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| A tablet from Epic of Gilgamesh |
Are the Stories in Genesis in the bible taken (plagiarized) from other ancient stories?
The Akkadian text of the Epic of Gilgamesh was first discovered in 1849 AD by the English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Layard was seeking evidence to confirm the historicity of the events described in the Hebrew Bible, i.e. the Christian Old Testament, which, at the time, was believed to contain the oldest texts in the world. Instead, his excavations and those of others after him revealed the existence of much older Mesopotamian texts and showed that many of the stories in the Old Testament may actually be derived from earlier myths told throughout the ancient Near East.
Genesis was written in roughly 550 BC. Tradition tells us that Moses (Moses was born in Egypt sometime in 1391-1392 BC) is the author of Genesis, as well as the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and most of Deuteronomy, but modern scholars, especially from the 19th century onward, see them as being written hundreds of years after Moses is supposed to have lived, in the 6th and 5th centuries BC.
The Epic of Gilgamesh began as a series of Sumerian poems (containing similar Genesis stories) and tales dating back to 2100 B.C., but the most complete version was written around the 12th century B.C. by the Babylonians.
Question 1: Which story came first?
Question 2: Who copies who?
See evidential research:
