Noah's ark NOT found

In case you missed it, there is a story out today about some Chinese and Turkish explorers who believe they may have found Noah's ark 4,000 meters up a mountain in Turkey. They were reported as being 99.9% sure.

They reason it was a wooden structure that could not have been built as a building by an early civilization since it carbon dated to 4,800 years ago and was above 4,000 meters and no established human civilization has ever been found above 3,500 meters in that area and from that time period.

Of course no 4,800 year old boats have ever been found above 3,500 meters either.

Not

I am going to go way, way out on a limb and predict that this is assuredly NOT Noah's ark.

The Bible

First of all, let's talk about the Bible story of the flood. Assuming you accept the story as literal and factual, as I do, you probably subscribe to one of three schools of thought.

1. The flood was global and catastrophic.
2. The flood was global, but non-catastrophic.
3. The flood waters were worldwide from Noah's perspective, local from our perspective, but global in their impact on humanity.

Pretty much everyone would agree that while Noah may have been very intelligent and very old, he almost assuredly didn't have access to Roman or even Egyptian era technology and lived in a time when there was likely no commercial shipping.

Also, the boat he built was vey big. So big in fact, that no modern designer has been able to make a wooden boat even close to those dimensions.

That leaves us without any explanation for how Noah could have designed and built a boat with no engineering or boat building experience, no advanced tools, and no opportunity for failure. It isn't looking good for Noah and the future of humanity.

You might argue that God would have guided him every step of the way. I would agree that is what it would have taken to build a hollow hulled boat and even then, it may have needed some steel reinformcement or some sort of wondrous wood strengthening compound. My problem with this view is that it assumes far, far more than is suggested either in the Bible text or by history and archaeology.

A realistic boat

Since I have started doing hand tool woodworking, I have developed the idea that the ark was likely based on a design along the lines of a floating dock or barge-like structure. Perhaps it was several distinct structures linked together in some way and that is what was meant by the rooms that were to be made.

First of all, the Bible text says it was pitched within and without. Why would a hollow structure need to have been pitched on the inside? To preserve it for future explorers? A floating barge made up of split beams laid side by side and layered many layers deep could have been pitched throughout so the logs wouldn't get waterlogged and to help hold them together. On top of this structure, a storied house could have been built to hold everyone.

A craft of this kind could have been built with simple hammers, knives, axes, and wedges. Logs could have been felled along one of the rivers or its tributataries, split, dried and pitched with tar either before or after arrival at their destination, rolled down into the water or floated with the rising spring waters and floated downsteam to the dockyard.

When the logs arrived, they could have been maneuvered into place relatively easily with just a few men if the logs were split into beams, and lashed or interlocked to the other logs.

This type of construction would very possibly have been familiar to Noah and allows for the ark to have actually been built on the water and therefore be float tested before the big flood. Also, it would allow for significant flexibility of the base in the flood waves without leaking or breaking apart, and could have been built by a relatively small labor force over a period of dozens of years.

It might even be conceivable that such a structure could have been build just with Noah and his family over a period of a hundred years or so. If so, this solves another problem. Some have suggested that Noah was likely a king-type figure and had great wealth and the ability to conscript large labor forces. It seems that such assumptions would be necessary for the building of a hollow hulled boat. On the other hand, it seems that if so many people were involved in building the ark that at least some of them would have gotten on the ark if only to have pleased Noah. If Noah and his family were the lone ark architects, it makes more sense that they were the only ones to get on. Also it solves the related problem of how a people could be so bad with such a good king.

If my theory of a bargebased ark is correct, given its immense bulk, we might actually have a slim chance of finding parts of the base of the ark, particularly if it were made from some rot resistant wood, which I think likely. Cypress is probably the most commonly suggested wood species. I suppose it is as good a candidate as any since we really have no idea what gopher wood was.

Finding Noah's ark

What we should be looking for is more along the lines of something that was once huge stacks of large timbers rather than a large hollow hull. Depending on your view of the Genesis geneaologies and how much telescoping of the generations you are willing to allow for, it should be roughly 4,300 to 50,000 years old.

Of course, we would then have to redraw all of the ark pictures in every Bible story book ever written.

—Luke