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Excerpt: ...communication of the plan of the gods at the beginning of the Fourth Column of our text.(3) (1) Cf. l. 195 f.; "I did not divulge the decision of the great gods. I caused Atrakhasis to behold a dream and thus he heard the decision of the gods." (2) Cf. Poebel, Hist. Texts, p. 51 f. With the god's apparent subterfuge in the third of these supposed versions Sir James Frazer (Ancient Stories of a Great Flood, p. 15) not inaptly compares the well-known story of King Midas's servant, who, unable to keep the secret of the king's deformity to himself, whispered it into a hole in the ground, with the result that the reeds which grew up there by their rustling in the wind proclaimed it to the world (Ovid, Metamorphoses, xi, 174 ff.). (3) Op. cit., p. 51; cf. also Jastrow, Heb. and Bab. Trad., p. 346. So far from Berossus having missed the original significance of the narrative he relates, I think it can be shown that he reproduces very accurately the sense of our Sumerian text; and that the apparent discrepancies in the Semitic Version, and the puzzling references to a wall in both it and the Sumerian Version, are capable of a simple explanation. There appears to me no justification for splitting the Semitic narrative into the several versions suggested, since the assumption that the direct warning and the dream-warning must be distinguished is really based on a misunderstanding of the character of Sumerian dreams by which important decisions of the gods in council were communicated to mankind. We fortunately possess an instructive Sumerian parallel to our passage. In it the will of the gods is revealed in a dream, which is not only described in full but is furnished with a detailed interpretation; and as it seems to clear up our difficulties, it may be well to summarize its main features. The occasion of the dream in this case was not a coming deluge but a great dearth of water in the rivers, in consequence of which the crops had suffered and the country...