5 - THE DELUGE

The story of the Deluge, the Great Flood, is part of human lore and communal memory virtually in all parts of the world. Its main elements are the same everywhere, no matter the version or the epithet-names by which the tale’s principals are called: Angry Gods decide to wipe Mankind off the face of the Earth by means of a global flood, but one couple is spared and saves the human line.

Except for an account of the Deluge written in Greek by the Chaldean priest Berossus in the third century B.C, known to scholars from fragmentary mentions in the writings of Greek historians, the only record of that momentous event was in the Hebrew Bible.

But in 1872 the British Society of Biblical Archaeology was told in a lecture by George Smith that among the tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh discovered by Henry Layard in the royal library of Nineveh, the ancient Assyrian capital, some (Fig. 21) contained a Deluge tale similar to that in the Bible. By 1910 parts of other recensions (as scholars call versions in other ancient Near Eastern languages) have been found.

They helped reconstruct another major Mesopotamian text, the Epic of Atra-hasis, that told the story of Mankind from its creation until its near-annihilation by the Deluge.

Figure 21

Linguistic and other clues in these texts indicated an earlier Sumerian source, and parts of that were found and began to be published after 1914. Although the full Sumerian text is yet to be discovered, the existence of such a prototype on which all the others, including the biblical version, are based, is now beyond doubt.

The Bible introduces Noah, the hero of the Deluge tale who was singled out to be saved with his family, as "a righteous man, of perfect genealogy; with the Elohim did Noah walk." The Mesopotamian texts paint a more comprehensive picture of the man, suggesting that he was the offspring of a demigod and possibly (as Lamech had suspected) a demigod himself. It fills out the details of what "walking with the Elohim" had really entailed.

Among the many details that the Mesopotamian texts provide, the role played by dreams as an important form of Divine Encounter becomes evident. There is also a precedent for a deity’s refusal to show his face to a beseeching mortal - God is heard but is not seen. And there is a vivid, first person report of a Divine Encounter unique in all the annals of the ancient Near East - the blessing of humans by the deity by the physical touching of the forehead.

In the biblical version it is the same deity who resolves to wipe Mankind off the face of the Earth and, contradictorily, acts to prevent the demise of Mankind by devising a way to save the hero of the tale and his family. In the Sumerian original text and its subsequent Mesopotamian recensions, more than one deity is involved; and as in other instances, Enlil and Enki emerge as the chief protagonists: the stricter Enlil, upset by the intermarriages with the daughters of Man, calling for putting an end to Mankind; but the lenient Enki, deeming Mankind as his "Created Ones," schemes to save it through a chosen family.

The Deluge, furthermore, was not a universal calamity brought about by an angry God, but a natural calamity seized by an upset Enlil to attain the desired goal. It was preceded by a long period of a worsening climate, increasing cold, reduced precipitation, and failing crops - conditions that we have identified in The 12th Planet as the last Ice Age that began circa 75,000 years ago and ended abruptly some 13,000 years ago.

We have suggested that the accumulating mass of ice atop Antarctica, causing by its sheer weight some of the bottom layers to melt, was nearing a point where the whole mass could slip off the continent; this would have caused an immense tidal wave that, surging from the south, could engulf the land masses to the north. With their IGI.GI ("Those Who Observe and See") orbiting the Earth and with a scientific station at the tip of Africa, the Anunnaki were well aware of the danger. And as the next orbital proximity of Nibiru to Earth was due, they well realized that the heightened gravitational pull on this passage could well trigger the calamity.

Throughout the mounting human suffering as the Ice Age became more severe, Enlil forbade the other Gods from helping Mankind; it is evident from the details in the Epic of Atra-hasis that his intention was to have Mankind perish by starvation. But Mankind somehow survived, for in the absence of rains crops still grew by dint of a morning mist and a nighttime dew. In time, however,

"the fertile fields became white, vegetation did not sprout."

"People walked hunched in the streets, their faces looked green."

