The Qur'an tells the flood as the story of a prophet rather than as the story of a boat. Nuh preaches to his people publicly and privately, by night and by day, for a span the text gives as nine hundred and fifty years, and is answered with mockery and with fingers stuffed into ears. Only when it is clear that none will believe beyond those who already have is he told to build under divine supervision, and the chiefs of his people laugh at him as he works. The waters come from an oven that gushes forth. The scene that has no biblical counterpart follows: a son standing apart, called to board, who answers that he will take himself to a mountain that will protect him from the water, and is drowned; when Nuh appeals for him as a member of his family, he is told that the son is not of his family, since his conduct was not righteous. The ark comes to rest on Judi.
Older flood narratives from Mesopotamia were recorded centuries before the biblical text and are the standard comparison in scholarship: a warned survivor, a sealed vessel, the loading of family and living creatures, a mountain landing, birds sent out to test the water, and a sacrifice on emerging. The relation between them is read by different scholars as direct dependence, as shared regional inheritance, or as independent treatment of a common experience of catastrophic flooding in the river plains, and no single account of the relation has become consensus. What is not in dispute is that the biblical writers were working in a region where the story was already old.