Noah's Ark

A painting by the American Edward Hicks (1780–1849), showing the animals boarding Noah's Ark two by two.

Noah's Ark (Hebrew: תיבת נח, Tevat Noach; Arabic: سفينة نوح, Safina Nuh) is the story of a large vessel featured in the mythology of Abrahamic religions. Narratives that include the Ark are found in the Hebrew Bible (Book of Genesis chapters 6 through 9) and the Qur'an (Suras 11 and 71). The stories describe a large vessel built by Noah (or Nuh) at God's command, that saved Noah, his family, and a representation of the world's animals from a great flood.

The Genesis narrative tells how God, grieved by the corruption of the Earth, decided to destroy all life with a flood. However, Noah, a righteous man who "found grace in the eyes of God", was instructed to prepare for this flood by building an ark and to retreat to it with his family and with male and female representatives of various animals. As the flood waters rose, those sheltered inside the Ark survived as the rest of humanity and animal life perished. As the waters reached their height, God "remembered Noah", the waters abated, and dry land reappeared. Noah and the animals left the Ark, Noah offered sacrifice, and God vowed never again to destroy the Earth in this manner.

This narrative has been subject to extensive elaborations in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ranging from hypothetical solutions to practical problems (e.g. waste disposal and the problem of lighting the interior), through to theological interpretations (e.g. the Ark as the precursor of the Church in offering salvation to mankind). By the 19th century, the discoveries of geologists, archaeologists and biblical scholars had led most scientists and many Christians to abandon a literal interpretation of the Ark story. Nevertheless, Biblical literalists continue to explore the region of the mountains of Ararat, in northeastern Turkey, where the Bible says Noah's Ark came to rest.

Narrative

Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Deluge, Sistine Chapel, the Vatican.

The story of Noah's Ark, according to chapters 6 to 9 in the Book of Genesis, begins with God observing the Earth's corruption and deciding to destroy all life. However, God found one good man, Noah, "a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time", and decided that he would save him. God instructs Noah to make an ark for his family and for representatives of the world's animals and birds in "whose nostrils is the breath of life".

Noah and his family and the animals entered the Ark, and "on the same day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened, and the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights". The flood covered even the highest mountains to a depth of more than 6 metres (20 ft), and all creatures died; only Noah and those with him on the Ark were left alive.

A depiction of the Genesis flood in Gustave Doré's illustrated edition of the Holy Bible.

At the end of 150 days the Ark came to rest (on the seventeenth day of the seventh month) on the mountains of Ararat. For 150 days again the waters receded, and the hilltops emerged. Noah sent out a raven which "went to and from the Ark until the waters were dried up from the earth". Next, Noah sent a dove out, but it returned having found nowhere to land. After a further seven days, Noah again sent out the dove, and it returned with an olive leaf in its beak, and he knew that the waters had subsided. Noah waited seven days more and sent out the dove once more, and this time it did not return. Then he and his family and all the animals left the Ark, and Noah made a sacrifice to God, and God resolved that he would never again curse the ground because of man, nor destroy all life on it in this manner. Man in turn was instructed never to eat any animal which had not been drained of its blood.

In order to remember this promise, God put a rainbow in the clouds, saying, "Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth."

The Ark in later traditions

In Rabbinic tradition

File:Noah Ayvazovsky.jpg

Noah descending from the mountains of Ararat. Painting by Hovhannes Ayvazovsky.

The story of Noah and the Ark was subject to much discussion in later Jewish rabbinic literature. Noah's failure to warn others of the coming flood was widely seen as casting doubt on his righteousness—was he perhaps only righteous by the lights of his own evil generation? According to one tradition, he had in fact passed on God's warning, planting cedars one hundred and twenty years before the Deluge so that the sinful could see and be urged to amend their ways. In order to protect Noah and his family, God placed lions and other ferocious animals to guard them from the wicked who mocked them and offered them violence. According to one midrash, it was God, or the angels, who gathered the animals to the Ark, together with their food. As there had been no need to distinguish between clean and unclean animals before this time, the clean animals made themselves known by kneeling before Noah as they entered the Ark. A differing opinion said that the Ark itself distinguished clean animals from unclean, admitting seven each of the former and two each of the latter.

