt:

Scholars and historians like to stress the remoteness of ancient culture, and there is an unspoken consensus that the greater the distance from us in time the scanter the traces of recognisable kinship […]. As a result of this outlook the past comes to confer a sort of ‘cardboardisation’ on our predecessors, whose rigidity increases exponentially in jumps the further back you go in time. As a result the Victorians would seem to have lived exclusively in a flurry about sexual intercourse; the Romans worried all day about toilets and under-floor heating, and the Egyptians walked about in profile with their hands in front of them pondering funerary arrangements, the ultimate men of cardboard. And before all these were the cavemen, grunting or painting, reminiscing wistfully about life back up in the trees. As a result of this tacit process Antiquity, and to some extent all pre-modern time, is led to populate itself with shallow and spineless puppets, denuded of complexity or corruption and all the other characteristics that we take for granted in our fellow man, which we comfortably describe as ‘human’. It is easiest and perhaps also comforting to believe that we, now, are the real human beings, and those who came before us were less advanced, less evolved and very probably less intelligent; they were certainly not individuals whom we would recognise, in different garb, as typical passengers on the bus home.

Here’s an hour-long lecture Finkel gave at the Oriental Institute Museum about his research of the Ark tablet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkp...

And here’s the BBC documentary (45 mins) on building the “The Real Noah’s Ark”:
https://vimeo.com/106758421




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[Libby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of THOSE books. You know...the type with the big time expert author and the complex and abstruse subject and the 600+ pages. This is a doorstop of a book. It made my wrists ache to hold it up to read. So why did I give it five stars? Well, as I have repeatedly stated in reviews and comments on this site, I'm all about the story. So this is one of the oldest, most beloved, most often told stories in the history of mankind. It's The Flood, people, the BIG flood; it's the huge boat and the harassed hero and the animals marching in two by two. People have been telling and retelling this one for better than three thousand years.

Our author, Irving Finkel is a Keeper at the British Museum. He is a cuneiformist, which is a polite way of saying he reads scratches for a living. Cuneiform is quite possibly the oldest form of writing we know. I suppose it's possible we might find another, but I'm not holding my breath till it happens. Given his expertise, we can believe him when he tells us that the tale of Noah and the flood was not the latest in new action stories when it was written up for the Bible. In the latter half of the 1800's, a lot of European scholars were wandering through the Middle East, looking for proof of the Bible. Imagine the giddy joy of the fellow who picked up a mud brick tablet and realized he was reading about the big boat and the floating menagerie! This particular version of the tale is known to us as the Story of Gilgamesh and was required reading when I was in college. In the story, Gilgamesh is visiting with an adventurer named Utnapishti, who was the fellow who built the boat and saved mankind and a bunch of critters. (So why did he save mosquitoes? And what did they do with all the elephant poop?)

However, this is only one treatment of this tale. Another one was found and several varients of this. In the earliest, our intrepid hero was a king of Sumer named Ziusudra, who was warned by a god that the other gods intended to wipe out humankind because they were too noisy!

Apparently, these adventure yarns were so popular that many parts of these tablets have survived. Finkel's part of the story begins when a young man showed him a tablet he inherited from his father who served in the British forces in modern day Iraq. Finkel was astonished and overjoyed to realize that the tablet had pieces of the story that were new and important. He did not realize it would absorb his time and lead to writing this book. I for, one, am glad he did, for he has narrated his story with erudition and charm. It IS a complex subject, but he explains the tough parts clearly with his tongue in his cheek and a twinkle in his eye. I particularly enjoyed a passage where he explained that if a certain theory were proved to be true, he would have to get an edible hat. Academic humor! But seriously, where do you find a book that literally tells you how to build an ark? Not just what it looks like, but how many feet of palm leaf rope and how many liters of bitumin! We visit Mesopotamia under Sargon and Jerusalem under Jehoichim. We follow the Jews into Babylonian exile and examine evidence as to how they comingled their history and Babylonian folklore into such familiar tales as Moses in the Bullrushes and Noah and the Ark. Along the way we learn a lot about ancient culture and language, magic and medicine and other fascinating things. Sadly, we never find out what they did with all the elephant poop. But go on, read this one anyway! You'll be impressed.

[Daphne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely ADORED this book. Not only did I learn an incredible amount, but the author is a quintessentially British academic - and that makes him adorable. At least, to me. I dig that sort of thing. Page after page is injected with both hard facts, historic discovery, and the dry humor that you either get and love - or you don't.

This is a book written by a man that deciphered one of the more important tablets that show how much the traditional myth story of "Noah's flood" was just a copy/paste job from an earlier myth. Only names were really changed. As a skeptic and atheist that has a healthy (mostly healthy I suppose) love of history, this book seemed tailor written for me to love every minute of it.

My favorite part was the small section about discovering the scratched in game boards on the feet of many statues that were used by soldiers whiling away their time. Most of these statues were scattered around museums across the world, and remained unseen until a serendipitous discovery one day.

