In 2014, four enterprising British physics graduate students at the University of Leicester published a paper calculating the carrying capacity of Noah’s Ark – the maximum weight it could carry while still floating, with the roof just above the waterline – to be about 2,150,000 sheep, using an average mass of 23.47 kg per sheep (1 kg corresponds to 2.2 lbs). Scholars have estimated, using reasonable estimates, that the Ark needed to carry only 70,000 animals to fulfill its mission (35,000 pairs, setting aside the fact that there were seven pairs of each variety of ritually clean animals to be used for sacrifices).
One would think that questions about the Ark would have been settled once it was established that the dimensions given in the Torah were sufficient to carry the animals and provisions for them (leaving aside the skeptics, as represented by a highly critical 41-page article in the National Center for Science Education’s Creation/Evolution Journal back in 1983, which dismissed the entire Biblical account as follows: “The story of the great flood and the voyage of the ark, as expounded by modern creationists, contains so many incredible ‘violations of the laws of nature’ that it cannot possibly be accepted by any thinking person. Despite ingenious efforts to lend a degree of plausibility to the tale, nothing can be salvaged without the direct and constant intervention of the deity.”).
Much to my surprise, however, writing in Tablet in July 2022, researcher Michael Lind, a fellow at New America and political conservative, began his article “Shape of Noah’s Ark: Mystery Solved,” with the statement: “What was the shape of Noah’s Ark? For millennia Jewish and Christian clerics, scholars, and academics, as well as others with too much time on their hands, have pondered this question.”
That was the first time I’d heard that such a question even existed. The description of the Ark in Sefer Bereishis seems quite straightforward: 50 cubits wide, 300 cubits long, 30 cubits high. And every cargo ship that we’re familiar with has roughly the shape of a rectangular solid, albeit with some curvature of the sides.
The question arose with the discovery of a cuneiform tablet, dated about 3,700 years old, which was translated in 2004 by Irving Finkel at the British Museum, describing the ark of King Atra-Hasis as being circular and made of reeds. (More about this to come.)
In his article, Lind’s conjecture begins by noting that the word tevah appears just twice in the Bible, once in reference to Noah’s Ark, and the other in describing the basket in which Yocheved places Baby Moses to float down the Nile. His point is that the basket would normally be thought of as circular. From there he engages in a lengthy argument that refers to several Babylonian flood myths describing a circular ark, as if to consign the story of Noah to that same genre, and concludes that the unknown author of Genesis he labels as “P” recycled those myths. To quote:
Most contemporary scholars agree that Genesis splices together at least two versions of the flood story by different authors, which in turn modify earlier Mesopotamian myths. The priestly author (or P) is thought to have been responsible for the measurements of Noah’s Ark. The pagan sources of the flood story that were modified by the Jewish authors probably were Babylonian, because Genesis in its current form is thought to have been put together following the return of Jewish leaders and priests from exile in Babylon, around 500 BCE.
Needless to say, Tablet is not an Orthodox periodical. So much for Deuteronomy’s account that Moshe Rabbeinu wrote the original scroll of the entire Torah as dictated by G-d.
Despite Lind’s problematic narrative, I believed it could be interesting to redo the students’ calculations using his identification of parameters to see what effect his change would have on the Ark’s carrying capacity. On further thought, however, I realized that the exercise is unnecessary because there is a serious difficulty with Lind’s analysis – namely, the construction of an ark with three stories.
Our starting point is his contention that the account of the Ark was derived from the story of the ark built by the Akkadian king Atra-Hasis. As previously stated, like most Mesopotamian arks, the Atram-Hasis ark was circular in cross-section, and made from reeds, similar to baby Moshe’s ark of bulrushes. (Lind gets around the Biblical description of the Ark as made of gopher wood, which the British students identified as cypress, by citing The Jewish Encyclopedia that the word gofer “may have been derived from the Assyrian word giparu for reeds.”) Whereas Finkel strained to translate the rare words rochav as width and orech as length, Lind changed the translation to radius and circumference, respectively, based on identifying the 6:1 ratio of orech to rochav as a sometimes-used Biblical approximation to 2 times pi, which to two decimal places is 6.28 (using pi = 3.14).
From there he extrapolated that the builders laid out a square 120 cubits on a side (the aforementioned physics students took an average value of 48.2 centimeters or 19 inches per cubit), and then inscribed a circle whose diameter was 120 cubits. The area of the circle, which is the floor area of the ark, is then pi times the square of the radius (60 cubits), which comes to 11,309.7 square cubits, about three-fourths the area – 15,000 square cubits – of the 300-cubit x 50-cubit rectangular ark.
Next, they drew two transverse diameters connecting the midpoints of each opposing side and marked their intersection as the center of the circle. Then the workers laid down 30 ribs, according to the Ark tablet, each 120 cubits long, equal to the diameter of the boat, with 10 cubits at each end curving upward to form a height of 12 cubits for the boat. This leaves about 100 cubits as the diameter of the boat, hence 50 cubits as the radius. The circumference of the circular boat is then 2 times pi times 50 cubits, equaling 314 cubits, which Lind rounds to 300.
As Lind writes, we now have two of the three numbers, the “length” of 300 cubits and the “width” of 50 cubits, that Genesis 6:15 specifies as dimensions of the Ark. As for the third, 30 cubits, he contends that it arises from a mistake by the hypothetical storyteller – assuming that the Ark was shaped like a bowl, with the 120-cubit sides curving upward to meet the perimeter of a circle of diameter 100 cubits. From geometry, in this case the vertical height of the bowl is 28.2 cubits, which he rounds to 30. The additional height allows for the addition of a third story.
This all seems to be a neat package, but there is one concern. The aforementioned Irving Finkel and his technical expert, Mark Wilson, wrote in their book Beyond Noah’s Ark that the Ark was made of wood, in accordance with the usual translation of gofer. Lind, however, suggests it was made of flexible reeds to account for bending the ribs upward to form the sides, as wood doesn’t bend so easily, as well as to maintain consistency with his view that the story of the Ark is adapted from the earlier Mesopotamian myths of an ark made of reeds.
It seems preposterous to me that an ark containing many thousands of animals – and a year’s supply of food for them – could possibly be seaworthy if it were made from reeds. Lind makes no reference to this issue. And if the ark were made of wood, how could Noah and his sons manufacture curved sides without the benefits of modern technology?
Lind concluded his article with the rhetorical flourish of appending the Latin phrase “Quod erat demonstrandum” (Q.E.D.), which translates as “which was to be demonstrated,” commonly used as the conclusion of a proof in geometry, although he qualified it by stating that whether one believes the Ark was circular or rectangular is less important than the point of the story. With all due respect, his argument, while somewhat plausible, falls short of a definitive proof using established postulates, theorems, and geometric properties. It is, rather, a hypothesis or conjecture inferred from evidence.
When it comes to the Torah, my response is to quote Tug McGraw, the star relief pitcher for the Miracle New York Mets, who won the 1969 World Series over the mighty Baltimore Orioles (and was also the father of country singer Tim McGraw): “You gotta believe.”