Utnapishtim vs. Noah: War of the Ships (Part 2)

By Stephen Mitchell

Now it is time to consider the ship of Noah, commonly known as Noah’s Ark. We learn this story from the Old Testament, the book of Genesis, chapters 6 and 7. Here is what the text says, using the New American Standard, 1995, translation:

Chapter 6

13 Then God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth.

14 “Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood; you shall make the ark with rooms, and shall cover it inside and out with pitch.

15 “This is how you shall make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits.

16 “You shall make a window for the ark, and finish it to a cubit from the top; and set the door of the ark in the side of it; you shall make it with lower, second, and third decks.

Chapter 7

13 On the very same day Noah and Shem and Ham and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons with them, entered the ark,

14 they and every beast after its kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth after its kind, and every bird after its kind, all sorts of birds.

15 So they went into the ark to Noah, by twos of all flesh in which was the breath of life.

16 Those that entered, male and female of all flesh, entered as God had commanded him; and the LORD closed it behind him.

17 Then the flood came upon the earth for forty days, and the water increased and lifted up the ark, so that it rose above the earth.

18 The water prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water.

19 The water prevailed more and more upon the earth, so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered.

20 The water prevailed fifteen cubits higher, and the mountains were covered.

Noah’s boat is 300 cu long, by 50 cu wide, by 30 cu tall. It at least sounds more like a ship than Utnapishtim’s boat. So how big was it? Since Noah’s boat has been the subject of much discussion and research, the following extensive quote will give the necessary details.

Most commentators adopt without question the Hebrews’ common cubit [17.5 inches], which is virtually identical to the Egyptian shorter cubit. This would logically make sense with Moses, a Hebrew with an Egyptian upbringing, writing in the first instance to Hebrews. However, most commentators simplify the calculations by adopting a rounded figure of 18 inches or 45 centimeters for the cubit. When all these considerations are taken into account, a conservative estimate for the dimensions of the Ark would be 450 feet (approximately 135 meters) long, 75 feet (22.5 meters) wide, and 45 feet (13.5 meters) high. Since the Ark had three decks (Genesis 6:16), it had a total deck area of approximately 98,800 square feet (approximately 9,100 square meters), which is equivalent to slightly more than the area of twenty standard basketball courts. The total volume of the Ark would also have been approximately 1.45 million cubic feet (approximately 41,000 cubic meters), which is approximately equal to the volumetric capacity of 540 standard livestock cars used on modern U.S. railroads. The displacement tonnage of the Ark, defined as the weight of seawater displaced by the volume of the ship when submerged to its design draft, assumed to be 15 cubits (half its height) because Genesis 7:20 refers to the Flood waters prevailing higher than 15 cubits over the mountains so that the Ark cleared them, would have been almost 20,700 tons (more than 21,000 tonnes). The gross tonnage of the Ark, which is a measurement of cubic space rather than weight—one ton in this case being equivalent to 100 cubic feet of usable storage space—would have been about 14,500 tons (approximately 14,730 tonnes), which would place it well within the category of large metal oceangoing ships today. (Snelling, 35-36)

If one does not round up the 17.5 inches to 18, the boat would have been 437.5 feet long, 72.92 feet wide, and 43.75 feet tall.

With that information, let’s consider its performance under the stated conditions of a flood. Since the only researchers who have taken the Ark seriously are creationists, it is to them that we will have to look for information on the seaworthiness of the Ark.

Note the ratio of length to width of the Ark’s design: 300 cubits to 50 cubits, or approximately 450 feet long to 75 feet wide. This ratio of 6 to 1 is well known in naval design for optimum stability. Many modern naval engineers, when designing cargo ships to battleships, utilize this same basic design ratio.

The Ark’s long, slender shape would have maximized cargo space and kept the vessel pointed into wave trends, thereby minimizing chances of it being broadsided by a wave that could capsize it. If we could take a cross-section of the Ark, we would see a pair of forces consisting of the Ark’s weight acting downward and buoyancy acting upward that form what naval engineers term a “righting couple.” This pair of forces acting in opposite, but parallel, directions tends to force the vessel to “right” itself when tilted. As shown in the figure, for any degree of tilt up to 90 degrees, the couple would right the Ark and return it to an upright orientation. (J. Morris, 13).