Noah was engaged both day and night in feeding and caring for the animals, and did not sleep for the entire year aboard the Ark. The animals were the best of their species, and so behaved with utmost goodness. They abstained from procreation, so that the number of creatures that disembarked was exactly equal to the number that embarked. The raven created problems, refusing to go out of the Ark when Noah sent it forth and accusing the Patriarch of wishing to destroy its race, but as the commentators pointed out, God wished to save the raven, for its descendants were destined to feed the prophet Elijah.

Refuse was stored on the lowest of the Ark's three decks, humans and clean beasts on the second, and the unclean animals and birds on the top. A differing opinion placed the refuse in the utmost storey, from where it was shovelled into the sea through a trapdoor. Precious stones, bright as midday, provided light, and God ensured that food was kept fresh. The giant Og, king of Bashan, was among those saved, but owing to his size had to remain outside, Noah passing him food through a hole cut into the wall of the Ark.

In Christian tradition

Construction of the Ark. Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).

Early Christian writers discovered elaborate allegorical meanings for Noah and the Ark. In the First Epistle of Peter those saved by the Ark from the waters of the Flood are said to prefigure the salvation of God's Elect through baptism, and the Anglican rite of baptism still asks God, "who of thy great mercy didst save Noah", to receive into the Church the infant about to be baptised. Early Christian artists frequently depicted Noah standing in a small box on the waves, symbolising God saving the Church as it persevered through turmoil, and St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), in City of God, demonstrated that the dimensions of the Ark corresponded to the dimensions of the human body, which is the body of Christ, which is the Church. St. Jerome (c. 347–420) called the raven, which was sent forth and did not return, the "foul bird of wickedness" expelled by baptism; more enduringly, the dove and olive branch came to symbolize the Holy Spirit and the hope of salvation and, eventually, peace.

St. Hippolytus of Rome, (d. 235), seeking to demonstrate that "the ark was a symbol of the Christ who was expected", stated that the vessel had its door on the east side - the direction from which Christ would appear at the Second Coming - that the bones of Adam were brought aboard together with gold, frankincense and myrrh - symbols of the Nativity of Christ - and that the Ark floated to and fro in the four directions on the waters, making the sign of the cross, before eventually landing on Mount Kardu "in the east, in the land of the sons of Raban, and the Orientals call it Mount Godash; the Armenians and Persians call it Ararat". On a more practical plane, Hippolytus explained that the ark was built in three stories, the lowest for wild beasts, the middle for birds and domestic animals, and the top level for humans, and that the male animals were separated from the females by sharp stakes so that there would be no cohabitation aboard the vessel.

From the same period the early Church Father Origen (c. 182–251), responding to a critic who doubted that the Ark could contain all the animals in the world, countered with a learned argument about cubits, holding that Moses, the traditional author of the book of Genesis, had been brought up in Egypt and would therefore have used the larger Egyptian cubit. He also fixed the shape of the Ark as a truncated pyramid, square at its base, and tapering to a square peak one cubit on a side; it was not until the 12th century that it came to be thought of as a rectangular box with a sloping roof.

In Islamic tradition

Ibn Battuta, 1304–77, the Moroccan world-traveller who passed by the mountain of al-Judi, near Mosul, resting place of the Ark in Islamic tradition.

Noah (Nuh) is one of the five principal prophets of Islam. References are scattered through the Qur'an, with the fullest account in surah Hud (11:27–51). As a prophet, Noah preached to his people, but with little success; only "a few"^[11:40] of them converted (traditionally thought to be seventy). Noah prayed for deliverance, and God told him to build a ship in preparation for the flood. The flood destroys all of Noah's people; an illegitimate son (named either 'Canaan' or 'Yam' depending on the source) of Noah's wife was among those drowned, despite Noah pleading with God to save him.

In the Quran itself, there is no indication that the flood was worldwide, only that it destroyed all the unbelievers among Noah's people. Some Muslim authorities have nevertheless adopted the Judeo-Christian view that the flood was global.