The starvation led to fraternal strife, even cannibalism. But Enki, defying Enid’s command, found ways of helping Mankind sustain itself, mainly by ingenious catches of fishes. He was especially helpful to his faithful follower Atra-hasis ("He who is most wise"), a demigod charged with acting as the go-between to the Anunnaki and their human servants in the settlement of Shuruppak - a city under the patronage of Ninmah/Ninharsag.

As the various texts reveal, Atra-hasis, seeking Enki’s guidance and assistance, moved his bed into the temple so as to receive the divine instructions by means of dreams. Keeping constant vigil in the temple, "every day he wept; bringing oblations in the morning" and at night "giving attention to dreams."

In spite of all the suffering. Mankind was still around. The people’s outcry - "bellowing" in Enlil’s words - only increased his annoyance. Previously he explained the need to annihilate Mankind because "its conjugations deprive me of sleep." Now, he said, "the noise of Mankind has become too annoying; their uproar deprives me of sleep." And so he made the other leaders swear that what is about to happen - the avalanche of water - would be kept a secret from the Earthlings, so that they would perish:

Enlil opened his mouth to speak and addressed the assembly of all the Gods: "Come, all of us, and take an oath regarding the killing Flood!"

That the Anunnaki themselves were preparing to abandon Earth in their shuttlecraft was another part of the secret that the Gods swore to keep from Mankind. But as all the others took the oath, Enki resisted.

"Why will you bind me with an oath?" he asked,

"Am I to raise my hand against my own humans?"

A bitter argument ensued, but in the end Enki too was made to swear not to reveal "the secret."

It was after that fatal oath-taking ceremony that Atra-hasis, staying day and night at the temple, received the following message in a dream:

The Gods commanded total destruction. Enlil imposed an evil deed on the humans.

It was a message, an oracle, that Atra-hasis could not understand.

"Atra-hasis opened his mouth and addressed his God: ‘Teach me the meaning of the dream, so that I may understand its meaning.’ "

But how could Enki be more explicit without breaking his oath? As Enki contemplated the problem, the answer came to him. He did swear not to reveal "the secret" to Mankind; but could he not tell the secret to a wall? And so, one day, Atra-hasis heard his God’s voice without seeing him. This was no communication by means of a dream, at night. It was daytime; and yet, the encounter was totally different.

The experience was traumatic. We read in the Assyrian recension that the baffled Atra-hasis "bowed down and prostrated himself, then stood up, opened his mouth," and said,

Enki, lord-God -
I heard your entry,
I noticed steps like your footsteps!

For seven years, Atra-hasis said, "I have seen your face." Now, all of a sudden, he could not see his lord-God. Appealing to the unseen God, "Atra-hasis made his voice heard and spoke to his lord," asking for the meaning, the portent of his dream, that he may know what to do.

Thereupon Enki "opened his mouth to speak, and addressed the reed wall." Still not seeing his God, Atra-hasis heard the deity’s voice coming from behind the reed wall in the temple; his lord-God was giving instructions to the wall:

Wall, listen to me! Reed wall, observe my words! Discard your house, build a boat! Spurn property, save life!

Instructions for the construction of the boat then followed. It had to be roofed over so that the Sun should not be seen from inside it, pitched all over with tar "above and below."

Then Enki,

"opened the water clock and filled it; He announced to him the coming of a killing flood on the seventh night."

A depiction on a Sumerian cylinder seal appears to have illustrated the scene, showing the reed wall (in the shape of a water clock?) held by a priest, Enki as a serpent-God, and the hero of the Deluge getting instructions (Fig. 22).

Figure 22

The construction of the boat, obviously, could not have been hidden from the other people; so how could it be done without alerting them, too, to the coming catastrophe? For that, Atra-hasis was instructed (from behind the reed wall) to explain to the others that he was building the boat in order to leave the city.

He was to tell them that, as a worshiper of Enki, he could no longer stay in a place controlled by Enlil:

My God does not agree with your God.
Enki and Enlil are angry with one another.
Since I reverence Enki,
I cannot remain in the land of Enlil.
I have been expelled from my house.

