ARCHAEOLOGY: Nippur Flood Tablet

...when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.

1 Peter 3:20

"During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the University of Pennsylvania conducted a

number of archaeological digs in the ancient Babylonian city of Nippur. Among the remains of the temple library, they found a tiny tablet fragment containing another account of the Flood. It was translated by Hermann Hilprecht, an expert Assyriologist, and was found to agree with Genesis remarkably in its details. It speaks of a deluge that would destroy all life, and how God commanded the building of a great ship in which the builder, his family and animals were to be preserved.
 The tablet could be dated quite precisely for a number of reasons, foremost of which is that the library in which it was found was known to have been destroyed around 2100 BC, when the Elamites invaded Nippur. Hilprecht believed it had been written sometime between 2137 and 2005 BC.

(2)……[the confines of heaven and Earth I] will loosen
(3)……[a deluge will I make, and] it shall sweep away all men together;
(4)……[but seek thou l]ife before the deluge cometh forth;
(5)……[For over all living beings], as many as there are, I will bring overthrow, destruction, annihilation
(6)……Build a great ship and
(7)……total height shall be it structure.
(8)……it shall be a houseboat carrying what has been saved of life.
(9)……with a strong deck cover (it).
(10)….[The ship] which thou shalt make
(11)….[into it br]ing the beast of the field, the birds of heaven,
(12)….[and the creeping things, two of everything] instead of a number,
(13)….and the family …

The Nippur Flood tablet is kept at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and is designated CBS 13532. According to the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.ucla.edu), it is assigned to the Early Old Babylonian period and is dated to 2000–1900 BC." CMI

The ESTIMATED Date of the FLOOD is around 2304 BC - give or take about a century. So with the Nippur tablet, we have a non-Biblical account, written closest to the event, which nearly matches Scripture!!!....the Gilgamesh and other flood legends of later begin to differ as they were tweaked over the years as people turned away from God....