Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and set the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks. (RSV)
There’s not a whole lot of detail and it allows plenty of room for imagination. The Creation Museum ended up with a vaguely Egyptian-looking design. The Bible doesn’t define the length of a cubit but it is the length from the elbow to the tip of the fingers. If the standard measure is 18 inches, the dimensions of the ark would be 450 x 75 x 45 feet. The Creation Museum chose an Egyptian cubit of 20.4 inches, so that makes their Ark 510 feet long. By contrast, the Titanic was 850 feet long, but was made of steel. Noah’s Ark would have been bigger than any wooden ship that has ever been constructed.
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“Entry of the
Animals” to Noah’s Ark by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680)
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As you can see, the biblical description leaves a lot of wriggle room. And the dimensions and the description of the door and three decks are the clearest parts. The rest of the passage uses some rare words (that I have emphasized in bold), the meanings of which are much debated.
The Hebrew word translated “ark” is tebah. It is used many times in Genesis 6-9, but outside of the flood narrative, it only occurs in Exodus 2:3, 5 to describe the basket in which baby Moses was placed. (The word translated “ark” in Ark of the Covenant is a completely different Hebrew word.) Tebah is a loan word from the Egyptian language to describe a box or chest. The Vulgate translates it as arca, from which we get the word “ark.” To be consistent, the word should be translated as “box” in both Genesis and Exodus. While tebah does not mean a ship, functionally it serves as a lifeboat in both cases.
Next up, the ark is to be constructed of “gopher wood.” What the heck is gopher wood? “Gopher” is a transliteration of the Hebrew word goper and no one knows for sure what it means, except that it has nothing to do with a burrowing rodent. Many English versions of the Bible (KJV, RSV, NJPS, NAB, NABRE) don’t try to translate it. A few others (NEB, NIV, NRSV) translate it as “cypress” wood, but that is just a guess. Hebrew does have a word for cypress, so if that’s what the Priestly writer wanted to say, he could have used that word.
The problem is that goper only appears here in the entire OT. Such a word is called a hapax legomenon (meaning “said once” in Greek). The most reliable way to translate a word is from its context, but how do you do that when you only have one context in which it occurs? Well, we can look to see how it was translated in ancient versions of the OT. The LXX translates it as “squared timber” and the Vg as “smoothed wood.” Both translations are describing not a particular type of wood, but wood prepared in some certain fashion. Because the LXX and Vg were closer to the time of the biblical writings, they may reflect a knowledge of the word no longer available to us or they may have simply guessed at the meaning of the word.
The Hebrew word translated “rooms” in many English versions (KJV, RSV, NRSV, NAB, NABRE, NJPS, NIV) is qinnim. This word is the plural of qen (“nest”) which elsewhere in the OT appears only in the singular. Since the original Hebrew only contained the consonants with the vowels added later, some scholars have proposed a different set of vowels that would yield the word qanim, “reeds” (NEB, NJB). This would yield a neat parallelism in the translation: “Make yourself an ark of gopher wood, with reeds make the ark.” The implication being that the ark would be constructed of both wood and reeds, perhaps with the reeds helping to seal the gaps between the wooden beams. Reeds were also used in the construction of the boats in the other flood myths like Atrahasis and Gilgamesh, so its use here could reflect an influence from those tales.
The Hebrew word (koper) translated “pitch” only appears here in the OT. It is not a hapax legomenon in the strict sense because the word is used twice in the verse, as verb and noun: “and pitch it on inside and out with pitch.” Koper is only one letter different from the hapax goper, so there is a bit of wordplay here. Pitch, tar, or asphalt are petroleum-based products. This poses something of a problem for Young Earth Creationists because they insist that all petroleum products were formed during the Flood. So where did a pre-Flood Noah get his pitch?
V. 16 gives us another hapax in tzohar, which the Vg translates as fenestra (“window”). Modern translators turn to a similar Arabic word which means the back of a hand or a human back. The logical conclusion is that tzohar was used to refer to the top or roof of the ark. The next part of the verse (“and finish it to one cubit from above”) is somewhat incomprehensible, so it is not clear if a gap between the roof and the sides is being discussed or an overhang of the roof.
What are we to make of all the rare words? One possible explanation is that those words were in the tradition that the Priestly writer received. Just like if we were retelling the nativity story, we might say something like “the infant Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid to rest in a manger.” “Swaddling clothes” and “manger” are not everyday words for most people but those words from the King James translation are such a part of the tradition that we would repeat them as-is. Something similar may be happening here with words like “gopher wood”.
Between the vague specifications and the rare words with contested or unknown meanings, we can only have a general idea of what Noah’s Ark was supposed to have looked like. But if you want to see the Creation Museum’s version, The Ark Encounter is scheduled for a grand opening in the summer of 2016.
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