Memorable World History/Authors

Noah's Ark: Fact or Myth?

Noah's Ark (Hebrew: תיבת נח‎; Biblical Hebrew: Tevat Noaḥ) is the vessel in the Genesis flood narrative (Genesis chapters 6–9) through which God spares Noah, his family, and examples of all the world's animals from a world-engulfing flood. The story in Genesis is repeated, with variations, in the Quran, where the ark appears as Safina Nūḥ (Arabic: سفينة نوح‎ "Noah's boat").

Searches for Noah's Ark have been made from at least the time of Eusebius (c. 275–339 CE), and believers in the Ark continue to search for it in modern times. Many searches have been mounted for the ark, but no confirmable physical proof of the ark has ever been found. There is no scientific evidence that Noah's Ark existed as it is described in the Bible, nor is there evidence in the geologic record for the biblical global flood.

Description

The structure of the ark (and the chronology of the flood) are homologous with the Jewish Temple and with Temple worship. Accordingly, Noah's instructions are given to him by God (Genesis 6:14–16): the ark is to be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. These dimensions are based on a numerological preoccupation with the number sixty, the same number characterizing the vessel of the Babylonian flood-hero. Its three internal divisions reflect the three-part universe imagined by the ancient Israelites: heaven, the earth, and the underworld. Each deck is the same height as the Temple in Jerusalem, itself a microcosmic model of the universe, and each is three times the area of the court of the tabernacle, leading to the suggestion that the author saw both ark and tabernacle as serving for the preservation of human life. It has a door in the side, and a tsohar, which may be either a roof or a skylight. It is to be made of Gopher wood, a word which appears nowhere else in the Bible - and divided into qinnim, a word which always refers to birds' nests elsewhere in the Bible, leading some scholars to emend this to qanim, reeds. The finished vessel is to be smeared with koper, meaning pitch or bitumen: in Hebrew the two words are closely related, kaparta ("smeared") ... bakopper.

Origins

Mesopotamian precursors

For well over a century scholars have recognized that the Bible's story of Noah's ark is based on older Mesopotamian models. Because all these flood stories deal with events that allegedly happened at the dawn of history, they give the impression that the myths themselves must come from very primitive origins, but the myth of the global flood that destroys all life only begins to appear in the Old Babylonian period (20th–16th centuries BCE). The reasons for this emergence of the typical Mesopotamian flood myth may have been bound up with the specific circumstances of the end of the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2004 BCE and the restoration of order by the First Dynasty of Isin.

There are nine known versions of the Mesopotamian flood story, each more or less adapted from an earlier version. In the oldest version, inscribed in the Sumerian city of Nippur c.1600 BCE, the hero is King Ziusudra. This is known as the Sumerian Flood Story and probably derives from an earlier version. The Ziusudra version tells how he builds a boat and rescues life when the gods decide to destroy it. This remains the basic plot for several subsequent flood-stories and heroes, including Noah. Ziusudra's Sumerian name means "He of long life". In Babylonian versions his name is Atrahasis, but the meaning is the same. In the Atrahasis version, the flood is a river flood.

The version closest to the biblical story of Noah, as well as its most likely source, is that of Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The most complete text of Utnapishtim's story is a clay tablet dating from the 7th century BCE, but fragments of the story have been found from as far back as the 19th century BCE. The last known version of the Mesopotamian flood story was written in Greek in the 3rd century BCE by a Babylonian priest named Berossus. From the fragments that survive, it seems little changed from the versions of two thousand years before.