The Ark’s seaworthiness was as fully researched as possible and recorded in a paper originally published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Creation Research by members of the Korean Research Institute of Ships and Engineering. The paper is titled “Safety Investigation of Noah’s Ark in a Seaway” (http://worldwideflood.org/ark/safety_aig/safety_aig.htm). In the introduction it states,

In this study, the safety of the Ark in the severe environments imposed by the waves and winds during the Genesis Flood was investigated.

In general, the safety of a ship in a seaway is related to three major safety parameters — structural safety, overturning stability, and seakeeping quality. Good structural safety ensures the hull against damage caused mainly by wave loads. Enough overturning stability is required to prevent the ship from capsizing due to the heeling moment caused by winds and waves. Good seakeeping quality is essential for the effectiveness and safety of the personnel and cargo on board.

Information about the hull is of course available from the existing references to Noah’s Ark, and from the reasonable (common sense) assumptions of naval engineers. In order to avoid any error due to the lack of complete hull information, we introduced the concept of ’relative safety’, which was defined as the relative superiority in safety compared to other hull forms. For this purpose, 12 different hull forms with the same displacement were generated systemically by varying principal dimensions of the Ark. The concept of relative safety of a ship has been introduced by several researchers, such as Comstock and Keane, Hosoka et al., Bales and Hong et al., to analyze the seakeeping quality. In this paper, we extend the relative safety concept for the seakeeping quality to the concept of total safety, including structural and overturning safety.

They noted:

“Because the maximum stress was smaller than the allowable stress, the Ark could be said to have had safe structural performance” (Section 5.3).

“… it had high structural safety” (Section 5.4).

“… the Ark was 13 times more stable than the standard for safety required by the [American Bureau of Shipping’s] rule” (Section 6.2).

“… flooding of the Ark would not have occurred until the waves became 47.5m [155.84 ft.] high, when the limiting heeling angle was 31^o“(Section 7).

“In conclusion, the Ark as a drifting ship, is thus believed to have had a reasonable-beam-draft ratio for the safety of the hull, crew and cargo in the high winds and waves imposed on it by the Genesis Flood” (Section 8).

Henry M. Morris, Ph.D in Hydraulic Engineering, also published a paper on the design of the Ark. In referencing the stability of the Ark he wrote:

… its relatively great length (six times its width) would tend to keep it from being subjected to wave forces of equal magnitude through its whole length, since wave fields tend to occur in broken and varying patterns, rather than in a series of long uniform crest-trough sequences, and this would be particularly true in the chaotic hydrodynamic phenomena of the Flood. The Ark would, in fact, tend to be lined up by the spectrum of hydrodynamic forces and currents in such a direction that its long axis would be parallel to the predominant direction of wave and current movement. Thus it would act as a semi-streamlined body, and the net drag forces would usually be minimal. In every way, therefore, the Ark as designed was highly stable, admirably suited for its purpose of riding out the storms of the year of the great Flood (H. Morris, 142).

So with Utnapishtim’s ship a complete disaster in a flood and Noah’s ship an ideal design for a flood, how could the Jews have copied Noah’s ship from Utnapishtim’s? Obviously, they could not and did not. If they did not copy it, then from where did they get the parameters for such an excellently designed barge? That will be the subject of the third post in this series.

Bibliography

Bible, New American Standard, 1995 Update.

S. W. Hong, et al, Safety Investigation of Noah’s Ark in a Seaway (http://worldwideflood.org/ark/safety_aig/safety_aig.htm). Accessed 9/14/’15.

Henry M. Morris, “The Ark of Noah,” Creation Research Science Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 2 (Sep. 1971)

John Morris, “The Survival of Noah’s Ark,” Acts and Facts, vol. 42, no. 1 (Jan 2013).

Andrew A. Snelling, Earth’s Catastrophic Past, vol. 1 (Dallas, Texas: Institute for Creation Research, 2009)