Erich von Daniken, Self-Plagiarism, and Laziness

After yesterday's exciting attack from Philip Coppens, I'm feeling a bit lazy today. So, in honor of that, I thought I'd share another example of how alternative writers aren't just bad at science but are also bad at writing. Here is a sample of Erich von Däniken being a lazy, sloppy writer. The text on the left comes from his 1997 book The Return of the Gods, while the text on the right comes from his 2009 book Twilight of the Gods:

RETURN OF THE GODS (1997)

So, Noah, the survivor of the Flood, for example, was not just anyone. His earthly father is named as Lamech, but in fact Lamech was not his physical father -- everyone can read this for himself in the Dead Sea Scrolls.[*] It says there that one day Lamech returned home from a journey which had taken more than nine months. Once home, he found a baby who did not belong to his family -- it had different eyes, different hair-colour and a different kind of skin. Furious, Lamech when to his wife, who swore by all that was holy that she had slept with a stranger, let alone a soldier or a son of heaven. Worried, Lamech went off to ask his father's advice. This was no other than Methuselah . He had no light to shed on the matter, and so, in turn, went off to ask his father, Lamech's grandfather. And who was that? Our friend Enoch. He said to his son Methuselah that Lamech should accept the boy as his own son and not be angry with his wife, for the 'guardians of the sky' had placed the seed in  his wife's womb. They had done this so that the cuckoo's egg, as it were, should grow into the progenitor of a new race after the flood. 

TWILIGHT OF THE GODS (2009)

Consequently, Noah, the survivor of the Flood, was not just anybody. Admittedly, his earthly father is given as "Lamech," but Lamech never fathered his son. You can read about this in the Lamech Scroll-one of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.[*] It tells how Lamech returned home one day from a long journey of several months. Upon entering his tent, he found a young boy who did not seem to be of his family. He had different eyes, a different hair color, and even a different skin color. Furious, Lamech confronted his wife, but she swore by all that is holy to her that she had not been unfaithful, neither with a soldier nor with one of the sons of God. Worried, Lamech set off to ask his father for advice. This worthy one was none other than Methuselah himself. He, too, was unable to help and turned to his own father for help, namely Lamech's grandfather. This was Enoch-the seventh antediluvian prophet. Enoch said to his son Methuselah that he should tell Lamech to accept this strange child as if it were his own. The "heavenly beings" had laid their seed in the lap of his wife without sexually abusing her. This young cuckoo was destined to become the progenitor of a new race after the Flood. Lamech was to call the lad Noah. And he did.

I could continue with the duplication, but you get the point.

The order of information, sentence structure, and exact wording clearly shows that the two passages are the same, probably differing only due to different translators working on nearly-identical German text. Not reproduced here is the footnote to Millar Burrows' Mehr Klarheit über die Schriftrollen (1958) located in the same exact position in both passages, marked with an asterisk above. The book is actually a German translation of the American scholar's analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls, New Light on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I have written about our erstwhile author's attempts to explicate this passage before, but I will add a bit more detail here. Von Däniken relies on Burrows' translation of the Genesis Apocryphon, which attempted to fill in the gaps in a badly damaged manuscript. In so doing, Burrows introduced some material that is not present in the extant scroll. However, at the time von Däniken wrote in 1997 (and more so in 2009), this early attempt at a translation--with its many conjectures and errors--had been superseded by more scholarly versions, additions, and emendations  published in 1966, 1971, 1984, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1995, and especially 1997. A modern translation was published again in 2005, and the most recent in 2009. Von Däniken still calls it the Lamech Scroll rather than the Genesis Apocryphon because that was Burrows' name for it, abandoned by scholars after Avigad and Yadin published their 1988 edition.

I mention this only to show that there is no good reason von Däniken should be wrong about the text. The fact is, the text is too heavily damaged in the essential section to draw the conclusion that space aliens implanted "seed" in the "womb" of Lamech's wife, making Noah a space alien. The most recent translation can be found here and demonstrates this fact. In the surviving text, the lines actually seem to say that Noah was "not" from the "sons of Heaven, but from Lamech." And again, Enoch says: "Go, say to Lamech your son, 'The child is truly from you and not from the sons of Heaven...'" But, as I said, the text is too damaged to make much sense of the context.

All of which is beside my main point: Erich von Däniken recycles his own work word-for-word in blatant and unacknowledged acts of self-plagiarism and then charges his readers for the privilege by promoting each recycled book as "new" content. Von Däniken is as poor a writer as he is a researcher, and his dishonesty extends not just to his theory but to his presentation of it.