Noah's Ark

Many Christians are familiar with the story of Noah's Ark in the Holy Bible.

Apparently God was kinda pissed with the world then, and He ordered Noah to build the ship by hand.


Genesis 6
[14] Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

[15] 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.

300 biblical cubit = 137.2 meter
50 biblical cubit = 22.86 meter
30 biblical cubit = 13.72 meter

And then God commanded him to bring in a pair of each species of living creature with him.

[19] And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.

[20] Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.

Then God poured water onto the earth for forty days and forty nights.

[11] In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

[12] And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

And the flood lasted for five months..

[24] And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.

and finally the rain stopped, and the boat came to rest on the Mountain of Ararat

[4] And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.

So they lived happily ever after, blessed by God, and apparently God made a covenant with Noah stating that He'd never wash the world with flood again, with the rainbow as the witness~ Thanks to Noah, now we've got rainbow every time it rains.


Hence the story got passed down from one generation to another, and now still we get to hear the story from our nursery.
And this has apparently attracted the attention of scientists worldwide who try to understand what actually happened on that fateful day.

In come Science

There were numerous expedition set out to find the remains of the ark, and sadly I couldn't trace the earlier sightings as they were more or less flawed, or mythical. There were even stories like some random scientists threatening some local people not to reveal the ark's position and so on, so I'll stick to the latest discovery then.

Recently there was a report in Nat Geo regarding a group of evangelical Christian explorers who ventured to Turkey, and of course, ended up on the Mount Ararat, and claimed to have found the ark. They claimed to be 99.9% sure that this is it o.O

Aerial view of the location of the ark. The shape of the deformed earth resembles that of a ship. How could this sort of thing occur high up on a mountain? Only a huge flood could carry a boat up a mountain.

But they couldn't produce any solid evidence to support their arguments.

There were videos, however, being released and it showed the dark interior of the supposed ark, and according to my understanding there were numerous reports saying that the ark had been destroyed by erosion and only part and parcel of the wood remained. o.O

It was also said that the ark was no longer there--it had been stripped apart by Noah and co. After the flood every living thing should be dead and the ground was literally barren, so where did the survivors find wood to build their houses and as fire wood? There in front of them was a giant vessels which could fuel their houses for years. Logical thinking would lead them to dismantle the ship to be used as firewood of course o.O

For real?

Another conflicting fact is that the reported ark was supposed to be quite old, and radiocarbon dating dated the wood to be much younger than what was told in the bible. Conflicting isn't it? Moreover, it was reported that the Turkish government had approved a plan to set up the area as a tourist spot, apparently to dig into the pockets of pilgrims from all over the world, just like what the Vatican does to its museum and St. Peter's Basilica. Commercializing holy places is evil.

Long queue to enter the Vatican Museum

I personally think that the report is biased, because the expedition was made up of evangelist Christians. Try to think what would the world say should they ended up without finding the damn ark? Atheists would certainly gain an upper hand and claim that the bible is not true after all, and other major religions would have an opportunity to attack the Abrahamic religions.

Anyway, I have always ignored all these findings, though I've had interested in it when I was much younger. But as I grew older I started to think that perhaps these reported sightings are biased reports made by some fanatic evangelists who interprets the bible literally.

Nicholas Copernicus

Nicholas Copernicus was a priests who stood by his view that the Sun was the center of the universe, and he published his findings when he was on his death bed, fearing the worst should the Vatican decided to accuse him of blasphemy. That's one perfect example of how people interpreted the bible literally and got led to nowhere, because perhaps God didn't mean it that way...?

There will be much more biblical findings in the future, I supposed, because Jesus Himself warned against "false Christs" that would appear and "lead us away from the truth"

Think before you believe =P



Malcolm