Irving L. Finkel

Finkel is a fascinating character and a very engaging reader; usually the author reading their own work is a terrible decision, here I could imagine no one else. The book gives you a state of the cuneiform writing system, an overview of the civilizations that used it, before getting into the meat of the title and describing the many tablets and versions of the flood myth that predate the Bible. The real surprise is seeing how detailed an account it is, given the staccato and formulaic show more languages used. Finkel describes instructions so literal and detailed (given the era) it's hard not to come away thinking there's a real event somewhere along the route of this story. show less

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Finkel is a cuneiform scholar at the British Museum who came across a small, 60 line tablet that discusses the building of Noah's Ark. He finds that it is one of the oldest and fits it into the other ark story tablets in interesting ways. It also has outstanding and distinct features. For instance, instead of the ark being an almond-shaped reed boat, or the unlikely cube of the Gilgamesh story, or the (incorrectly assumed) rectangular box of Genesis, this is a circular show more reed ark. This circular reed ark is similar to a boat that fell out of use in Iraq in the 20th century called a coracle, or a guffa/quffa in Arabic, which would have been called quppu in Akkadian (quppu→quffa→guffa). Interesting too is a line in the ark that Finkel translates as "two by two" as in the animals went in two by two.

Interesting all around, although, of course, Finkel does not believe there was a flood or a Noah character or an ark. For him, it was just a mythological story. He believes too that he knows how the stories were transmitted from the Mesopotamians to the Jewish Bible. This blinds him to an interesting oddity he mentions as an interesting oddity. On page 186 he mentions that an ark text he calls the Old Babylonian Atrahasis mentions that Atrahasis (one of the Noah characters) is told to bring "clean" animals on board in his list of animals. Finkel is puzzled: "The category of 'clean', too, cannot pass without comment, for the notion of clean and unclean animals did not exist in ancient Mesopotamia as it does in the Bible." For Finkel this is a puzzle. Why would an old Mesopotamian tablet mention "clean animals" if they didn't have them? Well, the Bible has them. What Finkel doesn't assume, because his preconceptions run against it, is that perhaps the original story had clean and unclean animals and the Bible story and the Mesopotamian stories descend from a common source, NOT that the biblical source descends from a Mesopotamian source.

Just a thought.

This is an interesting and well-written book. It is well-referenced, with a nice bibliography. It lacks footnotes/endnotes, but it has those silly new page notes at the end of the book. It has nice illustrations and a raft of appendices. There are a lot of good facts, ideas, and suppositions here for the scholar of the Ancient Near East, for the biblical scholar, and the Christian. (Or for any mix of the three.) show less

A lot of books like this tend to be dry and academic, this one is welcoming and fascinating, with the author's exuberance for the topic oozing through on every page. He holds the reader by the hand as together we decipher the faint cuneiform imprints on crumbling clay tablets, gleaning their meaning, and reading between the lines to get to know their anonymous authors.

This is definitely a work intended as popular scholarship for the general public, so experts likely won't get as much out of show more it and will likely quibble with some of the conclusions. But for everyone else, highly recommended. show less

Irving Finkel is a British national treasure. I already knew about the flood story in Gilgamesh predating the Hebrew scriptures, but this added so much detail and nuance to my understanding.

Do yourself a favor and listen to the audiobook, which he narrated himself, because it's a delight to listen to him and his dry humor. He knows how to give specifics with just enough linguistic detail to prove his point without losing the audience. (Caveat: as a linguist, my threshhold is higher, but I show more think this holds true for a general audience.) show less