L/B/D:
300 cubits × 50 × 30 (dph). Hull:
gopher wood. Comp.:
8 people; animals. Built:
Noah.
The Ark was the vessel that God commanded Noah to build in preparation for the flood, which He sent because "God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." God determined to drown all of mankind except for Noah, whom He ordered to build a vessel in which his family and representatives of all the species of the Earth could live for the duration of the flood. God's building instructions were explicit:
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.
After Noah had gathered his wife, his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth together with their wives, and "living creatures of every kind, two of each kind, male and female"—birds, beasts and reptiles—"and every kind of food that can be eaten," God sent the flood. The rain itself lasted for 40 days and eventually covered the earth with water to a depth of 15 cubits. There remained the problem of figuring out "if the waters were abated off the face of the ground." Noah investigated this by sending out a dove from the Ark. On the first try, she found nothing, and on the second she returned "and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off." On the third try, she failed to return. Nonetheless, the Ark drifted for 150 days before finally coming to rest on the mountains of Ararat, in what is now eastern Turkey. After one year, one month, and ten days, Noah and his family left the Ark, whereupon God established with Noah the covenant of the rainbow, and his sons went forth to populate the earth.
The historicity of the Ark has been the subject of endless speculation since biblical times, and several expeditions have set out in search of the vessel's remains in the twentieth century. The length-to-beam ratio of 6:1 is plausible for a vessel of the sixth century bce (the date of the composition of Genesis). But if a cubit is about half a meter (1.5 feet—some estimates put it at about 0.6m, or 2 feet), a length of 140 meters (450 feet) would make the Ark many times bigger than the largest known vessels from antiquity. (A simplified measurement of length times beam times half the beam divided by 100 yields a gross tonnage of about 12,000 tons.)
Of more immediate relevance to historians of later maritime history is the fact that the Ark is the most commonly illustrated vessel in European art. Taken together, these images in frescoes, stone carvings, manuscripts, and other media comprise a visual encyclopedia of shipbuilding that shows the transition from shell-first construction with frames inserted later (clinker in the north, carvel in the south) to the skeleton-first construction that predominated after the fifteenth century.
Genesis 6:1-8:17. Unger, The Art of Medieval Technology.
