Noah's Ark (Hebrew: תיבת נח; Biblical Hebrew: Tevat Noaḥ) is the boat in the Genesis flood narrative through which God spares Noah, his family, and pairs of each land animal in the world from a global deluge. The story in Genesis is based on earlier Mesopotamian flood myths. The myth of the global flood that destroys all life begins to appear in the Old Babylonian Empire period (20th–16th centuries BCE). The version closest to the biblical story of Noah, as well as its most likely source, is that of Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Scholars note shared themes, dimensions, and language but different causes for the flood. Scholars also link its structure to the Jewish Temple. Religious traditions from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Gnosticism, Mandaeism, and the Baháʼí Faith each developed distinct interpretations, often assigning spiritual symbolism to the Ark, its construction, or its occupants. Early Christian and Jewish writers, such as Flavius Josephus, believed that Noah's Ark existed. Unsuccessful searches for Noah's Ark have been made from at least the time of Eusebius (c. 275 – c. 339 CE). The story is repeated, with variations, in the Quran, where the Ark appears as Safinat Nūḥ (Arabic: سَفِينَةُ نُوحٍ "Noah's ship") and al-fulk (Arabic: الفُلْك). Its cultural legacy endures in literature, theology, art, and large-scale modern reconstructions. Believers in the Ark continue to search for it in modern times, but no scientific evidence that the Ark existed has ever been found, nor is there scientific evidence for a global flood. According to Robert Moore, the boat and the natural disaster as described in the Bible would have been contingent upon physical impossibilities. Some researchers believe that a real (though localized) flood event in West Asia could potentially have inspired the oral and later written narratives; a Persian Gulf flood, or a Black Sea Deluge 7,500 years ago, alongside the recurring river floods of ancient Mesopotamia has been proposed as such a historical candidate.
Description The structure of the Ark (and the chronology of the flood) is homologous with the Jewish Temple and with Temple worship. Accordingly, Noah's instructions are given to him by God (Genesis 6:14–16): the ark is to be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high (approximately 134×22×13 m or 440×72×43 ft). These dimensions are thought by some to be based on a numerological preoccupation with the number 60, the same number characterizing the vessel of the Babylonian flood hero. Its three internal divisions reflect the three-part universe imagined by the ancient Israelites: heaven, the earth, and the underworld. Each deck is the same height as the Temple in Jerusalem, itself a microcosmic model of the universe, and each is three times the area of the court of the tabernacle, leading to the suggestion that the author saw both Ark and tabernacle as serving for the preservation of human life. It has a door in the side, and a tsohar, which may be either a roof or a skylight. It is to be made of gopher wood "goper", a word which appears nowhere else in the Bible, but thought to be a loan word from the Akkadian gupru – and divided into qinnim, a word which always refers to birds' nests elsewhere in the Bible, leading some scholars to emend this to qanim, reeds. The finished vessel is to be smeared with koper, meaning pitch or bitumen; in Hebrew the two words are closely related, kaparta ("smeared") ... bakopper. Bitumen is the more likely option, as "koper" is thought to be a loanword from the Akkadian "kupru", meaning bitumen. The shape of the Ark is described in Genesis with the Hebrew word tevah, whose meaning is unclear and whose only other use in the Bible is to describe the rush basket of Moses; the King James Version of the Bible accordingly describes the Ark as the "ark of bulrushes". The third-century scholar Origen imagined the Ark to have been a square pyramid floating on a raft. What is now the standard visual depiction of the Ark, a ship's hull with a sloped roof and a side door, originates with Hugh of Saint Victor, an 11th century Saxon theologian, who dedicated a treatise to a description of the Ark.
Origins
Mesopotamian precursors
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