Friedrich Delitzsch

And so we have Henry Rollinson of the East India Company, George Smith...

Nathaniel Schmitt in the 1890s, Friedrich Delitzsch in the 1900s.

George Smith published on this topic in 1876, The Chaldean Account of Genesis, and in it he says this about the work of Henry Rawlinson.

On the discovery and decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, Oriental scholars hoped that copies of the Babylonian histories and traditions would one day be discovered, and we should thus gain earlier and more satisfactory evidence as to these primitive stories.

So when today I write books and say many of our familiar God stories are retellings of ancient cultures, stories of sky people, people react as if they'd never heard the like before.

But in fact, in academic circles, this has been a conversation for nearly 200 years.

In 1902, Friedrich Delitzsch delivered a lecture called Babel und Bibel.

And in that lecture, he argued that the biblical stories of creation, the flood, the Sabbath laws, the wisdom literature, such as in the book of Job and biblical law, were all lifted from Babylonian sources.