Here’s a Lesson from Noah’s Ark We Can All Use Today

Finding Noah’s Ark has got to be one of the greatest archaeological trophy hunts of all time. And the list of trophy hunters is remarkable for its variety, while the claims of success have frequently stretched credulity to its limits.

Take James Irwin, the eighth man to walk on the moon. In 1982, on a quest for Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey, he went off alone in search of a shortcut, fell, and lost consciousness. Hours later he woke up badly injured, somehow survived the night in his sleeping bag, and was rescued the next day.

In 1983 he was back, and this time a Turkish guide reported seeing wood where the snowline had receded. Wood, at that height, could only mean one thing. A blizzard drove the team down before they could reach it. “It’s easier to walk on the moon,” Irwin told reporters.

In 1984 he returned to inspect the mysterious object. It was not Noah’s Ark. It was a pair of abandoned skis.

Irwin was hardly alone. In 1955, the French industrialist Fernand Navarra got around Turkish restrictions on Mount Ararat by arriving with his wife and three sons on what looked like a family vacation.

He climbed the mountain with his 11-year-old son and came down with a five-foot piece of hand-worked timber that he claimed had come from the Ark. Eventually samples were carbon-dated by five different laboratories.

The results put the wood roughly between 1,200 and 1,700 years old. Very old wood, as it turned out, but nowhere near old enough to have belonged to Noah.

Then there is the Durupınar site. In 1959, Turkish army captain İlhan Durupınar noticed a 538-foot boat-shaped formation on an aerial photograph taken during a NATO mapping mission, about 18 miles south of Mount Ararat.

An expedition arrived the following year, dug into it, and concluded that it was “a freak of nature and not man-made.” The verdict did little to dampen enthusiasm. Turkey later promoted the site as Nuhun Gemisi — Noah’s Ship — even though the road sign points visitors away from Mount Ararat.

In November 1872, in a back room of the British Museum, a 32-year-old former banknote engraver named George Smith was sorting clay fragments from Nineveh when he realized that he was reading an ancient flood story. There were references to a great ship, a mountain, and birds sent out to test whether the waters had receded.

According to a later account, Smith became so excited that he jumped up, rushed around the room, and “to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself.” By December he was dressed again, presenting his discovery to the Society of Biblical Archaeology, with Prime Minister William Gladstone sitting in the audience. The text was part of what we now know as the 11th tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The similarities to the Torah’s flood story are remarkable. A god warns a man named Utnapishtim that a catastrophic flood is coming. He is told to build a great vessel and take aboard every living creature. The storm lasts six days and seven nights. The vessel comes to rest on a mountain, and birds are released to see whether the earth has dried — first a dove, then a swallow, and finally a raven that does not return.

Another Mesopotamian flood tradition, Atrahasis, is even older. And in 2014, Irving Finkel of the British Museum published his decipherment of a remarkable 4,000-year-old Babylonian tablet, about the size of a mobile phone, that had been brought to him by a private collector. It preserved yet another version of the flood tradition, including instructions for the animals to enter “two by two.”

At first glance, all of this seems to create a problem for the Torah. If Mesopotamian civilizations were telling flood stories long before the Torah was written down, perhaps Noach is merely another version of an old Babylonian legend.

But the part that really interests me is not how similar the stories are – it is how different they are. In Atrahasis, the gods create human beings to do the work they don’t want to do. But humanity multiplies, becomes unbearably noisy, and keeps the chief god, Enlil, awake at night.

He tries plague, drought, and famine, and when none of those solves the problem, he sends the flood. Afterwards, when the gods discover that humans have survived, they devise new methods to ensure that the population never again gets out of hand: infertility, infant mortality, and celibacy.

The flood has taught the Babylonian gods one lesson — there are too many people. The Torah says almost exactly the opposite. The problem is not that human beings are too noisy or too many, it is that they have become morally corrupt (Gen 6:11): וַתִּמָּלֵא הָאָרֶץ חָמָס — “the earth was filled with violence.”

Humanity is not destroyed for inconveniencing heaven; it is destroyed for being cruel. And after the flood, God’s first blessing to Noach and his sons is: “Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.” The Babylonian gods emerge from the flood wanting fewer people, but God in the Torah wants more.

There is an even more startling contrast. Before the flood, the Torah explains the coming destruction by saying that “every inclination of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil, all day long.”

Then, after the flood, God promises never again to destroy the earth, and gives what sounds like almost exactly the same reason: “because the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”

In other words, the flood had not solved the problem; humanity after the flood is still flawed. What changed after the flood was not us, it was God’s decision to remain in covenant with us anyway. And He sealed that decision with the rainbow — a covenant with the whole of humanity, long before there was a Jew in the world.

The Mesopotamian flood story removes its hero from ordinary humanity. Utnapishtim and his wife are granted immortality, made “like the gods,” and sent to live far away.

But the Torah does precisely the opposite. Noach remains painfully human. He survives the flood, plants a vineyard, gets drunk, suffers humiliation, grows old, and dies. The Sages even argue about whether he was righteous.

The Torah calls him “righteous in his generation.” Praise, say some — imagine remaining decent in a society saturated with evil. Not such high praise, say others — had he lived in Abraham’s generation, he would not have counted for much.

A mythology that wants to exalt its flood hero removes him from ordinary life, but the Torah sends Noach straight back into it. His reward is not immortality; it is an imperfect world and the responsibility to begin again.

Which may explain why Judaism has never particularly needed Noah’s Ark to be found. The Torah says it came to rest “on the mountains of Ararat” — mountains, plural — and then loses interest in the vessel. Noach comes out, the animals come out, and the story moves on.

Because what came down the mountain was not wood, it was a covenant: Do not murder. Do not steal. Establish justice. Do not turn appetite into cruelty. Do not fill the earth with violence again.

Truthfully, that ark is not particularly difficult to find. It is in how we treat people. It is in whether we tell the truth when nobody would ever know. It is in how we behave towards people who irritate us, inconvenience us, or have nothing to offer us.

James Irwin climbed perhaps the most famous mountain in the Bible looking for Noah’s Ark and found a pair of abandoned skis. But had he actually found the Ark, what difference would it have made?

The lesson of the Ark was never about the vessel; it was about what humanity would do with the world once their lives had been saved. Let the ark-hunters continue their quest. Meanwhile, the rest of us get the harder job: to stay in the real world, among the noise — and behave.

The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California