The conflict between Enki and Enlil, that earlier had to be surmised from their actions, has thus broken into the open - sufficiently to serve as a believable reason for the banishment of Atra-hasis. The city where the events were taking place was Shuruppak, a settlement under the Lordship of Ninmah/Ninharsag. There, for the first time, a demigod was elevated to the status of "king."

According to the Sumerian text, his name was Ubar-Tutu; his son and successor was the hero of the Deluge. (The Sumerians called him Ziusudra; in the Epic of Gilgamesh he was called Utnapishtim; in Old Babylonian his epithet-name was Atra-hasis; and the Bible called him Noah). As one of the settlements of the Anunnaki in the Edin, it was in the domain of Enlil; to Enki the Abzu, in southern Africa, was allotted. It was that land of Enki beyond the seas, Atra-hasis was to say, that he expected to reach with his boat.

Eager to get rid of the banished man, the elders of the city made the whole town help build the boat. "The carpenter brought his axe, the workers brought the tar stones, the young ones carried the pitch, the binders provided the rest." When the boat was finished, according to the Atra-hasis text, the townspeople helped him load it with food and water (kept in watertight compartments), as well as "with clean animals... fat animals ... wild creatures... cattle... winged birds of the sky."

The list is akin to the one in Genesis, according to which the Lord’s instructions to Noah were to bring into the ark two of each species, male and female, "of every living thing of flesh ... of the fowls after their kind and of the cattle after their kind."

The embarkation of pairs of animals has been a favorite subject of countless artists, be it master painters or illustrators of children’s books. It has also been one of the eyebrow raisers of the talc, deemed a virtual impossibility and thus more of an allegorical way to explain how animal life continued even after the Deluge. Indirectly, such doubt regarding an important detail is bound to cast incredulity on the factuality of the whole Deluge story.

It is therefore noteworthy that the Deluge recension in the Epic of Gilgamesh offers a totally different detail regarding the preservation of animal life: It was not the living animals that were taken aboard - it was their seed that was preserved!

The text (tablet XI, lines 21-28) quotes Enki speaking thus to the wall:

Reed hut, reed hut! Wall, wall! Reed hut, hearken! Wall, reflect! Man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu: Abandon your house, build a ship! Give up possessions, seek thou life! Forswear goods, the life keep! Aboard the ship take thou the seed of all living things.

We learn from line 83 in the tablet that Utnapishtim (as "Noah" was called in this Old Babylonian recension) had indeed brought on board "whatever I had of the seed of living beings." Clearly, this is a reference not to plant seeds, but to that of animals.

The term for "seed" in the Old Babylonian and Assyrian recensions is the Akkadian word zeru (Zera in Hebrew) which stands for that from which living things sprout and grow. That these recensions stem from Sumerian originals has been clearly established; indeed, in some of the Akkadian versions the technical term for "seed" has been retained by its original Sumerian NUMUN, which was used to signify that by which a man had offspring.

Taking on board "the seed of living beings" rather than the animals themselves not only reduced the space requirements to manageable proportions. It also implies the application of sophisticated biotechnology to preserve varied species - a technique being developed nowadays by learning the genetic secrets of DNA. This was feasible since Enki was involved; for he was the master of genetic engineering, symbolized in this capacity by the Entwined Serpents that emulated the double-helixed DNA (see Fig. 5).

The assigning by the Sumerian/Mesopotamian texts of the role of Mankind’s savior to Enki makes much sense. He was the creator of The Adam and of Homo sapiens, and thus he understandably called the doomed Earthlings "my humans." As chief scientist of the Anunnaki he could select, obtain, and provide "the seed of all living things" for preservation, and possessed the knowledge of resurrecting those animals from their "seed" DNA.

He was also best suited for the role of the designer of Noah’s ark - a vessel of a special design that could survive the avalanche of water. All the versions agree that it was built according to exact specifications provided by the deity.

