The Size of the Ark

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 1, 1875

The Size of the Ark.

INFIDELS object to the size of the ark, that there could not be a vessel large enough to hold all the creatures which must have been placed in it with sufficient food, it may be, for six or twelve months. Now from the dimensions of the ark in the record of Moses, calculating on the lowest possible scale, the ark was 300 cubits, or 450 feet long. The breadth is fifty cubits, or seventy-five feet, and thirty cubits, or forty-five feet high. In other words, it was as long as St. Paul's cathedral, London, nearly as broad, and half as high. Its tonnage, 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 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 240 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 required quantity of food to maintain them twelve months.