In our society, which is overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian, students often
             find it difficult to compare Bible stories with tales from other cultures,
             because our own belief system is wrapped up in the prior, and it is hard for many
             of us to go against our traditional faith to evaluate them objectively. But in a
             comparison of the Biblical book of Genesis with the ancient Sumerian text, Epic
             of Gilgamesh, many parallels suggest that the same type of spiritual searching
             inspired the composition of both works. It would seem that both cultures shared
             a concern for the nature of human life, and how its shortness affects the way life
             should be lived. However, the conclusions each culture derived from their
             observations are very different, and this led them to develop very different
             Gilgamesh is an interesting story because it contains several
             episodes in common with the Judeo-Christian Bible. For example, John Noss
             "The original flood story was Sumerian and came out of grim
             experiences of the overflowing of the two rivers [the Tigris and the
             Euphrates]. Several of the later versions of the tale, mostly fragmentary,
             have come down to us. The finest of these forms part of the Gilgamesh
             epic, into which it was inserted as an interesting interpolation. According
             to this narrative, the gods decided in anger to punish man's sins by a
             flood. Their secret decision was revealed to one man. The good god Ea
             felt kindly toward Utnapishtim [Gilgamesh's ancestor] and told him about
             it. The man proceeded immediately to build an ark" (Noss 38).
             Marietta Moskin agrees that many of the earliest Hebrew stories derived
             from the Sumerian text. She writes that, "The authors of Genesis surely must
             have looked around to see what other people thought about creation. And there
             was quite a lot. There were the Sumerian Seven Tablets of Creation; there was
             the...