Noah's Ark

This article should be merged with Noah

In the Old Testament Book of Genesis chapters 6-9 [1], Noah's ark was the boat that God commanded Noah to build to keep him, his family and a core breeding stock of the world’s animals safe from the impending Deluge.

Table of contents

1 The ark
2 The flood
3 After the flood
4 The flood under scrutiny
5 Many flood accounts
6 Modern searches
7 Modern Allusions
8 References
9 External links

The ark

According to Genesis the Ark was built of gopher wood. The meaning of "gopher" is not clear, as this is the only occurrence of the word in the Bible. It has been suggested that it is related to the Hebrew word kopher (pitch), or was at one time kopher but miscopied. If so, it would mean that the Ark was made of wood treated with pitch, of an unspecified type of tree. Some modern translations of the bible replace the word gopher with cypress, but there is little evidence to support this identification.

It was covered with pitch, 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. However, the actual size of the ark cannot be determined because the biblical account does not specify the type of cubit. If the Egyptian cubit was used, the Ark's dimensions could range from 129 metres long, 21.5 metres wide and 12.9 metres high to 165 metres long by 27 metres wide and 16.5 metres high. If the Sumerian cubit was used, the metric equivalents would approximate 155.2 metres in length, 25.9 metres in width and 15.5 metres in height. This proportion of length to width (6 to 1) is used by modern naval architects.

Traditional pictures of the ark typically show something shaped like a boat, though the Hebrew tebah, meaning "box", may suggest the actual shape of the ark, which would seem more practical for stability and volume as consistent with the narrative, considering the nature of the deluge.

The directions given by God appear to be for an oblong three-storey structure, with a door in the side and a window in the roof. Though, just what the window was, is debated, as there is only one dimension given to the window. The Hebrew word for window, "tsohar", merely indicates a "light aperture", giving no indication of its size or shape. God gave him the direction to "complete it to the extent of a cubit upward". The use of the words "extent" and "upward" seem to indicate much work and raising rather than building the window, which suggest the possibility that the window may have extended around the whole of the roof, which would act as an exhaust and make fresh air more available to the family and animals aboard. There is also no mention of a cover or door for the window.

The flood

The word for the Flood in the Hebrew, "mabbuwl", although often translated as "deluge", literally means "storehouse of water" or "heavenly ocean". This suggests that a massive amount of the earth's store of water was held aloft in the atmosphere until the "springs" of the earth's ocean were somehow "broken open", and the "floodgates" of the heavens were opened, letting the water cover "all the tall mountains" "up to fifteen cubits".

In the cosmology of the ancient Hebrews and Babylonians, the earth was a flat land mass supported by pillars in the ocean of the abyss. The sky was a great dome that was connected to the seas. (Imagine you are standing on the shore looking out at the ocean at night or during the day. The Sun, Moon and stars look like they fall and rise from the sea's horizon.) The water from the sky and rain seems, with a little creative imagination, that it may be the same water from the seas. This gives us a present day clue that this is the cosmology of the Noah's time and story. The flood is taking place around 3000 B.C.. This also gives us a clue why the measuring unit of a cubit, approximately the distance from the tip of the middle finger to the elbow of an adult; about 18 inches, is present and used in this story.

In the ark were Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives. They also took seven pairs of each kind of clean animal, two pairs of each kind of unclean animal and seven pairs of each kind of bird. The ark kept them safe for the forty days of rainfall and about another year until the flood waters receded.

How many of each kind of animal was taken on board is told in two versions. In chapter 6, verses 19–20, Noah is instructed to bring one pair of each kind aboard. In chapter 7, verses 2–3, he is told to bring aboard seven pairs of each kind of 'clean' animal, two pairs of each kind of 'unclean' animal, and seven pairs of each kind of fowl. If the Biblical account is to be self-consistent, the latter must be true, because one of the first things that Noah did after the flood was to sacrifice one pair of each kind of 'clean' animal. If there was only one pair of each on board, this would of course mean extinction.

After the flood

After several months, water began to subside, and the Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat (Genesis 8:4). After waiting another forty days, Noah sent out a dove to see if there was dry land for it to land on, but it returned. He waited seven more days, and sent it out again, and it returned with an olive leaf. After another week, he sent it out yet again, but this time it did not return. He knew then that the time had come to disembark.

God commanded Noah to take his family and all the animals out of the ark and concluded a covenant with him, in which he promised never to flood the Earth again, and imposed a basic set of laws on humanity, the "Noahide Laws". God symbolized his promise with a rainbow, to remind his people after each storm that there would never again be a storm as big as the one that he had caused.

The flood under scrutiny

Critics of the account, suggest that the flood was (if there truly was one), though quite large, was just a local one that affected the Persian Gulf region. The breaching of the sill at the Strait of Hormuz is proposed as the cause: as sea level rose from glacial melt following the Ice Age, and the lower Tigris-Euphrates valley was flooded to form the Persian Gulf. There is also the explanation of the breakthrough that formed the Black Sea, which possibly ties the Turkish mount Ararat with the biblical account. However, the Bible is very clear on how the deluge happened. It doesn't speak of a flood, but of 40 days of continuous rain, which is something very different.

