Was the Ark Capable of Doing What the Bible Says It Did

 

Gen. 6:13  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.

Gen. 6:14  Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

Gen. 6:15  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.

Gen. 6:16  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.

 

God commanded Noah to make an Ark of gopher wood.  In this way Noah would preserve the human race and the animal kingdom from the annihilating judgment of the Universal Flood.   We will talk more about the issue of universality a little later on.

Many questions have been raised about the Ark by those who presumably would believe the Biblical story if there were no fatal flaws of possibility and probability.  Commensurate with the rules and purposes that we have posited, we want to comment on a few informative things that will address honest questions.  We have no desire or intention to enter into sharp-shooting sessions with those who have dishonest questions.  If anyone has already made up his mind that he does not believe the Bible, nor that there was an Ark and a Universal Flood, I do not expect to say anything that will change his mind.

An Ark of Gopher Wood

The word gopher comes from a Hebrew word which anglicized and pronounced the identical same way: “gopher.”[1]  It appears to mean: "house, or to house in."  We have already noted in chapter 5 that Cain built a city.  One of the things that comes out here is that men lived in houses built of wood in those days.  Noah and his sons were able to build a ship that could endure the Great Flood and carry its enormous cargo for one whole year.  This shows quite clearly that they were skilled builders.  The word for wood is the Hebrew `ets (ates)[2] and it means firmness.  It comes from the primitive root word `atsah (aw-tsaw’)[3] which means: to close, or to shut, and is closely related to the word `atseh (aw-tseh')[4] which means: the spine (as the firmness of the body) or the backbone.  Drain board stock, which is strong, fine-grained (closed up) wood and considered to be the very best, comes usually from the heart of the tree.[5]  It is the straightest, most durable, most water-resistant and does not warp when it gets wet.  In the antediluvian world a mist went up every morning and watered the whole face of the earth.  Chapter 2, verses 5, 6, say, or at least imply that there had been no rain. 

A tropical climate prevailed the whole earth around, as evidenced by the Mastodons frozen in ice with green grass in their mouths and undigested grass in their stomachs, and the climate was very humid.  In addition, at least some of the effects of the sun which we now feel were filtered out by the great canopy of moisture which surrounded the earth and fell during the Flood.  In order for houses to last a thousand years and not rot, the wood from which they were made was the very best, water proof, and warp-resistant.  That is the wood which Noah was instructed to use in building the Ark.  To paraphrase it, God said, “Take the best, closest grained, building grade wood, which comes from the spine, or the backbone of the tree.”  Being the spine of the tree it was also the most resilient.  It could flex the most without breaking.  This is a point of no small significance.  They had metal in those days before the Flood, and they knew how to work with it, according to chapter 4, verse 22.  It is not clear that they possessed the metallurgical skills to form it into a large vessel nor is it a certainty that they did not.  In any case the Ark was much stronger being made of the kind of wood that Noah was instructed to use.  It was able to withstand much greater stress loads without structural failure, than if it had been made of metal.

How Long did it Take?

How long was the Ark in the building?  The answer, which is arrived at inductively, is around 98 years; possibly a few years less.  In verse 32 of chapter 5 Noah was said to be five hundred years old.  It also says that Shem was already born.  We have pointed out that this statement is not to be taken as a part of the iteration of the genealogies, because of the literary change in the narrative.  The end of the precise defining of the genealogies was reached with Lamech, Noah's father.  Lamech lived 777 years and died 4 years before the Flood.  With Lamech, the genealogy ceases for a while, as we give attention to Noah, the Ark, and the Flood.  The scene in verse 32 of chapter 5 was not exactly in Noah's 500th year.  The literary style is that of generalization, so it is neither critical nor inconsistent.

It is not clear from the record whether or not God spoke to Noah at that time. Verses 1 through 13 of chapter 6 intervene before we hear God saying anything to Noah.  He may have talked to Noah before this, but there is no way of knowing for certain.  But there can be no speculation as to how old Noah was when the Flood came.  This is spelled out in verse 11 of chapter 7: “In the 600th year of Noah's life, in the 2nd month, and the 17th day.”  If verse 32 of chapter 5 does not intend to be specific, this verse does.

Shem’s Age and the Ark’s Building

In verse 10 of chapter 11 we read that Shem was a hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the Flood.  This age is to be taken as exact also, because it is a part of a genealogy, and it is telling us, along with verse 11, how long Shem lived.  He lived to be exactly 600 years.  So we know that there could have been no more than 98 years between the 32nd verse of the 5th chapter and the Flood.  98 years would assume that Shem was born that year, which is reasonable, since he was the youngest of the three, according to chapter 10.  If he was born earlier, less time would have intervened.  Because of the approximate five hundred year age of Noah, less time is not argued for, though it would not have mattered insofar as whether or not there was enough time to build the Ark.

