Deluge. The Genesis flood narrative is a flood myth found in the Tanakh. The story tells of God's decision to return the Earth to its pre-creation state of watery chaos and then remake it in a reversal of creation. The narrative has very strong similarities to parts of the Epic of Gilgamesh which predates the Book of Genesis. A global flood as described in this myth is inconsistent with the physical findings of geology and paleontology. A branch of creationism known as flood geology is a pseudoscientific attempt to argue that such a global flood actually occurred. The flood is part of what scholars call the primeval history, the first 11 chapters of Genesis. These chapters, fable-like and legendary, form a preface to the patriarchal narratives which follow, but show little relationship to them. For example, the names of its characters and its geography, Adam and Eve, the Land of Nod, and so on, are symbolic rather than real, and much of the narratives consist of lists of firsts: the first murder, the first wine, the first empire-builder. Few of the people, places and events depicted in the book are mentioned elsewhere in the Bible. This has led scholars to suppose that the primeval history forms a late composition attached to Genesis to serve as an introduction. At one extreme are those who see it as a product of the Hellenistic period, in which case it cannot be earlier than the first decades of the 4th century BCE; on the other hand the Yahwist source has been dated by others, notably John Van Seters, to the exilic pre-Persian period, precisely because the primeval history contains so much Babylonian influence in the form of myth. The flood narrative is made up of two stories woven together. As a result many details are contradictory, such as how long the flood lasted, how many animals were to be taken aboard the ark, and whether Noah released a raven which went to and fro until the waters were dried up or a dove which on the third occasion did not return to him again, or possibly both. Despite this disagreement on details the story forms a unified whole, and many efforts have been made to explain this unity, including attempts to identify which of the two sources was earlier and therefore influenced the other. The flood myth originated in Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamian story has three distinct versions, the Sumerian Epic of Ziusudra, and as episodes in two Babylonian epics, those of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh. Noah was a righteous man and walked with God. Seeing that the earth was corrupt and filled with violence, God instructed Noah to build an ark in which he, his sons, and their wives, together with male and female of all living creatures, would be saved from the waters. Noah entered the ark in his six hundredth year, and on the 17th day of the second month of that year the fountains of the Great Deep burst apart and the floodgates of heaven broke open and rain fell for forty days and forty nights until the highest mountains were covered 15 cubits, and all earth-based life perished except Noah and those with him in the ark. In Jewish legend, the kind of water that was pouring to the earth for forty days is not the common, but God bade each drop pass through Hell of Gehenna before it fell to earth, and the 'hot rain' scalded the skin of the sinners. The punishment that overtook them was befitting their crime. As their sensual desires had made them hot, and inflamed them to immoral excesses, so they were chastised by means of heated water. After 150 days, God remembered Noah. and the waters subsided until the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat. On the 27th day of the second month of Noah's six hundred and first year the earth was dry. Then Noah built an altar and made a sacrifice, and God made a covenant with Noah that man would be allowed to eat every living thing but not its blood, and that God would never again destroy all life by a flood. The flood is a reversal and renewal of God's creation of the world. In Genesis 1 God separates the waters above the earth from those below so that dry land can appear as a home for living things, but in the flood story the windows of heaven and fountains of the deep are opened so that the world is returned to the watery chaos of the time before creation. Even the sequence of flood events mimics that of creation, the flood first covering the earth to the highest mountains, then destroying, in order, birds, cattle, beasts, swarming creatures, and finally mankind. The ark itself is likewise a microcosm of Solomon's Temple. Intertextuality is the way biblical stories refer to and reflect one another.