Built so that two-thirds of its great size would be below the waterline, it was given considerable stability. Its wooden structure was made waterproof with bitumen tar both inside and outside, so that when the tidal wave engulfed it even the upper decks would hold off the waters. The flat top had only one small jutting cubicle, whose hatch was also closed and sealed with bitumen when the time came to face the Deluge.

Of the many suggestions for the shape of Noah’s Ark, the one by Paul Haupt ("The Ship of the Babylonian Noah" in Beitrage zur Assyriologie - Fig. 23) appears to us the most plausible.

Figure 23

It also bears a striking resemblance to a modern submarine, with a conning tower whose hatch is closed tight when diving.

No wonder, perhaps, that this specially designed vessel was described in the Babylonian and Assyrian recensions as a tzulili - a term which even nowadays (in modern Hebrew, Tzolelei) denotes a submersible boat, a submarine. The Sumerian term for Ziusudra’s boat was MA.GUR.GUR, meaning "a boat that can turn and tumble."

According to the biblical version it was built of gopher wood and reeds, with only one hatch, and was covered with tar-pitch "within and without." The Hebrew term in Genesis for the complete boat was Teba, which denotes something closed on all sides, a "box" rather than the commonly translated "ark." Stemming from the Akkadian Tebitu, it is considered by some scholars to signify a "goods vessel," a cargo ship. But the term, with a hard "T," means "to sink." The boat was thus a "sinkable" boat, hermetically sealed, so that even if submerged under the tidal wave of the Deluge, it could survive the watery ordeal and resurface.

That it was Enki who had designed the boat also makes sense. It will be recalled that his epithet-name before he was given the title EN.KI ("Lord of Earth") was E.A - "He Whose Home/Abode is Water." Indeed, as texts dealing with the earliest times state, Ea liked to sail the Edin’s waters, alone or with mariners whose sea songs he liked. Sumerian depictions (Fig. 24a,b) showed him with streams of water - the prototype of Aquarius (which, as a constellation, was the zodiacal House honoring him).

Figures 24a and 24b

In setting up the gold-mining operations in southeast Africa, he also organized the transportation of the ores to the Edin in cargo vessels; they were nicknamed "Abzu ships" and it was in emulation of them that Atra-hasis was to build the Tzulili. And, as we have mentioned, it was on one of the trips by an Abzu-boat that Ea "carried off" the young Ereshkigal. A seasoned sailor and an expert shipbuilder, it was he, more than any other one of the Anunnaki, who could devise and design the ingenious boat that could withstand the Deluge.

Noah’s Ark and its construction are key components of the Deluge tale, for without such a boat Mankind would have perished as Enlil had wished. The tale of the boat has a bearing on another aspect of the pre-Diluvial era; for it restates familiarity with and use of boats in those early times - aspects already mentioned in the Adapa tale. All this corroborates the existence of pre-Diluvial shipping, and thus the incredible Cro-Magnon depictions of boats in their Cave Art - see Fig. 15.

When the construction of the boat was completed and its outfitting and loading done as Enki had directed, Atra-hasis brought his family into the boat. According to Berossus, those coming on board included also some close friends of Ziusu-dra/Noah. In the Akkadian version, Utnapishtim "made all the craftsmen go on board" to be saved by the boat they helped build. In another detail from the Mesopotamian texts we also learn that the group also included an expert navigator, Puzur-Amurri by name, whom Enki provided and who was instructed where to veer the boat once the tidal wave subsided.

Even though the loading and boarding were completed, Atra-hasis/Utnapishtim himself could not sit still inside and he was entering and leaving the boat constantly, nervously waiting for the signal that Enki had told him to watch for:

When Shainash,
ordering a trembling at dusk,
will shower a rain of eruptions -
board thou the ship,
batten up the entrance!

