Navel Gazing

Did Adam and Eve have navels? They didn’t need navels because they did not form in a womb, but there is a theory called the Omphalos hypothesis that claims the world was created with an apparent age: Adam and Eve with navels, trees with rings in the Garden of Eden, light from distant galaxies created en route. The Omphalos hypothesis is sort of a get-out-of-jail-free card for creationists, because any evidence a skeptic presents proving the age of the earth or universe can be shot down with the assertion that God simply created it to look antique, like a rustic distressed coffee table from Pottery Barn.

But the situation changes when you get to the Noachian deluge. Here we are no longer dealing with the story of creation where “apparent age” can be used as a trump card. In the flood story, we find claims that can be scientifically verified or discredited. If a worldwide flood happened, there should be some trace of it left behind, whether geological, ecological or zoological. Or, historical traces since, according to biblical literalists, the flood was supposed to have occurred between 2300 and 2350 BCE, well within the confines of recorded history.

Skeptics have presented dozens of challenges to the veracity of Noah’s flood and creationists have found “creative” ways of answering most of those questions…to their satisfaction anyway. For example, a skeptic may question whether a large wooden structure like the ark would be seaworthy. Beyond a certain size, wooden ships bend and leak. But a creationist can argue that the ark was made of “gopher wood” and this wood, which no longer exists today, may have been as hard as steel for all we know. Or Noah was a master craftsman or God gave him special knowledge to construct the ark. 

Pretty sure it didn't look like this. ("Noah's Ark - The Homecoming" by Steve Crisp)

In the creationist literature, many appeals are made along the lines of “we don’t know what conditions were like on the pre-Flood earth.” Where did all the water come from? Where did it go? Maybe the pre-Flood earth didn’t have very high mountains or the oceans weren’t as deep. The tremendous weight of the water forced the oceans to become deeper and pushed the mountains up, so the water drained away from the land naturally. But geological shifts of this magnitude would have destroyed any trace of human civilization before the flood. Recall the flood is dated to approximately 2350 BCE and the Great Pyramid of Giza dates to 2560 BCE, 200 years prior to the flood. Yet the pyramid is still there when, according to creationists it should have been destroyed in the flood cataclysm. According to Gen 10:6, the founder of Egypt was Noah’s grandson, so the entire history of Egypt should post-date the flood, but Egyptian history is well-documented back to 3100 BCE and shows no discontinuity.

Either the dating of the flood is wrong, a theory creationists are loathe to admit because that puts the reliability of the Bible’s dates into question, or the generally accepted dates – not only for Egyptian history, but also for other ancient civilizations – must be wrong. But that poses another problem because the Bible dates to Exodus to around 1450 BCE, 900 years after the flood. Events over 1500 years of recorded Egyptian history would have to be crammed into 900 years. Far less than 900 years actually, because rebooting the post-Flood world with only 8 people would require many generations before there was enough of a population to form distinct cultures and societies.

And then there’s the problem of the animals and whether the ark was big enough to hold them all. Creationists claim that Noah didn’t have to bring every type of animal aboard the ark, but only land mammals, birds, and reptiles. Insects and amphibians were left to fend on their own and fish like water. And Noah didn’t have to bring a representative of every species, but only every “kind” and they define “kind” at the taxonomic category of “family” or, at worst, “genus.” For example, if Noah was only required to bring a pair from the “cat” family (felidae), that would cover house cats, cheetahs, lions, tigers, leopards, etc. That stretches credulity a bit, so most creationists will accept (for the sake of argument) that Noah would have to bring representatives of each genus. That’s over 4000 genera for mammals, birds and reptiles and there would be at least a pair of each and seven pairs for the clean animals, so it would be more like 10-20,000 animals.

And not just representatives of every living genus, but every genus that ever existed, dinosaurs included. Why? Because creationists use the flood to explain fossils, so all those extinct animals – pterodactyls, T-Rex, mammoths – had to be alive at the time of the flood. And Noah would have to bring their representatives – juveniles, to save space – aboard the ark, even though they apparently didn’t survive conditions in the post-Flood world. (God should have informed Noah not to bother with them.) One creationist estimates 16,000 animals in all, representing living and extinct genera. The number seems on the low side to me, but let’s go with it.

Animals vary in size, but creationists like to use a sheep as an average size. The ark had a volume of 1.5 million cubic feet, which they say is equivalent to 570 railroad stock cars, each of which can carry 240 sheep. That works out to 11 cubic feet per animal, so if you have 16,000 animals, they would need 176,000 cubic feet. It sounds like there would be a lot of room left over on the ark, but Noah had to provision food for one year. A human can eat 8 times his weight in food over a year and an ox or cow twice that, so factoring in 8 times the space required for each animal for food, you arrive at 1.4 million cubic feet. This uses up all the space on the ark, with no space left for corridors, ramps, ventilation, water reservoirs or waste storage. Perhaps God put the animals in suspended hibernation – like astronauts in a science fiction movie – so they would not require food or water. But if God could whip out a miracle to save the day, why put Noah through the trouble of constructing an ark in the first place? Why not transport Noah and the animals to the tallest mountain and have them wait it out?

Once the ark landed and the animals disembarked, you would expect to see population densities in decreasing amounts as you travel further away from the site where the ark settled, but that is not the case. Marsupials managed to travel across oceans to South America and Australia, about as far as you can get from the Middle East, without stopping to settle anywhere along the way. God could certainly have infused a migratory impulse within the kangaroos and koalas to head to Australia and use ice ages to conveniently create land bridges for them to cross oceans, but that’s taking special pleading to ridiculous levels. A more plausible scenario is that humans brought the animals with them, but if that is the case, why did they only bring marsupials and not placental mammals? And how did flightless birds – penguins – get to Antarctica?

This brings us back to the Omphalos hypothesis. What young earth creationists are asking us to believe is that not only did God manage to set up the conditions on a pre-Flood earth that would have made a worldwide flood possible, but God also did an excellent job of eliminating all evidence of a global flood. The flood obliterated any trace of the pre-Flood world while, at the same time, laid down a sedimentary and fossil record that gives the appearance that animals went extinct over a long period of time. Recorded human history begins, not with a few survivors trying to rebuild civilization after the flood, but with well-organized societies of thousands of people building massive structures like the pyramids. Within an incredibly short period of time after the flood, animals and humans spread throughout the globe, crossed vast oceans and rapidly adapted to specific environments.

Is God is setting up a series of logically absurd situations in order to test our faith in the veracity of the Bible? The answer is clearly laid out in this quote from creationist literature: “The principal error of this view is that it starts from supposed scientific anomalies, such as the fossil record, rather than from Scripture.” In other words, Scripture drives the interpretation of science, not the other way around.

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.