{"id":96996,"date":"2022-07-26T17:05:41","date_gmt":"2022-07-26T15:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=96996"},"modified":"2022-07-26T08:20:40","modified_gmt":"2022-07-26T06:20:40","slug":"02-05-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=96996","title":{"rendered":"Mystery of Noah\u2019s Ark Solved!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Mystery of Noah\u2019s Ark Solved!<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

MICHAEL LIND<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Artist rendering of the one true shape of Noah\u2019s Ark, scientifically provenILLUSTRATION: JON BERKELEY<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

What was the shape of Noah\u2019s Ark? For millennia Jewish and Christian clerics, scholars, and academics, as well as others with too much time on their hands, have pondered this question.<\/span><\/p>\n

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What makes it tantalizing is the precision of the numbers in\u00a0Genesis 6<\/a><\/span>\u00a0(here, in the King James translation):<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[13] And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.<\/strong>
\n[14] Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.<\/strong>
\n[15] And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.<\/strong>
\n[16] A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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The directions seem straightforward. But those who have tried to picture an ark built according to the numbers in Genesis have often ended up with bizarre and ugly results: a long, skinny box, or a squashed pyramid stretched on two sides, among others.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The measurements\u2014300 cubits, 50 cubits, and 30 cubits\u2014must be in the text of Genesis for a reason. But no one has been able to come up with a shape based on the Biblical dimensions that does not seem intuitively wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This would be a trivial question if it were not linked to a greater puzzle with profound theological and ethical implications. In the Torah, the strange word\u00a0tevah<\/em>\u00a0is used only twice: once to describe Noah\u2019s Ark, and once to describe the fragile container made out of bulrushes in which the infant Moses was placed in the Nile before Pharaoh\u2019s daughter found him. It has long been a mystery why the same word would be used for the wicker basket that rescued Moses and the vessel that rescued the ancestors of all present-day human beings and animals.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Until now. I have finally solved the mystery of the shape of Noah\u2019s Ark\u2014and discovered why it matters.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Most people in Western countries think they know what Noah\u2019s Ark looked like, thanks to illustrations and children\u2019s toys. The ark was a boat, a sort of plump and cuddly galleon, with the necks of giraffes rather than cannons poking out and Noah and Mrs. Noah looking down from a little house on top. Contemporary reconstruction of the ark by Protestant creationists who take the Bible literally either resemble conventional boats or long, narrow, floating coffins.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In depictions from the Roman era, Noah is often shown popping out of a chest or crate like a Jack-in-the-box. The ancient artists may have been influenced by pictures of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who survived a flood sent by Zeus in Greek mythology, and of Danae and her son Perseus, who were cast into the sea in a wooden chest by King Acrisius of Argos and washed up on the island of Seriphos.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Roman-era artists may also have been influenced by the Greek version of Genesis in the Septuagint. The word\u00a0aron<\/em>\u00a0is used for the sacred chest that contained the stone tablets of Moses, the Ark of the Covenant. In the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and later in the Greek New Testament, both\u00a0tevah<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0aron<\/em>\u00a0are rendered as\u00a0kibotos<\/em>, \u201cbox.\u201d In the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, this became\u00a0arca<\/em>, a Latin word for box, from which the English word \u201cark\u201d is derived.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Let\u2019s try to put aside preconceptions and figure out what a\u00a0tevah<\/em>\u00a0was, beginning with the\u00a0tevah<\/em>\u00a0of Moses.\u00a0Exodus 1:22<\/a><\/span>\u00a0describes the captivity of the Hebrews in Egypt: \u201cAnd Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive.\u201d\u00a0Exodus 2<\/a><\/span>\u00a0tells how Yocheved\u2019s mother saved him: \u201cAnd when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river\u2019s brink.\u201d Pharoah\u2019s daughter finds the baby boy, whom she names Moses, because, she says, \u201cI drew him out of the water.