The Sources of the Flood Story

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the veracity of the story of Noah was assailed by criticisms external to it. But later in that same century, historical criticism of the book of Genesis was beginning to question the internal consistency, coherency, and originality of the story of Noah. In 1878, the German Biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) published his Geschichte Israels (History of Israel).Footnote ¹ In this work, Wellhausen argued that the book of Genesis, and the account of Noah and the flood within it, was not a unified account of the early ages of the world, but rather a work compiled from a number of different sources, arising in different times, and intended for a variety of theological purposes.

For the century following Wellhausen’s work, the overwhelming scholarly consensus was that the story of the flood combined two literary strands: the Yahwist or J source dating from the tenth or ninth century bce, and the Priestly or P source dating from the Exilic or early post-Exilic period some four centuries later, with the Yahwist as a source for the later Priestly strand. Without putting too fine a point on it, there was a number of significant apparent differences between the P and non-P sources within the story that led to the questioning of the unity of the text.Footnote ² Thus for example, the text alternates between two names for God – Yahweh (or Jahweh) (YHWH) and Elohim. God sees the evil of humanity twice (Genesis 6.5, 11-12). Noah appears to enter the ark twice (Genesis 7.7, 13). Some passages speak of a flood that lasted forty days and forty nights (Genesis 7.4, 12, 17); others suggest a cosmic deluge that continued for 150 days (Genesis 7.11, 24). One passage tells Noah to bring two of every kind of animal into the ark (Genesis 6.19-20), while another has God tell Noah to take seven pairs of clean animals and a pair of unclean animals (Genesis 7.2-3).

Historical criticism treated the Bible like any other ancient text, thus threatening its privileged status. That said, as liberal Christians had come to terms with geology and evolution, they soon came to terms with historical criticism. The book of Genesis became sacred legend rather than sacred history. The Biblical story of the flood became just one of the many ancient accounts of universal floods, one whose immediate origins were to be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh and parallels to it in the Classical world. The source hypothesis came under strain under the weight of its own scholarly refinements over the last 140 years. And the study of the first five books of the Bible moved beyond asking ‘Did it happen?’ to ‘What does it mean?’ That said, historical criticism is still viewed as enabling access to the historical contexts in which the texts were created.Footnote ³ Crucially, the view that the Biblical story of Noah and the flood consisted of Hebrew versions of traditions of the flood that pre-existed it and that were variously incorporated into it still holds.

Another discovery was to transform all future understandings of Noah and the ark. Assyriologist George Smith (1840–1876) was sorting and classifying fragments of cuneiform tablets from the library of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal (reigned from 669–c.631 bce) in the British Museum. Smith noticed that some of the fragments told of a flood. And then, he later wrote, ‘my eye caught the statement that the ship rested on the mountains of Nazir, followed by the account of the sending forth of the dove, and its finding no resting-place and returning. I saw at once that I had here discovered a portion at least of the Chaldaean account of the Deluge.’Footnote ⁴ Smith had, in fact, discovered the source of the Biblical story of Noah – the eleventh tablet of The Epic of Gilgamesh and the flood story of its hero Uta-napishti.Footnote ⁵ On 3 December 1872, he read his account of the Gilgamesh flood to the Society of Biblical Archaeology.Footnote ⁶ It was then realised that not only did the Biblical story of Noah and the flood consist of stories that pre-existed it, but also that these stories were themselves drawn from an earlier Mesopotamian narrative of a universal flood. This meant that the Biblical story, like all the stories that were later to be based upon it, was itself a retelling and a re-imagining of an earlier legend contained within The Epic of Gilgamesh.

For conservative believers, however, historical criticism of the Bible was seen not only as undermining its authority, inspiration, and infallibility but also, in the case of the first five books of the Bible, as sabotaging the traditional attribution of their authorship to Moses. It was the thin end of a wedge that led to unbelief and atheism. As the conservative American theologian Franklin Johnson (1836–1916) put it in 1910, ‘The natural [historical] view of the Scriptures is a sea which has been rising higher for three-quarters of a century. Many Christians bid it welcome to pour lightly over the walls which the faith of the church has always set up against it, in the expectation that it will provide a healthful and helpful stream. It is already a cataract, uprooting, destroying, and slaying.’Footnote ⁷ Almost, one might say, like a Biblical deluge!

The Flood and the Young Earth

Those who believed in the historical accuracy and inerrancy of the Bible would always do battle (and still do) with the historical criticism of the Bible. That said, by the end of the nineteenth century, even conservative defenders of Christianity accepted that the Bible allowed for an ancient earth in accord with the science of geology. As Ronald Numbers notes,

In short, the creation story of the Bible was harmonised with geology and palaeontology.

But in the early twentieth century, a ‘young earth’ movement arose from the writings of the Seventh-Day Adventist George McReady Price (1870–1963). And creation was dated at some 6,000 (following Usher’s chronology) to 10,000 years ago (allowing for gaps of time in the Biblical genealogies). It was to lead in the 1960s to the advent of ‘creation science’. With the rise of this movement, the flood of Noah was to reassume its place at the centre of the debate between science and ultra-conservative evangelical Christianity. ‘The Genesis Flood,’ declared the text Scientific Creationism in 1974, ‘is the real crux of the conflict between the evolutionist and creationist cosmologies.’Footnote ⁹ And if the earth was no older than 6,000 to 10,000 years, the historical and scientific veracity of the Bible, against both geology and Darwinian evolutionary biology, was vindicated.