Man’s Years Shall Be 120

Arguments have been made that verse 3 of chapter 6 means the antediluvian race would only continue for another 120 years.  The argument goes that from the commandment to build the Ark until the flood came was 120 years.  They say that it could not have been talking about men after the Flood, because Noah and his sons lived longer than that. 

There are a number of problems with that argument.  First of all, the normal sense of the genealogies of Seth and Cain would tell us that both Japheth and Ham were already older than 120 when God spoke to Noah.[6]  And of course Noah himself was around 500.  The limitation of years was not on these men or on those immediately after the Flood, but on the human race in general.  It took a few generations for the lives of men to shorten to 120 years, but we see steady decline.  Arphaxad lived to be 438.  Salah lived to be 433, Eber lived to be 464, Peleg lived to be 239, as did Reu, Serug lived to be 230, and Nahor lived to be 148.  Abraham lived to be 175, but it is indicated that he lived an exceptionally long life.  By the time of Moses, the age of man was down to 120.  If this is not the meaning of God's words in verse 6, it is strange that this is just how it worked out with the race by the end of Genesis.  And if this is not what God meant to say, then why did Lamech prophesy that God was going to bless the race by greatly shortening their years?  It is always a little frightening to be at odds with imposing people.  Even so, it is my duty to point out that it could not have taken 120 years to build the Ark, since the age of Shem, when his son was born two years after the Flood, simply will not allow that exegesis.

Could the Ark Have Been Built in 98 Years?

Could Noah and his family have built the Ark in 98 years?  Let us think about that for a moment.  These were gigantic people, skilled in building houses and cities, living in a world where weapons and tools were made of brass and iron. They had lived and developed experience for five long centuries.  There were with huge elephants, oxen, horses and other animals, apparently much gentler than today, to use as beasts of burden and to pull windlasses for hoisting.   There were multitudes of people around to hire for helpers if needed.  If the purpose of asking is to raise doubts, then the question seems ludicrous on its face.  One must be ignorant of the matter altogether to suppose that building the Ark in that much time presented any kind of problem.

The Size of the Ark

How big was the Ark?  Well, we know exactly how big it was.  It was 300 cubits long, 30 cubits high and 45 cubits wide.  Now if we just knew for sure the size of a cubit, we would be in business.  The third chapter of Deuteronomy says that a cubit was “according to the measure of a man.” This means that it was from the elbow to the finger tips.  Sir Isaac Newton, an early church father who was a scientist and a much respected one even today, studied the matter and concluded that in the days of Moses when the giant Og lived, a cubit was 25 inches.  This conclusion was concurred with by Dr. Palazi Smith.  In Genesis, the instruction is to people who lived before the Flood in an era when every man was gigantic.   It seems almost, if not absolutely certain that a cubit was bigger in those days than it was in the days of Moses when it was determined to be 25 inches.  Even so, let us take the Newton-Smith figure so that we do not stretch credulity. 

At 25 inches per cubit the Ark would have been 625 feet long, 62.5 feet high and 104 feet wide.  It would have had a deck area of 195,000 square feet, with each deck having 65,000 square feet.  The total cubic feet of area in the Ark would have been 4,062,500.  Noah was told to put rooms in the Ark, on its three decks, or stories.  The word for room is the Hebrew queen (Kane)[7] and it means: the nesting, chamber, or dwelling.  It is contracted from the word qanah (kaw-Nan')[8] which means: to build or to occupy as a nest, or to make a nest.  This is the only time in the Bible that queen is translated room, but 17 times it is translated nest or nests.

The Honeycomb Design 

In other words, Noah was to make nestings or stalls for these animals.  So this whole vessel was honeycombed with stall-like cells inside the Ark. 

Why Didn’t Moses Take Any Black Cats in the Ark?[9]

Morris-Whitcomb, in The Genesis Flood, says that about 35,000 creatures, from ants on up, would have been more than plenty to do what God told Noah to do.  They estimate the average size of the creatures on the Ark (realizing that some were much bigger, although the bigger animals would have been relatively few in number, and some were much smaller) to be about that of a grown sheep.  I am going to take their projections here, since they seem to be indisputably safe.