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A postcard of \u2018Noah\u2019s Ark on the pier, Venice, California,\u2019 undatedCALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY\/FLICKR<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Reading Genesis without preconceptions, we might guess that Noah\u2019s\u00a0tevah<\/em>\u2014made out of \u201cgopher-wood\u201d and water-proofed with pitch\u2014is a giant version of the\u00a0tevah<\/em>\u00a0of Moses, made out of bulrushes and water-proofed with pitch (and slime!). The mysterious word \u201cgofer\u201d in \u201cgopher wood\u201d in the King James Bible occurs only once in the scriptures, in\u00a0Genesis 6:14<\/a><\/span>. The Greek Septuagint translation of Genesis renders \u201cgofer wood\u201d as \u201csquare timber.\u201d But as the Jewish Encyclopedia notes,\u00a0gofer<\/em>\u00a0may have been derived from the Assyrian word\u00a0giparu<\/em>\u00a0for \u201creeds.\u201d Significantly, perhaps, the word translated as \u201crooms\u201d in the King James version in Hebrew is\u00a0quinnim<\/em>, \u201cnests,\u201d as in birds\u2019 nests.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Most contemporary scholars believe that the basic motifs of the Noah story\u2014the command to build an ark to save his family and animals, the sending out of birds to search for dry land, the ark\u2019s coming to rest on a mountain, and a sacrifice followed by a divine promise\u2014come directly from earlier Mesopotamian myths told about Flood heroes: the Sumerian king Ziusudra (\u201cLife of Long Days\u201d), the Akkadian king Atra-hasis (\u201cExceeding in Wisdom\u201d), and the Babylonian king Utnaphishtim (\u201cHe Found Eternal Life\u201d), who describes the Flood to Gilgamesh in the\u00a0Epic of Gilgamesh<\/em>. It is interesting, therefore, that reeds play a role in the directions given by the god Enki to Atra-hasis, the Babylonian Noah:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Wall, wall! Reed wall, reed wall!<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Atra-has\u012bs, pay heed to my advice,<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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That you may live for ever!<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Destroy your house, build a boat\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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This makes sense only if Atra-hasis tore down his reed house, of a kind common to this day among the marsh Arabs of Iraq, and used the material in constructing his ark.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A lot of contextual evidence, then, supports the view of the Ark as a giant version of the basket of the infant Moses. But there is a problem, in the form of three numbers. Recall\u00a0Genesis 6:15<\/a><\/span>: \u201cAnd this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be\u00a0three hundred<\/em>\u00a0cubits, the breadth of it\u00a0fifty<\/em>\u00a0cubits, and the height of it\u00a0thirty<\/em>\u00a0cubits.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The length-to-width ratio here is 300 cubits to 50 cubits, or 6 to 1. That seems to describe a long, skinny, rectangular or oblong boat. Which is a problem for the theory that the\u00a0tevah<\/em>\u00a0in the Noah story is a giant basket.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Enter Irving Finkel.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cRelic reveals Noah\u2019s Ark was circular<\/a>,\u201d shrieked the headline in\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0in 2010. \u201cNoah\u2019s Ark: Round?<\/a>\u201d\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0asked in 2014.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 2009, the British Museum received the donated fragment of an ancient cuneiform tablet that contained a hitherto-unknown Akkadian version of one of the Babylonian Flood myths with detailed ark-building specifications that preceded and influenced the story in Genesis. As he relates in his entertaining and erudite 2014 book,\u00a0The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood<\/em><\/a>, Irving Finkel, the British Museum\u2019s authority on Mesopotamian cuneiform writing, used the detailed instructions in the \u201cArk Tablet\u201d to reconstruct the ark of Atra-hasis as a circular structure made out of coiled ropes that were waterproofed by being covered with pitch. In 2015, PBS aired a\u00a0documentary<\/a>\u00a0in which a smaller-than-life-size reconstruction of the round ark of Atra-hasis, made to Finkel\u2019s specifications, was built and launched. It took on water and was saved from sinking by pumps.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Contrary to the sensational headlines that his book inspired, while Finkel argues that most of the arks of Babylonian, Akkadian, and Sumerian legend were circular, he agrees with those who believe that Noah\u2019s Ark in Genesis is a rectangular or oblong watercraft. Finkel is the greatest, and possibly the only, member of the category of erudite individuals who are not evangelical Protestant creationists but have nevertheless spent years thinking about the shape of Noah\u2019s Ark. I read and enjoyed\u00a0The Ark Before Noah<\/em>\u00a0when it appeared in 2014, and I took it on his authority that the question was settled. Many if not all arks in earlier Mesopotamian myths were circular, but Noah\u2019s was not.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Having come across various competing ark designs during my recreational reading in ancient theology and legend (a harmless hobby if pursued in moderation), I was reminded of the scholar Dan Shapira\u2019s wonderful Tablet essay exploring fantastic visions of imaginary temples and cities in Jewish lore, \u201cThe Floating Space City of the Jews<\/a>,\u201d published on May 26, 2022. After I read Shapira\u2019s article, I found myself again pondering the question of the shape of Noah\u2019s Ark.<\/span><\/p>\n

