Did the Bible Copy Some of its Stories from Other Religious Myths and Legends?


There are many stories in the Bible that have remarkable similarities with stories from other religions, legends, and myths.

There are cases of borrowing, but in these cases the Bible was the source, not the pagan myths (despite pseudo-academic claims to the contrary). Consider the case of Sargon’s birth. Legend has it that Sargon was placed in a reed basket and sent down the river by his mother. He was rescued by Aqqi, who then adopted him as his own son. That sounds a lot like the story Moses in Exodus 2. And Sargon lived about 800 years before Moses was born. So the Moses baby-sent-down-the-river-only-to-be-rescued-and-adopted story must have been borrowed from Sargon, right?

That sounds reasonable, but what is known of Sargon comes almost entirely from legends written many hundreds of years after his death. There are very few contemporary records of Sargon’s life. The legend of Sargon’s childhood, how he was placed in a basket and sent down a river, comes from two 7th century B.C. cuneiform tablets (from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who reigned from 668 to 627 B.C.), written hundreds of years after the book of Exodus. If someone wants to argue that one account was borrowed from another, it would have to be the other way around: the Sargon legend appears to have borrowed from the Exodus account of Moses.

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