What is Gopher Wood?

In northern Kentucky, the Creation Museum is building a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark, based on the specifications provided in Genesis 6:14-16:

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.

“Entry of the Animals” to Noah’s Ark by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680)

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.

A.D.: The Bible Will Not be Continued

The Bible, a 10-part mini-series was a big ratings success on The History Channel a couple of years ago. Produced by Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Apprentice, Shark Tank) and his wife, Roma Downey (Touched by an Angel), it led to a major motion picture, Son of Man, and now a 12-part series on NBC called A.D.: The Bible Continues. The series premiered on Easter Sunday to a respectable audience of 10 million viewers, but the audience declined each week and, by the season finale two weeks ago on Father's Day, the audience had dropped to less than half that of the premiere.

Mark Burnett -- who nowadays looks like an OT character with his Duck Dynasty beard -- had hoped that the new series would be like Game of Thrones and air for several seasons, premiering on Easter Sunday each year. But that was not to be. A couple of days ago, NBC announced that the program would not be renewed for a second season. Undaunted, Burnett and Downey say that they will continue the program on their new faith channel. But, if so, it will be with a different cast because the main actors were released from their contracts following NBC's cancellation of the series.

Roma Downey, Mark Burnett (and his beard)

I did not watch The History Channel's The Bible  mini-series, so I can't really compare A.D. to that. The Bible certainly sounds like something I would have been interested in, but the promos made it look like it would be all cheesy sets, fake beards and bad acting. The History Channel simply does not have the budget that one of the main networks does. There were lots of Bible movies that hit the high points like Noah and the Flood, Abraham, the Exodus, and so on. I've been down that road before and had no desire to waste my time on it unless it offered something new, or a different take on the material.

I decided to watch A.D.: The Bible Continues because the post-gospel material covered in Acts of the Apostles doesn't often get movie treatment. The only thing similar that I can recall was a 5-part mini-series, also called A.D., that aired 30 years ago. It was supposed to be the continuation of Franco Zeffirelli's 2-part Jesus of Nazareth (1977), but paled in comparison. While Jesus of Nazareth balanced reverence with believability, good production values and acting, the 1985 version of A.D. was rather amateurish by comparison. 1981's made-for-TV movie Peter and Paul was a similar misfire.

Actually, I thought A.D.: The Bible Continues would be a mini-series like The Bible was. I was expecting, therefore, that my time investment would be limited but, after two or three episodes, I realized that the pacing of the plot was going too slow to allow it to cover the entire Acts of the Apostles within the scope of a half-dozen or so episodes. And, apparently not finding the storylines in Acts compelling enough, the producers saw fit to introduce extraneous elements to provide dramatic conflict, such as the troubles Caiaphas and Pilate have with their wives or a Zealot attempt on Pilate's life that led to mass crucifixions.


Peter (Adam Levy) and Mary Magdalene (Chipo Chung). No Paul.

My wife's interest was a fairly good barometer of the show's flagging ratings. She watched the first few episodes with me and, I think, found them interesting. She's not as familiar with the contents of Acts as I am and seemed to be a member of the audience this program was trying to target. She would ask me if something that just happened was in the Bible. For the first couple of episodes, I was able to tell her it was. Then it was, "That wasn't in the Bible, but it could have been." At some point, she said, "You can watch it without me. If it is just making up stuff, I don't see any point in watching."

And there you have the problem with A.D.: The Bible Continues. The producers of the show don't understand who their intended audience is. True-blue Bible believers want a program that will portray the Bible as it was written. A.D.: The Bible Continues attempts to do that...sort of. If Acts says that an angel rolled the stone away from Jesus' tomb, then they will show an angel drop down from heaven like a meteor and roll away the stone. But then the producers start elaborating on what the Bible says by putting the Ethiopian eunuch (from Acts 8:27-39) in cahoots with the Zealots and, as a result, they lose the Christians who want to see fidelity to the Bible story. When creationist Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis finds your program unbelievable, you've really accomplished something.

I don't have a problem with a faith-based program deviating from the scriptures, just like I don't expect a movie to be exactly like the book. What plays on the written page doesn't necessarily translate to the screen, and vice versa. The program could have gone in a different direction by having a more character-driven narrative and downplaying the miracles. For example, it would have been interesting to show the interior journey that Saul took from being a persecutor of the early Church to its greatest evangelist. You could portray Saul being struck by lightning and, when he comes to, he relates his experience of encountering the resurrected Jesus. You don't have to literally show a glorified Jesus talking to him to get the point across. Such a program might not attract fundamentalists, but it might have appeal to people like my wife who aren't familiar with the post-gospel stories of the apostles.

What the producers chose to do instead was play it both ways. Re-enact the miracles as described in the Bible with cheesy special effects to get the Bible crowd while amping up the dramatic tension with over-the-top acting and a jaw-dropping nonchalance towards historical accuracy to appeal to those who are just looking for entertainment. The jump-the-shark moment for me was when the Emperor Tiberius decided to make a house call on Pilate in Jerusalem with his nephew Caligula in his entourage. Historically, Tiberius spent the last years of his life on his island of Capri. Even if he hadn't, the idea of an emperor of Rome personally making a journey all the way to Jerusalem to do a performance review on one of his governors is just ludicrous.

It continued to get worse once Caligula killed Tiberius and, upon becoming emperor, ordered his statue placed in the Jewish Temple. Caligula may have toyed with the idea according to Roman historians, but it never happened. So the final episode (appropriately titled "The Abomination") builds to a climactic confrontation between the Romans trying to place the statue in the Court of the Women and the Jewish Sanhedrin and Jesus' disciples, in a first-century act of civil disobedience, saying literally, "Over our dead bodies." If this were a fictional program like Game of Thrones, the episode might work as drama, but when you know the entire crisis never happened as part of history, it rings hollow.

