Noah's Ark
And God said unto Noah, ...
Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.
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.
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.
-- Genesis 6: 13-16 (KJV)
Maybe you thought Noah brought a pair of each creature aboard his famous ark. But that's only one of two different stories told in Genesis -- that of the Priestly author (P). J (the Yahwist) thought otherwise.
Both authors agree, however, that mankind does not improve with age. With rare exceptions, such as Methuselah's father Enoch (who "walked with God"), men have grown throughly wicked within ten generations. So God the Creator resolves to become God the Destroyer: "I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them" (Genesis 6: 7). It is not said what the beasts, creeping things, and fowl have done to deserve extinction.
Luckily, one man, Noah, "found grace in the eyes of the Lord" (verse 8); grace enough for Yahweh to revise his plans. Rather than wipe out the entire human race and all those innocent species, he is just going to clean things up a bit with a massive flood. So that Noah and his family might survive the deluge to start up the race from scratch, God directs him to "make an ark of gopher wood."
And God, as is typical in the Priestly strand of Genesis, goes into painstaking detail on the ark's construction, including specifying its exact dimensions in those famous "cubits" (an ancient measurement of somewhere between 18 and 20 inches -- this would make the ark between 450 and 500 feet long). God then instructs Noah to bring aboard two of each kind of living creature -- or, if you believe J's version of events in Genesis 7, seven pair of each "clean beast" and one of each "unclean." Obedient Noah complies down to the detail -- at least, once he's figured out which of God's directions to follow.
"Ark" is now an uncommon English word reserved almost exclusively for biblical allusions. Besides Noah's flood-worthy vessel, the other famous biblical ark is the so-called "Ark of the Covenant," a mobile chest built to preserve the tablets delivered to Moses on Sinai (as we shall see in the entry on the Ten Commandments). In fact "ark" (from the Latin arca, "chest, box") was first used in English, in the ninth century, in reference to this holy Ark. Later the word was put to more general use, meaning either "ship" or "box" (as in the special box built to store copies of the Torah); in the United States it became the specific name of a flat-bottomed riverboat used to transport produce. But such usages virtually perished by the twentieth century, leaving only biblical citations, in particular Noah's ark, on the dry peaks of common parlance.
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books
on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling
Brush Up Your Shakespeare!