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At the center of the puzzle are the numbers combined with the Hebrew words for height (qomah<\/em>), width (rochab<\/em>), and length (orek<\/em>): 30, 50, 300. I wondered if there could be any mathematical significance to the peculiar 6-to-1 ratio of length-to-width in Noah\u2019s Ark. What, if anything, in geometry has a ratio that is approximately 6-to-1? The answer:\u00a0The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius is 6.28 to 1.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Let\u2019s plug in the numbers for width and length. If 50 cubits is the radius of a circle, this gives us a circumference of 314 cubits. Not exactly 300, but close. And 3 rather than 3.14 was often used as an approximation of pi in antiquity, by the Babylonians among others.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Could Noah\u2019s Ark have been round after all? Could the Hebrew word\u00a0rochab<\/em>\u00a0mean radius, instead of width? Could \u201corek\u201d mean \u201ccircumference\u201d instead of merely \u201clength\u201d in\u00a0Genesis 6:15<\/a><\/span>?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Before these possibilities occurred independently to yours truly, they had already been explored by Robert Sheldon, a physicist and biblical literalist, in his 2017 multivolume work\u00a0The Long Ascent:\u00a0Genesis 1\u201311\u00a0in Science & Myth<\/em><\/a>, in which he tries energetically if unpersuasively to prove the accuracy of Genesis by invoking the tale of Atlantis, as well as Greek, Egyptian, Sanskrit, Norse, and other mythologies. To answer the question of whether Noah\u2019s Ark could have been round, Sheldon went to the trouble of comparing ratios of the lengths and widths of various objects in Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, and other books, and concluded that the few examples with a ratio close to 6:1 did not support the hypothesis that the words\u00a0rochab\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0orek<\/em>\u00a0could have been used in ancient Hebrew to describe a round object.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But that does not settle the matter. Most contemporary scholars agree that Genesis splices together at least two versions of the flood story by different authors, which in turn modify earlier Mesopotamian myths. The priestly author (or P) is thought to have been responsible for the measurements of Noah\u2019s Ark. The pagan sources of the flood story that were modified by the Jewish authors probably were Babylonian, because Genesis in its current form is thought to have been put together following the return of Jewish leaders and priests from exile in Babylon, around 500 BCE.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Could \u201cwidth\u201d and \u201clength\u201d in Hebrew have been attempts at translating \u201cradius\u201d and \u201ccircumference\u201d from another language, probably Babylonian? Are there Babylonian words that plausibly might have been translated into Hebrew in this way?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Please now turn to your well-thumbed copy of Joran Friberg and Farouk N.H. Al-Rawi\u2019s\u00a0New Mathematical Cuneiform Texts<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2017), page 258: \u201c[T]he (length of the) arc of the semicircle is simply called\u00a0u\u015d<\/em>\u00a0\u2018length,\u2019 possibly because\u00a0u\u015d<\/em>\u00a0was routinely used as the name for the unknown in Old Babylonian quadratic equations.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bingo. In Old Babylonian, the word\u00a0u\u015d<\/em>\u00a0for \u201clength\u201d could be used to describe the circumference of a circle or the arc length of a semicircle. What about radius? Let\u2019s turn to Friberg and Al-Rawi again, page 252: \u201cFrom a linguistic point of view, the use of Akkadian\u00a0matnu\u00a0\u2018string\u2019 in \u00a7 1b as an Old\u00a0Babylonian\u00a0word for \u2018radius\u2019 comes as a big surprise. No word for \u2018radius\u2019 has ever appeared before in any known mathematical cuneiform text \u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Radius of the lost arc? (Sorry.)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If the Babylonian term for radius was obscure even to Babylonian speakers, and the Babylonian term for length could have referred to a straight line or an arc length or the circumference of a circle, then the case that the original meaning of geometric terms got lost in translation into Hebrew\u2014or even lost in paraphrase in Babylonian\u2014seems stronger.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On rereading, several of Finkel\u2019s arguments in\u00a0The Ark Before Noah<\/em>\u00a0in favor of a rectangular or oblong Noah\u2019s Ark, unlike the circular ark of Atra-hasis, seem weak to me. For example, describing what he calls \u201ca breakdown of the specs,\u201d Finkel defines\u00a0tevah<\/em>\u00a0as \u201cunknown word for rectangular boat.