There is always something new being found by those who examine very old things. For instance, there is a news story out about a 4000 year old clay tablet that reveals the real story of Noah's Ark. A scholar by the name of Irving Finkel has deciphered a clay tablet that was handed to him some 20 years ago and contains in it a Babylonian story that talks about a great flood and gives instructions on building a large sea vessel that will be used to save humans and preserve the animals of the earth. The catch is that the bible got it wrong, the ark isn't a large rectangle object, rather it was a large circular boat of the type that was commonly used in Mesopotamia at that time. Of course, all of this is irrelevant, if, like Dr. Finkel, you believe the Ark never existed in the first place.
So, what should the Christian do with this story? Here we have a 4000 year old tablet, older than any extant manuscript of the Old Testament. Since we have such an old tablet it makes sense to assume that the tablet is the original version of the story and the biblical account is the later. Even the normal traditions and chronologies of when Genesis were written would support the likely hood of this tablet being older than the Genesis account we have passed down to us.
The traditional Christian and Jewish account of the Scripture says that Moses wrote Genesis. Even using the earliest assessment of when the Exodus happened would put the writing of Genesis in the 15th century B.C. However, this tablet is likely from the 18th century, thus hundreds of years before the birth of Moses, likely in the time of Abraham or Isaac.
The argument goes that this shows that Moses would have been inspired by the tales connected to this tablet. Certainly we can, at the least, say that this tablet was not influenced by the biblical version of the flood story (as in the account written in Genesis). Since Moses would have been influenced by this flood tradition this demonstrates that Moses, in writing Genesis, was simply pulling from the various creation and history legends from his own time. More realistically, the argument goes, the bible was written later, probably during the Babylonian captivity and so included an abbreviated version of the Babylonian flood narratives that had passed down over the generations and lost some of the details the earlier versions contained.
We see this loss of information as stories are handed down through generations on a regular basis. One doesn't have to be a scientist to test the process. For instance, think of the family stories you may have heard about how your Grand Mother and your Grand Father met. Think of the stories friends have told you about their lives. Most of the time we can probably re-tell the stories of others, but not with the same detail or in the same way the stories were told.
This loss of information in stories is actually most easily seen with stories many of us would think of as the most familiar stories we know, the folk tales and fairy tales we grew up with. For instance, most of us may know the basics of the story of Little Red Riding Hood, but how many of us know about the Huntsman cutting open the wolf's belly and placing stones inside so that the wolf died? And how many of us know that there is a second story about another time a wolf tried to trick Little Red Riding Hood, and about how that wolf was drowned? The fact is that most of the folk tales we know have multiple variations, and many are more detailed than the versions we have learned and remember.
The point is that this is the same argument used for how the bible came into being. Here we have an example of a Babylonian story that discusses a great flood, written on a tablet that preceded the bible we know of today (at least by a few hundred years). The most obvious way to think about these two stories is that the flood story in Genesis is a derivative of the flood story written on the tablet, or at least comes from the same tradition. Thus the Genesis story is not the original, or the true version of events, but is a late arrival on the scene.
But, is this is the only way to look at the two stories? Is there some other way to think about these two stories that does justice to logic and, at the same time, defends the biblical account of the flood?
One way we could interpret the evidence before us is that we have two different flood traditions, both deriving from one real event that happened prior to either of the two traditions being handed down in written form. Such a view would acknowledge that this tablet is older than the written words of Genesis, but it does not hold that the account in Genesis spawned from the tablet. Rather, what we would be acknowledging is that there was some real event (the flood) that lead to the people of the area writing down a version of the flood that made sense of the technology that they most commonly used. This flood tradition lost the accuracy of what really happened in the flood as people passed it down, replacing the events of history with modern versions of what they saw in their own time.
On the other hand the Genesis narrative, while being written later, was not based upon the traditions spawned from this tablet, but rather either relied on other written documents, which we do not have or know about, or was based on divine revelation from God. In other words it is possible that the Genesis account, though written later, is the more factually accurate of the two as it includes more factually accurate information that was lost in the tradition that the clay tablet derived from. The mere fact that the clay tablet is older than the extant manuscripts of Genesis that we have, and older than the tradition of Mosaic authorship would allow Genesis to be, does not mean that it is more accurate, or that Genesis derived from the same religious tradition as the clay tablet.
We can make no positive argument in either direction based solely upon the fact that the clay tablet is older. While normally we would assume that an older manuscript demonstrates a more reliable version of a story, this is not always the case. There are times when an older manuscript is less reliable than a newer one. In this case, the fact that there exists a clay tablet that supports a flood tradition that is similar but different to the bible's, and that this clay tablet is older than the biblical text we have, does not mean that it is necessarily the most accurate version. The only thing the tablet proves is that there existed a flood story 4000 years ago, and that there were written narratives that allowed the peoples of that time to pass on their traditions.
The Christian does not need to be concerned that this discovery is going to upset the bible or that it proves the bible simply copied the stories of other cultures. Logic does not dictate that this is a strike to the bible in any way. We can rest assured that our faith stands on a solid bedrock, just as it did the day before this discovery became big news. The accuracy of the bible has been demonstrated by archaeological finds many times over. We should not be surprised if other cultures also had flood stories that existed before the bible was written (and that some of the details would be different from the biblical account), if we assume the accuracy of the biblical text in telling us that there was a world wide flood.
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