On Utnipishtim and Noah

 This are some rough notes, a comment I made in a FB group, that I wish to flesh out later. The question being "what evidene is there that the account in Genesis predates that of Utnipishtim?
He didn't "predate" him, because they are the same person! What we have to do is look at the elements of the account and determine which is most reasonably the derived version. The Babylonians kept using clay tablets while the Isralites adopted more Egyptian methods such as scrolls made of hide so unfortunately we can't just see who has the oldest record- you can't expect the hides to last as long. Scholars who accept the historicity of Moses put him in the 15th century BC, but the tolodoth phrase in the first 36 chapters of Genesis indicates he was stringing together an anthology of older accounts. That easily gets you prior to the 18th century BC record of Utnipishtim.

So let's look at the elements of the accounts and see which is most reasonably a derived version. Both say that the ark landed near the northern edge of Mesopotamia. This is a good distance from Babylon, and much farther from Uruk where Gilgamesh reigned. It is on the edge of the other end of Mesopotamia. It is even farther from Israel but the most common Y-haplogroup among Cohen surnamed Jews is J-M172 and J-M267 is the most common among the rest. This points to an origin in the Caucuses/Armenian region. This fits better with an origin account of people from the mountains that moved in to "the land of Shinar". So this fits better with the idea that they told the story to those dwelling in Mesopotamia when they got there, and those folks passed on a derived version.

Utnipishtim and his wife gain immortality. Noah lived much longer than a normal human, and his descendants revereted to more normal life-spans in a few generations, but the former seems more likely to be a dervived version of the latter, and more fanciful.

The conflicting account of what the god Ea said to Utnipishtim is also far more significant than the overlapping instructions of Elhohim and Yahweh to Noah. Did the god appear to him in person or in a dream? The Bablonian tale conflicts on this. The Genesis account can easily explain this as a coflation of the instructions Noah got from Elhomin, in a vision or voice or dream, and Yahweh, who seems more anthropomorphic (He shut them in the ark Himself).

The Babaloynian account also seems garbled when it comes to the process of landing. It makes it seem like he saw the slopes of the mountain that he landed on, as if it was out of the water, and yet still had to release the birds, who at first could not find land, even though Utnipishtim saw the slopes of the very mountain they were resting on. This indicates a garbled version of the Genesis account where they ran aground but the tops of the mountians were only visible either at a great distance or still under the water. This makes more sense with the birds not finding land at first.

So I would say the elements of the account make it clear which is the derived version.