\u201d But this is smuggling the conclusion into the definition. Whatever a\u00a0tevah\u00a0<\/em>was, it was the same kind of thing in the stories of Noah and Moses. In Akkadian legend, the infant Sargon was rescued from a container in a river. So was the infant Karna, a hero in the Hindu epic\u00a0Mahabharata<\/em>. Both Sargon and Karna were found floating in reed baskets, so it seems unlikely that Baby Moses floated past Pharaoh\u2019s daughter in a long, narrow canoe.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Finkel notes that an Akkadian tablet mentions some kind of boat called a\u00a0tubbu<\/em>\u00a0and speculates: \u201cI think that the Judeans encountered the Akkadian boat word\u00a0tubbu<\/em>\u00a0used for the Ark \u2026 and Hebraised it as\u00a0tevah<\/em>.\u201d When he goes on to conjecture that\u00a0tubbu<\/em>\u00a0is \u201cancestral\u201d to the English word \u201ctub,\u201d however, he loses me.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Finkel devotes considerable space in\u00a0The Ark Before Noah<\/em>\u00a0to arguing that the 300-by-50 dimensions of Noah\u2019s rectangular Ark were derived by complex mathematical reasoning from the measurements of Atra-hasis\u2019 circular ark by the author of the description in Genesis. In the Ark Tablet, Ea tells Atra-hasis: \u201cLet her flood area be one field \u2026\u201d A \u201cfield\u201d or\u00a0iku<\/em>\u00a0in Akkadian and Babylonian was 120 cubits by 120 cubits. Finkel takes this to mean that the area of Atra-hasis\u2019 circular ark was 14,400 square cubits\u2014the area of an\u00a0iku<\/em>. He notes that when you multiply the 50-cubit width by the 300-cubit length of Noah\u2019s Ark, you get 15,000 square cubits. Finkel argues that the author of the Genesis description, having decided that an oblong ark would be more seaworthy than a circular one, came up with the 50-by-30 dimensions in order to keep the same floor area found in the older source (14,400 square cubits), even though the shape was different:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What is more remarkable\u2014and assuredly no coincidence\u2014is that the base area of Noah\u2019s Ark is virtually identical to that inherited from cuneiform (within 4%) at 15,000 cubits, revealing it unmistakably as a reworking of the same original Babylonian idea, to construct on the same basis a boat of another shape altogether, one typical of practical, heavy-duty, riverine cargo barges.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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This raises a lot of questions. Why would P have considered the area of the ark of Atra-hasis to be significant? If the goal of P in Genesis was, for whatever reason, to make sure that the floor area of Noah\u2019s Ark matched the 14,400-square-cubit floor area of the Ark of Atrahasis, why not make the dimensions of Noah\u2019s Ark 200 by 75, or 150 by 100, each of which would lead to a more conventional oblong boat shape with an area of 15,000 square cubits, instead of 50 by 300? And I find it hard to imagine that the author of the P account in Genesis paused in his work of revising Mesopotamian mythology in the service of Jewish theology and morality to ponder the nautical qualities of various boat shapes.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In an apparent contradiction, Finkel elsewhere in his book writes that the ark \u201cis the size of a Babylonian field, what we would call an acre,\u201d and he also writes that \u201cthe coracle\u2019s floor area comes out at 3,600\u201d square meters. But 3,600 square meters is only about half of the area of an\u00a0iku<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To sort this all out, let\u2019s look at the god Enki\u2019s instructions to Atra-hasis, followed by the statements in Atra-hasis\u2019 own voice, in Finkel\u2019s 2014 translation of the Ark Tablet:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Draw out the boat that you will make<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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On a circular plan;<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Let her length and breadth be equal,<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Let her floor area be one field, let her sides be one\u00a0nindan<\/em>\u00a0high \u2026<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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I set in place thirty ribs<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Which were one\u00a0parsiktu<\/em>-vessel thick, ten\u00a0nindan<\/em>\u00a0long.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Here is the same passage from the Ark Tablet, translated by Nathan Wasserman in\u00a0The Flood: The Akkadian Sources<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2020):<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The boat which you will build, I will draw it out (for you)\u2014a circular plan:<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Her length and breadth should be equal, her base should be one\u00a0iku<\/em>, her hull (lit. walls) should be one\u00a0nindanu<\/em>\u00a0(high) \u2026<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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I put up thirty ribs which are one\u00a0parsiktu<\/em>-vessel thick, ten\u00a0nindanu<\/em>\u00a0long.