The signal was to be the launching of spacecraft at Sippar, the site of the Spaceport of the Anunnaki some one hundred miles north of Shuruppak. For it was the plan of the Anunnaki to gather in Sippar and from there ascend into Earth orbit. Atra-hasis/Utnapishtim was told to watch the skies for such a "shower of eruptions," the thunder and flames of the launched spacecraft that made the ground tremble. "Shamash" - then the "Eagleman" in charge of the Spaceport - "had set a stated time," Enki told his faithful Earthling.

And when the signs to watch for had appeared, Utnapishtim "boarded the ship, battened up the hatch, and handed over the structure together with its contents to Puzur-Amurri the boatman." The boatman’s instructions were to navigate the ship to Mount Nitzir ("Mount of Salvation") - the twin-peaked Mount Ararat.

A few important facts emerge from these details. They indicate that the master of the Salvation Plan was aware not only of the very existence of the Mount so far away from southern Mesopotamia, but also that these twin peaks would be the first to emerge from the tidal wave, being the highest peaks in the whole of western Asia (17,000 and 12,900 feet high).

This would have been a well-known fact to any one of the Anunnaki leaders, for when they established their pre-Diluvial Spaceport in Sippar, they anchored the Landing corridor on the twin peaks of Ararat (Fig. 25).

Figure 25

The master of the Salvation Plan, furthermore, was also aware of the general direction in which the avalanche of water will carry the boat; for unless the tidal wave were to come from the south and carry the boat northward, no navigator could redirect the boat (with no oars and no sails) to the desired destination.

These elements of the Geography of the Deluge (to coin an expression) have a bearing on the cause of and nature of the Deluge. Contrary to the popular notion that the watery calamity resulted from an excessive rainfall, the biblical and earlier Mesopotamian texts make clear that - though rains followed as the temperatures dropped - the catastrophe began with a rush of wind from the south followed by a watery wave from the south.

The source of the waters were the "fountains of the Great Deep" - a term that referred to the great and deep oceanic waters beyond Africa. The avalanche of water "submerged the dams of the dry land" - the coastal continental barriers. As the ice over Antarctica slipped into the Indian Ocean it caused an immense tidal wave. Gushing forth across the ocean northward, the wall of water overwhelmed the continental coastline of Arabia and rushed up the Persian Gulf. Then it reached the funnel of The Land Between the Rivers, engulfing all the lands (Fig. 26.)

Fig. 26

• How global was the Deluge?

• Was every place upon our globe actually inundated?

The human recollection is almost global and suggests an almost-global event.

What is certain is that with the eventual melting of the slipped ice, and the rise in global temperatures following the initial cooling, the Ice Age that had held Earth in its grip for the previous 62,000 years abruptly ended. It happened about 13,000 years ago.

One result of the catastrophe was that Antarctica, for the first time in so many thousands of years, was freed of its ice cover. Its true continental features - coasts, bays, even rivers - were available to be seen, if there had been anyone at the time to see them. Amazingly (but not to our surprise), such a "someone" was there!

We know that because of the existence of maps showing an ice-free Antarctica.

For the record let it be recalled that in modern times the very existence of a continent at the south pole was not known until A.D. 1820, when British and Russian sailors discovered it. It was then, as it is now, covered by a massive layer of ice; we know the continent’s true shape (under the ice cap) by means of radar and other sophisticated instruments used by many teams during the 1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY).

Yet Antarctica appears on mapa mundi (World Maps) from the fifteenth and even fourteenth centuries A.D. - hundreds of years before the discovery of Antarctica - and the continent, to add puzzle to puzzle, is shown ice-free! Of several such maps, ably described and discussed in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings /Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age by Charles H. Hapgood, the one that illustrates the enigma very clearly is the 1531 Map of the World by Orontius Finaeus (Fig. 27), whose depiction of Antarctica is compared to the ice-free continent as determined by the 1958 IGY (Fig. 28).

Figure 27

Figure 28

An even earlier map, from 1513, by the Turkish admiral Piri Re’is, shows the continent connected by an archipelago to the tip of South America (without showing the whole of Antarctica). On the other hand, the map shows correctly Central and South America with the Andean mountains, the Amazon River, and so on. How could that be known even before the Spaniards had reached Mexico (in 1519) or South America (in 1531)?

