TL;DR- pretty much every biblical scholar accepts these similarities as links to the past, and use them to establish a base of context.

Are these parallels thought to be mere coincidence?

No. These people lived in a tiny world, usually travelling no further than 20 miles from home in their lifetime. A big theory going around is called "revolt theory," wherein the ancient Hebrews were never even in Egypt, but instead actually rose up against the Canaanite society to overthrow it, and the story was written to sort of as allegory, passed down through oral tradition.

Oral Tradition is one of the biggest keys to keep in mind about the Ancient Near-East, as pretty much every biblical story originated as oral tradition. How do you remember stories? Tell the same stories as before, but only this time, instead of a god slaying a serpent, you have Elohim cursing the serpent. This goes even further into stories about the flood, etc. Additionally, it's important to remember that, when these stories originated (up till about 600-400 BC, can't remember exactly when) most Hebrews were Henotheistic, so in a lot of ways, they believed all gods would probably behave the same anyway.

The rest of anything I have to share would be more theological than historical, but I hope this helps. Most of my information came from this Fortress Commentary on the Bible, which my OT professor helped write and edit. It's a hefty tome, but it's got some really good stuff in there. If I remember, I'll try to link some more specific articles.

This is coming very late, but I think the Panbabylonists are so obscure that /u/honeybadgerelite (who has the only non-deleted comment here) has probably never heard of them because... well, they were a school of thought that was never a majority and died out a century ago. I mean, if I said "the (Cambridge) Myth and Ritual School", few besides those who had studied a lot of the history of history or anthropology or classics or religious studies (disciplines weren't so well defined back then) would know what I meant, even though people might be familiar with both myth and ritual.

Panbabylonism, the belief that essentially all mythology derive from Babylonian mythology. It's not just that there's influence (that, as /u/honeybadgerelite says is consensus among secular scholars--indeed, people point to the Ugaritic Baal Cycle these days more than Babylonian mythology proper, but both influences are there), but the now-obscure belief that essentially all mythology, including the Bible, is Babylonian mythology diffused (though there's also a corrupt "Caananite" substrate). It's a turn of the century, mostly pre-WWI, mostly German academic school that obviously has totally disappeared (to be honest, I would be surprised if anthropology did it in more than history).

Here's a short section on it from one of Jonathan Z. Smith's early books on it, as an imgur album. He returns to it several times in other books, because if you're interested in the history of religious studies as a field and set of theories (which J.Z. Smith is), well they're an interesting lot.

But for us today, they're a historical footnote. As I said, comparison between Biblical elements and Ancient Near Eastern elements is now quite standard stuff. There's more than just word for word copying but these things can also show the Sitz-in-Leben (the way of life) of the people who recorded the Bible, giving us a better sense of what it means. There are obvious things, like the flood narrative in Genesis and the one in the Enuma Elish, but there are more interesting things, where several of the later prophets rhetorically emulate Babylonian court procedure, with them as the prosecutor, Israel on trial, and G-d as the judge. It's very interesting! Beyond Babylon, as I've mentioned the discover of the Ugaritic (so Levantine, like Israel and Judea, rather than Mesopotamian, like Babylon and Assyria) Baal Cycle shows what Ancient Judaism was more or less "competing" with. Some of them my be "borrowings" but many likely stem from the same cultural sources--for instance, if you looked at English and German folktales there might be many common elements but that doesn't necessarily imply priority to one or the other. Most of the Babylonian stuff was written down first, but that doesn't mean it's original or that the Jewish stuff was in all cases derived from it (this is a big problem in tracing folklore and myths generally). There's probably some elements of borrowing, but much of the more fruitful comparisons to be made about more general things.

Imagine, for instance, that we only have a handful of book from 18-20th Spain, that we really really care about and want to understand. All of a sudden we find a huge cache of texts of all kinds from Germany 12-21st century (or whatever). Those Germany texts give us important context for some of the behaviors we see in our Spanish texts (why do all these texts mention suits and ties all of a sudden? What do they mean? Oh, from the German texts we can figure out that suits and ties became dress wear for formal occasions starting in the 19th century, and so forth). It's not just the borrowing that's interesting, where A takes elements from B, but also the whole wide common world that texts A-Z share, which gives us a lot of insight into some of the hard to explain bits in A.

But none of that has anything to do, really, with the Panbabylonian school. /u/nevergirls and /u/Cereal_Dilution asked this over /r/Judaism asked me about this, I should have known that this was askhistorians inspired and come here. For more than you ever possibly wanted to know about the Pan-Babylonian school, you can also see here, but I can't emphasize enough that the actual Panbabylonian school has been dead for almost a century and was never the dominant view in the then emergent field of Religionsgewissenschaft (translated as "History of Religion(s)" or "Religious Studies", but literally meaning "The Science of Religion"). But the Panbabylonian school came out with books with titles like Moses, Jesus, Paulus: Drei Varianten des babylonischen Gottmenschen Gilgamesch [Moses, Jesus, Paul: Three Variations on the Babylonian God-Man Gilgamesh]. That's not good history or Religionsgeschichte by an stretch of the imagination and anyone who puts forward theories like that is a kook (and probably a New Age kook, at that).