[Dschreiber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before 1872 everyone believed that the story of Noah and the Ark was unique to the Bible, a distinctive part of the story of the Jewish nation. That assumption crumbled one day when an assistant in the British Museum discovered a Babylonian version of the story from the city of Nineveh written on a clay tablet in wedge-shaped cuneiform, a full one thousand years older than the Bible version. It contained all the elements of the Genesis story: displeased by humans, the gods decide to drown everyone, acquiting only one man and his family from the deluge, enjoining him to build a mega-boat and fill it with plant seeds and a breeding pair of every species of animal. The museum assistant, overcome in his eureka moment, astonished his colleagues by running around the room and tearing off his clothes. During the next 113 years more small fragments of the Babylonian flood story were unearthed, and scholars peered at them, compared versions of the story, argued, and published their papers. In 1985 the world of ark studies was rocked again when a collector showed a cuneiform tablet to curator Irving Finkel at the British Museum. Not only did this tablet contain another thrilling version of the earliest Flood Story, but it also included detailed instructions for building an ark. Finkel dubbed it the Ark Tablet.

Rather than announcing his discovery modestly to the likes of Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie, Finkel wrote The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood for the general public as well as Assyriologists. It is written in such a pleasant, conversational style, always on the verge of humour or an outbreak boyish enthusiasm, that the sometimes arcane subject matter digests easily. The opening chapters on the rigors of learning cuneiform are so engaging (“Fellow students reading history or physics seemed to me frankly to be on a cushy ride”), and the pleasures of Babylonian scholarship are made so vivid that you wonder why you didn’t spend your life, too, squinting at clay tablets rather than doing other things.

Every possible implication is squeezed out of the Ark Tablet in The Ark Before Noah. All the cuneiform flood stories are scrutinized and compared, the subtlest contexts are unearthed, and words are held up to the light like diamonds. For each version of the story Finkel examines the shape and size of the ark, how it would have been built, what creatures were believed to have gone in to it, where it was thought to have landed. The boat in the earliest Sumerian story, for example, was shaped like a oversized reed boat from the marshes of southern Iraq, long and narrow, while in the later Ark Tablet the boat of Old Babylonian times was described as circular, a gigantic, basket-like coracle made of coiled rope smeared with bitumen for waterproofing. The ark in the Epic of Gilgamesh was cubic, it became oblong in the Bible and built of planks and nails in the Koran.

After proving that the Hebrew Bible story must have derived from its cuneiform predecessors, Finkel offers a fresh narrative of how the borrowing must have occurred. It happened, he says, during the Babylonian Exile, after Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Jerusalem, capital of the kingdom of Judah, in 587 B.C. and carried off every important or skilled Judaean to Babylon. For about 70 years the deportees lived in the new land not as slaves but as foreign workers, some of them assimilating. With the loss of Jerusalem and the temple, and with all the best people living within a much more powerful civilization, Judaean identity was in danger of disappearing. There was even the threat of rivalry in Babylonian religion, which was moving toward a kind of monotheism. One way to help save Judaean identity would be to compile a book of sacred texts. Part of that project would include a national history, which could be traced back through existing Judaean and Israelite annals; and, indeed, passages in Kings and Chronicles list several such sources. But what if there was a desire to go back even further? Then it would only be natural, argues Finkel, for the compilers to consult Babylonian texts. The Book of Daniel tells us that a number of the best and brightest of the Judaeans were taken into the king’s palace and trained in Babylonian language and literature. From the many surviving tablets left behind by Babylonian students we know that the Flood Story was a standard part of the cuneiform curriculum, so there was an easy path of transmission from Babylonian texts to the Hebrew Bible. Incidentally, the cuneiform curriculum also included the story of an infant named Sargon whose mother set him adrift on the river in a basket from which he was rescued and adopted, as well as the idea that humans in the era before the great flood lived wonderfully long lives, like Bible figures such as Methuselah, Mahalaleel, et al.

The Flood Story was undoubtedly part of an oral tradition long before the invention of writing; however, once cuneiform was developed in Mesopotamia, three separate versions appeared, the oldest, from about 1600 BC, in the Sumerian language, the later two in Akkadian. In the Akkadian Atrahasis Epic junior gods went on strike over their workload, so humans were created as substitute labourers. Unfortunately, they were created without mortality, and their penchant for reproduction increased their numbers inconveniently. This got on the nerves of some senior gods, especially the prickly Enlil, who decided to wipe them out, saying, “The noise of mankind has become too intense for me. With their uproar I am deprived of sleep.” Later Genesis replaced Enlil’s aural sensitivity with moral outrage as God decided to destroy humans because they were wicked, not merely noisy. When the story was taken up by the Koran, another motivation was added, Allah being incensed by unbelief as much as by bad behaviour.

Because the story of Noah, the flood, the ark, and the animals is so important in Judaeo-Christian-Islamic cultures, what is exciting in the world of clay tablets can be exciting to the person in the street. Luckily, the Ark Tablet was discovered by a scholar inclined to reach out past museum walls, someone capable of writing clearly, accessibly and with panache.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

extremely fascinating, informative, and funny. yes this is my special interest area but i think anyone could read and enjoy this book

[Matthew Colvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is delightful and fascinating to watch Finkel explain how he does textual criticism of Akkadian and Sunerian cuneiform tablets, and see how the details of the different versions of the flood story help unlock further lines that have been misunderstood or lost to damage. He warms to his task, providing helpful illustrations and diagrams along the way. I found myself thoroughly convinced of all his reconstruction and correction of the Akkadian philology in Gilgamesh and Atrahasis, and admiring the evident enthusiasm with which he makes his case. It's also apparent that Finkel goes out of his way to include facts and sources that are only marginally related to his main them of the flood, just because he finds these things fun and delightful. For me, this only makes the book more enjoyable. (It's how I try to teach as well.) He is a most droll and enjoyable raconteur, and clearly has his dream job as a curator of cuneiform at the British Museum. (He also looks like a wizard out of Tolkien, which only adds to his aura, as far as I am concerned.)