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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The best way to understand the terse account in the Atra-hasis epic, I think, is to conclude that the\u00a0iku<\/em>\u00a0or field refers not to the deck or a floor of the ark itself as completed, but to the area of the preliminary design to be drawn on the ground. Following Enki\u2019s instructions, Atra-hasis has his workers mark out an\u00a0iku\u00a0<\/em>on the ground, creating a square of 120 cubits by 120 cubits with a total area of 14,400 square cubits. Next the workers connect the midpoints of each opposing side of the square, to form two transverse diameters\u2014\u201cLet her length and breadth be equal.\u201d As it happens,\u00a0The Ark Before Noah<\/em>\u00a0contains an illustration of a cuneiform tablet showing a circle inside a square just like this.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Having used the two crossing lines to find the center of a circle with a diameter of 120 cubits (and an area of 11,309.7 square cubits, for what it\u2019s worth), the workers then lay down 30 ribs, each a\u00a0nindan<\/em>\u00a0long. A\u00a0nindan\u00a0<\/em>was 12 cubits, so that 10\u00a0nindan<\/em>\u00a0equal 120 cubits and each rib is as long as the diameter of the circle. According to Finkel and Mark Wilson, his adviser in the technical appendix of\u00a0The Ark Before Noah<\/em>, the thickness of a\u00a0parsiktu<\/em>-vessel corresponds roughly to a cubit.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Following a description of a modern coracle from the region of ancient Mesopotamia, Finkel and Wilson assume these 30 ribs are made of wood. But the ribs might have been long, flexible cylinders of bundled palm fronds and reeds, of the kind that to this day are bent by the marsh Arabs of Iraq into arches to form the ceiling of a\u00a0mudhif<\/em>, a ceremonial hall. Picture a Quonset hut made of reeds. This may explain Enki\u2019s command to Atra-hasis to tear down his royal reed house, so the arches could be recycled as ribs of a gigantic coracle.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Finkel and Wilson suggest that the ark of Atra-hasis resembles a\u00a0guffa<\/em>, a modern Middle Eastern coracle woven of plant materials covered with bitumen. This seems plausible. The shape of a\u00a0guffa<\/em>\u00a0has the profile of a doughnut or an automobile tire\u2019s inner tube, which, I can attest, makes a nice flotation device (the inner tube, not the doughnut).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If we assume that the ribs curve up to completely reinforce the hull of a\u00a0guffa<\/em>-shaped craft, then it is easy to deduce the actual diameter of the ark of Atra-hasis:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2026 let her sides be one\u00a0nindan<\/em>\u00a0high \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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I set in place thirty ribs<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Which were one\u00a0parsiktu<\/em>-vessel thick, ten\u00a0nindan<\/em>\u00a0long \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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According to the Ark Tablet, the sides of the ark are one\u00a0nindan\u00a0<\/em>or 12 cubits high. Assuming that Finkel is correct and the ribs support a\u00a0guffa<\/em>-shaped ark, then presumably a one-nindan<\/em>\u00a0portion of each of the 30 ribs at each of its ends is raised vertically to support the 12-cubit-high side. The 8\u00a0nindanu<\/em>\u00a0between these two raised ends remain horizontal, supporting the flat bottom of the ark.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Eight\u00a0nindan<\/em>\u00a0equals 8 x 12 cubits or 96 cubits. Because the 12-cubit sides need to bend out slightly, as in a\u00a0guffa<\/em>, we can add a few cubits to 96 to account for the outward curves of the walls on each side. Whatever the precise measure, the diameter of the ark of Atra-hasis at its widest point will be approximately 100 cubits.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Finkel and Wilson note in the technical appendix to\u00a0The Ark Before Noah<\/em>\u00a0that each rib will run \u201capproximately 8 \u00bd nindan along the base of the boat.\u201d Eight and a half\u00a0nindan<\/em>\u00a0add up to 102 cubits. To put this in perspective, 100 cubits is around 150 feet, a little less than the 160-foot width of a U.S. football field.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Intent on deriving the 50 cubits and 300 cubits in Genesis from their product, 15,000 square cubits, Finkel has overlooked an astonishing fact: If the diameter of Atra-hasis\u2019 ark is roughly 100 cubits, then the radius of the ark is 50 cubits and the circumference is 314 cubits, which we can round down to 300, because the Babylonians and others in the ancient world sometimes used 3 as an approximation for pi.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Eureka.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We now have 50 cubits and 300 cubits, two of the three numbers in\u00a0Genesis 6:15<\/a><\/span>. It turns out that the measurements of the radius and circumference of a hypothetical circular Noah\u2019s Ark are identical to the measurements of the radius and circumference of the circular ark of Atra-hasis, deduced from the recently rediscovered Ark Tablet first translated by Finkel.