The Average Stall Size

A stall of 5'x5'x3' would be very adequate for an animal the size of an adult sheep.  The goal was to keep these animals alive for one year, not to fatten them up or to make them luxuriously comfortable.  That would mean that, if these cages were stacked which is a common practice on ships, aircraft and in some farms where small animals are raised, you could get 35,000 stalls on two of the three levels of the Ark.  This would allow for one animal to a 75 cubic foot stall.[10]

The Feasibility of the Architecture

The twenty feet per story is about the right height for giants who were 18 feet or more tall.  It would have been an easy matter for them to feed and care for the animals, insofar as accessibility to their cages is concerned.

Feed and Food Storage

For animals the average size of a sheep, two pounds of food per day would be more that adequate to keep them healthy.  Remember now, that if animals were meat eaters at all before the Flood, and they may not have been, they were closer to their vegetarian diet in the Garden of Eden than they are now, by around 4300 years.  There is no animal, cat, dog, or any other that will not eat grain based foods and will not stay healthy on them if that is all they can get.  It is a recognized and mostly accepted concept that animals are less aggressive and more docile if they are not fed meat.  That is not always desirable but in this case it was.

In order to feed 35,000 animals of that average size for 365 days, Noah would have needed 25,550,000 lbs of grain.  At 40 lbs per cubic foot, which is the approximate weight of dry grain, the feed would have taken up 638,750 cubic feet.  This would have left a living area for Noah and his 7 relatives of 661,220 cubic feet.  In the Ark, this was an area of 104'x320'x20'.  That would have given each family a living area of approximately 8320 square feet, which is about 5 and 1/2 times as large as the average house in this vicinity.

Other Storage Concerns

While this is far more space than needed, there were other considerations too.  Possibly room was provided for fresh water storage, though that hardly seems necessary under the circumstances.[11] And then there was the matter of storing or disposing of waste.  It seems unlikely that waste could have been disposed of in the first 40 days, since unprecedented volumes of rainwater were falling and the windows in the Ark probably could not have been opened, though that is not a certainty.  But remember that these were not as backwards a people as we have sometimes supposed.  A lot could have been done in odor control with lime and other chemicals.  There was plenty of room to put sealed rooms for waste storage for the first 40 days.  After that the windows could be opened.  There was sufficient rigid strength in the Ark, given the honeycomb structure, to have many windows that could be opened.  We know that there were at least some, because Noah opened one of them when he sent out the dove and the raven.  Windows at sea level would have made water, so diluted by the deluge that the salt certainly wouldn't have been a problem, very available.  And then maybe they had pumps on board.  Remember that this civilization, that started with a much higher intellectual capacity than men have today, had been around for more than 1600 years.  There was plenty of animal power on the Ark to work the pumps and some of the larger animals could have well used the exercise of walking tread mills.  In addition, it is only reasonable to assume that Noah took ropes and rigging, tools, wheelbarrows, small wagons, and the like into the Ark.  They had plenty of time to construct a vast and sophisticated system of hoists and trams and a network of ramps for vehicle access to the various levels and stalls. 

Chores on the Ark

There probably would have been no more than 200 stalls that would have needed periodic cleaning (the vast majority of the creatures would have been birds or tiny creatures), and possibly much less than that if you consider one pair of dogs to cover all wolves, coyotes, hyenas and all members of the dog family, one pair of cats to cover all lions, tigers, leopards, etc.[12]  There would really have been relatively few pairs of large animals.  If each person cleaned and fed 3 1/2 stalls a day that would have accomplished the task.  With a team of horses, seven yolks of oxen, a pair of elephants, llamas, camels, and the like, there was ample muscle for the tasks that needed to be done.  If they worked twelve hours per day that would mean less than one stall every four hours.  This would have left them twelve hours for sleeping, house work, and interacting among themselves.  The time needed to care for insects, amphibians, small reptiles, rodents, and the like would have been of seldom frequency and of small demand.  The tiny creatures would have comprised the vast majority of life, numerically speaking, on the Ark.  Remember that fishes, seals, sea lions, whales, porpoises, octopus, sharks, and the like, and possibly even amphibians were not in the Ark.  This hardly seems strenuous, much less unreasonable.

Some men, Morris-Whitcomb among them, have suggested that maybe the animals were in a state of hibernation on the Ark.  While that is a possibility, it hardly seems likely in the light of verse 21 of chapter 6, which says:  “And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.”  Hibernating animals do not eat.

The Advantage of Weanlings

It only makes sense that Noah would have taken babies of weaning age among the large animals.  They would have been much easier to handle while getting them on the Ark, they would have been less trouble during the journey, and they would have had more time to multiply once they reached the new world.  If they developed any hostility or unruliness while on the Ark, they could easily have been let out when the time came.  We do this all of the time with range bulls and other surly creatures.  We open the gate and let them out, and away they go.  Even so, with rhinoceros, elephants and such, a few years is not very old.  Also, tiger and lion cubs would not grow very wild in a year, being penned up and handled every day.

