Survivors Of The Epic Floods

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Survivors of the Epic Floods

How does one survive an Epic flood that wipes out all of mankind on earth? Be righteous and gain favor among the Gods would be one answer. In the ancient stories Gilgamesh, Genesis, and The Metamorphoses of Ovid, all of mankind was wiped off the face of the earth with a global and epic flood. In each of these stories, there were two survivors a holy man and woman which in some way, with their divine character, held favor in the eyes of their Gods enough to be saved from the tragedy and repopulated the earth. What most wonder is why were these people saved and others wiped from existence. How did they survive or get warned ahead of time, of the incoming doom? Another thought is who where they and why were they revered above all others enough to be saved and what Character details were similar and different among the stories. These are the questions I hope to answer in the following Pages.

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In all three accounts of the flood there were a righteous man and woman that survived an impending doom. First off in Gilgamesh there was a man named Utnapishtim that was warned by a god Ea in a dream of a disastrous flood that was going to happen and told him “O Man of Shurrupak, son of Ubara-Tutu; tear down your house and build a boat”(Gilgamesh 35). In Genesis there was Noah who was warned by God to build an Ark, “And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold I will destroy them with the earth.” (Genesis 6-9) This shows that Noah was forewarned about the flood and was told to take on this huge task of making an ark to save his family and two of every animal. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses it doesn’t seem that Deucalion and his wife were warned but were smart enough to get in a small skiff to escape the flood, perhaps they had divine favor from the start, because it says later how just and devoted they were and Jove spared them. In each story the similarities are great, like how they each were ordained by the Gods and either warned or spared based on how good they were. In Ovid it says “One could not point to any better man, a man with a deeper love for justice than Deucalion; and of all women, none matched Pyrrha in devotion to the gods.” (Ovid 15) That paragraph in Ovid shows the kind of character these people had to find favor among Jove to be saved.

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So staying on the side of the gods this seems to be a common theme amongst all three of the stories that each of the characters had a more holy than thou attitude, and were chosen to be saved because of their deeds or strengths of character to remain faithful and true to their Gods, a shining beckon standing out in all the wicked sinners of the time. One wonders who where these characters and why were they saved in each of the three stories there is Noah in Genesis, Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh, and Deucalion in Ovid, that were ordained by their gods to live on and somewhat purify the earth. Maybe the Gods thought that if only they survived there would only be good people in the world and the wickedness would fade with the sinners that meet their dooms. If we look at Noah what made him so great that he and his family would be the only ones left after the flood. In Genesis it says that Noah was six hundred years old. Being six hundred is unheard of now of days. So I think something must have been keeping him alive for so long, perhaps some Godly powers at play. Genesis didn’t say much more about Noah other than “Noah was just a man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.” (Genesis 6-9) This could be interpreted in a lot of ways such as if he were perfect and walked with God and found favor among him that is why he was saved. Unlike Noah, Utnapishtim had some kind of oath with his god that warned him of the incoming flood.

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In which he was instructed to build a big boat to survive it, but it is similar in that each of the stories they were warned by their God and saved, but in Ovid it doesn’t seem Deucalion was warned but survived on the luck that he and his wife had a boat and their Devotion to the gods, is what spared them. The fact that the story says, “One man seeks refuge on a hill, another rows in his curving boat where, just before he’d plowed.”