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Coincidence? I think not.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Does this mean that Noah\u2019s Ark is Atra-hasis\u2019 ark? No. The ark of Atra-hasis is 12 cubits (one\u00a0nindan<\/em>) high and has two levels, while Noah\u2019s Ark is 30 cubits high and has three levels. Assuming that Noah\u2019s Ark is a literary descendant of the Atra-hasis epic\u2019s ark, how did the height change from 12 to 30 cubits?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Here\u2019s my hypothesis: Once again, the 30, 120-cubit ribs described in the Ark Tablet provide the key to unlocking the mystery.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Let\u2019s imagine that a later Babylonian priest or scribe is retelling the Atra-hasis epic. He, or some predecessor, has spelled out the radius, diameter, and circumference of the ark of Atra-hasis in cubits, 50 and 100 and 300\u2014numbers that are not explicit but can be deduced from the text of the Atra-hasis epic.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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From a version of the Atra-hasis story similar or identical to the one we possess, our hypothetical story-reteller understands that the flexible 120-cubit ribs curve up to support the hull of the ark. But he doesn\u2019t understand the peculiar inner-tube or doughnut shape of the\u00a0guffa<\/em>-style coracle. He envisions the ark of Atra-hasis as a simple bowl with a circular rim, like an open umbrella standing upside down. He assumes that the edges of the flexible 120-cubit reed-bundle ribs curve up to attach to the perimeter of a circle that is 100 cubits in diameter.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Johan Huibers stands in front of his 70-meter-long Noah\u2019s Ark replica constructed of steel and American cedar as it waits to be finished, March 31, 2005, in Schagen, NetherlandsMICHEL PORRO\/GETTY IMAGE<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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What is the height, or depth, of the bowl thus created by the simple curve of the 30, 120-cubit ribs? The cross-section of a bowl is a circle segment. If you know the length of the segment\u2019s chord (the rim-to-rim diameter of the bowl) and the arc length (the length of the curve from one rim down to the bottom of the bowl and then up again to the other rim), then you can calculate the height or \u201csagitta\u201d of the arc. Our Babylonian author knows both numbers. The chord is 100 cubits and the length of the arc of the hull is 120 cubits. We have calculators to do these operations, but a few notched strings would have let him do the job, and Babylonian astronomer-priests were the math jocks of antiquity<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The answer? Drum roll, please.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Thirty cubits.<\/em>\u00a0That\u2019s the height of an arc whose chord is 100 cubits and whose arc length is 120 cubits. Actually, the height is 28.2 cubits, but we\u2019ll round it off to 30.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Another coincidence? I think not.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We now have derived all three numbers found in\u00a0Genesis 6:15\u2014300<\/a><\/span>\u00a0cubits, 50 cubits, and 30 cubits\u2014from the dimensions of the original circular ark of Atra-hasis. The numbers 50 and 300 are derived accurately, in the case of the ark\u2019s radius and circumference, while the number 30 for the ark\u2019s height is derived by mistake, as a result of an easy-to-understand misreading of the older text.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It is in this presently lost retelling of the Atra-hasis epic, I suggest, that a third floor is added to the two original floors of the ark, because there is room for another level in a bowl-shaped coracle that no longer resembles a\u00a0guffa<\/em>. As for the 1-nindan<\/em>\u00a0or 12-cubit height of the sides in the original text, our hypothetical reteller presumably ignored that detail after failing to understand it and adopting the 30-cubit height instead.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It may be that this hypothetical Babylonian version of a bowl-shaped ark of Atra-hasis with three levels and a height of 30 cubits, a radius of 50 cubits, and a circumference of 300 cubits was the one known to P, the Jewish composer of the description in Genesis. P may have been fluent in Babylonian and used the Hebrew words\u00a0rochab<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0orek<\/em>\u00a0as approximations for radius and circumference, respectively, because Hebrew at the time lacked technical terms for those measurements. Or he may have misread his Babylonian source or sources to mean width and length in the conventional sense.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But there is another possibility. There may have been\u00a0another version of the Mesopotamian flood story, between my hypothetical version, with its 30-cubit high, bowl-shaped ark, and the text of P that was incorporated into Genesis.