Set beside Gilgamesh Tablet XI, this tablet shows the same episode serving a different purpose. In Atrahasis the flood settles a quarrel about population and the ordering of the world; in Gilgamesh the story is told by the survivor Uta-napishti to prove that the immortality he received was a unique and unrepeatable gift, and the pattern of details, the warning through the reed wall, the boat, the storm, the sacrifice, is carried across largely intact.
The Genesis flood of chapters 6 to 9 shares that pattern in turn: a divine decision to destroy, one man warned, a great vessel, the saving of family and living creatures, a grounding, and a sacrifice on emerging. Historical-critical scholarship generally reads these as members of a common ancient Near Eastern flood tradition rather than as one text copying another, with each community shaping the inherited story to its own theology. Genesis makes the cause moral rather than a matter of noise, gives the deity a covenant to seal, and reduces the pantheon to one. Readers who hold Genesis to be revealed scripture and scholars who read it as literature can both make use of the comparison; it is offered here as comparative scholarship, which is what it is, and not as a verdict on the standing of any of the three texts.