Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [32]
All of these similarities suggest that these Near Eastern stories shared some common tradition, perhaps a memory of a catastrophic flooding of the Tigris-Euphrates plain. It is easy to imagine that people whose “world” constituted the area in which they lived could imagine that a devastating flood that affected them had actually destroyed the whole world. In fact, the Hebrew word for “earth” in Gen. 6:17 also means “land” or “country,” which would suggest a much more limited flood.
Generations of archaeologists have looked for evidence of this all-encompassing Flood. When the pioneering British archaeologist Leonard Wooley (1880-1960) was investigating Ur, one of the most important ancient ruined cities in the Tigris-Euphrates area, he found a layer of silt with remains of human civilization both above and below it. He was initially convinced this was physical evidence of Noah’s Flood. But Wooley later realized that this Ur-flood was local news, rather than an international story. He later wrote, “It was a vast flood (or series of floods) in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates which drowned the whole of the habitable land between the mountains and the desert; for the people who lived there that was indeed all the world.” It was later dated to a time too recent in human history to have been the Bible’s Big Flood. Researchers working in Wooley’s footsteps have since found evidence of numerous floods at sites in modern Iraq, some of them showing evidence of extensive destruction. Despite extravagant claims made by many in the past century, no one has discovered evidence of a flood that could have covered the whole earth.
For centuries, people have also searched for the remnants of Noah’s ark, just as they searched for the actual Garden of Eden, and numerous false claims still crop up, attracting tabloid newspaper attention. Unlike many other biblical places and objects whose location or exact appearance is a mystery, the ark came with God’s Little Instruction Book, a very rough set of directions. For all those parents who have sat down with a thousand bicycle parts on a child’s birthday, Noah’s predicament is understandable.
God gave Noah some fairly basic dimensions: 300 cubits long; 50 cubits wide; 30 cubits high. A cubit is roughly 18 inches (45 centimeters), giving the ark approximate dimensions of 450 feet (140 meters) long × 75 feet (22 meters) wide × 45 feet (12 meters) high. In other words, it was a very large box, the equivalent of one and a half American football fields. God told Noah to make it of “gopher wood” (in the King James Version), a wood mentioned nowhere else in the Bible, and translated elsewhere as “cypress.” The wood was to be covered with pitch, another similarity with the Gilgamesh epic’s boat. The ark was to have three decks, a door, and a roof. Besides these dimensions and rough outlines, God’s Little Instruction book was rather imprecise. It doesn’t specify the roof dimensions. Was it partial? Or complete? It doesn’t mention windows, although there was at least one.
In spite of the fact that this would have been a rather large object that Noah left behind, the search for the ark has turned up empty. Nobody ever found Eden and, so far, no one has unearthed the remains of the ark. Perhaps Noah chopped the ark into firewood because there was no dry wood around. For a long time, the search for the ark centered on Mount Ararat, even though Genesis specifically mentions that Noah’s ark settled on “the mountains of Ararat.” And where exactly are these mountains? The “mountains of Ararat” lie in a region surrounding Lake Van in modern Turkey, located midway between the Black and Caspian Seas.
Apart from its historical possibilities, the Noah story serves as a symbolic second creation tale. God realizes his flaws and starts over. It is not