Did Moses steal the flood story from the Babylonians?
“Moses stole the flood story from the Babylonians.” This year, many college freshmen will hear those words in lecture halls at universities across the nation. “Moses plagiarized an older flood story found in the Epic of Gilgamesh.” Many college freshmen, weak in their faith and unequipped to deal with these objections, will be shaken by the words from their professors, who then proclaim, “The Genesis flood is nothing but a myth, borrowed from an earlier Babylonian source.”
That argument is featured nowhere more prominently than in the book titled The Flood Myth, edited by Alan Dundes.1 We will address that argument in this article.2
Is the Genesis flood account (in Genesis 6–9) merely a borrowed story or a fictional tale lifted from a neighboring nation? The way we answer this question has massive implications for how we see the Bible, and therefore how we view God and even ourselves.
Either Moses is telling the truth, or Dundes and other secularists are telling the truth.
We have, therefore, two very different positions before us concerning the Genesis flood. Only one can be true.