Like Ellen White (1827–1915), the co-founder of his Seventh-Day Adventist Church, George McReady Price was deeply committed to an uncompromising literal reading of Genesis. The book of Genesis taught unambiguously, he believed, that ‘life has been on our globe only some six or seven thousand years; and that the earth as we know it … was brought into existence in six literal days’.Footnote ¹⁰ Fossils, rather than being evidence of successive ages, pointed rather to the creatures whose remains they were as having lived at the same time and to all having been destroyed ‘by one overwhelming world disaster’, namely the flood of Noah.Footnote ¹¹ ‘The one simple postulate,’ Price wrote, ‘that there was a universal Flood clears up beautifully every major problem in the supposed conflict between modern science and modern Christianity.’Footnote ¹² The scientific evidence for a universal flood, he believed, was ‘as firmly established as a real historical event as the reign of Hammurabi or the wars of Attila’.Footnote ¹³

Price gave little attention to how such a universal flood was caused. But he had no doubt that there was sufficient water on the earth to cover all of it to a depth of a mile and a half. The only astronomical cause of a universal deluge, he surmised, ‘would be something of the nature of a jar or shock from the outside, which would produce an abnormal tidal action, resulting in great tidal waves sweeping twice daily around the earth from east to west, this wave travelling at 1,000 miles an hour at the equator’.Footnote ¹⁴

After the flood, the large variety of new species arose, not so much from Darwinian evolution as from divine intervention. We may be very sure, Price wrote, ‘that the great superintending Power which is over nature, adapted these men and these animals and plants [after the deluge] to their strange world’.Footnote ¹⁵ As for the varieties of humankind, Price looked to divine intervention after the Tower of Babel. Before then, all of humankind were of one speech and one race. God again intervened, scattering people across the earth. And, ‘just as artificial barriers of language were interposed to keep them from again blending into one world-embracing despotism, so we may well suppose that the barriers of race and colour were also interposed at this same time, these racial barriers assisting in segregating the people of the world off into self-contained groups.’Footnote ¹⁶ In short, the Bible record of the dispersal of mankind soon after the flood provided ‘by far the most believable explanation of the facts as we now know them through archaeology and philology’.Footnote ¹⁷

The Flood and Creation Science

Price’s flood geology was driven by his unwavering belief in the authority and inerrancy of Scripture. Significantly influenced by the writings of Price, John C. Whitcomb (1924–2020) and Henry M. Morris (1918–2006), the founding fathers of creation science, proceeded in The Genesis Flood (1961) ‘from the perspective of full belief in the complete divine inspiration and perspicuity of Scripture, believing that a true exegesis thereof yields determinative Truth in all matters with which it deals’.Footnote ¹⁸ Not much room for harmonising compromises there then! Rather than geology’s estimate of the age of the earth at 4.5 billion years, creation science held to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years. ‘The decision must then be faced,’ declared Morris, ‘either the Biblical record of the Flood is false and must be rejected or else the system of historical geology which has seemed to discredit it is wrong and must be changed. The latter alternative would seem to be the only one which a Biblically and scientifically instructed Christian could honestly take, regardless of the “deluge” of scholarly wrath and ridicule that taking such a position brings on him.’Footnote ¹⁹ Their target was a twofold one – any science that threatened the infallibility of the Bible and any theology that compromised Biblical truth in support of science.

For Whitcomb and Morris, it was flood geology that was the key to deciding between creation on the one hand and evolution on the other. If it could be shown that the fossil-bearing strata had not been laid down over long periods of time but rather during the course of a single year at the time of the flood of Noah, ‘The last refuge of the case for evolution immediately vanishes away, and the record of the rocks becomes a tremendous witness, not to the operation of a naturalistic process of Godless development and progress but rather to the holiness and justice and power of the living God of Creation.’Footnote ²⁰ That said, while science that was in conflict with their flood geology was to be rejected, Whitcomb and Morris continually drew upon modern science to validate the Biblical account of the earth before, during, and after the flood. Wherever possible, science was to be the handmaiden of Biblical truth.Footnote ²¹ Thus, armed with their flood geology and the results of congenial science, the theologian Whitcomb and the hydraulic engineer Morris were able to weave a new (apparently) scientifically supported ‘modern’ legend of Noah and the flood.

According to The Genesis Flood, with the exception of Noah, the wickedness of humanity was such as to require its destruction. A universal flood was necessary because from the time of Adam to Noah, the population of the world had spread across all of it. Moreover, ‘the longevity and fecundity of the antediluvians would allow for a very rapid increase in population, even if only 1,656 years elapsed between Adam and the flood’.Footnote ²² Whitcomb and Morris calculated a population of 1 billion people on earth at the time of the deluge. The evidence of human fossils scattered all over the world suggested that humanity had spread before the flood way beyond the Near East.

The opening of the windows of the heavens and the breaking up of the fountains of the deep were supernatural acts of God. But, throughout the entire process, ‘“the waters which were above the firmament” and “the waters which were under the firmament” acted according to the known laws of hydrostatics and hydrodynamics. They churned up, carried away, and deposited sediments according to natural hydraulic processes, moving at velocities and in directions that were perfectly normal.’Footnote ²³ According to their calculations, the flood lasted just over a year, six weeks to reach maximum height above the mountains, followed by twenty-two weeks before it began to subside, and a further thirty-one weeks for the waters to subside sufficiently to make an exit from the ark possible.

Animals of all kinds lived within the vicinity of the ark. God imparted a ‘migratory directional instinct’ in the animals that enabled them to reach it.Footnote ²⁴ Because there were not then all the varieties of animals present in the world today, the barge-shaped ark only needed to contain at most 35,000 air-breathing vertebrate animals. At their estimate of 1,396,000 cubic feet, ‘the Ark had a carrying capacity equal to that of 522 standard stock cars as used by modern railroads or of eight freight trains with sixty-five such cars in each’.Footnote ²⁵ Dinosaurs may also have been represented on the ark, ‘probably by very young animals, only to die out because of hostile environmental conditions after the Flood’, or not represented at all ‘for the very reason of their intended extinction’.Footnote ²⁶ As to the care of the animals on the ark, they required minimal attention. They hibernated their way through the time of the flood, ‘having received from God the power to become more or less dormant’.Footnote ²⁷ There remained the problem of explaining the distribution of animals from the ark after it landed on the mountains of Ararat. Rapid dispersion and land bridges provided the main answers. Thus, for example, ‘it is quite conceivable that marsupials could have reached Australia by migration waves from Asia, before that continent became separated from the mainland’.Footnote ²⁸

