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All: Genesis and the new sciences

Genesis and the new sciences

The birds: where the two accounts agree, and where they do not

In short

Both accounts have birds sent out to test whether the water has gone, and that is a real parallel, but the birds differ in kind and in order, and a reader should be shown both facts.

The tablet, in Smith's translation: "38. I sent forth a dove and it left. The dove went, it returned, and 39. a resting-place it did not find, and it came back. 40. I sent forth a swallow and it left… 42. I sent forth a raven and it left. 43. The raven went, and the carrion on the water it saw, and 44. it did eat, it swam, and turned away, it did not come back." Dove, swallow, raven, and the raven, sent last, does not return.

Genesis, in a version we host: "and he sent forth a raven, and it went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth" (Genesis 8:7, ASV), and then a dove, sent three times.

Raven first, no swallow.

⭐ The honest statement is that both the resemblance and the difference are real. The shared elements, a warned survivor, a vessel, a mountain landing, birds released to test the water, a sacrifice afterwards, are what made the 1872 announcement so startling. The divergences are equally on the page. What the resemblance MEANS is contested and is not settled here: it has been read as one memory preserved in two traditions, as borrowing in one direction or the other, and as two independent recollections of the same event.

No winner is picked here. Anyone weighing the parallel deserves the differences in the same breath, which is why both are set out above.

Sources: Smith, Chaldean Account, Tablet XI, column III; Genesis 8:7 (ASV).

Sources, trace every one

Every cited verse, in full. Tap any reference to open it in the reader.

  • Genesis 8:6bsb

    After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark

  • Genesis 8:7bsb

    and sent out a raven. It kept flying back and forth until the waters had dried up from the earth.

  • Genesis 8:8bsb

    Then Noah sent out a dove to see if the waters had receded from the surface of the ground.

  • Genesis 8:11bsb

    And behold, the dove returned to him in the evening with a freshly plucked olive leaf in her beak. So Noah knew that the waters had receded from the earth.

  • Genesis 8:12bsb

    And Noah waited seven more days and sent out the dove again, but this time she did not return to him.

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On contested questions we show every major view, attributed and cited, and pick no winner. Answers are synthesized from primary sources, truth you can trace, not opinion.

The birds: where the two accounts agree, and where they do not · Bubble Bible