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Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Qinnim you shall make the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch.
The term "ark" (Hebrew teba) appears in only this story and the story of how Moses is saved from death in the waters of the Nile. Here the ark is the size of an enormous boat, there the ark is a small vessel just large enough to hold a baby. Both times God works to save a significant individual from death in water.
The term gopher is Hebrew, and its meaning is not clear. It appears only here. One suggestion is that, on account of the use of resinous wood in ship-building and due to the similarity of the Hebrew GPR to the Greek kyparissos, it is cypress. See Gesenius on this word.
Qinnim is difficult. In the rest of the Bible, the term qen refers to a bird's nest, and is sometimes used metaphorically of a human dwelling-place. Perhaps it is on the basis of this metaphor that the KJV extends it a bit further: "rooms shalt thou make in the ark." They likely rested on rabbinical precedent in making this choice. Rashi[1] takes this as referring to individual "compartments", leaning on the interpretation found in the Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer.
Earlier, Philo reads "nests nests" as though the Hebrew text once repeated qinnim qinnim. This kind of duplication can have a distributive meaning, so that "Nests nests you shall make the ark" means roughly "you shall make nests throughout the ark." Kittel indicates that in his opinion qnym qnym is more original than the mere qnym (once) found in the Masoretic Text.
Another theory on the meaning of qnym is that it should be read as qanim 'reeds', hearkening back to an earlier stage in the story in which the ark is described as being made of reeds. It is significant to this interpretation that the ark of Moses was made of reeds, and, similarly to the ark of Noah, is described as being coated with a water-proofing substance. Likewise, in the Flood story found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, reed-workers are involved in the construction of the ark.
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