Did the Hebrews copy Genesis from Mesopotamian myths like Enuma Elish, or is it the reverse?
A viewer notes that historians claim Hebrew Old Testament stories such as the ark were taken from earlier myths, and asks Robert to expound on his position that in most cases it is flipped, and that those other myths borrowed from the Old Testament.
Answer
The documentary hypothesis, proposed by two Protestant liberals, Graf and Wellhausen, in the late 1800s, claims the Hebrews copied their creation, flood, and Babel stories from Mesopotamian sources, with the most famous being Enuma Elish, and it helps their case to claim the Jews did not write Genesis until around the end of the Babylonian captivity, inventing Yahweh to compete with the Babylonian god Marduk. But they have no proof, and we can refute it empirically. The earliest copy of Enuma Elish that we actually possess dates from the twelfth century BC, not the 2500 BC they claim for it. Meanwhile Scripture itself, in passages like Deuteronomy 31:24, says several times that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, and Moses lived in the fifteenth century BC, coming out of Egypt around 1447 and writing around 1400 BC. So Moses predates our earliest copy of Enuma Elish by roughly two hundred years. Real scholarship bases a theory on the earliest copy you can find, not on a hypothetical earlier one you do not have. The evidence therefore shows these myths are late compared to what Moses wrote, not the source of it.