The Size of the Ark

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jun 10, 1875

The Size of the Ark

INFIDELS have objected to the size of the ark; have asserted that it is absurd to suppose that there could be a vessel constructed large enough to hold all the creatures that must have been placed in it, with sufficient food, it may be, for six or twelve months—water for fish, corn for four-footed animals, seed for birds, and so on. Now we will take the dimensions of the ark from the records of Moses, and calculate them on the lowest possible scale. There are two definitions given to a cubic, one that it is eighteen inches, or a foot and a half, and the other that it is twenty inches; we will take it only at the lowest. Moses states that the ark was 300 cubics long, this would make it 450 feet long, of about the length of St. Paul’s cathedral, London. The breadth he states to be fifty cubics; we have it seventy-five feet in breadth. He states it to be thirteen cubics high. In other words, it was as long as St. Paul’s cathedral, nearly as broad and half as high.

The tonage of the ark, according to the computation of modern carpenters, must have been 32,000 tons. The largest sized English ship (of a size altogether unimaginable to those who have never seen it) is 3,500 tons burden; so that the ark must have been equal to twenty-six first-rate ships of war, and if armed as such ships are, it would have contained beyond 18,000 men, and provisions for them for eighteen months. Buffon has asserted that all four-footed animals may be reduced to 250 pairs, and the birds to a still smaller number. On calculating, therefore, we shall find that the ark would have held more than five times the quantity of food to maintain them twelve months.—Christian Advocate.