From the time of the six days of creation until the flood, a protective canopy of water vapour over the earth (‘the waters above the firmament’) ensured the longevity of the antediluvian population. It furnished a warm, pleasant, and healthy environment with no rainfall throughout the world. And it provided ‘a shield against the intense radiations impinging upon the earth from space’.Footnote ²⁹ After the flood, with the canopy disappearing, variations in climate appeared. The declining life span after the flood was also the consequence of the dissipation of this protective cloud. That said, longevity declined slowly, and the population growth after the flood was abnormally high, more than sufficient to have produced the current population from the eight survivors of the ark.

Needless to say, the community of non-creation scientists was not buying any of it. Flood geology caused hardly a ripple of regard, more an ocean of disdain. For The Genesis Flood of Morris and Whitcomb looked far more like a harmonising product of the science of the seventeenth century than that of the twentieth. The days of Noah and the flood that destroyed the world and all living things within it playing a significant role in secular science were well and truly over.

Searchers for the Lost Ark

According to the book of Genesis, the ark came to rest ‘on the mountains of Ararat’ (Genesis 8.4). Within the Old Testament, it is clear that the reference to Ararat is to a mountainous kingdom called ‘the land of Ararat’ (2 Kings 19.37, Isaiah 37.38) broadly in the region of Armenia in West Asia.Footnote ³⁰ As early as the first century ce, the Jewish historian Josephus remarked that ‘the ark rested on the top of a certain mountain in Armenia’.Footnote ³¹ Jerome’s Latin version of the Bible known as the Vulgate (383–404 ce) translated ‘on the mountains of Ararat’ as ‘super montes Armeniae’. John Chrysostom asked of unbelievers, ‘Do not the mountains of Armenia testify to it, where the Ark rested? And are not the remains of the Ark preserved there to this day very for our admonition?’Footnote ³²

That said, the boundaries of ‘Armenia’ were sufficiently porous for a number of more specific sites to be imagined. The book of Jubilees (second century bce) had the ark coming to rest on ‘the top of Lubar, one of the mountains of Ararat’.Footnote ³³ Similarly, Epiphanius of Salamis reported that the ark came to rest ‘in the mountains of Ararat, in the midst of [or “in between”] the mountains of Armenia and of Kurdistan [Gordyene], on a mountain called Lubar’.Footnote ³⁴ Josephus reported that the Babylonian Berossus had told of a part of the ship in Armenia, at the mountains of the Cordyaeans, and that ‘some people carry off pieces of the bitumen, which they take away, and use chiefly as amulets for the averting of mischiefs’.Footnote ³⁵ The Greek historian Nicolaus of Damascus (64 bce–4 ce), Josephus added, spoke of ‘a great mountain in Armenia, over Minyas, called Baris, upon which it is reported that many who fled at the time of the Deluge were saved; and that one who was carried in an ark came on shore upon the top of it; and that the remains of the timber were a great while preserved. This might be the man about whom Moses the legislator of the Jews wrote.’Footnote ³⁶

A specific ‘Mount Ararat’ soon appeared as part of a legend that was to have many variations throughout the medieval period. The fifth-century Armenian historian Faustus of Byzantium tells us of St. Jacob of Nisibis who travelled to the mountains of Armenia, ‘that is to say, to Mount Ararat in the principality of Ararat’, and, nearing the summit, received from an angel a piece of wood from the ark. Upon his descent, he gave the wood to the people of the city, ‘and it is preserved to this day among them as the visible sign of the Ark of the patriarch Noah’.Footnote ³⁷ In the sixth century, Isidore of Seville remarked that ‘Ararat is a mountain in Armenia, where the historians testify that the Ark came to rest after the Flood. So even to this day wood remains of it are to be seen there.’Footnote ³⁸

Islamic traditions were also to enter into the issue of the location of the ark. The Qur’an, we recall, has Noah praying that God will bring him ‘to a blessed landing place’ (Qur’an 23.29) before the ark came to rest on al-Jūd ī (or Cudi). In the period after the founding of Islam up to the end of the first millennium, there was a general agreement among Muslims, Christians, and Jews that the mountain referred to in the Qur’an was the peak now called Cudi Dag (Mount Cudi), within the borders of ancient Armenia. Thus, for example, the Arab geographer al-Mas’udi (d. 956) had the ark resting on Mount al-Judi at the head waters of the Tigris River. Similarly, the tenth-century Arab traveller ibn Hawqal identified Mount Judi as near Nisibin in the same region (reflecting the Christian tradition that associated the ark with St. Jacob of Nisibis).

The location of the ark in Armenia was also a commonplace within medieval Christianity. Eutychius (877–940), the Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria, declared that ‘the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat, that is, Jabal Judi near Mosul’.Footnote ³⁹ The encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais (c.1184–1264) knew the story of Jacob of Nisibin or at least a variant of it. He told of a city in Armenia near Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark rests, at the foot of which is the city called Laudume built by Noah. He then recounted the story of the monk who, having finally reached the summit of Ararat, ‘brought one of the beams from the Ark back with him. At the foot of the mountain, he then built a monastery in which he faithfully placed this same beam as (so to speak) a holy relic.’Footnote ⁴⁰ The location of the ark in Armenia was a tradition that lasted into the thirteenth century. Thus, for example, the monk Jehan Hayton wrote of a mountain in Armenia by the name of Ararat, the highest in the world, upon which the ark of Noah landed. Because of the quantity of snow all year round, no one could climb it. But at the summit, ‘a great black object is always visible, which is said to be the Ark of Noah’.Footnote ⁴¹

