There are other Babylonian tablets which give an account of the Flood, but here again we find the idea that it is sent not by one great god, but by several gods, working together. Over them all seems to be the sun-god, here called Shamash, who is in Heaven. The flood is so dreadful that it compels the lesser gods living on the earth to fly to Heaven for refuge. There Ishtar (Venus), taking pity on mankind, prays Shamash to stop the flood, and he consents to do so. One of the earth gods had warned a certain man, named Ut-napistim, that the flood was coming, and advised him to make a ship to save himself from it. So Ut-napistim built the ship, made it water-tight with pitch, put in it his family, pairs of all the animals, workmen and a pilot, and so they floated for seven days until the ship came to ground on a mountain to the east of the Tigris. Then, apparently after another seven days, Ut-napistim sent out first a dove, then a swallow, then a raven. The first two came back, but the last did not, from which Ut-napistim concluded that the raven had found dry ground somewhere. You will see how like this is to the story of Noah and the Ark in the Bible, and almost certainly it was with some such tradition as this in their minds that Abraham and his people came from Ur. It is my purpose, in this story of mankind around the Mediterranean, to bother you as little as possible with names, either of persons or of places, and as little as possible with dates, because the more we have of them, the more difficult it becomes to remember those {62} that are really important. For the years very far back it is impossible to fix the dates at all exactly. What is important is to know in what order the great events in the story happened. The date at which Abraham came out of Ur and settled in the southern part of what was afterwards called Judah has been determined by scholars to have been about 2250 or 2300 B.C. You will remember that the date to which we brought down the Egyptian story was about 1500 B.C. So Abraham came to Palestine about 750 years earlier than that. Abraham's date is more or less fixed by the evidence of what is by far the most famous code of ancient laws and customs that has come down to us, far beyond anything of the kind that has been found in Egypt, the code of Khammurabi. Khammurabi was king of Babylon, and it is considered nearly sure that it is he who is meant by "Amraphel, king of Shinar" mentioned in Genesis. He lived at the same time as Abraham. [Sidenote: Code of Khammurabi]