Mythology

illustrates the transformations which an ancient myth, such as the Sumerian myth of the farmer and the shepherd, may undergo in the course-of its wanderings. The next myth which the Yahwist has woven into his ’salvation-history’ is perhaps the most widely distributed of all myths, the myth of the Flood. We have already discussed the forms of this myth current among the Sumerians and their Semitic conquerors, and have observed that the Egyptians had no Flood myth, although they had a myth of the destruction of mankind. We shall also see that the Flood myth was not the only form of the myth of the destruction of mankind known to the Hebrew writers. But before we deal with the Hebrew form of the Flood myth there is some important mythological material to be noticed which has been used to make a narrative link between the myth of Cain and Abel and the Flood myth. We have already pointed out that the genealogical list of ten generations from Adam to Noah is a variant version of the Yahwist’s list of Cain’s descendants given in Chapter 4. But there are two features of P’s list which call for comment. We have seen that P is using what is commonly called the I-E narrative in his final edition of Genesis in its present form, and that he has added certain elements of his own to it. Here he has added to the I story of Cain and Abel a genealogical list which contains ten names instead of the eight names of the I list, and has assigned to the ten names an extraordinary duration of life; with the remarkable exception of Enoch, the length of life assigned to each member of P’s list extends to little short of a thousand years. For the explanation of this we have to turn to those early Sumerian sources which were known to the editors of the Creation myths of the Hebrews. A Babylonian priest named Berosus, who lived in the reign of Alexander the Great, wrote in very bad Greek an account of the ancient traditions of Babylon, and it has been established by recent discoveries that Berosus was using ancient Sumerian king-lists. [12] Two king-lists from the Sumerian city of Larsa have been discovered, one of which contains eight names, and the other ten, and both of them conclude with the name of Ziusudra, also called in the Akkadian version Utnapishtim, the hero of the Flood myth. Both in Berosus and in the Larsa lists the prediluvian kings are said to have reigned an incredible number of years, ranging from twenty to seventy thousand years. At the end of one of the Larsa lists the scribe has appended a note which says, ‘The Flood came. After the Flood came, kingship was sent down from on high.’ Since Ziusudra and his wife had been made immortal and translated to Dilmun, no legitimate successor was available and, as it was not conceivable that ordered life could continue without kingship, it had to be sent down from heaven. It is possible that astrological or cult reasons may underlie these strange figures, but the explanation does not concern us here. What does concern us is the relation between the Sumerian king-lists and the genealogical list in Gen. 5. In the first place, we have in each case a list of ten names before the Flood; secondly, there is the abnormal length of life attributed to the individuals in each list; thirdly, the seventh person in each list is noteworthy for similar qualities. The seventh king in the Sumerian tradition was regarded as possessing special wisdom in matters pertaining to the gods, and as being the first of mankind to practise divination. The seventh name in the P list is that of Enoch, of whom it is said that ‘he walked with God’, and who in later Jewish tradition was said to have been taken up into heaven without dying.” It may be merely coincidence that one of the Larsa lists contains eight names and the other ten, just as the J list has eight, and the P list ten names. But the other parallels are too striking to be fortuitous. It seems difficult to avoid the inference that the Priestly writer has prefixed to his account of the Flood a list of ten patriarchs with

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