At least by the thirteenth century, the focus of attention for the location of the ark had moved northwards from Mount Cudi or Judi to another ‘Mount Ararat’ – to the mountain known as Agri Dag (Mount Agri) in Eastern Turkey. The Franciscan traveller William of Rubruck (c.1214–c.1270), on a mission on behalf of Louis IX of France to the Mongol emperor Möngke Khan, was the first European to identify Mount Agri as the site of the ark. Near the city of Naxua, he wrote, ‘are mountains in which they say that Noah’s ark rests … and there is a town there called Cemamum, which interpreted means “eight”, and they say that it was thus called from the eight persons who came out of the ark, and who built it’.Footnote ⁴² William then went on to tell the story of Jacob of Nisibin as Faustus of Byzantium had reported it. Until the nineteenth century, Mount Agri and Mount Cudi would compete as the two likeliest places for the site of the ark. Each mountain has a tradition of the ark, floating northwards, having stopped temporarily elsewhere; each was the site of a monastery connected with the ark story; and each has a grave of Noah nearby.Footnote ⁴³

There were many possible locations of the ark, tales of ascents, accounts of wood retrieved from it, and towns built by the first family nearby. And there was no shortage of mountains to suggest themselves as the site of the ark’s coming to rest. Yet, as Lloyd Bailey notes, no one claimed to have seen the ark, to have visited the landing site, or to have spoken directly with someone who had.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, for example, early in the eighteenth century, the French traveller Jean Chardin (1643–1713) told his readers, ‘Twelves leagues to the east of Erivan [in Armenia] one sees the famous mountain where almost everyone agrees that Noah’s ark landed – though no one offers solid proof of it.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Perhaps Chardin also heard of the Armenian legend that Noah, while looking in the direction of Erivan, exclaimed ‘Yerevats!’ (‘it appeared!’). Chardin, like others before him, went on to tell the story of Jacob of Nibilis receiving a piece of the ark from an angel.

The variety of locations was, no doubt, due to the religious importance of the site of the ark. In the scheme of Christian history, its location was as crucial as that of the garden of Eden. For where the ark landed was the point on earth closest to heaven; it was a cosmic centre from which human civilisation had begun again, and it was a site where relics of the ark were to be discovered, revealed, kept, and treasured. In the nineteenth century, however, the location of the ark became a matter of scientific exploration, and the quest for hard evidence seriously began. The search for the lost ark on Mount Agri (now identified with Mount Ararat) began in earnest, and the first ‘eyewitness’ accounts began to emerge. The first ascent to the summit was by the German explorer Johann Friedrich Parrott and five others (1791–1841) in 1829. Parrott reported that the summit contained sufficient space for the ark to have landed upon it, ‘three hundred ells [cubits] long and fifty wide, would not have occupied a tenth part of the surface of this depression’.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, he reported, while the ark may well have landed there, the snow and ice that began to cover the ark after the flood was sufficient to cover it from sight. Before beginning their descent, ‘we gladly poured a libation to the Patriarch Noah’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Later ascents announced greater fortune. In 1876, the intrepid English holiday-maker James Bryce (1838–1922) found a piece of wood some 4,000 feet below the summit, four feet long, five inches thick, and clearly shaped by a tool. While he recognised that its presence there might have another explanation, he did not wish to discredit his own relic. The argument that it was a piece of the ark, he declared, was exceptionally strong: ‘[T]he Crusaders who found the Holy Lance at Antioch, the archbishop who recognised the Holy Coat at Treves, not to speak of many others, proceeded upon slighter evidence.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Actually, perhaps, that was not really saying very much.

Mount Ararat provided fertile soil for charlatans. John Joseph was ‘Prince of Nouri’, ‘Grand-Archdeacon of Babylon’, and ‘Episcopal Head of the Nestorian Church of Malabar’. The Christian missionary Frederick G. Coan (1859–1943) reported on his encounter with Joseph in the early twentieth century in Tehran. According to Coan, Joseph had succeeded in reaching the summit of Mount Ararat on his third attempt. There he had seen the ark, wedged in the rocks, and covered with snow and ice. He had made careful measurements that, he claimed, coincided exactly with those in Genesis. Coan was unpersuaded. As he admits, his question to Joseph whether ‘he saw Mrs. Noah’s corset hanging up in her bedroom’ was rather mean-spirited.Footnote ⁴⁹

A conspiracy theory, wrapped in ‘fake news’, on the discovery of the ark appeared in the Los Angeles’ New Eden Magazine in 1940 under the title “Noah’s Ark Found’ by a Russian aviator Vladimir Roskovitsky. According to this, Roskovitsky saw the ark on Mount Ararat from the air just before the Russian Revolution. It was a strange craft, he wrote, ‘built as though the designer expected the waves to roll over the top most of the time’. He and his co-pilot reported their find on their return. Their captain told them it was Noah’s ark, ‘sitting up there for nearly five thousand years’, and duly reported it to the Russian government. The Czar sent 150 soldiers to investigate. They found the ark and took measurements and photographs of a ship containing hundreds of small rooms, some very large with high ceilings ‘as though designed to hold beasts ten times as large as elephants’. Above the ship they found a rough, stone hearth ‘like the altars the Hebrews use for sacrifices’. Unfortunately, a few days after this expedition sent its report to the Czar, ‘the government was overthrown and godless Bolshevism took over, so that the records were never made public and probably were destroyed in the zeal of the Bolsheviks to discredit all religion and belief in the truth of the Bible’.Footnote ⁵⁰

This was not the last occasion on which photographic evidence went missing. According to a later account, in the late summer of 1952, mining engineer George Jefferson Greene, on an exploration of Ararat, saw a strange object protruding from the ice. ‘“The Ark!” was Greene’s first startled thought.’ Back in the United States, on examination of the photographs that he had taken, he became more and more convinced that he had found the ark. Unable to raise an expedition to return to Ararat, he left for British Guyana where, in 1962, he was murdered. None of his possessions, including the ark photographs, were ever recovered. Fortunately, he had shown them to an acquaintance, Fred Drake. And fortunately, Drake remembered the photographs of the ark sufficiently well to draw some sketches of it that he sent to real estate agent and well-known arkeologist Eryl A. Cummings. In the attached letter, he told Cummings that the further discovery of it on Ararat ‘will be the most important discovery that the modern world has ever known’.Footnote ⁵¹ That was true. But nothing more ever came of it.

