the Noachian deluge in the book of Genesis. For the
Pentateuchal story is indubitably a patchwork, composed of fragments
of at least two, different and partly discrepant, narratives,
quilted together in such an inartistic fashion that the seams remain
conspicuous. And, in the matter of circumstantial exaggeration, it in
some respects excels even the second-hand legend of Berosus.

There is a certain practicality about the notion of taking refuge from
floods and storms in a ship provided with a steersman; but, surely, no
one who had ever seen more water than he could wade through would dream
of facing even a moderate breeze, in a huge three-storied coffer, or
box, three hundred cubits long, fifty wide and thirty high, left to
drift without rudder or pilot. [8] Not content with giving the exact
year of Noah's age in which the flood began, the Pentateuchal story adds
the month and the day of the month. It is the Deity himself who "shuts
in" Noah. The modest week assigned to the full deluge in Hasisadra's
story becomes forty days, in one of the Pentateuchal accounts, and a
hundred and fifty in the other. The flood, which, in the version of
Berosus, has grown so high as to cast the ship among the mountains of
Armenia, is improved upon in the Hebrew account until it covers "all
the high hills that were under the whole heaven"; and, when it begins
to subside, the ark is left stranded on the summit of the highest peak,
commonly identified with Ararat itself.

While the details of Hasisadra's adventure are, at least, compatible
with the physical conditions of the Euphrates valley, and, as we have
seen, involve no catastrophe greater than such as might be brought under
those conditions, many of the very precisely stated details of Noah's
flood contradict some of the best established results of scientific
inquiry.

If it is certain that the alluvium of the Mesopotamian plain has been
brought down by the Tigris and the Euphrates, then it is no less certain
that the physical structure of the whole valley has persisted, without
material modification, for many thousand years before the date assigned
to the flood. If the summits, even of the moderately elevated ridges
which immediately bound the valley, still more those of the Kurdish and
Armenian mountains, were ever covered by water, for even forty days,
that water must have extended over the whole earth. If the earth was
thus covered, anywhere between 4000 and 5000 years ago, or,