Finkel's sweeping suggestions about the circumstances and methods of the composition of the Old Testament are the weakest part of the book, and are evidence that he is not as good a scholar of the Hebrew Bible as he is of Akkadian and Sumerian. He thinks the whole OT was composed during the Babylonian captivity, using adapted Mesopotamian myths all polemically changed to make monotheistic YHWHism's claims. To be sure, there is some of that going on, but Finkel generalizes too much, and does not give the Hebrews enough credit for their own high degree of literacy and tradition.

For my own part, I picked up the book because I was learning Akkadian and reading Gilgamesh in translation. Now, having read most of Finkel's book, I am even more excited about this language. His enthusiasm is infectious, and I have fallen under his spell so much that I am inclined to agree when he says, "I would go so far as to recommend Assyriology enthusiastically as a way of life to many.”

[Sophia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I can't say I was fully convinced by all of Finkel's arguments, but his passion for the subject is evident and I got swept up in the text. For a casual reader, the sections on cuneiform may seem dry and a slog to get through, I did not mind them at all, and learned quite a bit. My favorite portions of the book were comparisons of the different texts and his bold hypothesis about how the flood story was translated to the Judeans (which I won't spoil here). My main issue is that in talking about the history of these artifacts he didn't talk about how they came into the British Museum's collection or the colonial history of their collection. I suppose as a curator there he is discouraged from doing so, but it did rub me the wrong way. Otherwise, a book that will appeal to those deeply interested in the topic and will probably bore those not.

[Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Irving Finkel never fails to entertain even as he pulls his audience down into deep waters of technical argumentation. And, unlike many books of its kind, The Ark Before Noah lays enough general groundwork in Assyriology that an uninitiated (but interested) reader can reasonably follow the ensuing scholarly work.

Finkel's work here covers some wide ground, but it essentially falls into three categories:

First, he introduces and explains the features and functions of a particular 2nd millennium tablet bearing details about the Old Babylonian version of the flood story. I found all his arguments to be compelling and extremely interesting on this front.

Second, he explains what this tablet reveals about, and how it fits into, the development of this story on Mesopotamian literature. Here, also, I enjoyed the content immensely.

Third, he makes a number of proposals for how, why, and through what mechanisms the biblical flood story adopted and adapted the Mesopotamian myth. Here I found most of his suggestions entirely plausible, even if not totally convincing. Many of his points rest on the argument that the Mesopotamian and Hebrew versions of the story are too similar to represent independent recensions of an earlier tradition. On that point, I may be more inclined toward a third way: The story existed and circulated independently in both cultures, but the Babylonian version may well have influenced certain details in the biblical account -- possibly for polemical reasons. I don't believe the accounts are so similar that every point in the Genesis passage must be explained as a reworking of a Babylonian original.

All in all, though, I really enjoyed this one. Accessible enough for a newbie, but technical enough to interest more informed readers, and witty enough to entertain all involved. From an evangelical perspective, it's also a great opportunity to confront and consider an opposing view of the biblical history.

[Angus McGregor · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you visualized an archetypal curator of cuneiform tablets at the British Museum, you would get Irving Finkel. His flowing beard and wizard like demeanor are a delight.

His discovery of an ancient Babalonyian version of the Biblical arc myth on one of the museum's 130,000 clay tablets is an extraordinary tale.

The pocket size guide to the flood narrative, written in 60 lines of Babylonian cuneiform, allows Finkel to trace the flood narrative through hundreds of years of shifts until Genesis and the Quran.

The book's narrow focus, however, was disappointing. Rather than using the stories as insights into Near East culture, most of the book examines the construction of the Ark, the materials, shape, and kinds of animals on board.

Stronger chapters like the Jewish reproduction of the Babylonian myth during the exile fell under the radar.

Finkel is still best enjoyed on YouTube.

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Stories of the Flood by Irving Finkel (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday 2014) (299.21) (3533).

Having finished reading The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Stories of the Flood, it is clearly obvious that author Irving Finkel is the smartest guy in the room. Any room. He has spent a lifetime deciphering ancient Mesopotanian cuneiform, and he is reportedly as comfortable reading ancient Babylonian texts as most modern readers are reading newsprint.

Finkel goes to great lengths with photos and diagrams to explain how he deciphers cuneiform symbols. I tried to follow his meticulous explanations, but it was all Mesopotanian to me.

I expected to find a comparative survey of the flood legends of the various middle eastern cultures. The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Stories of the Flood certainly provides a look at the tradition of the flood from the perspective of a number of different cultures.

My takeaway from this volume is a new appreciation of the knowledge and skill required to bring dead languages to life.

As a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist. Maybe I still do.

My rating: 7/10, finished 5/4/21 (3533).

[Cal McCormick · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite kind of book genre is someone who is clearly passionate about something explaining that thing in a less academic setting, making it more approachable. The author has spent decades of his life studying Cuneiform Babylonian and Akkadian tablets and it’s great to read and think about the artifacts he has seen and what insights they can still provide.

