1. The catalog of “borrowed” stories — by level of certainty
This doesn’t work like that — we’re after the truth here. The Bible is said to be a holy book — “holy” carries a strong connotation — and it’s also said that God himself had people write it, meaning divine, true word. The argument “back then that’s how it was done, borrowing stories from other peoples was a normal practice” doesn’t hold — the Jews present the Bible as their absolute truth, and if things stand otherwise, that’s a huge lie. I’m right to reject the “that’s how it was done back then” argument: it’s valid as a historical observation about scribal practice in the ancient Near East, but it doesn’t solve the problem at all if the claim is “absolute divine truth, dictated by God.” The two things are in direct contradiction. And this isn’t just a personal theory — it’s exactly the controversy that exploded publicly in 1872, when George Smith translated the flood tablet from Gilgamesh at the British Museum: the discovery was a real theological shock at the time, because it directly threatened the Bible’s claim to inerrancy.
So the direct question is worth asking: how many such stories are “borrowed” from other peoples and placed in the Bible as if they were original revelation? And is any of it repeated in the Talmud too?
The documented catalog of “borrowed” stories splits into levels of certainty. At the most solid level, almost unanimously accepted academically, stand four cases.
– 1. The Flood — already discussed separately, with its origin in Ziusudra, Atrahasis, and Gilgamesh.
– 2. Moses in the basket on the river — a direct parallel to the birth legend of Sargon of Akkad (~2334 BC), which states explicitly: his mother placed him in a reed basket sealed with pitch, set him on the river, and the child was found by a gardener. It is structurally identical to Moses’s story, just with different names — the “hero exposed on water” motif is catalogued by folklorists (Otto Rank) as a recurring pattern, which also appears with Oedipus, Cyrus, and Romulus.
– 3. The law code in Exodus, the Covenant Code (Exodus 21-23) — direct parallels, sometimes almost identical in wording, to the Code of Hammurabi (~1754 BC), discovered in 1901: the law of talion “an eye for an eye,” the laws about the goring ox, the laws about slaves — very close in structure and content.
– 4. Proverbs (22:17-24:22) — a documented literary dependence on the Egyptian text “The Instruction of Amenemope” (~1200-1000 BC), identified by Egyptologist Adolf Erman in 1924 — some verses are near word-for-word translations.
At a second level, solid but with parallels less identical word-for-word, stand five more cases.
– 5. The Tower of Babel — echoed in the Sumerian text “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,” which mentions a time when all people spoke a single language, until the god Enki confused the languages.
– 6. The Genesis 1 creation account — a structural and even linguistic parallel to Enuma Elish: the Hebrew word for “the deep” (tehom) is philologically related to Tiamat, the primordial chaos monster whom Marduk defeats.
– 7. The Sinai covenant — its structure (historical prologue, stipulations, curses/blessings, witnesses) copies almost exactly the format of Hittite suzerainty treaties from the second millennium BC — a standard academic observation, noted by George Mendenhall.
– 8. Job — parallels with Mesopotamian texts about the “righteous sufferer” (Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi, “The Man and His God”).
– 9. Ecclesiastes — a thematic echo of the tavern-keeper Siduri’s speech in Gilgamesh (“eat, drink, be merry, immortality is not for man”) — almost identical in message to “eat your bread with joy” in Ecclesiastes.
There remains the question about the Talmud. No, the Talmud (compiled ~200-500 AD) does not directly reintroduce the Sumerian or Akkadian story — it works on the already-Judaized text of Genesis, adding rabbinic commentary (the Sanhedrin tractate discusses at length the flood generation, the reasons for the punishment, etc.), not the original Mesopotamian source. The “borrowing,” then, happened only once, at the level of the redaction of Genesis — probably around the Babylonian exile, 6th century BC — and the Talmud merely inherits and develops the already-adapted version, without knowing or citing the Sumerian source. The rabbis of that era most likely had no access to, or knowledge of, the original tablets, which were only rediscovered in the 19th century.