In contrast to the Jewish tradition, which uses a term which can be translated as a "box" or "chest" to describe the Ark, surah 29:14 refers to it as a safina, an ordinary ship, and surah 54:13 as "a thing of boards and nails". `Abd Allah ibn `Abbas, a contemporary of Muhammad, wrote that Noah was in doubt as to what shape to make the Ark, and that Allah revealed to him that it was to be shaped like a bird's belly and fashioned of teak wood. Noah then planted a tree, which in 20 years had grown enough to provide him all the wood he needed.

The Persian historian Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari's History of the Prophets and Kings (c. 915) includes numerous details about Noah's Ark found nowhere else; for instance, he says that the first creature aboard was the ant, and the last was the donkey, by means of whom Satan came aboard. He also relates that when Jesus' apostles expressed a desire to learn about the Ark from an eye-witness, he responded by temporarily resurrecting Noah's son Ham from the dead, who told them more: to deal with the excessive dung, Noah had miraculously caused a pair of hogs to come out of the elephant's tail, and to deal with a stowaway rat, Noah caused a pair of cats to come from the lion's nose.

Abdallah ibn 'Umar al-Baidawi, writing in the 13th century, gives the length of the Ark as 300 cubits (157 m, 515 ft) by 50 (26.2 m, 86 ft) in width, 30 (15.7 m, 52 ft) in height, and explains that in the first of the three levels wild and domesticated animals were lodged, in the second the human beings, and in the third the birds. On every plank was the name of a prophet. Three missing planks, symbolising three prophets, were brought from Egypt by Og, son of Anak, the only one of the giants permitted to survive the Flood. The body of Adam was carried in the middle to divide the men from the women. Sura 11:41 says: "And he said, 'Ride ye in it; in the Name of God it moves and stays!'" takes this to mean that Noah said, "In the Name of God!" when he wished the Ark to move, and the same when he wished it to stand still.

Noah spent five or six months aboard the Ark, at the end of which he sent out a raven. But the raven stopped to feast on carrion, and so Noah cursed it and sent out the dove, which has been known ever since as the friend of mankind. Masudi writes that God commanded the earth to absorb the water, and certain portions which were slow in obeying received salt water in punishment and so became dry and arid. The water which was not absorbed formed the seas, so that the waters of the flood still exist.

The medieval scholar Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husayn Masudi (died 956) says that the Ark began its voyage at Kufa in central Iraq and sailed to Mekka, circling the Kaaba before finally traveling to Mount Judi, which surah 11:44 states was its final resting place. This mountain is identified by tradition with a hill near the town of Jazirat ibn Umar on the east bank of the Tigris in the province of Mosul in northern Iraq, and Masudi says that the spot where it came to rest could be seen in his time.

Noah left the Ark on the tenth day of Muharram, and he and his family and companions built a town at the foot of Mount Judi named Thamanin ("eighty"), from their number. Noah then locked the Ark and entrusted the keys to Shem. Yaqut al-Hamawi (1179–1229) mentions a mosque built by Noah which could be seen in his day, and Ibn Batutta passed the mountain on his travels in the 14th century. Modern Muslims, although not generally active in searching for the Ark, believe that it still exists on the high slopes of the mountain.

In other traditions

The Mandaeans of the southern Iraqi marshes practice a religion that was possibly influenced in part by early followers of John the Baptist. They regard Noah as a prophet, while rejecting Abraham (and Jesus) as false prophets. In the version given in their scriptures, the ark was built of sandalwood from Jebel Harun and was cubic in shape, with a length, width and height of 30 gama (the length of an arm); its final resting place is said to be Egypt.

The religion of the Yazidi of the Sinjar mountains of northern Iraq blends indigenous and Islamic beliefs. According to their Mishefa Reş, the Deluge occurred not once, but twice. The original Deluge is said to have been survived by a certain Na'umi, father of Ham, whose ark landed at a place called Ain Sifni, in the region of Mosul. Some time after this came the second flood, upon the Yezidis only, which was survived by Noah, whose ship was pierced by a rock as it floated above Mount Sinjar, then went on to land on Mount Judi as described in Islamic tradition.