This book gives me a lot to think about as regards the story of Noah, and was a worthwhile listen for me

[Victor Sonkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have probably given it four stars immediately after reading it; after some time, I feel the grip of the material is not strong enough, but that is certainly my problem rather than Finkel's. For an introduction (at least from one of the sides) into Mesopotamian history and the like, this is as good as any; and some of the stories and reconstructions are gripping indeed.

[Joanne, drinker of tea, reader of books, servant to cats · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved loved loved this book.

There are other very good reviews that go into technical details of the book, so I won't repeat them. I highly recommend you peruse the reviews, as many of them are as good as the book.

Most of us know the story of Noah and the flood. Some of us know that Noah's story is based on much older flood narratives and epics. But, where and when were those stories written, and how did the Noah version come about?

One day at the British Museum, Irving Finkle was handed a cuneiform tablet that didn't just tell a pre-Noah flood story, but gave instructions on how to build the ark. The story pre dated Noah. It even predated Gilgamesh.

The build instructions resulted in an ark that did not look like the one we have come to expect.

Suffice to say, this isn't a simple telling of the various flood stories upon which the story of Noah is based. This is the story of writing, of language, of how stories change as they are retold and adopted, and indeed history itself.

What could have been a rather dull monologue (given the subject matter) was instead humorous and enlightening, and in places, downright exciting.

As well as being an expert in his almost life long subject matter, Irving Finkle has a brilliant and dry wit, and it very much comes through the pages of this book.

[Heath Henwood · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to question whether this book was another to capitalise on Russell Crowe’s new movie Noah, or whether it was a genuine academic text.

While there will be some cross promotion with the movie, it does not take long to determine that The Ark before Noah is a purely academic text. To call it dry would be a complement.

It is in fact an investigation into the ark and more specifically an ancient clay tablet, called cuneiform. The book centres on the tablet and how it provides a new interpretation of the Noah's Ark story. The tablet that actually describes animals entering an ark "two by two".

There is no doubting the excitement that the author Dr Irving Finkel's has for cuneiform, and his research to show that the flood story is real, and documented prior to the Biblical recount.

The tablet confirms the Biblical account of the flood, but apart from the discovery and interpretation of the cuneiform tablet it doesn’t provide any new information or interpretation.

There is a rather long and tedious recount of the author’s background and academic history. Apart from establishing his credentials it serves no purpose at all, and is quickly skipped over.
You would need to be either a keen historian or flood fanatic to read through the entire book.

[Tovis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finkel brings something as dry as ancient history and cuneiform and brings it to life. It is wonderful to read a book in which the author actually did his own research and is an authority on the subject he presents. He doesn't actually rub it in your face in the book either. Rather, he reveals his passion in some of the stories he tells about his life's work. This is by no means a light read, but I enjoyed it. I may not agree with all of his conclusions, but it is still worth 5 stars.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

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The rating, any status updates, and those bookshelves, indicate my feelings for this book.

[Justin Tapp · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoy works by practitioners of their craft over journalistic accounts of those crafts and the practioners' discoveries. I suppose most practitioners too eccentric to be good writers, but Irving Finkel does a decent job he; apparently moonlights as a fiction author. He's a committed philologist and Assyriologist living his childhood dream of working in the British Museum and is one of the world's foremost experts on Akkadian/Sumerian/Babylonian cuneiform. I listened to Gerald Davis' "new" translation of Gilgamesh before this book; that and Genesis 5-11 are prerequisites. I take particular interest in this book as Answers in Genesis is building a life-size replica of the biblically-described ark not too far from where I live.

The first 1/3 of the book deals with the development and history of language and its translation. Writing was invented in Mesopotamia around 3,500 BC. The earliest clay tablets from around that time have yet to be translated. Gilgamesh and other works are quite difficult to translate, and Finkel gives plenty of details of his own discoveries regarding the Ark tablet he uncovered that will make one appreciate the difficulties of translating ancient texts, including the Hebrew Bible. (One also shudders at the invaluable history that ISIS has destroyed in Syria and Iraq, never again to be recovered.)

Interestingly, cuneiform cannot be written with the left hand, which perhaps helps explain the aversion to left-handedness that exists in many cultures there today. Clay tables with errors are remarkably uncommon and Finkel details how they dealt with errors. Akkadian became the dominant language in Mesopotamia until it was replaced by Aramaic at about 1,000 B.C. It's important to remember that what we have on clay or paper is not the sum of ancient thought, knowledge, or philosophy-- it's only a window, at best, and much still remains untranslated.

Finkel's office came into possession of several cuneiform tablets donated from an antiquities collector, and on a small "mobile phone-sized" tablet Finkel found lines matching up with Utnapishtim's account of building the ark that he dates around 1,750 BC. Finkel feigns no modesty in calling this "one of the most important documents ever discovered," and translating and filling in the blanks are Finkel's devotion. The way in which this is done is interesting but I noted that Finkel falls into a couple of exegetical fallacies along the way (more on that later).