In all these instances, the mapmakers of the Age of Discovery stated that their sources were ancient maps from Phoenicia and "Chaldea," the Greek name for Mesopotamia. But as others who have studied these maps had concluded, no mortal seamen, even given some advanced instruments, could have mapped these continents and their inner features in those early days, and certainly not of an ice-free Antarctica. Only someone viewing and mapping it from the air could have done it. And the only ones around at the time were the Anunnaki.

Indeed, the slippage of Antarctica’s ice cover and its effects on the Earth are mentioned in a major text known as the Erra Epos. It deals with the events, millennia later, when a deadly dispute arose between the Anunnaki concerning the supremacy on Earth. As the zodiacal age of the Bull (Taurus) was giving way to that of the Ram (Aries), Marduk, the Firstborn son of Enki, asserted that his time had come to take over the supremacy from Enlil and his legal heir.

When instruments located at sacred precincts in Sumer indicated that the new age of the Ram had not yet arrived, Marduk complained that they reflected changes that had occurred because "the Erakallum quaked and its covering was diminished, and the measures could no longer be taken." Erakallum is a term whose precise meaning escapes the scholars; it used to be translated "Lower World" but is now left in scholarly studies untranslated.

In When Time Began we have suggested that the term denotes the land at the bottom of the world - Antarctica, and that the "covering" that had diminished was the ice cover that had slipped circa 13,000 years ago but grew back to some extent by 4,000 years ago. (Charles Hapgood surmised that the ice-free Antarctica as depicted in the Orontius Finaeus map showed the continent as it was seen circa 4000 B.C., i.e. 6,000 years ago; other studies saw 9,000 years ago as the right time).

As the Deluge overwhelmed the lands and destroyed all upon them, the Anunnaki themselves were airborne, orbiting the Earth in their spacecraft. From the skies they could see the havoc and destruction. Divided into several spacecraft, some "cowered like dogs, crouched against the outer wall." As the days passed "their lips were feverish of thirst, they were suffering cramp from hunger."

In the spacecraft where Ishtar was, "she cried out like a woman in travail," lamenting that "the olden days are alas turned to clay." In her spacecraft Ninmah, who shared in the creation of Mankind, bewailed what she was seeing. "My creatures have become like flies, filling the rivers like dragonflies, their fatherhood taken away by the rolling sea." Enlil and Ninurta, accompanied no doubt by the others from Mission Control Center in Nippur, were in another spacecraft. So were Enki, Marduk, and the others of Enki’s clan.

Their destination, too, was the peaks of Ararat that - as they all well knew - would emerge from under the waters before all else. But all, except Enki, were not aware that a family of humans, saved from the calamity, was also headed that way...

The unexpected encounter was full of surprising aspects; their bearing on the human search for Immortality lingered for ten thousand years, and beyond. They also left a permanent human yearning to see the Face of God.

According to the biblical tale, after the ark had come to rest on the peaks of Ararat and the waters receded from the drenched earth, "Noah and his sons and his wife and the wives of his sons who were with him," plus the animals that were in the ark, left the boat.

"And Noah built an altar unto Yahweh, and he took of every clean cattle and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And Yahweh smelled the pleasant savor, and said in his heart: ‘I will no longer accurse the Earth because of Man.’ "

And Elohim blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them: "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth."

The rapprochement between the angry God and the remnant of Humankind is again described in greater detail and some variation in the Mesopotamian sources. The sequence of events is retained - the cessation of the tidal wave, the falling level of water, the sending out of birds to scout the terrain, the arrival at Ararat, the stepping out of the ark, the building of an altar, and the offering of burnt sacrifices; followed by the recanting triggered by the sweet savory smell of the roasted meat, and the blessing of Noah and his sons.