According to Irish mythology, Noah had a "fourth son" named Bith who was not allowed aboard the Ark, and who instead attempted to colonise Ireland with 54 people, all of whom were then wiped out in the Deluge.

The Bahá'í Faith regards the Ark and the Flood as symbolic. In Bahá'í belief, only Noah's followers were spiritually alive, preserved in the ark of his teachings, as others were spiritually dead. The Bahá'í scripture Kitáb-i-Íqán endorses the Islamic belief that Noah had a large number of companions, either 40 or 72, besides his family on the Ark, and that he taught for 950 (symbolic) years before the flood.

Historicity

Paradisaea apoda, literally "the Bird of Paradise Without Feet", so named by early European naturalists because the first specimens to reach Europe were prepared as skins without the feet; scholars decided that the bird was native to Paradise, and that it had flown endlessly inside the Ark without roosting.

Various editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica reflect the collapse of belief in the historicity of the Ark in the face of advancing scientific knowledge. Its 1771 edition offered the following as scientific evidence for the ark's size and capacity: "...Buteo and Kircher have proved geometrically, that, taking the common cubit as a foot and a half, the ark was abundantly sufficient for all the animals supposed to be lodged in it..., the number of species of animals will be found much less than is generally imagined, not amounting to an hundred species of quadrupeds... ." By the eighth edition (1853-1860) the encyclopedia says of the Noah story, "The insuperable difficulties connected with the belief that all other existing species of animals were provided for in the ark are obviated by adopting the suggestion of Bishop Stillingfleet, approved by Matthew Poole...and others, that the Deluge did not extend beyond the region of the earth then inhabited..." By the ninth edition, in 1875, there is no attempt to reconcile the Noah story with scientific fact, and it is presented without comment. In the 1960 edition, in the article Ark, we find the following, "Before the days of "higher criticism" and the rise of the modern scientific views as to the origin of the species, there was much discussion among the learned, and many ingenious and curious theories were advanced, as to the number of animals on the ark..."

16th-18th centuries

The Renaissance saw a continued speculation that might have seemed familiar to Origen and Augustine. Yet at the same time, a new class of scholarship arose, one which, while never questioning the literal truth of the Ark story, began to speculate on the practical workings of Noah's vessel from within a purely naturalistic framework. Thus in the 15th century, Alfonso Tostada gave a detailed account of the logistics of the Ark, down to arrangements for the disposal of dung and the circulation of fresh air, and the noted 16th-century geometrician Johannes Buteo calculated the ship's internal dimensions, allowing room for Noah's grinding mills and smokeless ovens, a model widely adopted by other commentators.

By the 17th century, it was becoming necessary to reconcile the exploration of the New World and increased awareness of the global distribution of species with the older belief that all life had sprung from a single point of origin on the slopes of Mount Ararat. The obvious answer was that man had spread over the continents following the destruction of the Tower of Babel and taken animals with him, yet some of the results seemed peculiar: why had the natives of North America taken rattlesnakes, but not horses, wondered Sir Thomas Browne in 1646? "How America abounded with Beasts of prey and noxious Animals, yet contained not in that necessary Creature, a Horse, is very strange".