The flood narrative was first recorded around 2,000 BC and the non-biblical account comes down to us in three forms: One Sumerian and two Akkadian on nine known tablets from the Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian periods. Finkel's table is composed in the literary Akkadian style. In deciphering certain unusual words, Finkel consults lexicons created by other Assyriologists finding definitions from limited other tablets. Finkel's headline discovery is that the boat described in his tablet is round and held together by hundreds of kilometer of rope. In this way, it resembled a larger version of the vessels that were used in the rivers of Mesopotamia.

I note one exegetical fallacy in Finkel's quest to interpret the text, and that is to look for meaning of a word in a different semantic field. Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic are all Semitic languages with similar grammar and shared root words. But the meaning of words in those languages evolved over time, as words do in every language. At one point, Finkel reaches for the Arabic word meaning "basket" to show a similarity in sound with a word on his tablet which he says gives further evidence for the round basket-like boat he is interpreting from his text. So, he's reaching for a word dating after 600 AD in one language to determine the meaning of a word written in another language 2,000 years before! Surely someone would correct him in his fallacious reasoning here, but apparently not.

Finkel's lack of cross-checking his work with others also comes across in his putting forth a "new" theory about when the Old Testament, including and especially Genesis, was written. This stems from Finkel's second exciting discovery- the words meaning "two by two" which were either missing or illegible in previously discovered tablets, which match the biblical account of animals coming onto the ark in pairs. Finkel uses this fact and the date of when the Genesis account could have been recorded, if indeed by Moses (~1400 BC during the exodus from Egypt), to state that the Hebrew flood account MUST have been copied from the Babylonians. Finkel proposes that the entirety of the Torah was written whole cloth in Babylonian times with Jews borrowing everything from monotheism (Marduk) to the flood account (Gilgamesh) and rewriting it to establish an independent and seemingly superior account for national interest.

This "new" hypothesis, not theory, is neither new nor supported by evidence nor is it accepted by scholars, for good reason. Many scholars already believe that the Torah and Talmud as we have them today were compiled by Hebrew scribes around 500-600 BC during the 70-year Babylonian exile, that is not new. But no one believes the Hebrews made up their traditions out of whole cloth as they had a tradition of language and literacy and brought with them both scrolls and oral tradition from Israel. Hence, there were scribes who could read and write the Hebrew text that scholars believe they had the capability of writing. (Finkel even cites the this bringing of scrolls as authoritative, undermining his own argument.)

Most scholars believe all the separate pieces were compiled and redacted into a single collection, with the more liberal/skeptical scholars arguing for a greater amount of redaction than others. Finkel is claiming that there was little or nothing to be redacted, everything needed to be written for the first time-- where the Hebrews had oral traditions about creation and the flood, their scholarly leaders deemed them inadequate to explain their exile predicament and insufficient to keep Hebrews patriotically devoted to rebuilding their homeland. Daniel and his friends, for example, were attending Babylonian schools and would have been well-schooled in their languages and literature; it was likely among these, claims Finkel, that the Hebrew Bible was written. Finkel either ignores or omits that the Book of Daniel (9:1) records Daniel's reading of Hebrew scrolls (Jeremiah) predating the exile. Jeremiah, like Isaiah and Ezkiel (also predating the exile) quotes from or alludes to Genesis 1-11, and Isaiah refers to Noah.

It is also problematic that Finkel accepts one of several versions of the Documentary Hypothesis without explaining its background and how that hypothesis has evolved in the last two hundred years. For a description and critique of the hypothesis, as well as a plausible Tablet Model that Finkel does not mention, see this link:
https://answersingenesis.org/bible-ch...

The Documentary Hypothesis, ironically, can be used against Finkel's argument about how Genesis was written as scholars subscribing to the hypothesis believe the 3 or 4 traditions (depending on which form of the hypothesis they endorse) were written down before the exile. As pointed out by others critiquing Finkel's work, many of these texts (such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, which was studied by Daniel during the exile) refer to Genesis and mention the flood. Finkel is either ignorant of or omits the Tablet Model, that the "toledoth" found in Genesis may indicate multiple tablets as part of a single narrative -- a view I find more plausible given Finkel's own research on the various tablets related to Gilgamesh.

Given the historical problems with Finkel's hypothesis, I find it unlikely that the Hebrews also borrowed Genesis 1-3 from Babylonian accounts. Major parts of Genesis 1-11 seem clearly written as a polemic against alternative creation, flood, and geneological accounts in Mesopotamia and Palestine. The Gilgamesh epic is polytheistic, Babylon believed it descended from heaven as a divine city (rather than being the source of God's judgement of languages--Babel), and the biblical account clearly contrasts with these and its stories are much less fantastic than Gilgamesh. If we believe that Moses had something to do with the writing of these accounts (as Exodus says and Jesus as well as Jews in his day claimed) then it stands to reason he would have been aware of these competing accounts, having been raised in Pharoah's household and likely literate in many languages and having encountered stories from ancient Mesopotamian cultures, such that he could have been conscious of them writing ~1400 BC. Finkel argues that these accounts clash because of a concerted effort of Hebrew scribes, but the evidence of historical dates is against him, as well as the lack of the ability of anyone to concertedly write so well and so subtly a polemic (even many commentaries written on Genesis today miss the polemic aspects).

