Doubting My Religion: are the holy stories older than the holy books?
This is an interactive quiz about where the foundational stories of Judaism, Christianity and Islam actually came from. The short version: Noah's flood, the law of "an eye for an eye," the Tower of Babel and the creation account were all written on Mesopotamian clay tablets centuries — sometimes over a thousand years — before the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament or the Qur'an. The original tablets are on public display in the British Museum in London. Enable JavaScript to take the quiz, or read the documented answers below.
If you were raised Jewish
- The Jewish calendar came from Babylon. The month names — Nisan, Iyyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Av, Elul, Tishrei — are Babylonian, adopted during the exile. The older pre-exilic Hebrew names were different (Aviv, Ziv, Ethanim, Bul). Tammuz is itself the name of a Babylonian god, and the Talmud admits the month names came up from Babylonia.
- The square Hebrew script is a borrowed alphabet. The letters in a Torah scroll today are the Aramaic square script (Ktav Ashuri, literally "Assyrian script"), adopted around the exile. The original Hebrew script was Paleo-Hebrew.
- Noah's flood retells an older Mesopotamian flood myth. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Tablet XI) and the older Atrahasis tell of a man warned of a flood who builds a vessel, saves his family and animals, and releases birds to find land — centuries before Genesis.
- "An eye for an eye" predates the Bible. The lex talionis and specific laws like the goring ox appear in the Code of Hammurabi (around 1750 BCE), roughly 500 years before the Covenant Code of Exodus.
- "Ur of the Chaldeans" is an anachronism. Abraham is traditionally placed around 2000 BCE, but the Chaldeans only controlled Babylon in the 7th–6th centuries BCE — about 1,400 years too late. It is the fingerprint of a much later author.
- "Babel" does not mean "confusion." The name is Babylonian Bab-ili, "Gate of God." The biblical explanation from the Hebrew word balal ("to confuse") is a pun, not an etymology.
If you were raised Christian
- The Old Testament is the Jewish Tanakh. The Christian Old Testament is the Jewish scriptures, adopted whole and relabelled — Christianity built its foundation on an inherited library.
- The flood and creation stories are older than Genesis. Noah's flood matches the Epic of Gilgamesh; the six-day creation, with watery chaos shaped into an ordered world, tracks the Babylonian creation poem Enuma Elish.
- The chain runs Sumer and Babylon → Hebrew scripture → Christian Old Testament. Each tradition inherited its core material from the one before.
- Eden is in Mesopotamia. Genesis names the Tigris and the Euphrates, placing paradise in the same region that produced the flood myth, the law codes and the creation poem.
- "Babel" means "Gate of God" (Bab-ili), not "confusion."
If you were raised Muslim
- The Qur'an's prophets come from older scriptures. Adam, Nuh (Noah), Ibrahim (Abraham), Musa (Moses) and Isa (Jesus) all originate in the Torah and Bible, written centuries before the Qur'an (7th century CE).
- Nuh's flood is over 2,000 years older in Mesopotamian form. The flood narrative appears on Babylonian and Sumerian clay (Gilgamesh and Atrahasis) long before any scripture.
- The doctrine of tahrif runs against the calendar. The Jewish and Christian texts said to be "corrupted" are demonstrably older than the Qur'an that corrects them — by roughly 600 years for the Christian writings and over a thousand for the Hebrew ones.
- Abraham's "Ur of the Chaldeans" is an anachronism of around 1,400 years, marking the story as a late composition.
- The pattern across all three faiths is inheritance: Babylon → Judaism → Christianity → Islam, each receiving its stories from the one before while tending to claim priority.
See the evidence at the British Museum, London (free entry)
- The Flood Tablet — Gilgamesh Tablet XI, the flood story in cuneiform, older than Genesis (Room 55).
- The Cyrus Cylinder — the Persian king who ended the Babylonian exile (Room 52).
- The Enuma Elish — the Babylonian creation tablets from the library at Nineveh.
- Hammurabi's law code — the stele stands in the Louvre in Paris.
This page does not tell you what to believe. It asks how you came to know it. Enable JavaScript to take the interactive 2-minute quiz.