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Berossus (330-250 BCE?) was a celebrated Babylonian priest and astrologer who founded a school of Eastern astrology on the Greek island of Cos, rather as a celebrity guru might open his own ashram in modern-day California or London. Berossus wrote a three-book history of Babylon in Greek that he dedicated to Antiochus I, one of Alexander\u2019s generals who had won control of Mesopotamia during the battles that followed Alexander\u2019s death. According to descriptions of his lost history by other authors, the bicultural Berossus described how the god Chronus instructed Xisuthrus (a Hellenized version of the Sumerian Ziusudra) to build an ark to escape the coming flood. The Jewish Roman historian Josephus cited the work of Berossus as proof of the historicity of the Noah story in Genesis.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For our purposes, we need only note that Syncellus says Berossus gives the ark a length of 5 stades and a width of 2 stades, while Eusebius, relying on another author, Alexander Polyhistor, claims that Berossus said the ark was 15 stades by 2 stades, with a ratio of 7.5 to 1. The latter is close to the 6-to-1 ratio of length to width of Noah\u2019s Ark which, I have argued, reflects the circumference-to-radius proportions of the original circular ark of Atra-hasis. Berossus\u2019 history was full of prodigies\u2014he traced history back 400,000 years\u2014and his ark was vastly bigger than all the others. A stade was a Roman stadium, so five stades was a modern kilometer or six-tenths of a mile, and 15 stades would have been nearly two miles.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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John Day, a distinguished biblical scholar and emeritus professor at Oxford, has drawn attention to a number of parallels between the accounts of the flood in Berossus and the P account in Genesis and suggests that both accounts drew on a common source\u2014a version of the Atra-hasis epic. If he\u2019s right, then it may be in this hypothetical shared source that the tradition of a circular ark was lost altogether. Also lost at this stage might have been the the detailed instructions for building the ark of Atra-hasis, including any mention of the 30 ribs and their length of 120 cubits or 10\u00a0nindan<\/em>. All that might have remained might have been 30 cubits for the height, 50 cubits for the radius, and 300 cubits for the circumference.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Why would this hypothetical intermediary text have included a width of 50, from the radius, rather than a width of 100, from the diameter? Because, according to historians, the Babylonians calculated the areas of circles by two main formulas, both used to this day: one-twelfth the circumference squared, or pi times the square of the radius. To save space (and clay!) in a cuneiform tablet, it was sufficient to describe a circle with radius and circumference alone.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Encountering the numbers 50 and 300 in the source he drew on, even a Babylonian author might have misunderstood the arcane and ambiguous mathematical terms for radius and circumference and assumed that they meant the width and length of a rectangular boat. If that is the case, then both Berossus and P in Genesis may have taken the numbers they found in a shared Babylonian source in which all traces of a round ark had been lost. To impress his Greek-speaking audience, Berossus might have inflated the length and width measures in the common source by a factor of 20 or so.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Irving Finkel was right: The numbers for the width and length of Noah\u2019s Ark are indeed derived from the dimensions of the ark of Atra-hasis. But if I\u2019m correct, his explanation of how they were derived is mistaken. The numbers 50 and 300 were not chosen by a Jewish author to ensure that the floor area of Noah\u2019s Ark matched that of the ark of Atra-hasis, even though their shapes were different.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The alternative explanation I present here makes more sense. Note how one number leads to others. The oldest version of the Atra-hasis story may have simply said that his ark was as big as a field (iku<\/em>). A later storyteller, wishing to add details for verisimilitude, made each rib of the ark 120 cubits (10\u00a0nindan<\/em>) in length, a number suggested by the length of the side of a square\u00a0iku<\/em>. Bending a 120-cubit rib to fit a\u00a0guffa<\/em>-shaped, two-level ark that was one\u00a0nindan<\/em>\u00a0or 12 cubits in height all around produced the ark in the Ark Tablet, with a diameter at its widest of about 100 cubits, a radius of 50 cubits, and a circumference of 300 cubits. A subsequent chronicler got the radius and circumference right, but mistakenly believed that the ark was shaped like a bowl reinforced by 120-cubit ribs and therefore necessarily must have a height of 30 cubits. At some point, possibly in a later Babylonian source used by both P and by Berossus, or possibly in the work of P himself, the 120-cubit ribs dropped out of the story altogether and the numbers 50, 300, and 30 were completely detached from the original context of a circular ark and equated with width, length, and height, puzzling people to this day.