Browne, who was among the first to question the notion of spontaneous generation, was a medical doctor and amateur scientist making this observation in passing. Biblical scholars of the time such as Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) and Athanasius Kircher (c.1601–80) were also beginning to subject the Ark story to rigorous scrutiny as they attempted to harmonise the biblical account with natural historical knowledge. The resulting hypotheses were an important impetus to the study of the geographical distribution of plants and animals, and indirectly spurred the emergence of biogeography in the 18th century. Natural historians began to draw connections between climates and the animals and plants adapted to them. One influential theory held that the biblical Ararat was striped with varying climatic zones, and as climate changed, the associated animals moved as well, eventually spreading to repopulate the globe. There was also the problem of an ever-expanding number of known species: for Kircher and earlier natural historians, there was little problem finding room for all known animal species in the Ark, but by the time John Ray (1627–1705) was working, just several decades after Kircher, their number had expanded beyond biblical proportions. Incorporating the full range of animal diversity into the Ark story was becoming increasingly difficult, and by the middle of the 18th century few natural historians could justify a literal interpretation of the Noah's Ark narrative. An uneasy rapprochement was reached by thinkers such as Edward Stillingfleet, a late 17th century English theologian and scholar who suggested that mankind at the time of Noah had inhabited only a small portion of the world, so that a purely local Flood would square the bible with science; the idea gained popularity in intellectual circles in the 18th century, but was increasingly abandoned as the century wore on and the scientific evidence mounted.

Torah scroll, open to the Song of the sea in Exodus 15: British Library Add. MS. 4,707.

19th century

See also: Flood geology

In 1862 William Thompson, later Lord Kelvin, calculated the age of the earth at between 24 and 400 million years. His calculations were based on almost a century of steady advances in the scientific study of geology, and for the remainder of the 19th century, discussion was not about whether Kelvin was right or wrong, but about just how many millions were involved. The field of Geology had a profound impact on attitudes towards the Biblical Flood and Ark story: without the support of the Biblical chronology, which placed the Creation and the Flood in a history which stretched back no more than a few thousand years, the historicity of the Ark itself was undermined. The influential 1889 volume of theological essays Lux Mundi, which is usually held to mark a stage in the acceptance of a more critical approach to scripture, took the stance that the gospels could be relied on as completely historical, but the earlier chapters of Genesis should not be taken literally.

See also: Documentary hypothesis

Biblical scholars were beginning to examine the origins of the Bible itself. The Noah's Ark story played a central role in the new theories, largely because it seemed to contain two stories, closely intertwined. It states twice over, for example, that God was angered with his creation, but the reasons given in each telling are slightly different; we are told that there was a single pair of each animal aboard, but also that there were seven pairs of the clean animals; that the source of the water was rain, but also that it came from the "windows of Heaven" and the "fountains of the Deep"; that the rains lasted forty days, but that the waters rose for 150. Using the newly developed tools of biblical criticism, scholars discovered in the Ark narrative two complete, coherent, parallel stories. This, they decided, was how the entire Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) had been written: the work of many authors over many centuries, combining separate sources into a single whole.

See also: Deluge (mythology)

The 19th century also saw the growth of Middle Eastern archaeology. George Smith made a remarkable discovery of a Mesopotamian story which paralleled the story of Noah's Ark in great detail. The story came in several versions, but the closest to Genesis 6-9 was found in a 7th century BC Babylonian copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh: the hero Gilgamesh meets the immortal man Utnapishtim, who tells how the god Ea warned him to build a vessel in which to save his family, his friends, and his wealth and cattle from a great flood which the gods planned to use to destroy all life on earth.

Modern Biblical literalism

Biblical literalists continue to believe in a literal Ark, advancing arguments not so different from those in the earliest editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. They feel that finding the Ark would validate their views on a whole range of matters, from Geology to evolution. "If the flood of Noah indeed wiped out the entire human race and its civilization, as the Bible teaches, then the Ark constitutes the one remaining major link to the pre-flood World. No significant artifact could ever be of greater antiquity or importance... [with] tremendous potential impact on the creation-evolution (including theistic evolution) controversy." Searches therefore continue on and around Mount Ararat in Turkey.

See also

• Searches for Noah's Ark
• Wives aboard the Ark

References

• Bailey, Lloyd R. (1989). Noah, the Person and the Story. South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 0-87249-637-6.
• Tigay, Jeffrey H., (1982). The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. ISBN 0-8122-7805-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Woodmorappe, John (1996). Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study. El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research. ISBN 0-932766-41-2.
• Best, Robert M. (1999). Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic. Fort Myers, Florida: Enlil Press. ISBN 0-9667840-1-4.
• Young, Davis A. (1995). The Biblical Flood. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co. ISBN 0-8028-0719-4.