It will be noticed that the coincidences between the Babylonian and Hebrew narratives are quite as much in details as in general outlines, and these coincidences cover the Hebrew narrative as a whole. It is not with the Elohist or with the Yahvist alone that the Babylonian poet agrees, but with the supposed combination of their two documents as we now find it in the book of Genesis. If the documentary hypothesis were right, there would be only two ways of accounting for this fact. Either the Babylonian poet had before him the present ‘redacted’ text of Genesis, or else the Elohist and Yahvist must have copied the Babylonian story upon the mutual understanding that the one should insert what the other omitted. There is no third alternative. As the Babylonian epic was composed in the age of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel, neither of the two alternatives is likely to be accepted by the advocates of the Hexateuchal theory, and the whole theory, consequently, must be ruled out of court. It breaks down in the first test case to which the results of archæological discovery can be applied, a case, moreover, in which its plausibility is unusually great. Henceforth the historian who pursues a scientific method may safely disregard the whole fabric of Hexateuchal criticism. The story of the Deluge itself suggests what may be put in place of it. With all its likeness to the Babylonian story, the Biblical narrative has nevertheless undergone a change. It has been clothed not only in a Hebrew, but also in a Palestinian dress. The ship of the Chaldæan Noah has become an ark, as was natural in a country where there were no great rivers or Persian Gulf; the period of the rainfall has been transferred from Sebet or January and February, when the winter rains fall in Babylonia, to ‘the second month’ of the Hebrew civil year, our October and November, the time of the autumn or ‘former rains’ in Canaan, while the subsidence of the waters is made to begin in the middle of ‘the seventh month,’ when the ‘latter rains’ of the Canaanitish spring are over; and the dove is said to have brought back in its mouth a leaf of the olive, a tree characteristic of the soil of Palestine. Though the Biblical narrative has been borrowed from Babylonia, it has been modified and coloured in the West. Even the hero of the Babylonian poem has become the Noah or Naham of Canaan.