On the positive side, I did appreciate the multi-ethnic cast. There were many black and brown faces to go along with the usual Caucasian actors you typically find in Bible movies. Probably due to Roma Downey's influence, female characters like Mary Magdalene, Pilate's wife Claudia, and Caiaphas' wife Leah had important roles throughout and weren't just background characters. The computer-generated views of the Temple really give you an idea of the grandeur of the structure and the sets and costumes looked well-done. There were a lot of fake beards and it was jarring to see actors like Richard Coyle (Jeff from BBC's Coupling) as Caiaphas and James Callis (Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica) as Herod Antipas, but overall, the "look" was right.

In conclusion, I'm not at all surprised that the series will not be renewed. Apparently, faith-based programming is popular in small doses, but there's not enough of an audience to pull in the kind of ratings that a major network like NBC expects. And if you depart too much from the Holy Scriptures to fill in narrative gaps or provide motivation for your characters, you lose a big chunk of the Bible-believing audience. Burnett and Downey get an "A" for effort but a "D" for execution.

I Saw the Light

Many readers of the creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:3 have wondered why God creates light on the first day but doesn’t create the sun, moon and stars until the fourth day. Now, the ancient Hebrew may not have had a very sophisticated understanding of astronomy, but he must have had some idea that light came from the sun. How does one explain this obvious blunder?

Creationist Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis explains it this way: “God created light first. He then created the sun to be the light-bearer for earth.” Thanks for clearing that up, Ken.

Reviewing other creationist websites, the most common explanation is that the light created on Day 1 emanated from a source other than the sun. Perhaps it was a cosmic light coming from God. At any rate, it alternated in some fashion with the darkness to provide Day and Night. (There was no rotation of the earth because, as we previously discussed, the ANE concept of the cosmos was of a flat, unmovable earth.) The sun, moon and stars were created on Day 4 as sources for the light that had already been created on Day 1. (For the time being we're going to ignore that the moon only shines by reflected light from the sun.)

In fact, some creationists argue that the counter-intuitive order of light before sun is “a hallmark of authenticity” because if the story had been made up, the author would have God creating the sun on the first day. “Having ‘day’ without the sun would have been generally inconceivable to the ancients.” The problem with that statement is that it was very conceivable to the ancients.

In 1849, archaeologists digging through the ruins of a library in in Nineveh (modern-day Mosul in Iraq) discovered thousands of fragments of clay tablets from various texts. One of these texts was a Babylonian creation myth called Enuma Elish, after its first two words. In 1000 lines on seven tablets, the epic tells the story of the god Marduk who slayed the sea monster Tiamat and, after using her carcass to create a new world, established the city of Babylon where Marduk was celebrated as king of the gods.

On line 38 of the first tablet of Enuma Elish, one god complains to another: “By day I cannot rest, by night [I cannot lie down]”. The account of Marduk creating the stars of the zodiac, moon and sun is on the fragmentary fifth tablet. The stated purpose of creating the zodiac was to regulate the months and the moon was appointed “to determine the days”. And therein lies a very important clue. The cosmic light that alternated with darkness provided a sense of Day and Night, a degree of order over the chaos of darkness that existed prior to light’s existence. But without sun, moon and stars, there was no way to know if the day had just begun or was about the end. No way to know if it was time to plant crops or if winter was coming. By creating the heavenly bodies, Marduk was really creating a way for humans to reckon Time.

This matches up with how the Bible describes the purpose of the heavenly bodies. According to Gen 1:14, the sun, moon and stars were created to “be signs for the seasons, the days and the years” (v. 14). But why couldn’t the astral bodies have been created on the first day?

To the ancient mind, it would have been impossible for God to have created them on Day 1 because the prerequisites were missing. On Day 1, there was nothing but the watery abyss and darkness. At a minimum, God needed to create the dome of sky in which to place the heavenly bodies. But, you also have to consider that the end goal of the Genesis author was to provide justification for the Sabbath rest. That required a regime of creative activity spread out over six days. When you start off with only primordial darkness, the first creative act has to be the creation of light in order to begin the cycle of Day and Night. And, as the Enuma Elish shows, the idea of light existing prior to the heavenly bodies was certainly an option. But why wait until Day 4 to create sun, moon and stars?


Sunrise on the Florida shoreline (photo by author)

Genesis 1:1-2:3 has an orderly, parallel structure that the rambling Enuma Elish lacks. Many have noticed that in the first three days, God creates: 1) light, 2) the firmament to separate the waters above the sky from the waters of the sea, and 3) dry land. During the next three days, God creates: 1) moving bodies of light, 2) living creatures to inhabit the sky and sea, and 3) living creatures and humans to inhabit the dry land. At the end of the third day, God creates vegetation on the new earth, and on the sixth day, he gives the vegetation over to his creatures as food. (God’s original intent was that there would be no killing for food. That would only come later, after the Flood.) Finally, on the seventh day, God rested.

The creation of the light-giving bodies on Day 4 parallels the creation of light itself on Day 1. The prerequisites are now in place: light alternates with darkness to give us orderly days, the dome of sky separating the waters will provide the location for the astral bodies, and the dry land will be the dwelling place for humanity. From the earth, humans will be able to track the motions of the light-giving bodies as they move through the sky so they can know when it is time to celebrate the Sabbath and other religious feasts.

Far from being a goof, creation of light prior to the sun was a logical necessity once you understand the goal behind the creation account in Gen 1:1-2:3 and the ancient concept of the cosmos.