George Heath-Whyte

Where to even start? Well let’s start with “The Utnapishtim story … comes from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.” WHAT. The version of the Gilgamesh story that contains the flood narrative of Utnapishtim is NOT written in Sumerian, but Babylonian (Akkadian).

There are older Sumerian stories about the character Gilgamesh, none of which contain a flood story. There is even a Sumerian flood story too, but it’s not the flood story he’s talking about (although it’s this one that has a character called Ziusudra).

It seems he's talking about a weird mix of one Babylonian flood story about a guy called Atrahasis and another Babylonian flood story about Utnapishtim (the latter being a part of the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh)...

...but come on Dawkins, even Wikipedia could have told you that neither of these were written in Sumerian.

Problem no. 2: “Arguably the world’s oldest work of literature, it was written two thousand years earlier than the Noah story.”

So he’s just stated that Genesis was written “during the Babylonian captivity” (6th century BC), and now he’s stated that (what we assume he means to be) the epic of Atrahasis, or the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, was written 2000 years earlier – so roughly 2,600-2,500 BC.

The first statement masks an intense scholarly debate that still rages as to when Genesis was written. The second is just down right incorrect.

Of course, the composition dates of Atrahasis and of the 12 Tablet Epic of Gilgamesh are debated too, but even if you happened to think that Genesis was written in the first century AD, then you’d still be pushing it to say that either of these were written 2,000 years earlier.

Most likely Atrahasis was written less than 1,300 years before the Babylonian captivity, and the version of Gilgamesh that included a flood story was probably finished less than 1,000 years before the Babylonian captivity, and likely quite a few centuries less than a thousand.

Ok, we know Dawkins has got confused, so maybe he meant to say that some other flood story (there were a few) was “arguably the world’s oldest work of literature”, and was “written two thousand years earlier than the Noah story”.

Well, whatever flood story he was thinking of, there is no debate: no flood story was “arguably the world’s oldest work of literature”, and the earliest flood stories currently known were only written down (at the very earliest) 1,400 years before the Babylonian captivity.

Up next: “The rest of the story is pretty much the same as the Noah version: animals of every kind taken on board, a dove, a swallow and a raven released from the ark to see if there was any land coming up, and so on, including the spectacular rainbow finish.”

If you’re making a list of the similarities of two texts, make sure every aspect of that list is in both texts. The dove, swallow, and raven are part of the Gilgamesh flood story, but there is no swallow in the Hebrew version: there’s a raven, then a dove, then a dove again.

Also, there's no rainbow mentioned in any Mesopotamian flood story. Anywhere. There just isn’t. There’s not even a normal bow.

After the flood in the epic of Gilgamesh, and in Atrahasis, the goddess Bēlet-ilī makes a necklace out of flies (yes, flies) to help her remember what happened.

One scholar has suggested that, because a fly’s wings, and sometimes their bodies, can look a bit multicoloured, this goddess’s necklace was maybe “a symbolic reference to the rainbow”. But that’s the closest you’ll get.

Ok, last sentence: “It was another god, Ishtar, who put up the rainbow as a sign that there would be no more catastrophic floods”.

Even if this necklace is symbolic of a rainbow, Bēlet-ilī (who is not Ishtar in Atrahasis, and most likely not in the epic of Gilgamesh) didn’t make the necklace “as a sign that there would be no more catastrophic floods”, but so she could "remember these days.”

A quick google search suggests that Dawkins’ source for a lot of this stuff may be a cute little website called historywiz. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a scholarly edition of the epic of Atrahasis or Gilgamesh, or even an article about them. https://www.historywiz.com/flood.htm 

The suggestion that the flood story of Genesis is based on the flood story found in the Epic of Gilgamesh is not new, and pedantically pointing out the inaccuracies in this paragraph as I am doesn’t defeat the argument...

...but, to use a phrase Dawkins seems to be very fond of in his book, “no serious scholar” should make factual errors as blatant as these.

The sorts of things he does in this one paragraph – stating his side in an ongoing scholarly debate as fact; overstating the weight/lack of evidence; including factual errors that betray a lack of research – seem unfortunately to be the norm in the book so far.

Dawkins' primary concern is apparently for The Truth. I’ve only read 60 pages of the book so far, but he keeps on demonstrating to me that, if you’re primary concern is also for The Truth, then he's not the person to listen to.

(*your)