Concerning the rain: it can be calculated how much water is needed at minimum to flood the entire earth (taking the average circumference of the earth and then add 15 cubits, using the smallest cubit used in the days of Noah). This amount of water must have fallen to the ground in just 40 days of continuous rain. The amount of kinetic energy in the rain, which would be transferred as heat upon impact, would be enough to heat the surface of the earth to several hundred degrees Celsius. Since water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, rain would be impossible.

The tradition that Mt. Ararat itself was the resting place of Noah's Ark is widely known, but not supported by the biblical account. (The Book of Genesis states only that it came to rest "upon the mountains of Ararat.") This concept can be traced back to a hoax in 1933. In a Russian-language article from the early 1930’s, in a White Russian refugee publication called 'Mech Gedeona' (Sword of Gideon), there were pictures of what looked like a giant boat on a mountainside, said to be Mount Ararat. It was then discovered that the author of Mech Gedeona had taken the story from another refugee publication called Rubez. And Rubez had gotten the story from the German newspaper, the ‘Koelnische Illustrierte Zeitung’, which published the story on April 1, 1933. On April 8, 1933, the newspaper confessed that the article was an April Fools Day hoax. This however has not deterred expeditions from searching for the Ark on Mt. Ararat.

The details of how Noah knew to build an ark to preserve his family alive is explained as a legend built up around a momentous event in the early expansion of the human race. Skeptics also find the idea of an all-good, all-powerful God destroying humanity and all other life on the planet (except Noah, his family and the animals on the Ark of course) simply because He was displeased with them highly questionable and immoral if it were true. Modern biblical scholars suggest this story may mean the ancient hebrews taught there is a limit to evil and God's forgiveness.

It is unclear what is meant with 'kind' of animal. There are many different possible definitions of species—based on morphology, on genus, on differences in DNA or in the possibility to create viable offspring. Since most Christians who believe in the literal account of the flood deny that evolution takes place, at least as far as speciation and/or macroevolution is concerned, each species of landanimal that can be found on the planet today must have been on board of the Ark.

There is no evidence that all current species of animals fanned out over the planet from one spot, that is, the place where the Ark rested after the flood, wherever that was. There is no explanation why certain species can only be found at certain continents, such as marsupials in Australia. Some creationists explain this by stating the earth looked much different then it looks now. Species live on a continent because they moved there from the Ark and were subsequently cut of by seas or oceans from the rest of the world. Again, there is no evidence of such a journey, and the geological processes involved would have to have been impossibly fast, since according to the Biblical account, this happened not more then 6000 years ago. This would mean the Noah story is an artistic theological lesson, taught in the language of myth. This is a common method used by ancient and primitive peoples. Biblical oral story tellers and writers are very skilled and ingenious in this; which seems to be their highest form of art.

While the flood might explain the extinction of species such as the dinosaur, it gives no explanation for the extinction of any marine life, which of course would not have drowned. Also, the Bible mentions that Noah took 1, 2 or 7 pair of EACH landanimal on board (more precisely, every landanimal with the breath of life in its nostrils). Why he would not have taken any dinosaur on board is not explained. It is impossible that dinosaurs didn't breath or breathed through their skin like some insects simply due to their size.

There is also little chance that so few humans and animals would have survived for long. With such a small genepool, they would have become extinct soon because of the negative effects of inbreeding. Creationist counter this by claiming DNA was much more perfect back then and inbreeding would not cause the problems it causes today. Even if true, this still leaves the problem of too little genetic diversity to survive plagues or sudden changes in the environment.

Many flood accounts

Although many cultures have stories of a great flood, the story of Noah’s Ark is probably the best-known of these. The next most notable is the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim (found in the Epic of Gilgamesh) which has broadly the same structure and plot as Noah’s Ark, suggesting the possibility that the Biblical depiction has drawn influence from the archaeologically older Sumerian account. But, both of these also has quite a difference. Noah also has a counterpart in Greek mythology, Deucalion. In Indian scriptures, a terrible flood was supposed to have left only one survivor - a saint named Manu, who was saved by the god Vishnu in the form of a fish. Many more extra-biblical variations of the flood account exist in cultures around the world: for fuller details, see Deluge (mythology).

Modern searches

The three most popular locations for the Ark are the Ethiopian highlands, somewhere in the mountains of Ararat and most specifically Mount Judi in the Ararat range both of which are in eastern Turkey. Ethiopia is also known as the country where the Ark of the Covenant can allegedly be found, in the care of the Coptic Church. Whether insightful or misguided, the only archaeologist to have claimed to have possibly located the Ark's final resting place was Ron Wyatt. Since his death he has been heroized by many bible-believers; a plethora of sites coming into existence concerning him, many fabricating information about him and his discoveries.

An Italian archaeological group named NARKAS is the most recent of numerous groups claiming to have pinpointed the location of Noah's Ark close to the top of Mount Ararat, which straddles the border of Turkey and Armenia. Photographs of this alleged discovery (with a link to Babelfish to supplement their Italian descriptions) are available on their website [1]. The images can be interpreted as being a layer of rock that is weathering differently than the layers above and below it.

In 2004, there is yet another expedition going to Mount Ararat in Turkey to try and locate the Ark.