On one occasion, a hoax became clear. In February 1993, the television special entitled ‘The Incredible Discovery of Noah’s Ark’ was broadcast to 20 million viewers.Footnote ⁵² Without ever saying so, it was undoubtedly sympathetic to the young earth creationist view. In the program, a George Jammal told how he had discovered the snow-covered location of Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat. He displayed what he claimed to be a piece of wood from the ark that he had hacked from it. ‘This piece of wood is so precious – and a gift from God.’ Having entered the ark, he said, ‘We got very excited when we saw part of this room was made into pens, like places where you keep animals,’ he recalled. ‘We knew then that we had found the ark!’ In October of the same year, Jammal, an out-of-work actor living in California, admitted that his story was a hoax. The ‘sacred wood’ from the ark was in fact a piece of California pine that he had hardened by cooking it in a mixture of blueberry and almond wine, iodine, sweet-and-sour barbecue sauce, and teriyaki sauce.Footnote ⁵³ He had never been to Turkey, he admitted. ‘They should have asked me,’ he said in 2007, ‘why Noah’s ark smelled like teriyaki sauce.’Footnote ⁵⁴

This story has its own long history. It began on 1 November 1985 when Jammal wrote in jest to Duane Gish, then president of The Institute for Creation Research, telling Gish that, on his third trip to Turkey in search of the ark, he and his companion Vladimir crawled into an ice cave which proved to be the ark. Each chipped off a piece of wood to prove what they had found. Unfortunately, Jammal’s companion fell into a crevasse, along with his piece of wood and photographic proof, and was killed. On 10 June 1986, creation scientist John D. Morris (1946–2023), son of Henry Morris, interviewed Jammal who had, by then, read up on the search for the lost ark, on Mount Ararat and surrounding regions, and had watched the videotape of the precursor to ‘The Incredible Discovery of Noah’s Ark’ – the 1976 production ‘In Search of Noah’s Ark’. Jammal failed to show Morris his piece of the ark, and Morris was uncertain about the truth of it all.

However, in 1992, Morris gave Jammal’s name to Sun International Pictures, the producers of these ark programs. By this time, Jammal had become acquainted with the Religious Studies scholar Gerald Larue (1916–2014) from the University of Southern California. Believing that he had been badly treated in an earlier Sun production, Larue came in on the hoax. Sun International Pictures took the bait, and the program went to air with Jammal’s fake story included. Jammal’s story was part of a program filled, wrote Leon Jaroff of Time, ‘with a mixture of fact, conjecture, fantasy, and arrant nonsense, while offering no clues as to which was which’ – a harsh but fair judgement.Footnote ⁵⁵

During the twentieth century, for conservative evangelical Christianity, the search for the lost ark became the religious equivalent of the hunt for the Loch Ness monster. For the most part, the sincerity of those involved in the search cannot be doubted. However, without engaging in a finely grained analysis of every supposed ‘find’, and putting hoaxes aside, the accounts of ark sightings or pieces of wood discovered on Mount Ararat have been unpersuasive, photographic evidence of the ark mysteriously disappearing has been questionable, and aerial or satellite photography of it unconvincing.Footnote ⁵⁶ Thus, with hard evidence still absent, even among those predisposed to believe in the presence of the ark on Mount Ararat, it has become more a matter of faith than of knowledge. And searchers live more in hope than in expectation.

In 1961, after 130 years of ascents to the summit, the founders of creation science, John Whitcomb and Henry Morris, admitted that discoveries of the ark on Mount Ararat have never been confirmed and ‘any hope of its preservation for the thousands of years of post-diluvian history is merely wishful thinking’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Baptist conservative Timothy F. LaHaye (1926–2106) and John D. Morris, in their survey of the history of the search for the ark on Ararat, declared that the discovery of the ark would ‘ring the death knell to the already fragile theory of evolution’ and lead the world to realise ‘that the Bible is true’.Footnote ⁵⁸ But despite the paucity of the evidence, they could do little more in the end than assert their unwavering determination to believe, quite simply because they believed in the inerrancy of the Bible.

By 2015, John D. Morris had travelled to Ararat over a dozen times. But, he declared unhappily in that same year, ‘we never found the Ark’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Creation science now appears to have given up the quest. ‘Despite so many supposed sightings and evidences over the years,’ concluded Tim Chaffey on ‘Answers in Genesis’, a creation science website, ‘it seems unlikely that Noah’s Ark has been found in recent times. And even though we would be ecstatic if the Ark were discovered, we have reason to doubt that it will be found in the future.’Footnote ⁶⁰ Unlike other legends in which a ship carries the hero in search of an object of desire, the quest here was for the ship itself. This quest was an admittedly fruitless and unsuccessful one.

Creators of the Lost Ark

On 7 July 2016, the ‘Ark Encounter’ opened in Williamstown, Kentucky. It was a date (seventh day of the seventh month) chosen to correspond to Genesis 7.7: ‘And Noah with his sons and his wife, and his sons’ wives went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood.’ Its showpiece is a ‘replica’ of the ark of Noah, built (more or less) to Biblical measurements, five hundred and ten feet long, eighty-five feet wide, and fifty-one feet high (based on a ‘royal cubit’ of 20.4 inches). It is constructed, not of ‘cyprus wood’ (Genesis 6.14) but of New Zealand pine with uprights of Engelmann spruce. Its base is made of concrete and is not therefore intended to survive another of the divine’s watery whimsies. It contains some 132 bays, each about 18 feet high spread over three decks, with a volume of 1.88 million cubic feet, ‘enough to contain 450 semi-truck trailers’.Footnote ⁶¹ The Encounter Ark is an extraordinary feat of modern design and construction and is, at the time of writing, the world’s largest free-standing timber frame structure. The building of this ark is both a homage to the Bible’s offering of a ‘blueprint’ of the ark and a making-real of the literal truth of the Genesis text.

