Ancient texts beside the Bible
Scripture grew up surrounded by other writing — older Near-Eastern epics it reworks, and Jewish and Christian books from around the New Testament era that never entered the canon. This section hosts those texts in full, in public-domain translations, so you can read them next to the chapters they resemble and judge the likeness for yourself. Every line a scholar has connected to a verse carries a ✦ link; the reverse links sit in the verse's study panel and on the parallels page.
Translations here are old (1821–1921) and sound it. Newer scholarly renderings differ in wording, rarely in substance. Which text influenced which — or whether both drew on common tradition — is debated for almost every case, and the notes say so.
A glossary of shared words → — 13 terms of vocabulary the Bible holds in common with its neighbours (tehom/Tiamat, kopher/pitch, Watchers/ʿirin, Sabbath/shapattu …).
Mesopotamian
Creation, flood, law and lament — the older Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian versions of stories Genesis and the Torah retell.
Enuma Elish (The Babylonian Epic of Creation)
Seven tablets, recited at the Babylonian New Year festival. It opens before the world exists, with nothing but two mingled waters — fresh Apsu and salt Tiamat. The younger gods are born inside them, Apsu resolves to dest…
The Flood (Gilgamesh, Tablet XI)
Gilgamesh, searching for the secret of immortality, reaches Uta-Napishtim, the one man who survived the flood and was made deathless. Uta-Napishtim tells the story: the gods decide to wipe out humankind; Ea warns him thr…
The Flood according to Berossos
The Babylonian priest Berossos wrote a history of his country in Greek for the Hellenistic world. His flood account — the hero is Xisuthros — was still being copied a thousand years later. It is the version an ancient Gr…
The Code of Hammurabi
Nearly three hundred case-laws inscribed on a black stone pillar, set up by King Hammurabi of Babylon and topped with a carving of the king receiving the laws from the sun-god Shamash. Johns's 1903 translation gives the …
The Revolt in Heaven
A short, badly damaged tablet describing a rebellion during a festival of praise in heaven: a company of divine singers 'broke up his holy song ... spoiling, confusing, confounding his hymn of praise', a trumpet-blast ba…
The 'Tower of Babel' Tablet
Nineteenth-century scholars read this broken tablet as a Babylonian tower-of-Babel story: a king builds a great tower, the gods are angered, they 'make strange his speech' and scatter the builders, and a storm destroys t…
An Accadian Penitential Psalm
A prayer for the forgiveness of sins — unknowing sins as much as deliberate ones. 'My transgressions are many, great are my sins.' 'How long, O my god, until thy heart be at rest?' 'The transgression that I committed, le…
Chaldean Hymns to the Sun
Five hymns to Shamash, the sun-god, who in Mesopotamia is also the god of justice. 'Sun, from the foundations of heaven thou art risen; thou hast unfastened the bolts of the shining skies; thou hast opened the door of he…
Accadian Proverbs
A handful of proverbs from a scribe's exercise tablet — the oldest wisdom sayings we have. 'Once and twice he has made gains, yet he is not content.' 'By himself he dug and wrought.' The 'heap of witnesses' in line 6 car…
Ancient Egyptian
A Hymn to Amen-Rā
A temple hymn to Amen-Rā, the sun-god of Thebes who by the New Kingdom had absorbed the other gods and was addressed as maker of everything: "maker of men, creator of all animals … Maker of the herbage that sustaineth th…
The Song of the Harper
A harper's song, sung at banquets, that looks the tombs of the great dead in the face and concludes that since "their place is no more" and "not one of them cometh from where they are," the living should "give comfort to…
The Destruction of Mankind
The sun-god Rā, grown old, learns that the humans he made are plotting against him. He calls a council of the gods, and on their advice sends his Eye — the goddess Hathor / Sekhmet — to slaughter the rebels in the desert…
The Precepts of Ptah-hetep & the Maxims of Ani
Two Egyptian instruction-books — a father teaching a son how to live. Budge notes they are "remarkably like" the Book of Proverbs. The parallels are specific: "If thou art one of a company seated to eat in the house of a…
The Tale of the Two Brothers (Anpu and Bata)
Two brothers farm together. While the elder brother Anpu is away, his wife tries to seduce the younger, Bata: "Come, stay with me … I will make for thee beautiful garments." Bata refuses in horror — "thy husband is to me…
Jewish — Second Temple & after
1 Enoch, which Jude quotes by name; and Josephus, the Jewish historian who is the main outside source for the world of the New Testament.
1 Enoch (The Book of Enoch)
The most important Jewish book outside the Bible for reading the New Testament. Jude 14–15 quotes it by name — "Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these" — the only place the NT cites a non-canonical book a…
Josephus on the New Testament figures
Flavius Josephus was a Jewish priest and general who surrendered to Rome in the revolt of 66–73 AD and spent his later life in Rome writing the history of his people. His Antiquities of the Jews (93 AD) is the single mos…
The Qur'an
Six centuries after the New Testament, a later scripture retells the same figures — Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Mary, Jesus — as signs and warnings. The direction of influence here runs the other way.
Hermetic & esoteric
Not parallels to the Bible — Greek and Arabic esoteric writing that Renaissance Christians nonetheless read alongside scripture.
Sources, all from Project Gutenberg: E. A. Wallis Budge, The Babylonian Legends of the Creation (1921) and The Babylonian Story of the Deluge (1920); C. H. W. Johns, The Oldest Code of Laws in the World (1903); Babylonian and Assyrian Literature (Colonial Press, 1901); Richard Laurence, The Book of Enoch the Prophet (1821).