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Young Earth Creationists are an oddball lot. Not least in their insistence on clinging to the idea that the Bible must, in every word, be literally true. Not occasionally metaphorical, nor at times garbled in the centuries of transmission and translation, but absolutely, literally, true. Hence their often weird obsession with ‘proving’ the story of Noah’s Ark.
No matter how hard they have to abuse history, archaeology and geology, to do so.
A recent example comes from an American (unsurprisingly – such things being a notably American obsession) blog that claims that:
A discovery of absolutely epic proportions has just been revealed, but the corporate media in the United States almost entirely ignored it. A team of scientists led by Dr Irving Finkel has deciphered the oldest map in the world, and we are being told that it actually reveals the location of Noah’s Ark.
Does it, though?
In fact, digging back through the sources the American blogger liberally misuses reveals the usual wild agglomeration of serious scholarship and tendentiously selective misinterpretation.
What it reveals is hardly new – the scholarship is at least a decade old – and not quite what the literalists would have us believe. For one thing, the tablet gives quite specific instructions on how to construct an ark – and they’re nothing like what Genesis tells us.
Biblical texts recount that Noah’s Ark came to rest on the “mountains of Ararat” in Turkey following a flood lasting 150 days that drowned the Earth and every living thing not housed inside the wooden ship. The supposed ark site in Turkey aligns with dimensions stated in the Bible – “300 cubits, 50 cubits, by 30 cubits” –translating to around 515 feet long, 86 feet wide, and 52 feet high.
Yeah, we’ll get to that…
The blog airily claims that:
Controversy persists over whether the structure in Turkey is natural or divinely created.
In fact, the “controversy” is solely of the Creationists’ making. Geologists are in no doubt: it’s a rare natural formation.
The other problem for our would-be ark discoverers is that it’s nothing like the ark described by the Babylonian tablet. Their ark is round: essentially a giant coracle, about two-thirds the size of a soccer field.
An ark, so the tablet instructs us, should properly be circular in shape, have an area of 3,600 metres, and be fashioned out of plant fibre.
That is, a circle roughly 11m across. That is, about 24 Babylonian cubits. Or 36 feet.
Oh, and its walls should be six feet high.
So much for correlating the Genesis account to the Babylonian tablet.
What does the tablet really tell us, then?
Firstly, it tells us a great deal about the Babylonians’ conception of how the world was shaped.
The Imago Mundi depicts a circular world map, illustrating early Babylonian ideas about the world’s creation. The map is thought to show the entire known world at the time, with Mesopotamia at the bottom center. Mesopotamia is enclosed by a circle representing a “bitter river” that was believed to surround the entire world, marking the borders of the known world at that time.
It also serves as an early example of Judeo-Christian syncretism. In a region where the very basis of early civilisation was based on the floodplains of two great rivers, it’s only natural that stories were passed down of a flood so great that it would very much have encompassed their entire world. That is, the landscape of Mesopotamia.
As Finkel himself says:
The flood story clearly originated in Mesopotamia because of the landscape, the geology the geography, the history, the riverine nature of their landscape. There is no question that it comes out of that part of the world. There’s no question that the literary structure, the literary creation went from the Babylonian forerunner into the biblical narrative in the Book of Genesis. There seems to be no doubt about it, but it’s not pinching words from God or undercutting the clergy […]
The narratives in the bible, they were borrowed from here and there and the crucial point, intellectually and from a religious point of view is that they were used to tell different messages.
As Finkel says, the essential point of the Flood story that so appealed to the Hebrew writers of Genesis, exiled in Babylon, was that of a great man on a literal mission from God, to save the world, “and the clock’s going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick”.
So, yes, in a very real sense, there was an ark that saved the family and all the important animals of a particularly wise patriarch in ancient Mesopotamia – and the tablet tells later people just how to make one.
But looking for the precise ark of Noah, exactly as described in the Genesis account, is futile.
