But even if we regard this suggestion as unproved or improbable, Ezekiel’s reference to Noah surely presupposes that at least some version of the Flood story was familiar to the Hebrews before the Captivity.  And this conclusion is confirmed by other Babylonian parallels in the early chapters of Genesis, in which oral tradition rather than documentary borrowing must have played the leading part.(1) Thus Babylonian parallels may be cited for many features in the story of Paradise,(2) though no equivalent of the story itself has been recovered.  In the legend of Adapa, for example, wisdom and immortality are the prerogative of the gods, and the winning of immortality by man is bound up with eating the Food of Life and drinking the Water of Life; here too man is left with the gift of wisdom, but immortality is withheld.  And the association of winged guardians with the Sacred Tree in Babylonian art is at least suggestive of the Cherubim and the Tree of Life.  The very side of Eden has now been identified in Southern Babylonia by means of an old boundary-stone acquired by the British Museum a year or two ago.(3)

     (1) See Loisy, Les mythes babyloniens, pp. 10 ff., and cf. 
     S. Reinach, Cultes, Mythes et Religions, t.  II, pp. 386
     ff.

(2) Cf. especially Skinner, Genesis, pp. 90 ff.  For the latest discussion of the Serpent and the Tree of Life, suggested by Dr. Skinner’s summary of the evidence, see Frazer in Essays and Studies presented to William Ridgeway (1913), pp. 413 ff.

(3) See Babylonian Boundary Stones in the British Museum (1912), pp. 76 ff., and cf. Geographical Journal, Vol.  XL, No. 2 (Aug., 1912), p. 147.  For the latest review of the evidence relating to the site of Paradise, see Boissier, “La situation du paradis terrestre”, in Le Globe, t.  LV, Memoires (Geneva, 1916).

But I need not now detain you by going over this familiar ground.  Such possible echoes from Babylon seem to suggest pre-exilic influence rather than late borrowing, and they surely justify us in inquiring to what periods of direct or indirect contact, earlier than the Captivity, the resemblances between Hebrew and Babylonian ideas may be traced.  One point, which we may regard as definitely settled by our new material, is that these stories of the Creation and of the early history of the world were not of Semitic origin.  It is no longer possible to regard the Hebrew and Babylonian Versions as descended from common Semitic originals.  For we have now recovered some of those originals, and they are not Semitic but Sumerian.  The question thus resolves itself into an inquiry as to periods during which the Hebrews may have come into direct or indirect contact with Babylonia.