This summer my wife and I traveled to Kentucky to visit one of the modern wonders of the world, the Ark Encounter. Before my eyes was a gigantic to-scale wood replica of Noah’s Ark, far exceeding my childhood imagination of a pilgrim-like wooden boat with Noah standing on the bow, and open windows with giraffes, lions, horses, sheep etc. peering out. Might these 525 feet long, by 87 feet wide, by 52 feet high wooden behemoth be a realistic replica of the ark Noah built?
I know a little bit about large ships. The summer of 1966 I worked as a deckhand aboard the Silver Bay, a 650-foot-long ore boat in Republic Steel’s fleet. Mid-ship was a precisely engineered set of flexible joints, designed to prevent such a large ship from breaking in half when encountering rough seas. Memories flooded back of a time my ship headed westward from the Sioux Saint Marie locks into Lake Superior’s Whitefish Bay; we encountered 30-foot waves that day, causing the ship to bend and creek, and me to review my eternal future. Recall, it was a few years later in these same waters that the pride of U.S. Steel’s fleet, the Edmond Fitzgerald, sank.
As we toured through the ark, it wasn’t long before my scientific mind went into action; I began to question the authenticity of what I was experiencing. I recently read a scholarly article, written by geologist, Dr. Alan Dickin, which appeared in the September 2018 issue of the Journal of The American Scientific Affiliation, titled “New Historical and Geological Constraints on the Date of Noah’s Flood”. Dr. Dickin’s research uncovered some interesting findings. Let’s start with the basic understanding of the word “ark” found in Genesis 6:14. Hebrew for ark is “tebah” (tay-baw); Strong’s concordance defines tebah as a “box” - not a boat, or ship, or ark, or vessel. The literal translation of Genesis 6:14 in early Hebrew reads as follows:
“Make for yourself a basket-vessel of building-wood; nests you shall make together with the basket-vessel; and you cover inside the house with pitch and outside with pitch.”
Contrast that with other Bible versions:
“Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark and cover it inside and out with pitch”. (ESV)
“Make yourself an ark out of resinous wood. Make it of reeds and caulk it with pitch inside and out”. (New Jerusalem Bible)
The point is not to cast doubt on the validity of the scriptural story of Noah and his ark, but rather to highlight the challenges facing scholars when they try to exegete ancient Hebrew passages considering modern realities. Dicken’s article suggests Noah likely built an ark consistent with available building materials and boat-building engineering styles of his time.
Mudhif - Guffah
Archeologists report that from before the time of Noah through the modern era people groups, like Marsh Arabs, camped by the Euphrates River, living in reed / pitch-built house structures called mudhifs; often mudhifs are mounted on walled or basket-like floating rafts made of reeds called guffahs. (see above picture). Such an ark could have been built to house many animals and would easily have survived a catastrophic Euphrates River-type flood event that scientists propose occurred around 5700 BC (7700 years ago). Data derived from excavations and core logs estimate a massive flood, the result of torrential rains which backed up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It was so catastrophic, that it wiped out all the Halaf-age settlements (Noah’s neighbors) within a 100,000 square kilometer area! Archeological records show the flood was so severe that the region was not resettled for another 500 years. No wonder Noah felt he alone survived; the known world around him was obliterated.
One thing I know for sure, neither the Ark Encounter version nor a large mudhif-raft would have been seaworthy enough to withstand ferocious ocean waves, leading one to speculate the Flood rapidly spread to form a vast, deep, inland sea that took many months to drain.
