If you're on a hill, it sounds unlikely that the water table itself is rising up all over your lot to the level of your basement and causing this flooding. It's more likely that the water flowing down slope is locally puddling/saturating the soil on that side and entering your foundation gravel from the wall or working under your basement slab. Either way, it might be practical to build a "curtain drain" to help to quickly remove much of the water before it seeps in deeply, and these are a lot easier to build than a deep French Drain right next to the foundation. The curtain drain intercepts the water while it is at/near the surface and gets rid of it before it can saturate the soil around your home. The most common way to build these is to dig a trench about 10-12" wide and 12-18" deep (rent a backhoe or a trencher--fun fun!) that crosses the path of the water coming down the hill. The trench slopes slightly downhill and exits to daylight away from the house. Put filter fabric in the trench bottom and up the sides about a foot, put a couple inches of gravel in the trench, put perforated 4" pipe in the trench so that it has a bit of drop, then cover with gravel and wrap the filter fabric over the top. Fill the trench all the way to the surface with coarse sand or, if you must, cover with only a bit of soil for grass. It's smart to put a riser at the high end and a sweeping elbow so you can clean the pipe out with a hose or even a snake if it silts up. Don't cheap-out and use the corrugated slinky pipe--it will silt up much more quickly than the smooth pipe, and it's harder to assure you get an uninterrupted, smooth fall on the pipe (any little dip will catch silt and eventually cause trouble).
I used a slight variation on the above at my house, because our soil has a lot of clay with fine sediment that will eventually totally clog a gravel bed like the one above (or the filter fabric around it). I used very coarse sand instead of the gravel and cut slots in solid pipe using a saw rather than using perforated pipe (the holes in perf pipe are too big and will let the sand in, it won't happen with the thin saw kerfs). I took the sand all the way to the surface (and now grow carrots there). Works great so far. According to some publications by the Army, a sand-filled drain like this keeps the fine particles from migrating in toward the pipe and resists silting up longer than a gravel bed.
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, of course I never needed to use it, but the battery pump was used a few times on its own battery.
