Noah's Ark Found ?

ABC News recently did a story about some Christian archeologists from Texas who claim to have found the remnants of Noah’s Ark. They apparently found something that looked to them like the Ark on Mount Suleiman in Iran's Elburz mountain range rather than on Mount Ararat in Turkey, the site identified in Genesis 8:4. Nevertheless, they believe it is the Ark. The material they found is being tested. "I can't imagine what it could be if it is not the Ark," said Arch Bonnema of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute, a Christian archeology organization dedicated to looking for biblical artifacts.

We have to wonder at the pathetic spectacle of “scientific” teams of grown men going out and climbing mountains to find the remains of Noah’s Ark. It is a little sad. Serious archeologists, geologists, historians, and theologians know that the story of Noah’s Ark is an ancient myth, a fairy tale, not history. It never really happened. Nevertheless, crackpots like Carl Baugh, director of the Creation Evidence Museum, have been claiming for years that the remains of the Ark are located on Mount Ararat. Now it is supposed to have been found on another mountain.

In the first place, there are two flood stories in Genesis. In one, God tells Noah that he is going to destroy sinful mankind with a flood and that Noah is to take his family and two of every kind of animal on board the Ark (Genesis 6:19). In the other, God directs Noah to take seven pairs of clean animals, of every type, and one pair of the unclean (Genesis 7:2). The reason that there are two stories is because there were different people who wrote different stories at different times which were later stitched together into what we now call Genesis. It was not written by Moses as is claimed in the Bible.

According to the Bible, the Ark was 300 cubits (about 450 feet) long. This is considerably longer than the largest wooden vessels ever built in historical times. Shipbuilders know that wooden ships over 300 feet long (the size of a football field) would not be able to float. The schooner Wyoming, launched in 1909, was the largest documented wooden-hulled cargo ship ever built. It measured only 350 feet and needed iron cross-bracing to counter warping and a steam pump to handle a serious leak problem.

Try to imagine fitting all those thousands of animals onto the Ark. There would be two (or seven) of every kind of elephant, rhinoceros, hippo, ox, cow, horse, lion, tiger, bear, giraffe, buffalo, etc. It would have been impossible for many of the animals to come from distant parts of the world. How could kangaroos and koalas get from Australia to the Middle East? How did Noah keep lions, tigers, bears, panthers, and hyenas from attacking deer, elk, antelope, sheep and other kinds of natural prey? How did Noah feed all those animals?

Anthropoligists and paleoanthropoligists have used fossils and DNA to trace the history of man. They know that our species originated in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. They have the bones of missing links from homo sapiens to more ancient species that preceded man. There has been no worldwide flood interfering with human history. Moreover, geologists are unable to find any physical evidence of the kind of worldwide flood spoken about in the Bible. There were, however, many local floods in the Mesopotamian valleys where the flood myths originated.

The story of Noah and the Flood did not originate with the writers of the Hebrew Bible. It was borrowed from ancient Mesopotamian myths that precede the writing of the Bible by thousands of years. The Mesopotamian myths were written about different gods and different people.

The Babylonian Epic of Atrahasis, written over a thousand years before the Bible, is an account of a pious hero who is warned by the god Enki to build a great ship and load it with family and selected animals in order to escape the coming deluge. The rains come, and everybody else in the world is drowned. The ship grounds on a mountain in Armenia and the hero releases three birds. The third bird does not return. A sacrifice pleases the god, and the god promises never to send another flood. Sound familiar? The Sumarian story of Ziusudra, and the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, both written thousands of years before the Bible, have similar stories. In the Babylonian flood myth, the central story is about a fight between the gods Marduk and Tiamat.

Fundamentalist Christians and Jews might argue that the building of the Ark was a miracle and that the whole story must be taken as miraculous. Why then do they expect to find the actual Ark? Surely it was a miraculous vessel that God created only for that one period of time, not a practical ship that would still survive today.

Perhaps I shouldn’t waste my time caring about these things. It is just that I have always felt that we are better off knowing the truth than believing in myths and fables.