After the flood in Babylonian stories

Says God blessed Noah and his sons (Gen 9:1) and established His covenant “with every living creature” (9:10): “never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth” (9:11). The bow in the clouds is its sign, and God will “remember” (9:13, 15).

In Rogers’s Eleventh Tablet the god brings out Ut-napishtim and his wife: “he stood between us, he blessed us”, saying, “Now let Ut-napishtim and his wife be like the gods even us”; they are made to dwell “afar off, at the mouth of the rivers”. Earlier the goddess raises “the great jewel” and vows, “I shall not forget the jewels of my neck”. King reads the Sumerian text as the gods “bestowing immortality” on Ziusudu, “as Enlil bestows immortality upon Ut-napishtim at the close of the Semitic Version”. In his summary of the Semitic Version, Ea bids that Enlil “should not again send a deluge to destroy the whole of mankind”, but be content with destruction “wrought by wild beasts, famine, and plague”. These are their readings.

Uncertain For King’s source-critical framing see Reading Genesis 2:4–25 alongside Genesis 1: from Josephus and Philo to Keil, Driver and Skinner. The stories share a blessing after the flood, a word against another flood, and a remembered token. They differ: Gen 9’s blessing repeats the words of 1:28 rather than granting immortality, and the one God binds Himself by covenant to every living creature. How they relate is open. No dependence is claimed, no lean is taken, and this background does not fix the meaning of Gen 9.