THE FLOOD BEFORE GENESIS?

In the Story of Patriarch Noah, there are Multiple Layers: Both a Literal History and a Metaphorical/Allegorical Prophecy. St. Noah Saves the World through Obedience, the World is Cleansed from Sin by Water, Life is Resurrected by the Holy Spirit (the Dove), and a New Covenant is Brought to Earth by God’s Promise, Symbolized in the Rainbow. In this St. Noah Functions as a Type of Christ, Triumphing Over Sin, Death and the Devil, by the Power of God’s Economy or Grace, and it is Symbolized by the Cross. 

A Western Orthodox Catechesis on the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Genesis Flood

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)

The Question

A student, reading The Epic of Gilgamesh in an English class, encounters the famous story of the Flood in Tablet XI. The teacher explains that this Babylonian tale predates the Book of Genesis, and thus, it seems that the biblical account might have been “borrowed” or “inspired” by older pagan literature. The question arises: If the Mesopotamian flood story was written before Genesis, how can the biblical account be true? Did Scripture simply copy an older myth, or is there a deeper explanation?

The Truth in Both Directions

The teacher is right that the written cuneiform tablets of Gilgamesh are older than the surviving manuscripts of Genesis. But she is also wrong if she means that the event or truth behind the biblical narrative is younger. The written form of a story is not the same as the event itself.

From the Western Orthodox perspective, the Book of Genesis was written by Moses, guided by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, when he communed with God on Mount Sinai, around the fifteenth century before Christ. However, the events Genesis records occurred long before Moses lived. The stories of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and others were transmitted faithfully through the ancient patriarchs, both orally and ritually, long before writing was common. Thus, while the Epic of Gilgamesh preserves a Mesopotamian version of the Flood story, Genesis preserves the true, inspired record of that same ancient memory, revealed and clarified by God Himself.

The Universality of the Flood Tradition

Every culture on earth preserves the memory of a catastrophic deluge. Anthropologists have recorded over 380 distinct flood narratives, from Sumeria and India to China, Africa, and the Americas. The details differ (names, mountains, animals), but the pattern is unmistakable: humanity once experienced or remembered a global, civilization-ending flood.

The Western Orthodox Church does not treat this as coincidence. Rather, it affirms that all peoples descend from a common origin: Noah and his sons, and that the Flood was a shared human event, later refracted into many different mythologies. As St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote, “The truth, being one, is scattered among many nations as fragments of a shattered mirror; but the Church gathers them up and shows the one Image of God entire.” (Against Heresies, IV.33.7) So too with the Flood: the fragments of memory are dispersed among nations, but Genesis restores the full and divinely interpreted truth.

Gilgamesh and Noah: Parallels and Purifications

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim survives the flood by building a great ship after being warned by a god. He releases birds to find land, and his vessel rests on a mountain. These details strongly resemble the story of Noah. Yet the tone and theology differ completely.

In Gilgamesh, the gods are frightened by the flood they themselves unleashed; they argue, regret, and contradict one another. The narrative reveals a polytheistic and effete worldview: capricious deities, arbitrary destruction, and no clear moral cause, other than the gods’ own immorality. In Genesis, the story is purified of mythic confusion. There is one God, just, merciful, and purposeful. The Flood is not chaos but divine judgment mingled with grace. The covenant of the rainbow reveals a moral and theological meaning absent in all pagan parallels. As St. Augustine wrote in The City of God (Book XVIII, ch. 2): “Even among the pagans there remain certain vestiges of the truth, but they are corrupted by falsehood; Scripture restores them to their proper order.”

Revelation, Not Invention

The Western Orthodox understanding of inspiration is not that God dictated words mechanically, but that He revealed eternal truth through human instruments. Moses, as the sacred historian, was not inventing myth or borrowing from Babylon, but receiving divine clarification of what humanity dimly remembered.

The Spirit, “who spake by the prophets,” (Nicene Creed) illumined the patriarchal tradition, correcting error and restoring truth. Thus, even if Gilgamesh preserves an older written form, Genesis preserves the truer and older divine memory, as known to Adam, Seth, Enoch, and Noah themselves.

This explains why the two stories overlap, because they spring from a common historical event, but only one, the biblical, carries divine interpretation and covenantal meaning.

The Catechetical Conclusion

The story of Noah does not imitate Gilgamesh; rather, Gilgamesh imitates and distorts Noah. The pagan myths are echoes; Genesis is the Voice. St. Peter affirms the historicity and theological depth of the Flood: “God spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness.” (2 Peter 2:5) And Christ Himself sealed it as truth: “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man.” (Luke 17:26) Therefore, the Flood is both history and prophecy, which is a real event and a moral warning, a type of the world’s baptism and of its final judgment by fire. In the words of St. Gregory the Great: “The ark of Noah is a figure of the Church, by which the faithful are saved from the flood of this world.”

Final Reflection

When the Church reads Genesis, she does not hear an ancient myth but the divine memory of the human race, restored by revelation. What the nations dimly remembered as legend, God Himself clarified through His prophet. The flood stories of the world are the echoes of a single thunder; Genesis is the lightning that reveals the truth.

COLLECT

O Lord God of Heaven and Earth, who hast revealed Thyself through signs and wonders from the beginning, and hast spoken to our fathers by the prophets, and in these last days by Thy Son Jesus Christ: Grant us grace rightly to discern the truth amidst the tales of men, and to know that all light is but a reflection of Thine eternal Word. Teach us to read the histories of the nations as broken fragments of Thy one great mercy, and to see in Thy holy Scriptures the perfect and unerring revelation of Thy will. So guide us, O Lord, that we may hold fast the faith once delivered to the saints, and humbly confess that every story of man finds its meaning in Thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

Summary Points

• The Epic of Gilgamesh preserves an early pagan version of a historical flood, distorted by polytheism.

• Genesis preserves the inspired and divinely interpreted account of that same event.

• All ancient flood myths stem from a shared ancestral memory of a real catastrophe.

• Moses, writing under inspiration, recorded the truth revealed by God, and not hearsay from Babylon.

• The Flood is both a historical event and a typological prophecy of redemption through Christ.