Genesis 6:14-16
The specification
Measurements, materials and two openings. The instructions are practical to the point of being dull, which is what makes them convincing.
Objects of the Bible
The ark of Noah
A box with a door and a window, built to float rather than to sail.
The ark is given dimensions, three decks, a door in the side and one opening for light, and nothing else. It has no bow, no rudder, no sail and no keel, which is to say it is not a ship. It is a container that keeps what is inside it alive while the outside is unmade, and it goes where the water takes it. The account returns twice to the door, first to say where it is and later to say who shut it.
Scroll down to the story
The movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of The ark of Noah
- 01
- 02
Genesis 7:7-16
The door
They go in, the creatures come, and the account states who closed the door behind them. Nobody inside could have.
- 03
Genesis 8:13-19
The covering removed
Noah takes off the covering and looks. The ark ends not with a landing but with a man checking.
Why it matters
The ark is the first object in the Bible built entirely on a word about the future. Nothing in the sky supported the project for a hundred years. It also sets the shape of rescue that Scripture keeps reusing: a way through judgment rather than around it, with a door that someone else closes.
3 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