But there is another agenda for the Kentucky Ark creators. They want to use the Ark Encounter experience to validate the respectability of young earth creationism by showing how to reconcile fossil evidence and the variety of animal species, among other phenomena, with a Biblical chronology. To this end, the Ark Encounter adopts a ‘methodological naturalism’ according to which science proceeds as if the supernatural does not exist while accepting that it may. They vehemently reject ‘metaphysical naturalism’ according to which science simply rejects the possible existence of the supernatural. ‘Methodological naturalism’, on the other hand, enables the Ark Encounter to use carefully selected science to show the validity of the Biblical young earth creation model, leaving the possibility of God’s activity in the world in place.

The Ark Encounter is the result of a partnership between the young earth creationist group, ‘Answers in Genesis’, and the ‘Ark Encounter LLC’. Its intention is to ‘lend credence to the Biblical account of a catastrophic flood and to dispel doubts that Noah could have fit two of every kind of animal onto a 500-foot-long ark’.Footnote ⁶² While the Ark Encounter recognises over two hundred myths from around the world about a major flood, ‘the true account,’ it declares, ‘was recorded by Moses’ in the book of Genesis. The people who dispersed from the Tower of Babel passed on their knowledge of the Biblical flood. Thus, other flood myths are ‘retellings of the real event that have been distorted through centuries of passing down information’.Footnote ⁶³

Within the Kentucky ark, through text, music and animal sounds, art, sculptures, interior settings, and interactive animatronics figures, a new legend of Noah is created. This new legend is based on the Biblical account. But the story in Genesis is read through the theology of creation science and its commitment to the young earth, as filtered through the ‘Answers in Genesis’ organisation. Thus, the Kentucky ark draws on non-Biblical sources to create a back story to the Biblical account.

In particular, the back story to the life of Noah, up to the time of the flood, is provided by the three-volume fictional account of Noah in the ‘The Remnant Trilogy’ by Tim Chaffey and K. Marie Adams. This trilogy provides much of the content for many of the exhibits of the pre-flood world in the Ark Encounter. As a result, in creating the exhibits within the Ark Encounter, as its (fortuitously named) founder Ken Ham and its content manager Tim Chaffey admit, much ‘arktistic licence’ was taken, imaginatively to fill in the gaps in the Biblical story and create their new legend of Noah and the flood.

The new legend of Noah that is reflected in the Ark Encounter begins with the creation of the world in six days, some 6,000 years ago. Initially everything was good.Footnote ⁶⁴ But Adam and Eve rebelled against God and thus brought suffering, disease, bloodshed, and death into the world. As their descendants multiplied, the world became an exceedingly wicked place (pretty much, the Ark Encounter creators suggest, like the world outside of the Ark Encounter today). Pagan worship of a serpentine god resulted in polygamy, child sacrifice, and ritual prostitution. People were sacrificed in the arena to giants and prehistoric animals. Even music and metalworking were used for immoral purposes. It was a culture filled with violence and obsessed with death. Men lived only for pleasure in orgies of ‘wine, women, and song’, we might say. Noah held to the original belief in the one true God, as did his wife, his sons, and their wives. So, God judged the world by destroying it with a global flood but mercifully saved Noah’s family and the animals on board the ark.

Filling out the above outline, we find, in the final chapter of the first volume of the trilogy, that Noah and his wife Emzara board the ark in order to flee a demonic serpent God whose idol is revealed ‘Coated in shimmering gold from its coiled base to its terrifying face, poised as if ready to strike, the towering statue of the Great Deceiver dominated the massive stage.’Footnote ⁶⁵ A version of the serpent idol is shown in the following exhibits: ‘The Pre-Flood World’ (second deck), ‘Who was Noah? (second deck), and ‘Flood Geology’ (third deck).

In chapter twenty-three of volume two, Naamah, the daughter of Cainite King Lamech of Kalneh, announces the institution of sacred prostitution as a feature of the pre-flood world.Footnote ⁶⁶ ‘We’ve learned,’ declares Naamah to the crowd, ‘that Nachash [the serpent god] is pleased when one of his followers engages in an act of sacred union with one of his priestesses.’ Emzara leans close to Noah. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’ Noah nods.Footnote ⁶⁷ ‘The Pre-Flood World’ exhibit shows people about to take part in ritual prostitution.

In chapter thirty-three of the same volume, after Noah is arrested for refusing to worship the serpent god, he finds himself facing death in an arena. ‘People of Iri Geshem,’ he declares, ‘Nachash is the Great Deceiver and the old stories are true. Just as he tricked our Greatmother Eve, he has misled the world, and now you, into following him.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Noah is confronted with a ‘grendec’ (based on a Carnotaurus, a smaller version of a Tyrannosaurus Rex). ‘Perched more than eight cubits in the air, the gaping maw displayed dozens of long bony daggers … Two absurdly small arms dangled from its torso, while brown and gray scales rippled over unbelievably powerful leg muscles … Noah stared in wonder at the mighty creature, but remained calm. Almost too calm.’Footnote ⁶⁹ As we recall, ‘The Nephilim [giants] were on the earth in those days’ (Genesis 6.4). And, along with the grendec, Noah was confronted in the arena by a giant warrior. ‘The Pre-Flood World’ exhibit features a large diorama picturing this dinosaur and the giant in the arena of Iri Geshem. Dinosaurs are plentiful in the Ark Encounter. Thus, for example, the starboard side of the lowest deck contains sculpted dinosaurs such as pterosaurs and scutosaurs ‘that have gone extinct since the Flood’.Footnote ⁷⁰ And here we begin to see the creators of the Ark Encounter setting out to reconcile the age of the dinosaurs, some 250–66 million years ago, with a Biblical chronology of the world that, according to their estimates, began some 6,000 years ago.

Finally, amongst many more crossovers between ‘The Remnant Trilogy’ and ‘The Ark Encounter’, we find, in the last chapter of volume three, the herding of the last of the animals, two giant pigs, into the ark, as Naamah and hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers arrive as the flood begins. After Noah’s and the family’s narrow escape into the ark, God miraculously closes the door of the ark with them safely inside. The sounds from outside are dampened – ‘An array of animal sounds within the ark overpowered the muffled screams, wind, torrential rain, and thunder.’Footnote ⁷¹ Noah asks Shem to put the pigs away and then join the rest of the family in prayer in the sitting room. Emzara reminds Noah that it was all as God had told him: ‘Still hurting from the heightened awareness that everyone outside the ark would soon be gone, but thankful for God’s mercy to him and his family, Noah nods and pulls Emzara close again. “Another reminder that we can always trust the Creator.”’Footnote ⁷² And, with those words, ‘The Remnant Trilogy’ ends. This closing scene in ‘The Remnant Trilogy’ is depicted at the end of the ‘First Floor Show’ of the Ark Encounter. For visitors, this is the first encounter with Noah’s family.

The legend of the Ark Encounter continues with Noah, his wife Emzara, his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their three wives on board the ark. The wives of Noah’s sons are now named (quite originally), Ar’yel, Kezia, and Rayneh, respectively.Footnote ⁷³ On the ark, as a good wife and mother, we are told, Emzara prioritised family time. But as an animal lover from her youth, she knew more about the animals than anyone else and showed her skills in caring for them and keeping notes on their well-being. Her favourite animal was the keluk, a pre-flood version of the giraffe. Ar’yel, the wife of Shem, was a convert to the true God after hearing Noah speak. She joined the family in building the ark. She loved to have discussions about God with Shem and read accounts of what life was like before the flood when it was filled with wickedness (see Plate 19). Kezia, Ham’s wife, grew up around Noah’s family as the ark was being built. She is the medical expert in the family, having learned her skills from her mother. When her parents left her to pursue other interests, she grew up among Noah’s family. Ham and Kezia grew close as she cared for the wounds he received from an animal attack, leaving his face permanently scarred. Japheth’s wife Rayneh also grew up with Noah’s family, helping Japheth with his farming. She was the artistic one in the family, making pots and painting intricate designs on them. She worked closely with Emzara, sketching the animals on the ark while studying and recording their habits. In addition, during the construction of the ark, she created many of the clothes and tapestries on board. To its credit, the Ark Encounter gives roles to the wife of Noah and the wives of his sons. They emerge from their invisibility in the Genesis story, if only to fill ‘traditional’ female roles on the ark.

19 Shem’s Wife Ar’yel in the Kitchen of the Ark, according to the Ark Encounter, Kentucky.

According to this legend, we are all descended from Adam, then from Noah, and then from Noah’s sons and their wives. On this monogenetic account, we are all members of one human race. Thus, there is no Biblical justification for slavery. Sadly we are told, ‘some professing Christians have misused passages from the Bible to spread racist ideas, such as slavery based on a person’s skin tone or the notion that “interracial” marriage is sinful’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Noah and his wife had ‘middle-brown skin’, and their children could genetically have ‘exhibited the whole range of skin tones from light to dark’ within a few generations.Footnote ⁷⁵ The descendants of Shem and Ar’yel, Ham and Kezia, Japheth and Rayneh were eventually to populate the world.Footnote ⁷⁶

That said, the descendants of Noah refused to follow God’s command to multiply and fill the earth, happy to multiply but not so keen on filling. They gathered on the plain of Shinar (Genesis 11.2) and decided to build a city with a tower that reached to the heavens (Genesis 11.1-4). Because the people refused to disperse as ordered, God confused their language. From the confusion of language at Babel have arisen the ninety language families that have since evolved. Metals that were available before the flood had to be rediscovered and advances in technology reinvented for: ‘[A]s the various people groups scattered from that place, scientific achievements and technological advancements came slowly since most people spent their time struggling to meet their basic needs, such as food and shelter.’Footnote ⁷⁷

Another aspect of the legend of the Ark Encounter is its appropriation of ‘scientific’ thinking to explain some difficulties for Biblical inerrancy that science itself might have seemed to produce. One problem is the adequacy of the ark, despite its size, to accommodate all the terrestrial species that we know about today. This is resolved in an interesting way, via a distinction between ‘kinds’ and ‘species’, supplemented by a fast-tracked process of evolution after the flood. Thus, according to the Ark Encounter, Noah needed to bring only land-dependent animals onto the ark, fish, insects, and other invertebrates surviving outside of it. And he needed to embark only ‘two of every kind’ (‘min’ in Hebrew) along with birds, seven pair of clean animals, and one pair of unclean animals (Genesis 6.19-20). ‘Kind’ was a much broader category than ‘species’. Thus, Noah did not have to fit two of every species on the ark. Only two of each kind or family of animals were necessary. From these would later develop the many modern species of animals that have survived to this day, along with those that have become extinct.Footnote ⁷⁸ Thus, a representative pair of ancestors to all later species were on the ark – the Felid (cat) kind, the Alligator kind, the Pongid (great ape) kind, the Rhinoceros kind (formerly thought to be unicorns), the Thylacosmilid kind (now extinct), and so on. So, although there are some 34,000 land-dependent vertebrate species today, Noah then had to care, by Ark Encounter estimates, for 1,398 animal kinds (thus, give or take a few, 2,796 animals) on board.Footnote ⁷⁹

