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The biblical redactors dated the flood to somewhere between 2348 B.C. and 2105 B.C. This time frame falls within Egypt’s First Intermediate Period, an era of great chaos, corruption, and civil war. As one papyrus puts it:

The bowman is ready. The wrongdoer is everywhere. There is no man of yesterday. A man goes out to plough with his shield. A man smites his brother, his mother’s son. Men sit in the bushes until the benighted traveler comes, in order to plunder his load. The robber is a possessor of riches. Boxes of ebony are broken up. Precious accaciawood is cleft asunder.

At the core of Egypt’s political problems at this time was the diminishing authority of the ruling kings in Memphis and the rising rebelliousness of local warlords from the Egyptian city of Herakleopolis. The challengers achieved enough power to declare themselves the official rulers of Egypt, but later Egyptian writers considered the Herakleopolitan dynasty illegitimate, and several Egyptian king lists even omitted it from the roster of Egypt monarchs.

According to Egyptian beliefs, the king personified the god Horus, a solar deity who became ruler of Egypt after the death of his father Osiris, and any challenge to the authority of Horus/Pharaoh constituted a challenge to the natural order of the universe. The Egyptians were very conservative in their traditions and did not easily recognize major changes. Memphis had been the seat of royal authority for almost eight hundred years when Herakleopolis challenged it for the right to rule. The opposition claim had to be based on both theological and political arguments. Theologically, Herakleopolis had to show that its kings, not those of Memphis, continued the line of Horus. Politically, they had to have a reasonable basis for making such a claim. The unity of the theological and political arguments would most likely arise from a marriage between members of the Herakleopolitan and Memphite ruling families. The children from that marriage would provide a basis for a political and theological challenge to any alternative successor favored by Memphis.

This brings us to Genesis, which places the flood and its preceding era of wickedness during Egypt’s First Intermediate Period (c. 2300 B.C.–2040 B.C.). Genesis 6:5 indicates God’s desire to destroy humanity because of its wickedness. Immediately prior to this verse, Genesis provides an introductory passage to explain why things had gone wrong. The “sons of God” had married the “daughters of man” and they had children. As a result, the offspring had become corrupt and wicked.

Who were the sons of God and the daughters of man? The traditional explanation holds that the sons of God were the descendants of Seth (the third son of Adam and Eve, and the ancestor of the Hebrew people) and the daughters of man were the descendants of Cain. This created a bloodline mixing the cursed and the blessed. But, if we look at the story in an Egyptian context, another interpretation makes more sense.

The sons of god would be the sons of a ruling pharaoh, i.e. the sons of Horus. The daughters of man would be the daughters of a non-royal family. In the First Intermediate Period, Herakleopolis challenged Memphis for the right to rule. Behind that challenge would have been a marriage between a son of the Memphite royal family and the daughter of the Herakleopolitan ruling family. When the pharaoh died, various factions from Memphis and Herakleopolis would have jockeyed for position as the legitimate successor. The power vacuum resulted in competing claims to the throne, a period of widespread corruption and chaos, and civil war. The events of this time found their way into Genesis as the story of the sons of God and the daughters of man.