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It may seem like a stretch to argue that a round inner-tube-shaped ark metamorphosed, thanks to a series of misreadings, first into a bowl-shaped ark and then into a long, skinny rectangular ark. But the\u00a0Epic of Gilgamesh<\/em>\u00a0provides a parallel. Ever since that Babylonian epic was rediscovered in the 19th century, scholars have been baffled by the shape of the ark of the story\u2019s flood hero, Utnapishtim. It is a perfect cube: 120 x 120 x 120 cubits. Finkel argues persuasively that the author misunderstood the directions in the Atra-hasis epic or an equivalent, and accidentally turned a circular ark into a giant floating cube. The cube has seven stories, presumably put there by the author to fill up all that space. In the same way, a third level may have been added to the ark of Atra-hasis when, as I have conjectured, it was accidentally transformed by a later writer from an inner tube into a bowl.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Quod erat demonstrandum.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Noah is not a heroic sailor, like Odysseus or Sinbad. He is an elderly man of great piety, locked behind a door that was closed from the outside by the Lord.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is the real shape of Noah\u2019s Ark? Even if we ignore the parallels with other versions of the flood myth, most of the evidence in Genesis itself, apart from\u00a0Genesis 6:15<\/a><\/span>, suggests a round basket like the ark of Atra-hasis or a giant equivalent of the basket of Moses. If I had to depict Noah\u2019s Ark, I would translate\u00a0rochab<\/em>\u00a0as radius and\u00a0orek<\/em>\u00a0as circumference and portray it in the form of my hypothetical bowl-shaped version of the ark of Atra-hasis, with its 30-cubit height and three levels. And I\u2019d add a shallow conical roof slanting up to a cupola through which Noah could release the raven and the dove to search for land. But if literalists refuse to read width as radius and length as circumference, that is their right, given that the text in Hebrew literally says width, length, and height.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Does any of this matter? If it lacks any moral or spiritual significance, the shape of Noah\u2019s Ark is of no more importance than the number of oars on the Argo or the number of seagulls that carried the giant peach in Roald Dahl\u2019s\u00a0James and the Giant Peach<\/em>\u00a0across the Atlantic to its landfall atop the Empire State Building.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The author or authors of the Genesis account borrowed stories that were long familiar in their Middle Eastern neighborhood and rewrote them to express Jewish ethics and theology. The possible ethical significance of the parallel between the\u00a0tevah<\/em>\u00a0that contained Noah\u2019s family and the rescued animals and the\u00a0tevah\u00a0<\/em>that saved Moses by drifting along the Nile has often been noted in Jewish and Christian commentary. In\u00a0The JPS Torah Commentary:\u00a0Genesis<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(1989), Dr. Nahum Sarna writes, \u201cThe use of\u00a0tevah<\/em>\u00a0is intended to emphasize that the fate of occupants is to be determined solely by the will of God and not to be attributed to the skill of humanity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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According to\u00a0Genesis 7:16<\/a><\/span>: \u201cAnd they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the\u00a0Lord\u00a0shut him in.\u201d Noah and his family may stroll on the deck of a ship in Hollywood movies and modern fiction, but Genesis makes it clear that they were shut inside the ark before the flood and emerged only afterward. Noah is not a heroic sailor, like Odysseus or Sinbad or Horatio Hornblower. He is an elderly man of great piety, locked behind a door that was closed from the outside by the Lord himself, huddling with his terrified family and frantic animals in a giant container that bobs up and down on the waves like a buoy.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That is why it matters that the ark is not a boat that can be steered, but a passively drifting basket. Among other things, the story of Noah in Genesis is about being faithful during terrible events, in spite of being powerless to help yourself and those whom you love.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Eureka.<\/span>
\nQED.<\/span>
\nAmen.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Michael Lind<\/strong> is a columnist at Tablet and a fellow at New America. His most recent book is The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite<\/a>.<\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Mystery of Noah\u2019s Ark Solved! MICHAEL LIND Artist rendering of the one true shape of Noah\u2019s Ark, scientifically provenILLUSTRATION: JON BERKELEY What was the shape of Noah\u2019s Ark? For millennia Jewish and Christian clerics, scholars, and academics, as well as others with too much time on their hands, have pondered this question. What makes it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96996"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96996"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97025,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96996\/revisions\/97025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}