"The Babylonians divided their history into two great periods: the one before, the other after the Flood. Babylon was in quite a peculiar sense the land of deluges. The alluvial lowlands along the course of all great rivers discharging into the sea are, of course, exposed to terrible floods of a special kind--cyclones and tornadoes accompanied by earthquakes and tremendous downpours of rain." After referring to the great cyclone and tidal wave which wrecked the Sunderbunds at the mouths of the Ganges in 1876, when 215,000 persons met their death by drowning, Prof. Delitzsch goes on-- "It is the merit of the celebrated Viennese geologist, Eduard Suess, to have shown that there is an accurate description of such a cyclone, line for line, in the Babylonian Deluge story. . . . The whole story, precisely as it was written down, travelled to Canaan. But, owing to the new and entirely different local conditions, it was forgotten that the sea was the chief factor, and so we find in the Bible two accounts of the Deluge, which are not only scientifically impossible, but, furthermore, mutually contradictory--the one assigning to it a duration of 365 days, the other of [40 + (3 x 7)] = 61 days. Science is indebted to Jean Astruc, that strictly orthodox Catholic physician of Louis XIV., for recognizing that two fundamentally different accounts of a deluge have been worked up into a single story in the Bible."[171:1] The importance of the Babylonian Deluge story does not rest in anything intrinsic to itself, for there are many deluge stories preserved by other nations quite as interesting and as well told. It derives its importance from its points of resemblance to the Genesis story, and from the deduction that some have drawn from these that it was the original of that story--or rather of the two stories--that we find imperfectly recombined in Genesis. The suggestion of Jean Astruc that "two fundamentally different accounts of a deluge have been worked up into a single story in the Bible" has been generally accepted by those who have followed him in the minute analysis of the literary structure of Holy Scripture; and the names of the "Priestly Narrative" and of the "Jehovistic Narrative" have, for the sake of distinctness, been applied to them. The former is so called because the chapters in Exodus and the two following books, which treat with particular minuteness of the various ceremonial institutions of Israel, are considered to be by the same writer. The latter has received its name from the preference shown by the writer for the use, as the Divine name, of the word _Jehovah_,--so spelt when given in our English versions, but generally translated "the LORD."