As Utnapishtim recalled it when he told "the secret of the Gods" to Gilgamesh, after he had come out of the boat, he "offered a sacrifice and poured out a libation on the mountaintop, set up seven and seven cult vessels, heaped upon their pot-stands cane, cedarwood and myrtle." The Gods, emerging from their spacecraft as they too landed on the mountain, "smelled the sweet savor, crowded like flies about the sacrificer."

Soon Ninmah arrived and realized what had happened. Swearing by the "great jewels which Anu had fashioned for her," she announced that she will never forget the ordeal and what had happened. Go ahead, partake of the offering, she told the rank and file Anunnaki: "but let not Enlil come to the offering; for he, unreasoning, by the deluge my humans consigned to destruction."

But not letting Enlil savor and taste the burnt offering was the least of the problems:

When at length Enlil arrived
and saw the ship, Enlil was wroth.
He was filled with wroth against the Igigi Gods.
"Has some living soul escaped?
No man was to survive the destruction!"

His foremost son, Ninurta, suspected someone other than the Igigi Gods in their orbiters, and said to Enlil:

Who, other than Ea,

can devise plans?

It is Ea who knows every matter!

Joining the gathering, Ea/Enki admitted what he had done. But, he made sure to point out, he did not violate his oath to secrecy: I did not disclose the secret of the Gods, he said. All he did was to "let Atra-hasis see a dream," and this clever human "perceived the secret of the Gods" by himself ... Since that is how things had turned out, Enki told Enlil, would it not be wiser to repent? Was not the whole plan to destroy Mankind by the Deluge a big mistake?

"Thou wisest of the Gods, thou hero, how couldst thou, unreasoning," bring such a calamity about?

Whether it was this sermon, or a realization that he ought to make the best of the situation, the text does not make clear. Whatever the motives, Enlil did have a change of heart.

This is how Utnapishtim/Atra-hasis described what ensued:

Thereupon Enlil went aboard the ship.

Holding me hy the hand,

he took me aboard.

He took my wife aboard and made her kneel by my side.
Standing between us,

he touched our foreheads
to bless us.

The Bible simply states that after Yahweh had repented, "Elohim blessed Noah and his sons." From the Mesopotamian sources we learn what the blessing had entailed. It was an unheard-of ceremony, a unique Divine Encounter in which the deity had physically taken the chosen humans by the hand and, standing between them, physically touched their foreheads to convey a divine attribute.

There, on Mount Ararat, in full view of the other Anunnaki, Enlil bestowed Immortality upon Utnapishtim and his wife, proclaiming thus:

Hitherto Utnapishtim has been just a human;

henceforth Utnapishtim and his wife shall be like Gods unto us.

Utnapishtim shall reside far away, at the mouth of the waters.

And "thus they took me and made me reside in the Far Away, at the mouth of the waters," Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh.
The amazing part of this tale is that Utnapishtim was relating it to Gilgamesh some ten thousand years after the Deluge!

As a son of a demigod and, in all probability, a demigod himself, Utnapishtim could well have lived another 10,000 years after having lived in Shuruppak (before the Deluge) for 36,000 years.

This was not impossible; even the Bible allotted to Noah another 350 years after the Deluge on top of the previous 601. The really extraordinary aspect is that the wife of Utnapishtim was also able to live that long as a result of the blessing and the sacred place of residence to which the couple were transported.

Indeed, it was such famed longevity of the Blessed Couple that had led Gilgamesh - a king of the city of Erech, circa 2900 B.C. - to search for the hero of the Deluge. But that is a tale that merits close scrutiny by itself, for it is filled with a variety of Divine Encounters that enthrall from beginning to end.

As a final act of the Deluge drama, according to the Bible, Elohim assured the saved humans that such a calamity shall never occur again; and as a sign, "I placed my bow in the cloud as a token of the covenant between me and the Earth."

Though this particular detail does not show up in the extant Mesopotamian versions, the deity who had covenanted with the people was indeed sometimes shown, as in this Mesopotamian depiction, as a bow-holding God in the clouds (Fig. 29).

Figure 29

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