Crucially, for the sake of a young earth account of creation, the Ark Encounter is willing to build a super-fast version of evolution into its account of biological origins, one in keeping with ‘the mercy, creativity, and foresight of the Creator’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In short, a young earth and flood geology matter more than the conservative tradition of opposition to any accommodation with the Darwinian account of the evolution of species. All this, however, with the exclusion of one species – the humans – which was a divine creation some 6,000 years ago, 1,500 years before the flood: ‘The Bible is clear that God made man from the dust of the ground, and woman was made from his rib. There are no ape-like creatures in our ancestry.’Footnote ⁸¹

After the flood, the animals that exited from the ark developed into different species within kinds: Species gave rise to new species, characteristics were modified over time, and the fittest animals survived. Since the flood, therefore, large numbers of species of animals have become extinct. In short, animals developed to the number of species within the world today by natural selection, mutations, and other natural mechanisms. This has happened within the very short period of time since the universal flood. Thus, despite the 150 years of conflict between the Biblical account of creation and the Darwinian theory of evolution, the Ark Encounter accepts evolution and natural selection as the major cause of the multiplication of animal species, along with the extinction of many of them (including the dinosaurs). In short, this is Darwinian evolution but within a young earth chronology – a genuinely original harmonising of evolution and the Bible.

Noah and his family were easily able to look after this number of animals, not least because of the high levels of technology that had developed since the time of Adam: The longer life spans before the flood ‘enabled innovators and inventors to collaborate for decades, or even centuries, to produce sophisticated technologies’.Footnote ⁸² The ark contained complex technologies to care for the animals on board – automated smart feeders to allow animals to eat and drink at will, slotted floors with angled trays beneath to allow animal waste to be easily collected at the bottom of the stack, clay pots with water within to enable reptiles and amphibians to be held in a moist environment, and central cribs to house moths that would allow them to climb directly into the clay pots. Fortunately, many animals were not such picky eaters back then – koalas, vampire bats, and anteaters had wider diets than their modern descendants. Wave power was utilised to pump air through the ark, aided by convection currents within. Both oil lamps and light through skylights at the top of the ark provided lighting. Clean water was funnelled from the roof into large storage tanks with a system of spigots and bamboo (or even copper) pipes to deliver water from these to the ark.Footnote ⁸³

The animals, 85 per cent of which weighed 22 pounds or less, were held in 22 extra-large cages, 186 large, 293 medium, 174 small, 308 cages for birds, and 415 for amphibians. The ark was sufficiently large for many more animals than this. But even for this number of animals, 322,400 gallons of water needed to be stored and captured, while there were 15,000 storage vessels for food. Carnivores on the ark were catered for with preserved meat prepared for them beforehand. Noah and his family were vegetarians until after the flood, so meat, fresh or otherwise, was not a problem for them. The eight persons on board were sufficient to manage ark maintenance – three to clean the cages; two to water and feed the animals; half to shovel waste from pit to pump; one and a half to manage laundry, human waste, maintenance, and animal care; and one to deal with human food and special diets.

After a year, the world before the flood was completely ruined. Land animals were progressively destroyed and buried in the rapidly accumulating layers of sediment on the submerged land masses, which eventually led to their fossilisation. Mountain ranges were forced up from these submerged land masses, which would eventually be filled with fossil remains (and misguided judgements about their age by later old earth geologists). The highest hills were covered by water to a depth of fifteen cubits (greater than twenty-two feet). Eventually, the ark came to rest ‘on one of the newly formed mountains in the region of Ararat’ but not on Mount Ararat.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Ark Encounter, like Creation Science more generally, has given up on Mount Ararat (Agri) as the site of the lost ark. Approximately one year after boarding, Noah, his family, and the animals left the ark.

From the one continent before the flood, seven new continents were created. After the flood, with the build-up of snow and ice on land trapping water inland, and with so much water removed from the ocean, sea levels were hundreds of feet lower. This enabled land bridges from one continent to another, across which the animals spread to the new lands. They also reached distant shores by swimming, floating on debris, and with people on boats.

According to the young earth Ark Encounter, all the fossil evidence points to a universal flood some 4,500 years ago, not the millions of years of old earth geology. And it has no interest in harmonising Biblical chronology with old earth geology. ‘In a misguided attempt,’ we read, ‘to blend Biblical teaching with the popular idea that the earth is millions of years old, some Christians have invented imaginative ways to reinterpret the Bible’s creation account. However, every concept they have developed, such as the gap theory, progressive creationism, the framework hypothesis, and the day-age theory, is littered with problems.’Footnote ⁸⁵ Only flood geology can make sense of the scientific evidence available.

That said, in repeatedly attempting to demonstrate through scientific evidence the truth of the Biblical account of Noah and the ark, the overall theological purpose of this new legend of Noah becomes clear. In the time of Noah, the world was destroyed by a flood sent by God. The rainbow is a reminder that it will never again be destroyed by a worldwide deluge. Next time, the world will be destroyed by fire. Rescue from the judgement of God at the final end of the world will then only be for those who have found refuge from the world in Jesus Christ.

Thus, despite its commitment to the literal reading of the story of Noah and the flood, the Ark Encounter looks to the deeper meaning of the story of the flood in the Christian allegorical tradition of the interpretation of it. The ultimate purpose of the Ark Encounter is thus a theological one. The door through which Noah, his family, and the animals entered the ark in the Ark Encounter is illuminated by a cross. ‘The Ark’s door reminds us,’ we are told, ‘that we need to go through a door to be saved. Jesus Christ is our one door to salvation, the “Ark” is our door to salvation, the “Ark” that saves us from God’s judgment for eternity.’Footnote ⁸⁶ For good or ill, for the Ark Encounter, the meaning of the story of Noah and the flood is to be found in the next life rather than in this one.