rudder or pilot.<8> Not content with giving the exact year of
Noah's age in which the flood began, the Pentateuchal story adds
the month and the day of the month. It is the Deity himself who
"shuts in" Noah. The modest week assigned to the full deluge in
Hasisadra's story becomes forty days, in one of the Pentateuchal
accounts, and a hundred and fifty in the other. The flood,
which, in the version of Berosus, has grown so high as to cast
the ship among the mountains of Armenia, is improved upon in the
Hebrew account until it covers "all the high hills that were
under the whole heaven"; and, when it begins to subside, the ark
is left stranded on the summit of the highest peak, commonly
identified with Ararat itself.

While the details of Hasisadra's adventure are, at least,
compatible with the physical conditions of the Euphrates valley,
and, as we have seen, involve no catastrophe greater than such
as might be brought under those conditions, many of the very
precisely stated details of Noah's flood contradict some of the
best established results of scientific inquiry.

If it is certain that the alluvium of the Mesopotamian plain has
been brought down by the Tigris and the Euphrates, then it is no
less certain that the physical structure of the whole valley has
persisted, without material modification, for many thousand
years before the date assigned to the flood. If the summits,
even of the moderately elevated ridges which immediately bound
the valley, still more those of the Kurdish and Armenian
mountains, were ever covered by water, for even forty days, that
water must have extended over the whole earth. If the earth was
thus covered, anywhere between 4000 and 5000 years ago, or, at