DELUGE is the name given to a great flood of water sub merging the whole or a large part of the earth's surface. Legends of such floods occur in the traditions of many peoples. Collec tions of these legends have been made by several scholars, no tably R. Andree (Die Flutsagen, 1891), M. Winternitz (Die Flut sagen des Alterthums and der Naturvolker, 1901), and J. G. Frazer (Folklore in the Old Testament, vol. i. pp. 104-361).
Hebrew Traditions.—The most familiar of these stories is that related in Genesis vi.–ix. It has long been recognized that the Biblical record consists of two distinct traditions which have been dovetailed by an editor to make a consecutive story. One of these comes from the Yahwist document J, the other from the "priestly" source P. The matter common to the two traditions tells of God's anger at the iniquity of mankind, whom He there fore proposes to destroy by a flood. Noah, whose piety finds favour in God's eyes, is instructed to take into an "ark" his family and specimens of all beasts and birds. (In J the animals fit for sacrifice are taken by sevens, the others by twos, but in P all alike by twos.) A great flood is caused by rain—P adds also an uprush of the subterranean waters—in which all men other than those in the ark perish, but God promises that no similar flood shall ever occur again. Peculiar to the J story are the details that Noah sends out birds from the ark to test the subsidence of the waters and that Noah, after he comes out of the ark, offers a sacrifice, which God smells. Peculiar to the P story are the warning given to Noah, the elaborate instructions as to the making of the ark, and in particular the mention of bitu men, the resting of the ark upon a mountain in Ararat, and the rainbow sign. No doubt there were parallels to some features in one or other documents which have disappeared in the dovetailing process. The time notes show considerable variation. In J the flood culminates in 4o days; in P it reaches its climax in i5o days. In J the animals take seven days to enter the ark, but seemingly only one in P.
Babylonian Traditions.—Numerous traditions resembling the Genesis story have been found in Babylonia. Most of them are, unfortunately, but fragments. The best-known forming the i I th tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic, is elaborate, and the experi ences of Utnapishtim, bear striking resemblances to those of Noah. The Gilgamesh story, for example, relates the sending forth from the ark of three birds in succession—dove, swallow, raven, instead of a dove three times as in Genesis (where the raven probably does not belong to the original text). It mentions the bitumen, using the same word as Genesis, and speaks of the ark grounding on a mountain. The offering of the sacrifice is mentioned, with the detail, in almost identical words, that the gods smell the savour. The Babylonian traditions reflect a higher level of civili zation. Utnapishtim takes into his ark not only animals but treasure and craftsmen of all kinds, so that not only all kinds of animals but all different crafts may be preserved. One of the craftsmen was a sailor, to whom, very prudently, Utnapishtim entrusted the navigation of his vessel during the flood. The ver sion of Berossus, a Babylonian priest who wrote at Babylon c. 30o B.C., which is doubtless much older than its recorder, shows also a care for literature in the detail that its hero buries before the flood a written account of "the beginning, middle and end of all things," disinterring it when the flood had gone. But the Biblical story reaches the higher religious and ethical levels. Its majestic conception of God is in striking contrast with the many gods of the Babylonian story, who suffer from human weaknesses such as cowardice, intrigue and deceit. It is hardly fair to say that the Babylonian record is without ethical qualities. In at least one version the piety of the hero is emphasized. In the Gilgamesh version the god Ea protests that only the guilty should have been punished, from which it may be inferred that the flood was intended as a punishment for sinful men. But in any case the sense of sin is much more definitely expressed in Genesis.