2. The complete list — from the Myth of Adapa to Etemenanki
The list needs to be carried through to the end — I want the complete list, not a convenient selection. The continuation of the catalog draws on what else is seriously documented in comparative literature (Ancient Near East studies), avoiding weak speculation and sticking strictly to academically recognized parallels.
– 10. The Myth of Adapa, the Mesopotamian variant of the tree of knowledge/life — Adapa (attested on Amarna tablets, 14th century BC, plus later Assyrian copies) is a wise man created by Enki, summoned before the god Anu after breaking the wing of the south wind. Enki warns him not to eat or drink anything offered to him there, telling him it will be “food/water of death.” In fact, Anu offers him the food and water of life, that is, immortality, and Adapa refuses, following Enki’s mistaken warning — thereby losing, for all of humanity, the chance at immortality. It is a structure almost identical to Genesis 2-3: a man, a divine food test, a definitive consequence for the whole species.
– 11. Gilgamesh and the plant of youth, stolen by the serpent — at the end of the epic, Gilgamesh obtains the plant “the old man becomes young,” but while he bathes, a serpent steals it, sheds its skin on the spot, and dives to the bottom. It is an etiological explanation for why snakes shed their skin while man does not gain immortality — a direct and close parallel to the serpent in Eden, which deprives man of access to immortality.
– 12. The Sumerian King List and absurdly long lifespans before the flood — the Sumerian antediluvian kings reign for tens of thousands of years, Alulim reaching 28,800 years. Not identical numerically, but the pattern is the same as in Genesis 5: the patriarchs before the flood, with Methuselah at 969 years, live enormously long lives, and after the flood longevity drops sharply — the same narrative structure of “the age before was different.”
– 13. The Apkallu, the seven antediluvian sages, and the Watchers of Enoch — the Mesopotamian tradition of the seven Apkallu, semi-divine beings sent by the gods before the flood to bring civilization (writing, crafts, rites) to mankind. Researcher Amar Annus, in his 2010 work “On the Origin of Watchers,” rigorously documented the parallel with the Watchers of the Book of Enoch — heavenly beings who descend and teach mankind forbidden knowledge (metallurgy, cosmetics, astrology, magic). It is one of the most solid recent connections in academic research on Enochic literature.
– 14. “The image of God” as a Mesopotamian royal-ideology concept, later democratized — in Mesopotamian and Egyptian royal ideology, only the king was described as made “in the image of the god,” an exclusively monarchic title. Genesis 1:26-27 makes a distinct move: it extends this title to all people, not just the king. It’s not plagiarism proper, but a deliberate adaptation, a democratization of an already-known royal concept — but it clearly shows that the idea did not appear out of nowhere; it is a reformulation of an existing concept from the Ancient Near East.
– 15. Psalm 104 and the Hymn to the Aten from Egypt — Psalm 104, a hymn about creation and nature, has striking structural and thematic similarities to Akhenaten’s “Great Hymn to the Aten” (~14th century BC, the period of Egypt’s short-lived monotheism) — a comparison noted since the early 20th century by Egyptologist James Henry Breasted.
– 16. The Tower of Babel and Etemenanki — Herodotus describes Marduk’s ziggurat in Babylon, Etemenanki, “the House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth,” rebuilt and enlarged by Nebuchadnezzar II during precisely the period of the Jewish exile in Babylon. Many scholars regard the story of the Tower of Babel as a direct, mocking polemic against this specific structure, which the exiled Jews saw with their own eyes.
It must be said honestly, so as not to overstate the case: this list is not complete in an absolute sense. The specialist ANE (Ancient Near East) literature is vast, and some parallels — Etana’s flight to heaven, certain laws in Leviticus — are far more speculative and contested than the ones above. But these sixteen are the ones solidly documented, cited consistently in academic comparative research, not personal speculation.