Finkel's descriptions of the difficulty of translating and interpreting are the main thing I gleaned from this book. He points out that several parts of Genesis 6-9 contain Hebrew words not used elsewhere, illustrating the difficulties of translators. The ark's rectangular measurements are a problem for him, and he believes it was intentionally written not to be round. But I think given that ships built for centuries around the world tend to be rectangular in shape rather than round make the measurements unproblematic; why would the Hebrew scribes be so desirous to not let their boat be round if it's a good model? If the ark was round and Hebrew scholars have simply misinterpreted the ancient measurements all these years then that would still not have any implications for the veracity or meaning of the overall account.

Another interesting aspect of The Ark Before Noah is the evidence that people have been searching for Noah's ark for millennia and its pieces sold and used as amulets similar to how supposed pieces of Jesus' cross became marketable all through the Middle Ages. Finkel also notes tablets that indicate the Assyrian king Sennacherib searched for the ark. Sennacherib's seige of Jerusalem is recorded in 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Isaiah. After an angel wipes out 185,000 of his soldiers, Sennacherib returns to Ninevah where he is murdered by his sons while praying in a temple (Isaiah 37:37-38). Finkel reports that one of the Assyrian tablets confirms this account of his death, with the detail that Sennacherib was praying to a plank of Noah's ark. Finkel describes various recorded attempts to find the ark through history.

In all, I give this 3 stars out of 5. Finkel's exegetical stretches and eagerness to trumpet his own work without examining critiques of others is problematic for me. I enjoyed his passion for his craft and he gave me a greater appreciation for linguistics and interpretation.

[The Idle Woman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deep within the British Museum is the Arched Room, a soaring vaulted hall lined with shelves of cubbyholes. This is where the cuneiform tablets are kept and it feels rather like the Holy of Holies. I’ve only been once, but that single visit impressed me mightily: not just the architecture, but the hushed air of industry as scholars and students sat hunched over at the central line of desks, working away at deciphering these ancient fragments. Tablets might be business letters, court records or poetry. It’s an ongoing detective story and my brilliant Assyriologist colleagues never know what they’re going to turn up. In this book, the irrepressible Irving Finkel tells the story of the most exciting recent discovery, when a member of the public brought in a cuneiform tablet which offered fascinating new evidence about the story of the Ark and the Great Flood...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2018/03/28/t...

[Kasia (Kącik z książką) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Czy Potop naprawdę miał miejsce? Czy jedna z kluczowych biblijnych opowieści jest jedynie poruszającym wyobraźnię mitem, czy też faktem? Historia wybranego przez Boga człowieka, który buduje wielką łódź i ratuje przed zagładą ludzi i zwierzęta, jest obecna nie tylko w Starym Testamencie, ale również Koranie i babilońskim eposie o Gilgameszu. Wszystkie wersje różnią się pewnymi szczegółami, co nasuwa pytanie: która z nich była pierwsza, biblijna czy mezopotamska? Wygląda na to, że Irving Finkel jest w stanie udzielić nam wyczerpującej odpowiedzi.

Cała opinia:
http://www.kacikzksiazka.pl/2018/04/p...

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Irving Finkel's marvelous introduction to the topic of Assyriology and cuneiform tablets deserves a space on the shelf of anyone driven by the joy of curiosity and discovery. Finkel is your kindred. If you are fascinated by the concept of history or the working of the human mind as it invented writing and literature, you cannot find a better author to learn it from. As I read this text I feel I can hear Finkel speaking in my ear. He is aware that he is a boffin and yet unapologetically in love with his field of study.

I wrote that introduction about one-hundred pages into the book, and while I fully endorse it for those pages, I feel there are some caveats to add. Finkel's very close examination of the ark tablet became tiresome to me, as a person who is not moved by a detailed description of an engineering project, which is what the ark tablet is. I powered through it and was very impressed to discover that this ark story came complete with specs that have actual numbers the add up, make sense and seem possible to replicate (no one, to my knowledge has tried to build the ark so-described.) There is a type of reader who will eat this part of the book up, I am sure, but it is not me.

As much as I am in love with Finkel the writer and Finkel the researcher, I was not able to buy into all of his conclusions, which extend into areas of study that he did not offer the amount of evidence for that he could with his core area of expertise. Many of Finkel's hypotheses about the journey that the ark story took to get into the old testament are still hypotheses and he at times writes as if they are undoubtedly true. The Babylonian captivity surely makes sense as a time when Jews would come into contact with Babylonian stories. To consider it as tried and proven fact that several iconic tales from the old testament were taken wholesale from Babylonian legend, even when those legends correspond in detail so closely to the old testament versions, cannot be supported without demonstrating with evidence the step-by-step provenance. Again, it seems very reasonable, but an academic argument requires more evidence.

These concerns do not take away from my absolute delight at Finkel's descriptions of finding and translating the ark tablet and my enjoyment in getting a window on a world of cuneiform translation. If Finkel were offering a course, I would certainly give up my nights to attend it. And I will most certainly read more about Mesopotamian literature and read Finkel's upcoming book.

[Sean Tesauro · Rating 4 out of 5]

- An academic discovery made exciting -

Reading Dr Finkel's book is like having him talk to you through the page - I felt just as excited reading it as I'd imagine he would be telling me face to face.

A very interesting topic, for today; as a historical find; as an archeological and linguistic advancement; and as an exciting account of moulds being broken and real-time detective work.

