In Martin Worthington's study of Gilgamesh, the delight is in the details. Its 1,631 footnotes are a treasure trove of unexpected gems: to take only a few examples, Worthington discusses the frequency of fish consumption in southern Mesopotamia, whether Gilgamesh is still young when he arrives at Uta-napishti's island, and whether women could participate in Babylonian city assemblies. To argue for the rhetorical effectiveness of a particular proverb, he draws a parallel to the use of adages in south-eastern Nigeria. But the centrifugal force of his digressions and detours is balanced by an equally strong centripetal force: the book's focus is, at least in theory, narrow in the extreme.

Worthington sets out to argue that, when the god Ea reveals the coming of the Flood to the sage Uta-napishti – allowing the latter to build a boat and so save humanity – the message can be read in at least three different ways at once. Uta-napishti had asked Ea what he should say to the people of his city if he is quizzed about his seemingly bizarre boat-building project (and, as Worthington points out, how they will be remunerated for their help: the Akkadian word apālu can mean both “to answer” and “to repay”). Ea's reply contains a stanza, XI 43–47, that, Worthington contends, can be read both as a promise of plenty and abundance to the people of the city, and as two separate warnings about the rain, death, darkness, and demons that actually await them. These four lines are the real subject of the book.

But while the careful unpacking of each word forms the core of his analysis, Worthington begins as close to first principles as the discipline of philology allows: with the question of whether the literary interpretation of Babylonian poetry is methodologically defensible. Are the puns and the playfulness that modern readers identify in ancient texts real phenomena or fanciful projections? And did Babylonian scribes approach their literary texts in ways that are compatible with ours? Worthington makes a compelling case that ancient scholars could and did produce interpretations that were as complex, detail-oriented, and individually varied as those of modern scholars. This example illustrates the wingspan of Worthington's study, which ranges from reflections on the structure of Babylonian hermeneutics to a close examination of every syllable in Ea's speech.

Given the thoroughness of this approach, it is striking that the most powerful argument emerging from the book concerns those things that cannot be known about Ea and Uta-napishti. Worthington depicts both the god and the sage as shadowy, ambiguous, often morally suspect figures who manipulate words to their advantage and withhold information whenever they see fit. As he probes Uta-napishti's account, Worthington reveals just how much in it is left unclear: What was Uta-napishti's status before the Flood? How complicit was he in Ea's plan to let most of humanity be annihilated? Did he consciously trick the boatman Puzur-Enlil to his death as a form of sadistic revenge? And crucially, did Uta-napishti purposefully deceive Gilgamesh to prevent him from joining the ranks of the immortals? Worthington argues that these questions cannot be answered because they were not meant to be answerable: the uncertainty and complexity they cause is the whole point. Ea's and Uta-napishti's mischievous mastery of language, and the conspicuous silences that resound in their speeches, force readers to reflect critically on the text. The poem is deliberately open-ended, occluding critical information and allowing for contradictory readings. The reader is thus put in the same position as Uta-napishti when he first received Ea's message: we have to work to make sense of the text, we have to tease out the ambiguities that are buried in it. Ea's message is a lesson in literary criticism that the reader is then invited to apply to the epic more broadly.

The fact that Worthington's most compelling conclusions have to do with unresolvable absences and ambiguities points to a methodological tension at the heart of the book. His approach is characterized by a philological exactitude that demands solid proof for even common-sense propositions and that builds up its argument through a patient examination of minute detail. Most scholars versed in literary criticism would take it for granted that poetic texts are replete with double meanings and complex connotations, but Worthington seeks to prove each step of his argument beyond doubt. Before discussing the puns that are the focus of his book, he pauses to ask, “Are they ‘really there’?” (section 3.1). One is tempted to reply, “Of course there are puns in Gilgamesh”, but as always, the evidence that Worthington marshals in defence of his case amply rewards this more thorough approach (Roman Jakobson famously defined philology as “the art of slow reading”). But it is therefore striking that the solidity of his method leads him to confront precisely those puzzles in the epic that cannot be solidly solved, simply because – as Worthington himself would be the first to argue – they were designed to be unsolvable. The book proceeds as a sequence of tightly reasoned, clearly formulated arguments, but its theme is the ultimate elusiveness of Ea, the god of wisdom and water; and as we are reminded in the book's epigraph, a quotation from Thorkild Jacobsen: “the ways of water are devious”. It is this productive tension between form and content, between the solid and the fluid, that make Ea's Duplicity such a delightful contribution to the scholarship on Gilgamesh.