We can often learn a lot from Jewish historians who tear apart their own religious history in ways which Christians refuse to do. Irving Finkel is assistant keeper of the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum, specialising in Ancient Mesopotamia.
In his book ‘The Ark Before Noah’ (Hodder, 2014), Finkel provides a thorough examination of the earlier versions of the Flood myth (with Upnapištim and Atra-Hasis as the respective heroes in Atra-Hasis and Gilgamesh) repeated in Genesis, the form that an historical ark could have taken (a round Iraqi reed-coracle), and the historical context for the cultural transmission of the Torah’s appropriation of Mesopotamian myths, for which Finkel spends an entire chapter.
