>>18583314In Gen 6:3 there is an indication that the divine element, God’s “spirit,” was in continual contention with the flesh or body, and the decision to destroy all fl esh from the face of the earth (Gen 6:11–13) implicitly reinforces the culpability of the mortal fl esh as a source of human wickedness, a prominent Platonic theme.
One thus sees a similar progression in Critias and Genesis 6. Both Timaeus-Critias and Genesis 6 picture a mythical past in which gods took human wives, the subsequent rise of a ruling race of Heroes, an attenuation of the divine element among the demigods due to their continued intermarriage with ordinary humans, a rise of unjust violence that affected the whole world, and divine judgment in the form of earthquakes and fl ood. In Genesis, this led to the extinction of all terrestrial life created by Yahweh (Gen 6:17; 7:4, 21–23), except for the humans and animals preserved in the ark.
This generally corresponds with the destruction of the world by flood at the climax of the story of Atlantis (Timaeus 20e, 21d, 23c, 25c–d; Critias 108e, 112a). The Catalog of Women also concludes with a passage—unfortunately preserved only in fragmentary form—that appears to discuss a cataclysmic event initiated by Zeus and involving storms (West 1985: 120–1) and possibly, but not certainly, a fl ood. Various other fl ood stories existed in pre-Roman antiquity—Greek stories of the fl oods of Ogygus and of Deucalion, Mesopotamian stories with a fl ood hero named Utnapishtim, Ziusudra or Atrahasis—but only in the biblical fl ood story and in Timaeus-Critias was there an ethical deterioration into wickedness and violence that precipitated the fl ood as divine judgment. It was not until the early fi rst century CE, in the poetic version of the Ages of Humanity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1.68–312, that an-other literary tradition would claim that the wickedness of the human race caused the gods to send a fl ood to destroy them.
