one.
(But it shall be, when the dwellers upon earth have sinned,
I will judge them by _famine_ or by the _sword_ or by fire
or by _pestilence_ (lit. death), and there shall be
earthquakes, and they shall be scattered into places not
inhabited (or, the places of their habitation shall be
scattered). But I will not again spoil the earth with the
water of a flood, and) in all the days of the earth seed
time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and autumn, day and
night shall not cease . . ."; see James, _The Biblical
Antiquities of Philo_, p. 81, iii. 9. Here wild beasts are
omitted, and fire, earthquakes, and exile are added; but
famine, sword, and pestilence are prominent, and the whole
passage is clearly suggested by Ezekiel. As a result of the
combination, we have in the _Biblical Antiquities_ a
complete parallel to the passage in the Gilgamesh Epic.

It may of course be urged that wild beasts, famine, and pestilence are
such obvious forms of divine punishment that their enumeration by
both writers is merely due to chance. But the parallelism should be
considered with the other possible points of connexion, namely, the fact
that each writer is dealing with discrimination in divine punishments
of a wholesale character, and that while the one is inspired by the
Babylonian tradition of the Flood, the other takes the hero of the
Hebrew Flood story as the first of his selected types of righteousness.
It is possible that Ezekiel may have heard the Babylonian Version
recited after his arrival on the Chebar. And assuming that some form of
the story had long been a cherished tradition of the Hebrews themselves,
we could understand his intense interest in finding it confirmed by the
Babylonians, who would show him where their Flood had taken place. To
a man of his temperament, the one passage in the Babylonian poem that
would have made a special appeal would have been that quoted above,
where the poet urges that divine vengeance should be combined with
mercy, and that all, righteous and wicked alike, should not again be
destroyed. A problem continually in Ezekiel's thoughts was this very
question of wholesale divine punishment, as exemplified in the case of
Judah; and it would not have been unlikely that the literary structure
of the Babylonian extract may have influenced the form in which he
embodied his own conclusions.

But even if we regard this sugg