Parshat Noach opens with the family line of Noah. Noah himself has by this point already been introduced, for he and his family were the sole righteous individuals among the wicked who came to populate the earth. Soon after, a flood wiped all evil from the face of the planet, but Noah’s family, along with the animals he stowed aboard his ark, were saved. 

When we decide to dig deeper, the story of Noach becomes more than one of primordial deluge, righteousness, and a covenant with humanity. Instead, Parshat Noach is a record of the Jewish people’s ability to adapt, adopt, and survive in the face of certain doom.

While scholars believe that Noach as we know it was first written down in the years following the return from Babylonian captivity, its roots date back much further, since we know the written Torah was preceded by centuries of transmission through word of mouth as oral tradition. 

But what if I told you Noach was a special case? Because this story might not even be an Israelite story. Noah, his ark, and the deluge that wiped clean the face of the earth trace their lineage to the fertile strip of land between the Tigris and Euphrates: Mesopotamia.

So was Noah actually a Babylonian? Hardly.

This epic, dating back to the 18th Century BCE, displays beat-for-beat parallels with Parshat Noach, but why? How? The hero of this much older and highly influential Babylonian flood myth was named Atrahasis, and the gods were mad. This hero of the Babylonian flood myth learns from the god Enki that the rest of the pantheon wishes to wipe out humanity. Atrahasis builds a boat, climbs aboard with his family, friends, animals, and provisions, and seals himself inside. While a cataclysmic flood wipes out all other life on earth, the divinely-chosen hero survives. When the flood waters recede, Atrahasis sends out a raven who, finding land to rest on, does not return, letting him know it is safe to exit the ark.

So how do we answer our question from earlier? What accounts for these parallels? Why and how?  It’s simple: coexistence and cultural exchange! The Babylonian exile didn’t just bring psalms, hymns, and prophets; it gave us Noah’s Ark! There are more telltale signs of this story being loaned from the Babylonians. Take, for example, the word for flood, mabul; this probable loan word from Akkadian (the ancient Semitic language of the Babylonians), would have been alien to much of Parshat Noach’s early audience, so the author was kind enough to explain what it meant,  “waters upon the earth”. Floods were commonplace in Babylonia, where the Tigris and Euphrates flooded irregularly and violently. On the other hand, to a Levantine audience living in the land of Israel, such a concept was entirely foreign.

So what does this all mean? Why does it matter that Noah’s Ark was lifted from a Babylonian epic? 

The Babylonian Exile is the lamentation of ancient Judaism, second only to the destruction of Herod’s Temple by the Romans. It is the singular event that the Jewish people mourned for centuries, and yet it is also the source of one of Judaism’s most foundational texts. Yes, the idea of a flood and an ark and a bird are of Babylonian origin, but Noah is not Atrahasis. The point of Parshat Noach is not that humanity was wicked and god killed them all, it is that Noah was righteous, and god made a covenant never to destroy humanity again. 
From the tragedy of the Exile came the promise from God never to destroy humanity. From the near destruction of the Jewish people, the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, and the beginning of the diaspora that would come to define Judaism for millennia to come, rose the explicit promise from God Almighty to protect humanity Le’olam va’ed – for all eternity.