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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
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The period of the Babylonian captivity, when they were brought to Babylon as prisoners and stayed several decades through the 6th c. BCE before being freed by Cyrus II, is likely a point where they brought a lot of Babylonian culture back to Jerusalem. Plus, the god of the Bible comes from two origins, Yahweh and El, the latter being a storm god that had a lot of cultural osmosis in the entire second millennium BCE, being associated with Enlil and Baal, through whom the Sumerian and Akkadian stories did get around. So there's definitely a part where some of those stories made their way into Canaanite culture by themselves, then the Hebrews and Jews, naturally over several centuries to become their own ancestral culture, and a part where the Jews brought back and adopted Babylonian stories when they returned from the exile. We can tell because of the narrative / writing style and the variations that we can find, we can date when some of those stories appeared.
In the case of the Flood story, the text has too many similarities, identical lines, to not be straight up copy-pasted from Babylonian texts after the exile - but even then, there's a couple variations of the Biblical story that does suggest they already had a memory of that story in their own culture (40 days or 7 days, that sort of details). It's fairly likely that they simply considered that those stories were about the same god as their El, in the same way the Greeks would go "oh, you have a god of thunder too? I bet his name is Zeus. I like your story about Zeus." And really, they're not wrong, since they do have the same origin, they are in fact the same god, branching into many cultures across Mesopotamia over a couple millennia.
So no, they definitely didn't know anything about the actual event that inspired the deluge story (you can tell by how it's all an abstract threat to them, because the Jordan river doesn't flood anything like the Euphrates, compared to the real threat and pain of exile), but they knew about the story of the deluge.
Thanks very informative. I still believe you can analyze this shit to hell, and all you end up with is no actual knowledge of what the fuck is true or false. They are basing it on stories passed down through generations without knowing if they are true or merely allegories. When they turn out to be actually true, it is more coincidence than anything else.
That's why I don't really care if there was some event that was the basis for the stories in the Bible, because it'¨s irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the superstition surrounding it, not the truth of it.