His style is great: educational, friendly, playful and engaging - telling the accounts of the history and discoveries like a story that anyone can follow and feel brought along.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhat autistic look at the Babylonian flood myth. Author Finkel is a cuneiformist who got access to a tablet showing pretty exact building directions for Atra-Hasis's ark in the Babylonian creation story. Fascinating at times but often bogged down in detail unnecessary for the layman. The ubiquity of flood myths around the globe demands further attention.

[Brad Mundy · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a good writer! Who knew that a cuneiform scholar would have writing chops. He makes a complex subject very approachable and fascinating.

[Dominic Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Article Review:

There is a view of ancient history and texts – really a claim to modern culture and truth itself - that is prejudiced against the Bible and Christianity. It can be seen in the so-called ‘Renaissance’, and more so in the so-called ‘Enlightenment;’ from the Italian poet Petrarch naming the whole medieval period and its soaring cathedrals, ‘the Dark Ages’, to the Romantic poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, with its obvious obsession toward ancient Greece and Rome – unrelenting nostalgia for the past they have never visited and reconfigure into halcyon days. It is there in the liberal ‘theology’ of nineteenth century Germany, disparaging and dispensing with biblical truth, and casually dismissing its historicity. Their claims and theories turned out to be – and ever more so by the year – utterly unfounded, as the archaeologists dug up the very cities that didn’t exist, and read of the mythical Israelite kings, their battles, and decisions, in very substantial clay tablets and stone stele from under the sands. And yet, there exists still, a desire to disprove the Bible, to render it at least less-historical than other historical sources, to weigh it as less foundational a text, as construction and composite more than as source and inspiration.

Some of this bias can be found in Irving Finkle’s book on a recently discovered cuneiform ‘ark’ tablet, which does in many ways give a quite fascinating tour of ancient Mesopotamian writing. He introduces the reader to the tablets and the method of pressing the stylus into the unbaked clay, to the various surviving near-Eastern accounts of the flood and ark, animals to be saved ‘two by two’ and birds sent to find dry land – as the book of Genesis also details –and round coracles, taking onboard treasure, and one of the pantheon, Enki warning of the flood through a reed wall - as Genesis does not. Finkle then gives his theory of how the Bible took shape under the pressures of Babylonian exile.

It is in in this latter section that the worldview in which the whole book is couched is fully unveiled. Finkle, an expert reader of cuneiform tablets from the vast collections of the British Museum, prejudices the Babylonian origins of the ark and flood story, over the Hebraic. He imagines how the Judeans taken into exile in the 6th century BC would have assembled the Bible from their own and also Babylonian cuneiform texts, desperate to preserve and make sense of their identity and their history, painfully dislocated as they were in a foreign land. In this situation, he envisages the flood stories of Babylon influencing the story of Noah in Genesis. He even suggests that increasingly monotheistic interpretations of Marduk and the Babylonian pantheon of gods may have seemed, generations hence, somewhat synonymous with Jewish monotheism.

Such theories are not uncommon, and other writers have gone much further – even claiming Jewish monotheism as only formed in Babylonian captivity. These kinds of ideas display the tendency to belittle the Bible – the unparalleled historical source of the period – and to render Babylon with something of the prestige of ‘Babylon the Great’ that the biblical writers wrote explicitly against. In all such rehistoricisation lies a great deal of circular reasoning, of missing biblical evidence when it contradicts. The Old Testament prophets, writing in both the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and both before and at the start of their exiles, all undeniably and steadfastly share the same monotheistic faith in Yahweh, with other nations’ gods deemed idols. To claim that this Hebrew monotheism developed during Babylonian captivity requires book after biblical book to be cast aside and branded false. It is surely more plausible that the already established monotheism of Israel and Judea arrived and shook the pantheism of Babylon into some hasty but unsatisfactory amendments. This would not be a one-off occurrence: the sudden pivot to sun-god ‘monotheism’ of ancient Egypt occurs around the same era the Israelites would have been there as slaves; the adoption of a kind of deism by ‘neo’-Platonism occurs when Christianity spreads in the Roman Empire. The same thing keeps happening – when unsatisfactory and inferior belief systems meet the Jewish and Christian God, they embark on a mad scramble to stay relevant and cover over their inadequacies. The Hebrew texts tell of a people who betrayed their God and suffered the consequences; they emphasise his holiness and his call to purity upon them. To believe that these very same texts were designed by a bunch of liars and forgers is frankly absurd.

As Jesus later says in Luke 6:43-45 “For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”

The flood story and the Hebrew Bible, and its cuneiform roots, need no Babylonian genesis, not even the partial direction that Finkle suggests plausible. Abraham, the man to whom the promise of being made into a nation was first given, started off a Sumerian. He hailed from the city of Ur, where the moon god Sin was worshipped – and still was in Babylonia in the exilic era – and where the cuneiform script of Akkadian was used. When he left on his journey through Caanan with his father, and perhaps with a wealth of herds and servants, tents and possessions, it would be sensible to think that cuneiform went with him – tablets recording the already ancient past, the flood, his antecedents, and unfired tablets ready for legal documents and fresh record keeping. Hebrew was a script that later developed beyond cuneiform roots, but it would be natural to assume that by it the Kingdom of Israel maintained knowledge from the clay-tablet past. What flood story did Abraham carry with him from Ur? What did God reveal further to him of these events, and what to Moses, traditionally the writer of the first biblical books? As Finkle details, recovered Mesopotamian flood tablets reveal significant changed story details over time within their locally succeeding cultures. But it would be assumption, and against Israel’s scribal traditions, to think that comparable changes occurred in that kingdom.

