According to Christian tradition the book of Genesis was written somewhere between 1513-1440BCE, at around the time of the Israelite’s alleged exodus from Egypt. This tradition has now been proven to be founded upon nothing more than erroneous and unsubstantiated belief. According to the overwhelming amount of archeological, textual and extra-biblical record, the book of Genesis was more than likely written, or altered, sometime during the 6th to the 5th centuries B.C.E, whilst the Israelites were exiled in Babylon or even after they had returned, also known as the exilic and post exilic periods. At this point the reader may be wondering why this fact is significant. It is important, especially within the context of the archeologically proven fact that the Chaldeans, Sumerians and Babylonians, all had near identical myths from the creation of heaven and earth, the fall of man, the great flood, the tower of Babel, the Ten Commandments and even a Garden of Eden, to name a few. All of these ancient Babylonian myths pre-dated the Hebrew Scriptures by over a thousand years or more. (Ref: The Genesis Fraud)
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What is not often perceived is that the Jews had at their disposal a vast store of creation and other myths wholly unknown to us, from which they borrowed selectively. For instance, we know that the Eden of the Bible was located in the river delta region of Mesopotamia, and that the story of the creation of Adam is a Sumerian account. The story of the Ark, the Deluge and Noah came from Sumerian accounts. In fact, the story of the Deluge was not limited to the Middle East but was universally known.

There are also Ugaritic (northern Canaan) parallels to the Hebrew Bible. The story of Daniel was taken from a north Canaan poem dated as far back as 1500 BC. The Ugarit Epic of Keret deals with the capture of a bride of King Keret by a distant king. It later became the Helen of Troy motif. But more importantly, it is the source of the stories of Genesis 12 and 20 where twice Abraham had to get his wife Sarah back from the hands of other kings.
The story of Job comes from a Babylonian poem about a virtuous man named Tabu-utul-bel who was sorely afflicted for some inscrutable reason and tormented by the gods.

The story of Jonah has many origins and apparently was universal, for Hercules was swallowed by a whale at precisely the same place, Joppa. Persian legends tell of their hero Jamahyd who was devoured by a sea monster that later vomited him out safely upon the shore. A similar tale appears in India in the epic classic Samedev Bhatta where Saktedeva was swallowed by a fish and later escapes.

The story of Samson is so strange and foreign to Hebrew lore as to indicate that it was borrowed in toto from Canaanite mythology; in fact, his name is derived from Shamash, the Canaanite sun god who ruled Lebanon. Read more:
[link to www.bibliotecapleyades.net]
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Andrew R. George claims that the Flood episode in Gen. 6-8 matches the older Babylonian myth so closely, that few doubt that it derives from the Mesopotamian account. What is particularly noticeable is the way the Genesis flood story follows the Gilgamesh flood tale "point by point and in the same order".

The Hebrew flood story of Genesis dates to 5th century BC. According to the documentary hypothesis, it is a composite of two literary sources J and P that were combined by a post-exilic editor, 539–400 BC. Hans Schmidt believes both the J material and the P material were products of the Babylonian exile period (6th century BC) and were directly derived from Babylonian sources.

Sir James George Frazer (Folk Lore in the OT: Studies in comparative Religion, Legen and Law) - These (anthropological responses) took various forms: cultural, religious, and historical. The cultural responses were based upon the discovery of Assyrian and Babylonian texts which resembled the biblical accounts of creation and flood and the laws of Exodus 21–4. They illuminated the cultural context of ancient Israel and disclosed the history, religion, and culture of ancient Mesopotamia as never before. One conclusion that was drawn from these discoveries was that everything that was thought to be unique to the Old Testament was, in fact, derived from Babylon (Delitzsch 1901–2).
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OP, many of us do our homework, glad you are too!!

Kismet