Did the flood story in Genesis come from Mesopotamia?

Most scholars who study the texts think so, though in a more careful way than the headline suggests. The Genesis flood narrative, chapters 6 to 9 of the Book of Genesis, tells how God decided to destroy creation and saved only Noah and those who went with him into an ark. Scholars generally believe it was adapted from older Mesopotamian flood traditions, especially the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The reason is the order of the texts. Genesis was probably composed around the 5th century BCE, and the primeval history including the flood may have been added as late as the 3rd century BCE. The Mesopotamian flood myth, by contrast, is believed to have originated in the Old Babylonian Period, centuries earlier, and to have reached Syro-Palestine in the latter half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Three Mesopotamian versions survive: the Sumerian Epic of Ziusudra and episodes in the Akkadian Atrahasis and Gilgamesh epics. The hero is called Ziusudra, Atrahasis or Utnapishtim, depending on the version.

The stories echo each other in details. In the Gilgamesh account Utnapishtim builds a boat and takes his family, craftsmen and "all the beasts and animals of the field". On the seventh day he releases a dove, which comes back, a swallow, which also comes back, and a raven, which does not. Afterwards he makes a sacrifice. In Genesis, the ark rests on the mountains of Ararat, and Noah builds an altar and makes a sacrifice.

The discovery was dramatic. In 1872 George Smith, an assistant at the British Museum, translated a tablet from Nineveh. He reportedly exclaimed that he was the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion. For scholars, comparing the two is a question about how texts travel and change; it does not by itself settle what the story means to the people who hold it sacred.