From the January 28, 2014 eNews issue
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A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old tablet from ancient Mesopotamia contains the specifications for building an ark to endure a great flood and closely parallels the Biblical story of Noah. There is, however, one difference; the craft described on the tablet is round.
The tablet has gone on display at the British Museum in London.
Described by the museum’s tablet curator Irving Finkel as “one in a million,” he said that the tablet was “one of the most important human documents ever discovered.”
The cuneiform passage on the tablet describes a circular vessel known as a coracle, not the rectangular vessel of the Book of Genesis. It tells a similar story, complete with the key instruction that animals should enter “two by two.”
“It was really a heart-stopping moment—the discovery that the boat was to be a round boat,” Finkel said at the launch of his book The Ark before Noah. “That was a real surprise.”
George Smith, a British Museum decipherer, first identified the story known from the Book of Genesis in a seventh-century cuneiform tablet from Nineveh. As Finkel describes it, “when the gods decided to wipe out mankind with a flood, the god Enki, who had a sense of humor, leaked the news to a man called Atra-hasis, the ‘Babylonian Noah,’ who was to build the Ark.
“Atra-hasis’s Ark, however was round. To my knowledge, no one has ever thought of that possibility. The new tablet also describes the materials and the measurements to build it: quantities of palm-fiber rope, wooden ribs and of hot bitumen (tar) to waterproof the finished vessel.
“The result was a traditional coracle, but the largest the world had ever dreamed of, with an area of 3,600 square meters and six-meter high walls.”
Elizabeth Stone, an expert on the antiquities of ancient Mesopotamia at New York’s Stony Brook University, said it made sense that ancient Mesopotamians would depict their mythological ark as round.
Before this newest discovery, Answers in Genesis addressed the issue of the dimensions and shape of the ark. In their article “Thinking Outside the Box” Tim Lovett writes the following about the ark.
“While the Bible gives us essential details on many things, including the size and proportions of Noah’s Ark, it does not necessarily specify the precise shape of this vessel. It is important to understand, however, that this lack of physical description is consistent with other historical accounts in Scripture. So how should we illustrate what the Ark looked like? The two main options include a default rectangular shape reflecting the lack of specific detail, and a more fleshed-out design that incorporates principles of ship design from maritime science, while remaining consistent with the Bible’s size and proportions.
“Genesis describes the Ark in three verses, which require careful examination:
6:14 – “Make yourself an ark [tebah] of gopher wood; make rooms [qinniym] in the ark, and cover it inside and outside with pitch [kofer].
6:15 – “And this is how you shall make it: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits.
6:16 – “You shall make a window [tsohar] for the ark, and you shall finish it to a cubit from above; and set the door of the ark in its side. You shall make it with lower, second, and third decks” (NKJV).
“Most Bibles make some unusual translation choices for certain key words. Elsewhere in the Bible the Hebrew word translated here as “rooms” is usually rendered “nests”; “pitch” would normally be called “covering”; and “window” would be “noon light.” Using these more typical meanings, the Ark would be something like this:
“The tebah (Ark) was made from gopher wood, it had nests inside, and it was covered with a pitch-like substance inside and out. It was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high. It had a noon light that ended a cubit upward and above, it had a door in the side, and there were three decks.
“As divine specifications go, Moses offered more elaborate details about the construction of the Tabernacle, which suggests this might be the abridged version of Noah’s complete directions. On the other hand, consider how wise Noah must have been after having lived several centuries. The instructions that we have recorded in Genesis may be all he needed to be told. But in any case, 300 cubits is a big ship, not some whimsical houseboat with giraffe necks sticking out the top.
“Scripture gives no clue about the shape of Noah’s Ark beyond its proportions—length, breadth, and depth. Ships have long been described like this without ever implying a block-shaped hull.
“The scale of the Ark is huge yet remarkably realistic when compared to the largest wooden ships in history. The proportions are even more amazing—they are just like a modern cargo ship. In fact, a 1993 Korean study was unable to find fault with the specifications.
“All this makes nonsense of the claim that Genesis was written only a few centuries before Christ, as a mere retelling of earlier Babylonian flood legends such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Epic of Gilgamesh story describes a cube-shaped ark, which would have given a dangerously rough ride. This is neither accurate nor scientific. Noah’s Ark is the original, while the Gilgamesh Epic is a later distortion.”
Articles about the tablet seem to give credence to the thought that the ark was round rather than rectangular. The Bible, however, makes it clear that the ark wasn’t round, given the dimensions God gave to Noah. They make the same mistake that others have made about the ark of Genesis vis-à-vis the ark of the Epic of Gilgamesh. They assume that the author of Genesis merely copied the story of Noah and the Flood from the Babylonian story.
Given the integrity of the Old Testament as a divinely inspired work, the opposite is true.
References
Hodge, B. (2011, January 21). Was Noah’s Ark Shaped Like a Box? Retrieved from Answers in Genesis:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2011/01/21/feedback-ark-shape
Lovell, T. (2007, March 19). Thinking Outside the Box. Retrieved from Answers in Genesis:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n2/thinking-outside-the-box
Prigg, M. (2014, January 24). Was Noah’s Ark ROUND? Retrieved from The Mail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2545494/Was-Noahs-Ark-ROUND-3-700-year-old-clay-tablet-reveals-boat-coracle-reedsbitumen.html
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