Genesis Myth of Noah's Ark Derives from Older Mesopotamian Myth

The brain dead Bible beaters who claim that the Bible is inerrant and literally true just experienced another serious set back.  Already reeling from the human genome project's confirmation that the Adam and Eve of Genius never existed as historical people, new archaeological evidence seems to confirm that the Bible story of Noah's Ark is just a reheated version of a false myth dating from an earlier time in Mesopotamia.  I suspect that as time goes on, more and more scientific knowledge and new archaeological discoveries will further demonstrate that the Bible is anything but literally true much less the "inspired word of God."  Here are highlights from Jerry A. Coyne's blog (he is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago):

We’ve known since at least 1872 that the Great Flood detailed in Genesis is a descendant of earlier flood myths from Mesopotamia.  And there may be some credibility to the presence of at least some serious floods then, based on the fact that Mesopotamia is a giant flood plain and the presence of some archeological evidence for a big flood around 5000 BC. But what we didn’t know until now is that those earlier flood myths also incorporated a boat onto which species of wild animals were sequestered to save them—two by two!  This clearly shows, as if we didn’t know it already, that the Genesis story of Noah and the Ark isn’t true, but was simply an embroidery of earlier flood stories. (It will be interesting to see how Biblical literalists like Ken Ham react to this finding.)

This has all come to light since the recent deciphering of a clay cuneiform tablet first shown to curators at the British Museum in 1985, but not surrendered by its owner for translation until 2009.  Now the remarkable results are detailed in a book by Irving Finkel, Assyriologist and “assistant keeper” of ancient writings at the British Museum.
 [T]he “Ark tablet” . . . . contains 600 cuneiform characters and is dated between 1900 and 1700 BC, which makes it roughly a millennium older than the book of Genesis. According to Finkel, Genesis was assembled between 597 and 538 BC during the Jewish exodus in Babylonia.

Here’s a quick overview of what’s old and new; quotes from the articles are in italics:

• We’ve known since 1872, from another cuneiform tablet that came to the British Museum, that there were Mesopotamian flood myths that long antedated the one in Genesis. Other tablets surfaced, and their contents are famously detailed in Tablets XI and XII of the Epic of Gilgamesh, written beginning about 2000 BC.
•  The boat described as the earlier Ark was a huge coracle: a shallow round boat made from coiled ropes of palm fiber. Finkel describes it as being 230 feet in diameter (Chivers’s piece says 70 feet, but he must mean meters, since 70 meters is almost exactly 230 feet). 

[O]f course there’s no way they could have fit the world’s 7-million-plus species (in pairs) on either the Genesis ark or a 230-foot-diameter coracle, so of course literalists have to explain where the later species came from. The usual answer is “evolution” from a limited set of “kinds,” but this disguises the fact that evolution was admitted to occur! So what were taken on the Ark were a set “kinds” that split into all the species we know today.  The fruitless study of what the kinds really comprised is the subject of “baraminology,” which I mentioned above. It’s the world’s most useless (and, to a scientist, funniest) area of scholarly “research.”

The upshot is, of course, that the Ark story is fiction, which won’t surprise any of us. But when I debated those creationists in Arizona a while back, they all held firmly to the literalism of the Ark Story . . . ..

[T]he solution, of course, is to recognize both documents as myths that probably embroidered real-life but smaller floods occurring thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia.