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PAGAN FLOOD MYTHS: CUBE ARKS, ROUND ARKS, AND COWERING GODS (Friday Church News Notes, January 31, 2014, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Ever since the discovery of the Babylonian Gilgamish Epic in the 19th century, skeptics have attempted to use ancient pagan flood accounts to discredit the Bible. Yet like every other attempt to disprove Scripture, this one is found to have feet of clay. The first Gilgamish tablet was found in the 1850s by Henry Layard in the ruins of Nineveh and translated in 1872 by George Smith at the British Museum. It purports to be the account that Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh of how he survived the flood and gained eternal life. Several versions of the story have since been discovered. In contrast to the Bible’s majestic account, the Gilgamesh Epic is a ridiculous pagan myth on its very face. Its pagan gods are weak, competitive, and deceptive. Just as ridiculous, the Gilgamesh ark is a cube 200 feet square, which would have been incredibly unstable even on a calm sea! More recently, Irving Finkel of the British Museum has translated another ancient pagan flood account, and this one describes a circular ark as large as a football field made of a wood frame walled in with ROPE. Now that would be a stable ship for an ocean voyage through the worst weather this world has ever seen! Finkel observes that 

there were circular boats known as coracles that were used on rivers, which is true, but a river craft is not an ocean-going craft, to say the least. By contrast, the ark described in Genesis was 450 feet long by 75 feet wide by 30 feet high, similar to the proportion of modern sea-going vessels such as oil tankers and cargo containers. Finkel’s tablet is of unknown origin or “provenance.” He got it from “a man whose father acquired it in the Middle East after World War II” (“British Museum: Prototype of Noah’s Ark Was Round,” The Times of Israel, Jan. 24, 2014). Thus no one knows where it came from, who wrote it, or when it was written. Finkel’s claim that it is 4,000 years old is a mere guess. Yet this tablet and its silly story, with no solid history older than World War II, is used in an attempt to overthrow the Old Testament which was attested by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as divinely inspired. Don’t be deceived by willfully blind skeptics. The British Museum has been proven wrong many times (e.g., the Piltdown Man hoax), but the Bible has never been proven wrong. “Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts”