Ark Encounter: The Boat Don’t Float

To say that it would have been a rough voyage is an understatement. The weather on our planet owes all of its fluctuating patterns, its calms and its storms, to the variations in barometric pressure which its land masses produce. So what would happen to the Earth’s weather if we were to submerge these great continents, these many islands large and small, and cover the planet with water?

The reality of weather conditions during the Flood. My painting of the Ark Encounter’s ark bravely riding the monster waves is a fantasy. In reality, engineering principles for such an enormous wooden hull dictate that the vessel would inevitably have broken its back before even the first wave struck.

We do not need to speculate, because we can see the results by studying the other planets in our own solar system. Dry Venus and Mars have no surface water, and while both are certainly subject to [1]storms, to find a closer model to weather on our hypothetical water-covered Earth we need to look at such planets as Jupiter and Neptune. With lower cloud levels compressed by atmospheric pressure to a fluid-like [2]turbulence, massive storm systems rage unrelentingly around these planets. Why? Simply because there are no continental land masses to stop them. Once a wind picks up it is free to tear its way around every line of longitude a planet possesses – and with a planet’s rotation as its power source, it does.

Belts of storms rage around Jupiter. Removing Earth’s land masses from the equation to create a flooded world would generate such proportionally powerful and long-lived storms as these, and would have been the dismaying weather forecast for the ark’s seven-month voyage. 

This frightening weather scenario is the factor which seems to be most often overlooked – perhaps at times conveniently – when considering the feasibility of the story of Noah’s Ark. I was drawn back to this topic after learning that the Creation Museum in Kentucky has now opened its Ark Encounter theme park with its full-sized ark to the public. When I first discussed the feasibility of Noah’s Ark in my [3]previous post, plans by the [4]‘Museum’ to build a full-sized ark as a theme park attraction had just been made public. Now the ark is there, as large as life – or at least, as large as the dimensions provided by scripture.

The organizers of the Ark Encounter attraction claim their ark to be the most accurate ‘reconstruction’ ever. So let’s see what sort of description the Book of Genesis provides as a working blueprint. It is, in fact, so brief that I can quote it here in full. In Genesis 6 God instructs Noah as follows: “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. 16: A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it."

This version of the Ark Encounter’s ark at sea from the creationist website Answers in Genesis promises calm seas and a prosperous voyage. Apart from the fact that the vessel is sitting far too high in the water for the combined weight of its live cargo and the vessel itself, the difference between their version and mine is clearly in the weather conditions. But let’s face it: creationists never were that big on the science.

That’s all there is. Unless I have missed something, there is nothing whatever in this description about the [5]ark being like a boat, or even like a sea-going vessel of any kind. And although precise dimensions are given, the fact is that we simply do not know exactly how long a ‘cubit’ was. It is usually thought of as being the length of the human forearm, but it turns out that different [6]cultures all had their own ‘cubits’, with each one differing from another.

The interior of the Ark Encounter’s ark. Imagine this scene, not well-lit and filled with curious visitors, but rolling and pitching in semi-darkness at sea in storm conditions. The lateral stress on all those massive beams, the combined  cacophony of noise produced by the groaning timbers and the cries of hundreds of frightened animals fouling their cages with fear, and Shem, Ham and Japheth frantically trying to stuff rags into ever-more-serious leaks presents a rather less cosy picture than is suggested here.

And what is ‘gopher wood’? The term is virtually unique to this single verse of scripture – and unknown anywhere else. We are left to speculate. It might have been cedar wood, or cypress, or even reeds. Or it might simply refer to wood which has been treated in some way: either planed smooth or treated with pitch. We simply do not know. So if we cannot exactly calculate its dimensions, and if we do not know the type of wood from which it was constructed, and if we are not even told what form or shape it took… on what basis can we assert that any given reconstruction of the ark is ‘the most accurate’?

This drone view of the ark under construction shows a row of thirty skylight windows per side. That’s fifty-nine more than are specified in scripture. Even for creationists the answers, apparently, are not all in Genesis.

The Genesis description specifies that the ark had one door and one window. But look at the Ark Encounter ark in the scale diagram below. It certainly has one door – but that door has been placed below the waterline. Draw your conclusions. And it certainly does not have ‘one window’. In fact, it has a whole row of skylight windows running almost full length on either side of the roof (or deck, if you’re of a seafaring nature). I have counted thirty windows on each side, making sixty in all. They’re certainly not mentioned in scripture, so where did they all come from?

The two largest historically documented wooden vessels ever built were the U.S.S. Dunderberg, renamed the Rochambeau, and the schooner Wyoming. The Rochambeau saw only brief service before being decommissioned due to constant serious leakage. The Wyoming sank in sheltered waters with the loss of all hands, also due to serious leakage. The Ark Encounter ark shown here is half again as large as these two ill-fated vessels – and the door is below the waterline!

Now consider the Ark Encounter hull shape. The forward-raking bow is clearly modelled, not upon any [7]vessel of the time, but upon the hull of a contemporary cargo ship. Why? And those wooden planks are clearly laid upon some sort of synthetic (insulation?) cladding. Rather than being structural to the vessel, they literally are a mere veneer. You might argue that the ark, which additionally rests upon concrete piles, was never actually intended as a serious Bronze Age reconstruction of a possible vessel. You might indeed, but then you should not make any claims for its ‘accuracy’. Still, creationist claims have time and again proven, both in their [8]‘Museum’ and with the Ark Encounter exhibit, that showmanship is prized above intellectual honesty. For all its size, this particular ark is a mere theme park attraction, and any pretence at Biblical ‘accuracy’ is exactly that: a pretence, and a dishonest one at that.

The Ark Encounter ark under construction. The hull planking is laid over a synthetic cladding. Bronze Age construction methods these are not. And where is the coating of pitch so specifically mentioned in scripture? A black ark, apparently, was deemed to be not such an aesthetic crowd-puller, and even this brief passage in Genesis was cherry-picked in the name of showmanship. 

My previous post on this subject covers in detail exactly why a wooden hull with the proportions of a contemporary steel cargo vessel (that is: the ark’s dimensions as specified in Genesis) would lead to inevitable disaster. To sum things up in a single sentence: the inescapable engineering rule states that the larger a wooden vessel is, the weaker its structural integrity becomes. With its keel of necessity being made from several individual trunks of timber the vessel would break its back under its own weight and the combined weight of its biomass cargo (all those dinosaurs sure won’t help) as soon as it became waterborne. Why are these points important? Because of the other claim about the Ark Encounter ark: as stated on its [9]website, it is claimed to be ‘amazingly seaworthy’.

Dinosaurs in their enclosures on board the Ark Encounter ark. There is much that I could say about this, but I think I’ll just sit on my hands and refer you to my extended ‘caption’ about it here.

There is one relevant factor which I did not mention in my previous post, and that is the dangerous phenomenon known as ‘freewater’. It was [10]freewater which caused the Herald of Free Enterprise tragedy in 1987. It was freewater which caused the sudden sinking of Henry VIII’s flagship Mary Rose in 1545, and which sealed the fate of the newly-launched magnificent Swedish warship Vasa in 1628. Freewater is a shallow layer of water (it need not be deeper than a few inches at most) which can enter through any opening and fatally compromise a vessel’s equilibrium. Wave action will cause an ever more severe side-to-side rocking motion until the vessel inevitably rolls over. The frightening thing about the phenomenon is just how little water in a vessel it takes to cause disaster.

Creationists seem to labour under the delusion that saying something loud enough somehow makes it more true. The irony which seems to escape them is that this billboard’s statement actually is true: you cannot sink a ship which has never been launched in the first place. And apparently they encourage their own siege mentality by branding all who disagree with them as ‘intolerant liberals’. Basically, that means anyone who uses their common-sense, whether they believe that faculty is God-given or not.

I trust the point has been made: it is the very size of the Ark Encounter’s ark (and we’ll assume that it is at least within a reasonable margin of Biblical accuracy) which so counts against it as a credible seaworthy vessel. We tend to equate large size with security and a greater degree of safety, but with a [11]wooden hull the opposite is true. Maybe half the size and the ark just might have been a going concern. But half the size is not Biblical size, and in Biblical literalism scripture has to be adhered to, even if that means that all credibility is jettisoned. Great size, then, does not equal greater safety and stability. In fact, it fatally compromises both if the vessel is made, not of steel, but of wood.

And what of those huge storm systems that would have swept around the planet during the Biblical Flood? They would have created an unrelenting series of perfect storms through which the Ark would have had to struggle, and my painting of the Ark Encounter ark battling monster waves which heads this post is anything but overdramatised. And with the weight of immutable engineering principles to back me up, and with professional experience in the field of marine archaeology, I figure I’d be just as likely to survive in a rusty bathtub.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] In the case of these waterless planets, it is principally the variations in land contours which provide the weather. Any planet with an atmosphere will generate weather of some description.

[2] That is: the compressed lower atmospheric levels of these gas planets become analogous to a water-covered planet.

[3] Please see my post: The Lost Ark of Noah.

[4] As I always relish pointing out: in an apparent attempt to imbue their institution with an aura of respectability, the very Christian creationists have named their building after a pagan temple. The original Museum was actually the temple of the Muse in Ancient Greece.

[5] The translated word ‘ark’ in the original Hebrew text is ‘tebah’, which implies any sort of protective container whose contents are precious. Thus: the Ark of the Covenant. The basket in which the baby Moses was found is also referred to as a ‘tebah’.

[6] The Biblical cubit is generally thought to have been almost 46 centimetres or around 18 inches, but clearly the greater the distance measured, the wider the margin of error becomes – and over the length of the Ark that is clearly considerable.

[7] The only vessels of the time which had such a water-cleaving prow were modestly-sized Bronze Age Greek ships. Such a hull design did not reappear on ships until comparatively late in the modern era.

A side-by-side comparison between these three hulls clearly shows the influence upon the Ark Encounter’s ark of modern supertanker design. There is no mention whatever in scripture of such a forward-raking prow for the ark, or even that the vessel was boat-shaped as such, so where did these ideas come from?

[8] Please see my post: How do Creationists know what Dinosaurs looked like? for a particularly dubious  example of creationist hypocrisy.

[9] Ark Encounter. Bring a life vest.

[10] In the tragic case of the Herald, the loading ramp of the car ferry apparently had not been fully closed before the ferry cast off, and the vessel sank in calm weather within sight of the harbour which it had just left. With the Mary Rose and the Vasa, water appears to have entered through the open lower gun ports, although the Vasa already was a flawed top-heavy design. In all cases, witnesses report the shocking speed at which such a freewater-endangered vessel will roll over and sink – literally within minutes.

[11] What makes the ark so vulnerable? To clarify this point for any reader who is still wondering (or who might doubt what I say here!): steel can be welded to itself. Once a weld is made, two sheets of steel effectively become one large sheet, and so on over a whole hull. Wood is wood, and the size of the continuity of construction is limited by the plank or beam from the original tree. You cannot weld wood to itself. You can only join it using carpenter's joinery methods.

Rolling and pitching: So the larger the wooden hull, the more such joints it will contain. Every single joint represents a potential stress point which at sea is subject to wave action, and this action comes from multiple directions: both from the roll (side-to-side rocking) movement of lateral wave action, and from the pitch (up-and-down) bow to stern movement when the vessel is directly facing a wave. In rough weather these forces come from various directions at once, placing each and every joint under greater stress.

Why more joints equals greater risk: In heavy or even moderate seas most of the joints in the whole vessel will be subject to the added stress of water pressure from the sea itself, and every joint, no matter how perfectly-fitted it might be to its adjoining beam or plank, will move, and leakage is inevitable. The larger the hull size the more this factor is multiplied. For the ark, the factor is not so much how large it is overall, but how many joints its many timbers contain. So the engineering formula is:

The larger the wooden hull, the more joints there are, and the more joints there are the weaker and more vulnerable the overall structure becomes in waterborne conditions.

What is broaching? The ark has no steering means whatever. It would be completely at the mercy of the prevailing wind direction, and an unsteerable vessel is subject to a phenomenon known as 'broaching'. That is: it will tend to turn beam-on (side-on) to the weather. This means that the waves will be hitting it from the side - and with the hull proportions of the ark, that really matters. The longer a hull is, and the more narrow in the beam (width), the more vulnerable it becomes to a rollover in a broaching situation. Far from being the ideal proportions for seaworthiness claimed for it by the Ark Encounter exhibit, the ark's supertanker proportions combined with its wooden construction would have sealed its fate in even moderate seas.

The Word of God

What is the bottom line of your faith? If you are Christian, is it accepting the divinity of Jesus? Perhaps it is in the acknowledgment of his sacrifice to take your sins upon his own shoulders, or in tracing his perfect [1]lineage back to the prophets of old. But none of these things, however vital they might be to your faith, are necessarily at the foundation of what makes your faith workable. The keystone upon which all these other things rests is the simple acceptance that scripture is the revealed Word of God: that the texts of the [2]Bible, and every word which appears in them, are the product of Divine Revelation. Because without accepting this premise scripture becomes like any other secular text, and its supernatural elements – all of them – are reduced to an interesting but questionable fiction.

Ascribing authorship to the four gospels and other such texts is a considerably less certain exercise than the editors of my own [3]King James Version admit to. In fact, it’s not certain at all. Centuries before copyright laws existed, it would not have been considered a subterfuge to attach the name of some respected prophet or apostle to a text with the wish to imbue that text with an aura of authority.

That in almost every case we simply do not know who wrote these texts (regardless of the various names to whom these texts are nominally attributed) need not in itself be a reason to preclude them from being divinely inspired, any more than some of the greatest [4]literary works which we have are diminished in their greatness simply because their authors are unknown to us. So we must use other criteria to determine these texts’ divine source. But what are these criteria? By what standards can we possibly determine beyond doubt whether, when we open our Bible, the words that we read are truly those of God speaking through his chosen ones? 

While I was reading through some of the many annotations and footnotes in my copy of the [5]Gnostic Scriptures, a singular thought occurred to me. Here was a volume of texts presented with scrupulous scholarship. Its various translators of the original [6]Coptic and [7]Greek languages into English were happy enough, where appropriate, to provide possible alternative phrases and meanings where the original language had no exact English equivalent or was ambiguous. Little or no attempt had been made to polish the language of the originals for the sake of introducing a poetic turn of phrase. What richness of language there was emerged from the original texts, and not from any over-enthusiastic translation, however well-intentioned.

A portion of the poorly-preserved Gospel of Judas, written in Coptic. Such fragments dramatically illustrate the herculean task faced by scholars to recreate such texts, with reasonable assumptions made upon the basis of the context of the words around them being used to suggest what the words in the missing lacunas might have been.

But that was not all. Any ambiguities were further referenced to the works and examples of other translators beyond this particular edition, making any amount of cross-checking possible. And any lacunas (gaps in the text, usually caused through damage) were acknowledged as missing from the originals. If a word or a phrase used by the translator to fill such a gap was a speculative guess, then it was called just that. Scholastically, it was all impressively honest stuff.

My singular thought was: is there anywhere an equivalent volume published which deals with canonical texts in the same way? I know of individual books which do this for [8]specific texts in scripture, and there are of course individual studies and papers dealing with specific books or parts of books, but not a volume (or a series of volumes) which covers the whole of the Bible. On the face of it, there is no reason why there should not be a canonical (yet scholarly impartial) equivalent of my edition of the Gnostic scriptures. All of these texts, whether canonical or outside the canon, are ancient texts in ancient languages, written on scrolls or in [9]codices in various states of preservation. They are not even the original texts (no, none of them), but were written down by scribes and copyists, sometimes by blindly copying the characters of a [10]language unfamiliar to them, and with the inevitable scribal errors which this involves.

Part of the Dead Sea scroll in Ancient Hebrew known as the Great Isaiah Scroll. Where more than one copy of a text is available we can use these copies to create the complete text. But what if (as has happened) two copies contradict each other? How can we choose which version is the correct one? Perhaps only one copy is more true to the original – or perhaps even neither.

When reading, say, the King James Version, it is the easiest thing in the world to imagine that, yes, this must be the definitive complete version of scripture, simply because that is what it sounds like, and forget that the 17th-century KJV has been superseded in its accuracy both by contemporary scholarship and by new discoveries made since, particularly the Dead Sea scrolls, discovered just two years after the unearthing of the Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945.There is no ‘definitive’ version of scripture, simply because we do not have one. Neither can there ever be one, for who knows what texts still lie somewhere undiscovered that would yet demand revisions to what we now have? 

Just as with the Gnostic texts, what we instead have are variant readings with scribal errors, and the grappling with the exact meanings of words which [11]translation inevitably involves. Often-enough, a slight mistranslation can lead to a major error, such as the KJV having the Israelites cross the Red Sea, when the texts specify that they actually crossed the Reed Sea (Yam Suph: Hebrew: יַם-סוּף) – then an area of marshland east of the Nile Delta (at the time of these texts the Red Sea was actually known as the Erythraean Sea), or specifying the resting place of Noah’s ark as Mount Ararat, when the texts say, not ‘Ararat’, but the word ‘RRT’: the vowel-less rendition of the considerably less specific area of the kingdom of Urartu.

The Lord’s Prayer translated into the language of the Native American Choctaw Nation. Such powerfully-expressed sentiments as are found in this prayer perhaps lend themselves more readily to translation than complex episodes which took place within the cultural context of the Middle East of the Late Bronze Age, and which were written down in the Early Iron Age by minds already distant from the original settings of the events which they describe.

If I choose examples which already have been covered on this blog, then events taken as ‘Gospel’ truth shift under scrutiny from being actual historical events (the [12]Exodus, or the bloody Israelite [13]conquest of Canaan under the sword of Joshua) into being revealed either as metaphor or as concocted fiction. This hardly need surprise us, as the narratives relating these and other such Biblical events were only written down centuries (in the case of Joshua, almost a full thousand years) after the events which they describe. In our terms, the Book of Joshua is a historical novel.

How, then, can we reconcile these ancient texts, so full of errors, [14]contradictions and mistranslations, with being the immaculate revealed Word of God? Even Noah and his [15]ark turns out to be a story imported from the Babylonia of Israelite exile. David and Solomon might have existed, but their historical reality in all probability made them mere local warlords, rather than being the mighty father-and-son kings whose deeds resound in the pages of the Old Testament. If our belief accepts scripture as being divinely inspired en bloc, with all its omissions, mistranslations, bloody slaughters in God’s name, and shamelessly invented pedigrees of conquest, how do we reconcile these less-than-perfect (and certainly in places, morally odious) texts with divine perfection? In short: what is, or is not, divinely inspired, and how do we separate the two?

Two pages from a letter written in 1943 by Etty Hillesum in the holding camp of Westerbork in occupied Netherlands, prior to her deportation to Auschwitz. If this remarkable young woman could both find and recover a state of grace in a place that was a waking nightmare of inhumanity, why should we not consider that the Spirit acted through her at least as much as through the words that are written in scripture? How can we know where such a line exists?

The letters and diaries of Etty Hillesum reveal an ongoing dialogue with God through which she was able, even when facing the ultimate horrors of the Nazi death camp in which she died, to draw upon deep wellsprings of solace within herself, and even find compassion for her captors who took her life. Contrastingly, in the second book of [16]Kings we are told that forty-two little children are torn to pieces by bears, apparently for doing what little children do everywhere: for making fun of a bald man. In this case, the bald man in question being the prophet Elisha, the wrath of the Lord seems to have descended upon the children with ruthless [17]finality. Which of these two sources are we to consider more worthy of being divinely inspired: the horrific killing of little children for a triviality, or the profoundly spiritual yet deeply human words of a Holocaust victim?

You might criticize me for choosing such a grotesquely bizarre episode of scripture as my example, but that’s the whole point about scripture: it’s all in, or all out. If you want Psalm 23 and the Sermon on the Mount, then you also get the cruel deaths of those forty-two children and many other such shockingly inhuman episodes along with them. But what about those worthy ancient texts which are nowhere to be found between the covers of the Bible? Where is the magnificent passage from the Book of Enoch describing his ascent through the spheres of heaven, at least as stirring as anything in Ezekiel? Where are the profound spiritual insights offered by the Gospel of Thomas?

The prophet Enoch, who was claimed to be the seventh generation from Adam, and the great-grandfather of Noah. The book which bears his name might not have been written by him, but it does provide us with many of the details which otherwise are frustratingly missing from Genesis, from the nature of the fruit in Eden to the true reason for the Flood, as well as a stirring description to rival that of Ezekiel of Enoch’s ascent through the celestial spheres. We are left to wonder why this remarkable text never actually made it into scripture, but I for one consider scripture to be the poorer for its omission.

And that is what seems to be the problem with scripture as it has come down to us: the gaping flaw in our logic of perceiving it as being the result of Divine Revelation. However divinely inspired it might or might not be, whether a text – any text – is or is not the Word of God is something which is decided by imperfect and very fallible us.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Luke 3: 23-38 meticulously traces the lineage of Jesus from God, then Adam, all through the generations to the carpenter Joseph: a logic which passes me by when doctrine declares that his conception was of divine origin, and so making the tracing of such an earthly lineage redundant.

[2] Clearly this also applies to any texts which other religions deem to be the result of Divine Revelation. However much respect (or the lack of it) we might give the texts of another belief, one religion does not regard the text of another religion as falling within this category, otherwise the world would be of one faith. I have various editions of the Bible in my collection, including three editions in Dutch (right: the Dutch edition of the Bible illustrated with Rembrandt's etchings of Biblical subjects), as well as an authorized English translation of the Quran. Irrespective of my own beliefs, I treat them all with due consideration and respect. 

[3] King James Study Bible. Zondervan, 2002.

[4] The epics of Gilgamesh and Beowulf, and the 14th-century romance of chivalry Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are three examples which fall into this category.

[5] The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. Published by Harper One for Harper Collins, 2008.

[6] Coptic is an adaptation of written Egyptian using the Greek language.

[7] Such texts were written in Koine Greek: the common form of the Greek language in the Hellenist Middle East (that is: the areas which were subject to Greek influence following the conquests of Alexander the Great, which would have included Galilee and what is now Syria).

[8] Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (Trinity Press International, 1975) and Hans-Josef Klauck’s Ancient Letters and the New Testament: A Guide to Context and Exegesis (Baylor University Press, 2006) both provide exhaustive analysis of the letters of Paul.

[9] Codices are manuscripts bound in book form.

[10] From Ancient Hebrew into Greek for the Septuagint, or from Greek into Coptic. It is only to be expected that the more remote from the source, the less certain is the accuracy of the translation. The list, of course, goes on: from Aramaic into Greek, from Greek into Latin, from Latin into Middle English, from Middle English (and German) into the poetically archaic English of the King James Version, and so into all the languages of today. Translation, as anyone knows who has tried it, is not just a matter of transposing words. So many, many words simply have no equivalent in another language. Inflexions of meaning and differences in syntax and idiom can all conspire to force drastic compromise upon the translator, and subtle metaphors can become lost in a plodding literalism to take on new meanings which the original writers never intended. On this title page (left) of the Bible, translated from the Greek and Hebrew into German by Martin Luther in 1524, the artist Lucas Cranach depicts Joshua as an armoured knight very much belonging to his own time. 

[11] Please see my post A Simple Misunderstanding.

[12] Please see my post Odyssey and Exodus: the Long Journey Home.

[13] Please see my post The Butcher of Canaan.

[14] Please see my post The Words of Jesus.

[15] Please see my post The Lost Ark of Noah.

[16] 2 Kings 2: 23-24. I personally view these two short verses as two of the most callous and brutal which I have come across in all of scripture. This is not to say that I believe this shocking incident actually happened. It is what it says about it being included in scripture, and about what those who wrote it imagined to be God’s suitable justice. The two verses are short enough to include in full here: “23: And he (Elisha) went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. 24: And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.” If you think such bloody brutality would make even a Christian Apologist bend a knee, I refer you to this Christian website. Just scroll down to the picture of the bears and read how the ‘little children’ of scripture have mysteriously morphed in this commentary to become ‘young men’ who (according to this writer) get their well-deserved come-uppance. Seriously?

[17] While there appears to be much focus on the incident of the bears tearing the children to pieces as the result of Elisha’s cursing them, the following episode of Elisha raising a child from the dead (2 Kings 4: 8-37) seems to be glossed over in terms of placing it alongside the first incident to create a savage irony (which is why I do so here). Scripture tells us that Elisha had the power of life over death. Why then did he not compassionately use that power earlier – or more to the point: why did Elisha behave so despicably in the first place?

Sources:

Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries 1941-43, and Letters from Westerbork. Henry Holt and Company Inc. 1996. Other sourced titles are included in the notes above.

Gospel of Judas from National Geographic. Great Isaiah Scroll from Wikimedia Commons. Choctaw translation of the Lord’s Prayer provided by John C. Sacoolidge. Choctaw beaded sash from the 1830’s from the Oklahoma Historical Society. The imagined portrait of the prophet Enoch is painted by Hawkwood for the © David Bergen Studio, with a section of the Greek text of the Book of Enoch as a background.

Adam: The God who Failed

The story of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis, as with all such texts, was inherited from earlier oral traditions: stories that were handed down by word-of-mouth. And since all stories begin somewhere, and must have varied with subsequent retellings before they were committed to writing, we need not be so surprised if we come across variations of these now-familiar stories.

We might consider this or that version of a story definitive, as being the ‘right’ version, simply because it might be the version which has become the most familiar to us. In reality, definitive versions of these stories seldom exist. With the stories in scripture, the reasons behind why one is accepted into scripture and another is left by the wayside have had more to do with the arbitrary happenstances of history and individual opinion than is usually realized. So it is with the story of Eden.

In the morning of the world, on the slopes of Ararat, the gods El and his consort Asherah live in an idyllic garden. All is peaceable, and would have gone on being so were it not for the dark ambitions of the evil god Horon. The dark god has his sights set on El’s position as the supreme creator god, and might have made his ambitions a reality were his schemes not discovered by El. Horon finds himself cast out and hurled down the mountain. Seething with jealous rage and thwarted ambition, the dark god cloaks the world in a poisonous fog, and turns the beautiful Tree of Life that grows on the lower slopes into a black and twisted Tree of Death. As a final measure, he transforms himself into a terrible serpent and twines his glittering coils around the Tree’s branches.

Horon. Jealousy and thwarted ambition can poison the mind. When that mind belongs to a god the world as well can become poisoned.

Seeing the terrible transformation, and wishing only to restore his creation to its former pristine state, El dispatches the god Adam to set things to rights. Accompanied by his wife Eve, Adam journeys down into the world to confront Horon. Reaching the Tree of Death, Adam, it seems, seriously underestimates the evil serpent’s intent. Instead of persuading Horon to leave, Adam finds himself attacked and bitten by the serpent, and so relinquishes his immortality in the tree’s twisted shadow. The precious task entrusted to the god Adam by El has failed, and the world is changed forever. From that moment, Adam and Eve must live in the world as mortals, knowing death as the end of their days.

We recognize the principal characters and elements in this story. What we experience as its strangeness emerges from those other elements unfamiliar to us. Whether the story is more or less ‘true’ than the [1]version in Genesis is a question with little hope of an answer. It is, after all, a story, not a historical event. What we instead can say is that, being centuries older than the Genesis version, and therefore having gone through fewer retellings, it is closer to the [2]original source. The story is found on recently-deciphered clay tablets from the site of the Canaanite city of Ugarit, and the tablets have been dated to the [3]late 13th-century BCE.

The influential port city of Ugarit was centrally situated among the surrounding kingdoms and empires.

But how could this be a story of the Canaanites and not the Israelites? In a previous [4]post I mention the likelihood of the Israelites emerging from the Canaanite diaspora displaced by the Egyptian conquest of Canaan. In other words: the Israelites originally were the Canaanites. When the Israelites made a drive to assert their own identity as a people, they changed the name of El to Yahweh (Jehovah). But this happened over an extended period of time. The word appearing in the original Genesis text as [5]elohim is plural: ‘gods’, referring to El (the first syllable of Elohim) and Asherah. Thus the first words of Genesis correctly read:

“In the beginning the gods created the heaven and the earth.”

As with all goddesses, Asherah was eventually banished from the Israelite pantheon to be replaced by a single male-only deity, although her shadowy presence survives in these plural terms. Through our familiarity with Genesis we are aware of the similarities in the older Canaanite version of the Eden story. It is the differences which are momentous.

The goddess Asherah, mother of life. The rise of the new all-male monotheism left no room for any female presence of authority, and Asherah - and Eve the goddess - were among its victims.

In this world of gods and goddesses no blame falls upon Eve. Eve the goddess is not a woman who succumbs to temptation and taints the whole of humanity with sin. Rather, she is a victim of her husband’s reckless mishandling of the situation. It is Adam who drops the ball. But in the all-male preserve of later Israelite beliefs, such a scenario would not wash, and the story was subsequently changed to become the scriptural version which has damned womankind ever since.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Two Creations in Scripture: In fact, there are two different versions of the creation in the first two chapters of Genesis. The first chapter has an unnamed first man and woman being created simultaneously from the same prima materia. This unnamed couple appear after the creation of the animals. The second chapter contains the familiar version of Eve being created from a rib of the sleeping Adam, with Adam now being created before all the animals. From a scholastic perspective, this is a clear indication that the texts of Genesis were compiled from at least two different sources. Unlike science, there are no mechanisms in place within scripture which allow for correction and revision. Scripture is immutable, and contradictions and discrepancies in these texts, however obvious, remain unchanged for centuries.

[2] Stories from Exile: Original sources of scriptural stories often-enough lie in the lands of Hebrew exile, which principally were Egypt and Babylonia. Such stories would have been exported from these lands with the exiles’ return. The story of Noah’s Ark is Babylonian, the original version, as with the Ugaritic Eden story, pre-dating the scriptural version by several centuries. The clay tablets which relate the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh contain the story of Ut-napishtim, who is chosen with his family by the gods to be the sole survivor of a great flood. He builds a huge vessel and takes his animals on board with him. To discover whether the waters have abated, he releases in turn a dove and a raven to find signs of dry land. Coincidence? I think not. 

[3] As current scholarship dates the texts of Genesis to the 6th-5th-centuries BCE, the Ugaritic version of the Eden story is twice as old as these.

[4] Please see my post The Butcher of Canaan.

[5] Preserving Belief: In their annotation to Genesis 1:1, the editors of my King James Study Bible (pub. Zondervan) acknowledge the plural term, but explain that it indicates “intensification rather than number”. No, I don’t really understand what they mean by this either. Attempts to demonstrate the term as singular by coupling it to the singular verb (as the Zondervan editors further mention) offer little traction, as the term would then still refer to 'the god El'. Since academic opinion now accepts that early Hebrew beliefs, having been derived from Canaanite beliefs, were polytheistic, the Zondervan editors provide an unintentional example of the way in which a belief can at times only be preserved by wilfully omitting known evidence. 

Sources:

Marjo Korpel & Johannes de Moor: Adam, Eve, and the Devil: A New Beginning. Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014. The text of Professors’ Korpel and de Moor’s book provides the basis for this post. This earlier version of the Eden story, deciphered by these authors, and retold by myself here, is not a ‘what if?’ situation. The clay tablets exist, they have been deciphered, and they say what is said here.

The 'Horon' serpent is based upon a photo by Steve Gooch. The 'Tree of Death' background is my own. The map has been compiled from various sources. Other images of the gods Adam and Eve and Asherah are painted by Hawkwood for the © David Bergen Studio. All Rights Reserved.

The Lost Ark of Noah

Recently I was intrigued to learn that Kenneth Ham, the Christian fundamentalist founder and director of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, plans to extend the museum as a theme park, with a full-scale dry dock Noah's Ark as the main crowd-puller. A Biblical scale Ark! Wow! Or... maybe not? Not being sure just how do-able the original Ark could have been, and tending not to take things at face value, I decided to crunch the numbers. So this post is not about the feasibility of getting a mating pair of Argentinian giant anteaters to the Middle East in time to get aboard, or even about where a volume of water far greater than all the oceans of the world combined actually 'abated' to. It is about the Ark as a potentially seaworthy vessel.

Noah's Ark! The name alone has an extraordinary hold on the imagination. The story in Genesis is so familiar that it seems to stretch across boundaries of belief, and countless depictions and models of the vessel have been made. Could the actual vessel still be in existence somewhere, just waiting to be found? Some claim that it already has been, and using scripture as a sort of road map to guide their search, have headed for the famed Mount Ararat in present-day Turkey. The incentive to establish it's existence is not hard to understand, for it would provide the actual hands-on truth of the Genesis story. But is finding it really so straightforward?

This photo (above) was taken on the lower slopes of Mount Ararat in Turkey; the place where Genesis tells us the Ark came to rest after the Flood receded. It seems to show the remains of a huge boat-shaped vessel, and the dimensions of the formation do more-or-less tally with those given in Genesis - and some intriguing artifacts have been found around the formation. It seems compelling evidence indeed, although the structure does match surrounding geology. And yet another strange prow-shaped formation known as the Ararat Anomaly has been spotted on the very slopes of snowy Ararat. There's just one snag with the remains of these supposed Arks: the location of the Ark, if it ever existed, is probably not the Biblical Ararat at all.

Were it not for the fact that I had been reading a *book on a different subject (the Biblical Nephilim), I might not have chanced across this nugget of information. But apparently the Biblical phrase 'mountains of Ararat' (note the plural) is translated from the Assyrian 'mountains of Urartu', a sprawling kingdom that then lay between present Turkish Kurdistan and Russian Armenia (the map above) - a far less specific and more vast  location. As both Urartu and Ararat originally would have been written as RRT (without vowels), there originally was no difference between the names 'Ararat' and 'Urartu'. So it seems that our popular notion of the Ark coming to rest on the top of Mount Ararat needs some impartial revision. But is it anywhere to be found at all? Just how feasible in the first place is the Ark in terms of being a built structure?

Willem Vos is a name to conjour with here in Holland. He is a master-shipbuilder whose stunning achievement has been to recreate a full-scale replica of the wooden 17th century Dutch East Indiaman, the Batavia (above). This is no theme park attraction, but a museum-standard research project; a faithful and seaworthy reconstruction built using only the original tools and methods. Working with the assistance of a small army of student volunteers and maritime archaeologists (one of whom I have worked with, but that - and the fate of the original Batavia - is another story!), the project took ten long years to complete - and the reborn Batavia has been under full sail on the open seas.

So with the *claim by Mr. Ham that the Ark which Noah built would have been 'eminently seaworthy', and with the achievement of Willem Vos in mind, I set about doing the math. The Batavia is 56½ meters (186 feet) long. Converting Biblical cubits to contemporary measure, the Ark would have been (conservatively) some 137 to 140 meters long – almost three times the Batavia’s length. So what about other large wooden ships known from history? There was the U.S.S. ironclad Dunderberg, launched in 1865, purchased by France and renamed the Rochambeau. At 115 meters long, it is one of the largest documented wooden-hulled vessels known. Alas, it was considered 'neither stable nor seaworthy' because of it’s size, and after serving only briefly in the Baltic was decommissioned and scrapped. And there was the similarly-sized six-masted schooner Wyoming, launched in 1909. At 100 meters long, it needed iron cross-bracing to counter warping in its timbers caused by wave motion, and a steam pump to handle constant serious leakage. Having run from a storm, it sank in sheltered waters with the loss of all hands.

But what was the problem with these floating wooden giants? Why can't we just build a wooden vessel as large as we please? Well, that’s where the engineering factor comes in, because this equation states simply enough that the greater the wooden structure, the more the structural integrity is compromised. In other words: the larger a wooden vessel is, the weaker it becomes. Calculating in this factor means that an 80-90 meter keel is probably the safe outer limit for a wooden vessel – and the Ark was half as long again as this. But what was the source of the Ark’s building material? The ‘gopher wood’ (‘gopher’ could have meant a method of treatment, rather than a type of tree) could have been the large cedar of Lebanon, whose maximum height is about 40 meters. The Ark’s keel would therefore have required at least four separate trunks laid end-to-end – and any shipwright will tell you that a ship’s weakness lies in the joins of its keel. But to be frank about it, in all his long life 'shipbuilder' Noah probably had not built so much as a rowing boat before - and was building the Ark with the most ominous deadline in human history looming over his head.

So it seems that Kenneth Ham's proposed land-locked Ark is driven more by a flair for showmanship than by daring faith. But if I remain unconvinced, what, then, might sway me? How about: once the creationist Ark is completed, fill it to capacity with assorted [1]fauna both wild and domestic (I'm being generous in not insisting that those Argentinian anteaters are aboard), get it waterborne, crew it with eight hands who between them have zero experience of seamanship (I'm sure that Mr. Ham will confidently volunteer to captain the vessel), and tow it down to the latitude of the Roaring Forties to simulate [2]sea conditions during the Flood. Then cut it loose to ride out the monster waves for a period of seven months (as specified in Genesis), with no means of turning the craft into the weather. If I could stand on the coast and watch the Ark sail safely back to port, then I might - just might - start to believe. Until then, my conclusion will be that such an overly-massive wooden structure as Noah's Ark, had it ever existed, would have broken its back as soon as it hit the water.

Long ago, a man built a *great wooden vessel to escape a deluge sent as divine retribution to destroy all humankind, except for this chosen man and his family and the beasts of the field which he took on board with him. When the terrible destroying waters at last abated, he released in turn a dove and a raven to help him find signs of dry land. Sound familiar? This man’s name was Ut-napishtim, and his story was recorded on Babylonian clay tablets several centuries before the story of Noah was written.

Hawkwood

[1]Having written the above, after some thought I've decided to offer Mr. Ham a more-than-generous concession. In place of all those animals, I'll allow him to substitute sandbags to approximate the collective faunal weight. You'll guess my reason. I just don't like the thought of all those animals going under.

[2]When discussing this subject it's a usually overlooked factor that with no land masses to cause barometric differences and deflect them, storm-force winds would have raged continuously around the flooded planet, as they do for the same reason on planets such as Jupiter and Neptune. My depiction of the Ark in such weather conditions (top image), is for more than mere dramatic effect. The seas of the Flood would have been an unrelenting succession of perfect storms.

Sources:

*www.answersingenesis.org

*Andrew Collins: From the Ashes of Angels, pub. Michael Joseph

*Andrew George: The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated with an introduction, pub. Penguin Classics

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The Ark's true proportions
Note added 26 October, 2012: I like to get things right if I can - and it's also important to me that others can rely on what they read and see here. Since I posted it, my painting of Noah's Ark (top image) has bothered me. I based the Ark upon the commercial model produced by Minicraft Models, whose manufacturers assure us that it is 'produced to cubit scale'. As it turns out, it's not! What bothered me about my painting is that the Ark actually looks credibly seaworthy. It makes you believe that it just might ride out those monster waves after all.

But there are two issues here. The first is the term 'Ark'. The actual Hebrew word used is tebah, which indicates some kind of unspecified container or vessel: something that will sustain and protect the life within it. For this reason this same word tebah is also aptly used to describe the basket in which the infant Moses was found. No mention of any boat shape - or even box shape, as some Ark depictions show.

The second point is that the dimensions given in Genesis (300 cubits long, 30 high, and 50 wide) produce a very different proportion to the Minicraft Ark. These scriptural proportions produce a shape more resembling the proportions of large steel container ships of today - that is: of extreme length in proportion to the narrowness of their beam. As a wooden hull, it would have been more shockingly vulnerable even than my description in this post. The timbers of a hull of such extended length and slender width would have been under constant lateral stress from wave action even in moderate seas. There is also the factor that a vessel without steering tends to turn beam-on to the weather (that is: the waves would be hitting it side-on). This effect, known as broaching, would have caused ever-greater instability and the constant threat of a rollover. Serious leakage and an eventual hull breach would have been inevitable - and even this is assuming that a wooden hull of such massive weight and vulnerably slim length could manage to get fully waterborne in the first place. The stress points along the extended length of the keel - if indeed it had one - would have been compromised to the point of collapse from the collective weight of its cargo plus the weight of the timber of the vessel itself.

The Chinese Treasure Ships

Note added 13 October 2013: What has so far been omitted from this post is mention of the early 15th-century Chinese baochuan treasure ships, which written accounts claim to have been up to 137 meters (450ft) long and 55 meters (180ft wide). If these accounts are trustworthy, then they would have been the same length as the conservative estimate for the Ark in my diagram above. The difficulty with these accounts is that the ships themselves do not exist, and (with the exception of an excavated possible large rudder board) there is no actual physical evidence for them. Had they existed, they might have been of comparable length to the Ark, but their beam was proportionally far wider than the Ark’s Biblical dimensions, which would have provided considerably greater stability. Scholars nevertheless are skeptical – for the very engineering reasons which I have cited above. Being constructed entirely of wood, the flexibility of the structure on the open ocean would have been dangerously compromised even in moderate weather. It is possible that wooden vessels of this size were constructed – but would have been used primarily for show, and would not have left the safety of the Yangtze river. The diagram above is from the July 2005 National Geographic.

The Ark Encounter exhibit opens under leaden skies.
Note that the main door on this 'reconstruction' would actually have been below the vessel's waterline.

The Ark Encounter exhibit
Note added 15 September 2016: The Ark Encounter attraction is now open to the public, and you can visit the website here. The website describes the Ark as 'amazingly seaworthy' - a determinedly optimistic assertion which all that is said in this post continues to refute. If you go to the 'About the Ark' topic on the website you'll see a close-up of the hull timbers. The timbers are not even clinker-built, but are laid flush with each other: a recipe for disaster for such a large wooden structure in any waterborne situation.

The exhibit's organizers also claim that it is the most accurate version of the Ark ever built. But how can they determine this? The scriptural description gives the bare measurements and nothing more - and we do not even conclusively know how long a 'cubit' was, or even what 'gopher wood' was. So what are the criteria for such claims of 'accuracy'? When it comes to creationist claims, showmanship, apparently, counts for more than intellectual honesty.

Apparently Kentucky was hit by torrential rains and floods at the time the exhibit opened. It's tempting to conclude that the Almighty was signalling to those responsible for the exhibit finally to put their money (or rather: their painfully literalist beliefs) where their mouth is and actually get the thing to sea (to be realistic: in a powerful storm). But they won't, of course. Not now, not ever. No-one wants to watch their dearly-held beliefs capsize and sink like a stone.

Dinosaurs in their enclosures on board the Ark. Really??