LivLuvAndBootlegMusic said:
Read the Epic of Gilgamesh. The flood narrative in the Bible is the same story, except whoever wrote the Bible's version added a moral twist and decided to specify the dimensions of the ark. There may have been a period of rain and some flooding, but it probably didn't happen, but that doesn't matter because it's not the point of the narrative.
Genesis is older
It makes more sense that Genesis was the original and the pagan myths arose as distortions of that original account. While Moses lived long after the event, he probably acted as the editor of far older sources.9 For example, Genesis 10:19 gives matter-of-fact directions, ‘as you go toward Sodom and Gomorrah and Admah and Zeboiim’. These were the cities of the plain God destroyed for their extreme wickedness 500 years before Moses. Yet Genesis gives directions at a time when they were well-known landmarks, not buried under the Dead Sea.
It is common to make legends out of historical events, but not history from legends. The liberals also commonly assert that monotheism is a late evolutionary religious development. The Bible teaches that mankind was originally monotheistic. Archaeological evidence suggests the same, indicating that only later did mankind degenerate into idolatrous pantheism.10
For instance, in Genesis, God’s judgment is just, he is patient with mankind for 120 years (Genesis 6:3), shows mercy to Noah, and is sovereign. Conversely, the gods in the Gilgamesh Epic are capricious and squabbling, cower at the Flood and are famished without humans to feed them sacrifices. That is, the human writers of the Gilgamesh Epic rewrote the true account, and made their gods in their own image.
The whole Gilgamesh-derivation theory is based on the discredited Documentary Hypothesis.9 This assumes that the Pentateuch was compiled by priests during the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century BC. But the internal evidence shows no sign of this, and every sign of being written for people who had just come out of Egypt. The Eurocentric inventors of the Documentary Hypothesis, such as Julius Wellhausen, thought that writing hadn’t been invented by Moses’ time. But many archaeological discoveries of ancient writing show that this is ludicrous.