Relation Between Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions. —However clear may be the moral and religious superiority of the Biblical versions it remains true that the many striking points of resemblance make it absolutely certain that they are not independent of the Babylonian traditions. Since the latter are the older—even some of the written forms in which they come to us are several centuries older than the Mosaic period— they must, if the dependence be direct, be regarded as the cruder material which the Genesis tradition has refined. It would have been possible for the early Hebrews to learn the story either from Babylon itself or, more probably, from the Canaanites, for Canaan was very much under the influence of Babylonia. This, is, indeed, the view most generally held by scholars. It is urged that the story is much more likely to have arisen in a country liable to inundations, like Babylon, than in Canaan. The elabo rate description of the ark, too, seems much more plausibly to have originated in Babylonia than among a people so little accus tomed to the sea and its ways as were the Hebrews. A. T. Clay, however, has effectively criticized the proposition that the de scriptions of the deluge exactly fit the alluvial plain of Baby lonia. In the cuneiform records the cause of the flood is invari ably heavy rain, and not inundation from river or sea. Statistics seem to show that the average rainfall in Babylonia is by no means heavy, and therefore one of the main arguments for think ing the story indigenous to Babylonia is weakened. The theory of Suss, that the real cause of the flood was water driven in by a typhoon from the Persian gulf, though accepted by many scholars, has no foundation in the tradition itself. On the whole it is safer to conclude that, while there is undoubtedly a close kinship between the Biblical and the Babylonian traditions, the evidence hardly warrants a dogmatic assertion that the former are derived directly from the latter. In view of the widespread prevalence of similar traditions, and of the fact that, like the account in Genesis, the one in the Gilgamesh Epic is probably composite, it would be safer to say that both derive material from some common source.
Greek Traditions.—The most familiar of the Greek flood stories—later elaborated by Ovid—is that told by Apollodorus. It recounts how Deucalion, king of the country round Phthia, and his wife, Pyrrha, escaped from a flood caused by Zeus pour ing water on the earth. The escape was made in a chest, which Deucalion had previously constructed on the advice of his father Prometheus. In this they floated for nine days over the sea, until the chest grounded on Mt. Parnassus. After the rain had ceased Deucalion emerged from the chest and offered sacrifice to Zeus. Being granted a boon by the god he chose men; Zeus bade him throw stones over his head, and these became men, while stones similarly thrown by Pyrrha became women. It is true that the story in this form is not older than the end century B.C., but Hellanicus, a historian of the 5th century B.C., has a version of it in which the chest grounds on Mt. Othrys in Thessaly, and slightly older is the version of Pindar, in which the mountain is Parnassus. A Megarian account specifies Mt. Gerania.
But the tradition varies in features more important than this: in some versions Deucalion is replaced by Ogyges, founder of Thebes in Boeotia, or by Dardanus, who was a king in Arcadia. Frazer hazards the guess that the Ogyges story may be founded on an extraordinary inundation of the Copaic lake, which f or merly occupied a large part of central Boeotia, and thinks this theory may find some support from the Dardanus legend, for in one tradition the birthplace of Dardanus was Pheneus in north ern Arcadia, and "no valley in Greece is known to have been from antiquity subject to inundations on so vast a scale and for such long periods as the valley of Pheneus." On the whole, how ever, he is more inclined to the theory that the story may have been suggested by a desire to explain the origin of the gorge of Tempe, which was thought to be the opening burst by a vast lake once dammed by the circle of the Thessalian mountains. It is not easy to trace connection between the Greek and Babylonian traditions. The most likely link would be Hittite tradition. But though it is asserted that the Hittite deluge hero U1 (1)ush is the same as Ulysses (=Odysseus) this does not help very much.
Deluge stories are found in China, Burma, Cochin China, Malay, the Indian archipelago, among the aborigines of Australia, in New Guinea, and abundantly ;n the islands of Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia. They are plentiful also in South, Central and North America.
A survey of the whole field shows that deluge stories are com mon in Southern Asia, but not found in the rest of that continent, the examples quoted from China and Japan generally not answer ing to the description of universal inundations. Europe furnishes a few,,Africa hardly any. It is especially noteworthy that we have none from the valley of the Nile. On the other hand, America and the islands of the Southern Seas are prolific in these stories.