**On testimony and truth before the tribunal of history
When humankind had grown arrogant and violent, YHWH decreed the destruction of all life upon the Earth by a vast flood; yet He warned Noakh, the just and the pious one, that he might be spared from the cataclysm and safeguard the living kinds. When the deluge had subsided, the survivors offered a sacrifice, and God took such delight in its fragrance that He acknowledged having exceeded in His wrath — for He saw that humankind is unavoidably inclined toward evil. Then He proclaimed a covenant, sealed by the sign of the rainbow, with all men and living beings: the so-called seven Noakhide laws.
Everyone, at least in broad outline, knows the tale of Noakh’s Ark from the Book of Genesis. Yet a glance at the Sumerian–Akkadian corpus—and at the later Assyrian and Babylonian versions, including the Epic of Gilgamesh—reveals that, throughout the land between the two rivers, a nearly identical story was handed down for three millennia. The god Enlil, wishing to punish humankind for its violent clamour, hurled a flood upon the Earth; but the god Enki, through a subtle stratagem, managed to warn his faithful Utnapištim (also called Atraḫasis or Ziusudra) who saved himself from the waters by building a vessel on which he embarked pairs of all living creatures. And here too, when the event had passed, the survivors offered a sacrifice, and the gods—starved of burnt offerings and devotion, since men had perished—swarmed upon it “like flies.”
Biblical scholars explain this identity between the Hebrew and Mesopotamian myths by reasoning that most of the books forming the Torah—or Pentateuch—were written, or at least redacted anew, during the Babylonian Captivity, when the Israelites absorbed the local traditions (another parallel often noted is that both Sargon and Mosheh were saved from the waters as infants, each placed in a basket and abandoned to the river). Such an exegetical explanation of the origin of certain Old Testament narratives may seem, at first glance, sufficient.
Yet if one widens the field of vision beyond the narrow Middle East, further and stranger correspondences appear. In Greek mythology, too, there is an episode of a universal flood: Zeus, wishing to punish humankind for its hubris, sent the waters to cover the Earth, and only Deucalion, forewarned by Prometheus, was saved. Broadening the gaze still further, several Egyptian papyri—including a version of the Book of the Dead—recount how the gods, Atum, the primordial one, or elsewhere Thoth, resolved to inundate the Earth; while another myth tells that Ra sent Sekhmet to destroy the race of men. Similar tales are found in the Avesta, the sacred text of Zarathustra, as well as in Hindu scripture and in the Tamil tradition of southern India, where torrential rains are said to have drowned Kumari Kandam, the Indian Atlantis. Even Plato, in the prologue to the Timaeus, recalls—according to what a priest of Sais told Solon—that Atlantis sank beneath the waves, engulfed by a cataclysm around 9600 B.C.E.
Mark Isaak compiled and compared the many myths that recount a universal flood, discovering that more than two hundred and fifty civilizations—from every corner of the planet—speak of it in strikingly similar terms (Flood Stories from Around the World, available online).
That over two hundred and fifty cultures across the globe should describe an immense deluge that decimated humankind makes the expression “universal flood” not a metaphor but a literal definition. It also casts a different light on the story of Noakh’s Ark, making somewhat puerile the exegesis that regards it as a mere rewriting of Mesopotamian sources. For if the myths of every people have preserved the memory of the same event, the resemblance between any two of them ceases to be of consequence.
It then becomes difficult not to suspect that the most orthodox Jewish scholars may be right in considering the flood a real historical occurrence. This does not mean presuming that the Book of Genesis alone tells the truth while the Popol Vuh of the Maya Quiché or the traditions of the North American or Australian peoples do not; rather, that all traditions testify to one and the same event. If every civilization on Earth remembers the same cataclysm, that event must in some form have been real—each culture later interpreting and embellishing it in accordance with its own symbols and beliefs.
If, in a court of law, two hundred and fifty witnesses were to affirm—some clearly, others with confusion—that they had seen a certain event, and then a single witness were to appear declaring never to have seen such a thing, no judge would rely on that latter statement to conclude that the event had never taken place. For, in logic, the claim of ignorance of a fact cannot serve as proof of its nonexistence. Western scientific thought, however, stands precisely as this two-hundred-and-fifty-first witness—arriving late upon the stage of history, when the act has long been accomplished and the traces effaced—yet demanding that its absence from the scene be accepted as evidence that nothing ever occurred.
To this we must add that certain researchers have discovered that, precisely in the epoch when Plato situates the fall of Atlantis, a shower of meteorites struck the Earth, bringing the ice age then in progress to an end. The sudden melting of the glaciers that covered much of Europe and North America caused the level of seas and oceans to rise by about one hundred and twenty meters, unleashing immense climatic upheavals and natural catastrophes. That such melting and flooding took place is a scientifically established fact; what remains debated is the cause. The hypothesis of a meteor swarm appears almost certain, supported by the discovery—throughout the world—of a distinct geological layer that records its impact, though the academic establishment has yet to assimilate the evidence.
Faced with such a convergence of testimony and with so much empirical indication, what remains is only the conceit of our nineteenth-century science, which—from Darwin onward—has fed complacently on its own rationalistic prejudice, denying a fact that stands before the eyes of anyone willing to see.