The Ark as a Ship

The Ark was flat bottomed like a barge or a raft.  It was not a vessel made for navigation.  It was made to float on top of the water.  For a flat-bottomed vessel 625 feet long and 104 feet wide, 62.5 feet high with most of the weight near the bottom, it would have been nearly impossible for it to have capsized, and it was so incredibly strong because of its honeycombed structure that no force of wind or current could have broken it up.

Do Not Leave God out of the Equation

Above and beyond all of this is the supernatural.  God brought the Flood.  God brought the animals to Noah in the Ark.  God shut them in and God remembered Noah and every living thing that was in the Ark (8:1).  This means that God kept an eye on them and looked out for them.  If there was anything that was impossible to men—and we do not see it if there was—God is not limited in His power.  He kept them safe and He saw to it that they made it through safely.  After all, He created the heavens, the men and the animals, the earth and the sea on which they were floating.  We are not implying that rational and natural explanations are necessary.  But the point of this discussion is that God has given us some information, and the information given is not, as many would have us believe, of fairy-tale character.  If you want to talk about fairy-tales the RNAs and the DNAs blipping around in the primordial ooze, intercoursing with Amino Acids and giving birth to life on the earth, is where you should look.  That is the stuff that you have to be totally gullible to believe. 

In short, the time to build the Ark, the size of the Ark, the number of animals that it had to carry, the logistical considerations and the ability of the structure of the Ark to withstand the perils of the Great Flood, are all so easily understood as to almost be ordinary considerations when looked at fairly and in the light of reality.  From an engineering point of view it was not only a viable but an ideal design for what it was built to do.

Where is the Ark Today?

What happened to the Ark after the Flood?  Is it not likely that wood of that sort would have maintained some kind of structure for centuries?  It would of course, but the sensible thing to assume is that it was dismantled and used for building material since these people did live in, and know how to build, houses and since there probably was no other building material around for a few years.  The destroyed earth was desolate, and the climate was changed and bitterly cold in the high mountains of Turkey.  Noah had been promised by God that he would never need the Ark again.  I simply cannot believe that these resourceful, intelligent, and skilled men would have walked off and left the best wood in the world, the likes of which the new world would never again see, when it contained enough wood to build houses, barns, corrals, and provide fire wood for all of them for the five to seven years it would take for trees to grow to a size to provide building materials.  They could have and probably did use the large animals to draft the wood down to the valley.  It seems certain that those who look for the Ark are embarked upon an exercise of complete futility.  Nor can I find it in my heart to feel sorry for doubters who will not be content with the Biblical account and who think that the integrity of God and His Word rests upon empirical evidence that would never be more than disputed at best. 

Furnished for a New Life in a New World

Also, when Noah and his family debarked, they had seed for planting, manure for fertilizing, and animals for milk and farm chores.  Every thing they needed for a new start in a new world was on the Ark, or a part of it.

A Story with Credibility

The Ark, its mission, its journey, and the events surrounding it, is a completely reasonable and believable account that leaves no basic or necessary consideration uncovered.

A Just Comparison to Recorded History

When the Pilgrims came to the New World they brought corn, grape vines, and other things to plant.  They brought farm animals with them and they braved the rigors of raging storms that presented dangers, often fatal, that Noah and his family never had to be concerned with.  They were in these vessels—flimsy, open, unstable, and poorly made by comparison, and dependent upon the elements and navigation for a successful mission—often as long, and sometimes longer, than Noah was in the Ark.  They were on salty seas where water was scarce.  Yet no one in the world doubts the stories of these journeys or calls them impossible fairy tales. 

There are no facts concerning the Ark and the Flood that really stretch credulity.   The doubts about the reality and the universality of the Flood are religious in nature.  They are not questions of science, logic, or philosophy though they are most often made by those who profess to be scientists, ethicists, and philosophers.  The argument is not between science and religion, but between the Christian religion and the religion of humanism.  For the believer the question is:  “Do you believe God, the Bible, and the Orthodox Church?”  For the Unbeliever, the questions are: “How desperately does your religion of evolution and atheism urge you to characterize the story as mere fancy so that the real issues of the depravity of the race, the judgment of God, and the need for redemption do not have to be faced up to?” And: “How much does the intimidation of peers and college professors coerce you to believe what is popular for the sake of image, ego, and expediency?"