The Genealogy of Myth in the Quran with a Look at the Story of Noah’s Flood

Myth is a product of the processes of human interactions in multiple discourse systems that in connection with numerous cognitive approaches – ontology, epistemology and methodology – and evolution of theories can be interpreted. The diversity of modern theories has transformed the simple, cognitive and judgmental state of myth – untrue stories. The Flood Myth, as an ancient human archetype, has universal themes and recurring implications. As time has passed, this narrative phenomenon, in conjunction with different intellectual paradigms and the ruling discourse systems, has been narrated in different forms in different cultural systems. These narrative differences are also prominent in the Quranic story of the Flood. This paper seeks to address the ‘what’ of myth in the post-traditional era with a synchronous and functional semantic approach in the Quran in order to obtain the archetype of the Flood Narrative in relation to earlier narratives Thus, the genealogy of the Quranic narrative of the Flood, on the one hand, reviews the Quranic outlook on myth using a text-oriented approach and considering the contextual accounts in the Quran as well as the formulation of its discourse system, and, on the other hand, it identifies the various manifestations and developments of the Flood Narrative in earlier texts – including those of Mesopotamia – and pinpoints its minimal, structural and thematic differences.