Noah's Ark

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One of the Logic Mill cards. And this topic might relate to Snow Crash.

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Community entry:Noah's Ark

Noah is considered a Prophet in Islam, and the male progenitor of all living human beings on Earth in fundamentalist Judaism and Christianity.

How some imagine the ark on Mount Ararat

Accordingly, he is quite important, and his ethic of stewardship is likely under-explored and under-appreciated as an influence on religious thought over the centuries.

"The search for Noah's Ark has been a growth business ever since the French nobleman Pitton de Tournefort first scaled the mountain in 1707. It's mentioned - even earlier as such - in the book of Mandeville's Travels c.1366 as well

Noah's Ark (mostly from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

In the Bible, Noah's ark was a boat that God commanded Noah to build to keep him, his family and a core breeding stock of the worlds animals safe from the impending flood. The phrase Noahs Ark is also used as the title of the story of Noah and the Ark, found in Genesis chapters 6-9.

The Ark

The ark was built of cypress wood and covered with pitch, 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. However, the actual size of the ark cannot be fully ascertained, as we do not know the size of the particular cubit meant. If it were like the varying Egyptian cubit, its dimensions could be as little as 129m × 21.5m × 12.9m or even as much as 165m × 27m × 16.5m. Or if it were more like the strict Sumerian cubit, it would be 155.2m × 25.9m × 15.5m.

Traditional pictures of the ark typically show something shaped like a boat, though the Hebrew word, "tebah", meaning "box", may suggest the actual shape of the ark, which would seem more practical for stability and volume as consistent with the narrative, considering the nature of the deluge.

The directions given by God appear to be for an oblong three-storey structure, with a door in the side and a window in the roof. Though, just what the window was, is debated, as there is only one dimension given to the window. The Hebrew word for window, "tsohar", merely indicates a "light aperture", giving no indication of its size or shape. God gave him the direction to "complete it to the extent of a cubit upward". The use of the words "extent" and "upward" seem to indicate much work and raising rather than building the window, which suggest the possibility that the window may have extended around the whole of the roof, which would act as an exhaust and make fresh air more available to the family and animals aboard. Though no certainty on the subject can be determined. There is no mention of a cover or door for the window.

Animals entering the Ark.

The Flood

The rains that fell, in the account, should not be taken lightly. The word in the Hebrew, "mabbuwl", often translated as "deluge", literally means "storehouse of water" or "heavenly ocean", indicating that a massive amount of the earth's store of water was held aloft in the atmosphere until the figurative "springs" of the earth's ocean were somehow "broken open", and the figurative "floodgates" of the heavens were opened, letting the water cover "all the tall mountains" "up to fifteen cubits." In the ark were Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives. They also took seven pairs of each kind of clean animal, two pairs of each kind of unclean animal and seven pairs of each kind of bird. The ark kept them safe for the forty days of rainfall and about another year until the flood waters receded.

After the Flood

Gen. 8:4 reads, in the KJV, "And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat." (And modern Christian translations, and the older more authentic Torah version, are similar.) Ararat is a region in Armenia, according to Biblical scholars, so the verse is entirely consistent with the ark landing somewhere else than Mt. Ararat (whether or not the writer knew that), and is entirely consistent with the ark landing on Mt. Ararat (without the writer knowing that), but is hard to explain if the ark landed there and the writer intended to convey that. So the widespread traditional belief that the Book of Genesis identifies Mt. Ararat as the resting place of Noah's Ark must be described as a misconception.

When the Earth was dry again, God commanded Noah to take his family and all the animals out of the ark and concluded a covenant with him, in which he promised never to flood the Earth again, and imposed a basic set of laws on humanity. The 7 Noahide Laws set up the groundrules for ethical monothesism.

The Flood Under Scrutiny

Critics of the account, however, suggest that the flood was, though quite large, just a local one that affected the Red Sea region when it was possibly first flooded by means of the breaking of a natural barrier or sea wall that originally prevented the water from flooding the area.

Though, the detail of how Noah knew to build an ark to preserve his family alive is explained as simple legend built around a momentous event in the early expansion of the human race.

Other researchers, particularly famed oceanographer Bob Ballard, point to the breaching of the Bosporous and the flooding of the Black Sea basin around 5000 BC as the epic flood event that inspired this legend. Prior to this event, the freshwater Black Sea level was several hundred meters below that of the saline Mediterranean. To this day, there is an anoxic barrier at several hundred meters depth below which is entirely fresh water that has been starved of oxygen. Ballard's research these days includes searches for submerged ancient shoreline settlements as well as well preserved galleys of the ancient world.

As Noah and his family were talented in the use of large timbers, it was likely they logged in the mountains near the Bosporus and saw increasing signs of erosion from year to year that the rest of the people along the coast may not have been aware of.

Many Flood Accounts

Although many cultures have stories of a great flood, the story of Noahs Ark is probably the best-known of these. The next most notable is the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim (found in the Epic of Gilgamesh) which has broadly the same structure and plot as Noahs Ark, suggesting the possibility that the Biblical account has drawn influence from the archaeologically older Sumerian depiction. Noah also has a counterpart in Greek mythology, Deucalion. In Indian scriptures, a terrible flood was supposed to have left only one survivor - a saint named Manu, who was saved by the god Vishnu in the form of a fish. Many hundreds more extra-biblical variations of the flood account exist in cultures around the world.

Ethnic Oral Accounts

People saw big floods which predate historical written accounts that relate to the big thaws at the end of the last big Ice Age. A global flood to a specific ethnic group meant their world got flooded -- not the literal planet. A global flood would kill most sea life. Bob Ballard's Black Sea expeditions make sense in regard to the Sumerian depiction. A flood there would directly affect the Fertile Crescent area and nowhere else. As the Marta peoples surrounding Ur in Sumeria became the core of the new Hebrews -- the flood tale would be included in their Creation myths.