To favour the later experience of exile as the source for similarities between the flood stories found on Babylonian clay tablets and in the Hebrew text, is to negate the many centuries of Israelite life in Palestine, and their Sumerian ancestry. It is to belittle Israel and their literary culture, which existed in a near-East of well-known tales and retellings of ancient events, about which they surely had their own ancient records. It would seem logical that the Jews arrived in exile, carrying fully formed flood and other narratives, with no need to adopt or adapt from the obviously related, but distinctly different Babylonian tales they encountered, which did not honour Yahweh as the one true God.

Perhaps, for those secularists for whom the Bible has felt culturally familiar, there is indulgence in the hint of the extraordinary that a tablet pulled from the dust can evoke. Perhaps, as evident in poetic writings since the Renaissance, the vague spirituality of a long gone past seems preferential and amenable to the moral and spiritual call of the biblical text, which is alive, which speaks of sin, the need of a saviour, and asks of us our response. Biblical scripture in fact breathes of cuneiform, and further, of the Word beyond time and dust; and for those who can see them, the now translated marks still evoke as miraculously as their first scratches pressed in clay.

http://dominicgraham.net/2025/09/02/r...

[A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review: The Ark before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood by Irving Finkle

The Flood story, absent Noah, is rather widespread in ancient civilizations. There are remnants of two versions of the Flood story in the book of Genesis. (I challenge readers to review the Flood accounts in Genesis and to write down a summary of what they read.) It has been clear to me for decades, and to scholars for centuries, that the Flood stories in Genesis are derivative. That is why I read this book.
To his credit, Finkle establishes his authority as an Asseriologist by overwhelming his readers who are ignorant of cuneiform writing, which is to say, virtually all of us. But this comes at a cost: we unwashed really don’t care about the many word lists which pad the book, inasmuch as they serve no purpose other than to establish his credentials. Annoyingly, Finkle boasts of his scholarship and original ideas, at least one of which is centuries old and others are not original, throughout, instead of letting his work speak for itself.
Also to his credit, Finkle clearly identifies several Mesopotamian sources of the Flood story and carefully explicates each as to similarities and differences. He then goes on to indicate the relationship of these Mesopotamian stories to the Genesis accounts. This may be the chief value of the book. I salute his careful rendering of these accounts, but I must ask why he did not do what he set out to do in five thousand or so words, rather than four or five times that. I found the work increasingly tedious as he discussed topics which had minimal relevance to general readers, the audience for his work. The lack of documented sources for many assertions and several theses, together with a limited knowledge of critical exegesis limit the value of this book as a scholarly work. Clearly, he needed a more rigorous editor.
This work may appeal to a wide variety of people interested in the Hebrew Bible, or even interested in the New Testament. I would advise them to look for popular works by recognized scholars in scripture: there is a vast body of literature available today for the general reader which will satisfy any virtually any desire to understand, on virtually any level, Scripture.

Mr. Graziano is the author of From the Cross to the Church: the Emergence of the Church from the Chaos of the Crucifixion.

[Mouldy Squid · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the first third of "The Ark Before Noah" can be somewhat dry, especially to the casual reader, Finkel sets the foundation of assyriology and cuneiform writing and an over view of the writing system and a brief history of the cultures that produced it. This is necessary for the remainder of the book relies on at least a basic understanding of cuneiform texts and the myths they record.

Once this preliminary matter is dispensed with, Finkel clearly and entertainingly explains the Mesopotamian flood myths and provides a plausible thesis for their transmission to Judaism (and hence to Islam and Christianity). A profoundly interesting book for people who are interested in not just flood myths but for anyone with a hunger for history, religious studies and mythology.

Many readers will not find as much to enjoy here as I, and some sort of advanced degree is recommended although the layman will still be able to grasp all of the required material.

[Kevin Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

We have known for over a hundred years that Biblical account of Noah's flood derived from a Mesopotamian legends. Anyone who has read the Epic of Gilgamesh has noted the parallels. But apparently even the Gilgamesh tale is a late rendition of the legend. Finkel's book is a marvelous explication of that legend based on various cuneiform tablets. To read The Ark Before Noah is a bit of an undertaking. It is part memoir, part academic text and part detective story. It is alternately fascinating and extremely dry. It contains one of the best explanations of cuneiform writing that I have ever read but some of the detail is exhausting. Is it worth reading? If you have a strong interest in the ancient world, yes. If your interest is more casual, probably not,it is too big a mountain to climb. Biggest surprise: the description of the Ark.

[Mishehu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating insights into a little-known field of ancient history. Book chronicles the author's 'discovery', decipherment, and interpretation of a fragment of a Mesopotamian flood narrative, placing it both in its local historical context as well as in relation to the Biblical flood account. Though many questions about the text remain unanswered, Finkel does a superb job of elucidating what is known and what can be reasonably hypothesized about it. Reading this book was like looking over the shoulder of a scholar at work in the British Museum. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[FEED ME KITTENS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Irving Finkel does a fantastic job of breaking down the origins of the Flood Myth. Highly recommended for anybody interested in ancient history, mythology, storytelling, and how those topics interact over time.