It was a vast boat that saved two of each animal and a handful of humans from a catastrophic flood.
But forget all those images of a long vessel with a pointy bow—the original Noah’s Ark ... was round. 1
So begins a recent Associated Press article about the discovery of a reportedly 4,000-year-old clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia. This tablet pre-dates the famous Epic of Gilgamesh and goes on to describe the Ark as a round boat and two-thirds the size of a modern soccer field—something akin to a coracle, a primitive vessel that plied rivers in ancient Iraq.
Is this possible? Coracles were well known in ancient Mesopotamia, and it’s easy to see how the author of the clay tablet would latch onto such a vessel to describe a real event passed down to him from earlier times.在古代美索不达米亚, 小圓船 是人人认识的,很容易看出泥板的作者为什么用这样一艘船来描述从早些时候传递给他的真实事件。 A coracle, however, was a flimsy ship made of interwoven sticks and animal skins, and covered in tar;2 hardly something that would survive the raging waters of the global Flood.〔这样的圆船〕没有可能在全球洪水肆虐的水域中存活。
Nobody knows the true shape of Noah’s Ark. 没有人知道诺亚方舟的真实形状。Genesis 6:15, however, does give us the Ark’s proportions:然而,创世记6:15确实给了我们方舟的比例: “The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits.” 要長三百肘,寬五十肘,高三十肘。 These figures certainly show that it was not the round shape described in the Mesopotamian tablet.这些数字肯定表明它不是美索不达米亚泥板中描述的圆形。
The book of Genesis records the same global Flood event, but the ship that saved Noah and his family was a massive structure, expertly engineered to ride out the pounding waves of the earth-changing, worldwide Flood that destroyed all mankind and millions of animals except for those on the Ark.
Which of the two Noah’s Arks sounds most plausible?
The Flood was a real event etched into the memories of our ancestors. 洪水是一个真实的事件,铭刻在我们祖先的记忆中。Over 270 cultures retain some version of the account, but only the Bible preserves an accurate telling of it.超过270种文化保留了某种版本的记载,但只有圣经保留了准确的说明。