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This post was written in December 2016.
9 This is the account concerning Noah. Noah was a upstanding man, blameless among his contemporaries. Noah walked with God. 10 Three sons were born to Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. 11 Now the earth was ruined (šḥt) before God. The earth was filled with oppression. 12 God saw the earth, and there it was: ruined, because all flesh had ruined its way on the earth.
13 God said to Noah, The end of all flesh has come before me, because they have filled the earth with oppression. Therefore I will ruin them as well as the earth. 14 Make yourself an ark of gpr wood. Of compartments you are to make the ark, and you are to cover it inside and outside with bitumen. 15 This is how you are to make it: three hundred cubits the length of the ark, fifty cubits its width, and thirty cubits its height. 16 Make a ṣhr for the ark, and finish it to one cubit from above. Set an opening for the ark in its side. Make it with lower, second, and third [levels].
account. Hebrew toldot.
walked with God. An idiom for the way of life of upstanding people. Enoch walked with God (Genesis 5:24), Abraham was called to follow God in similar terms (17:1). Compare also Deuteronomy 8:6 and Micah 6:8 for the walking metaphor. Even at present, Jewish traditional law is referred to as halacha, ‘how one walks.’
God. Notice the use of the word God where Yahweh was used in verse 8. See Documentary Hypothesis.
oppression. Some translators read violence, but the underlying Hebrew word is a wider one than simply physical violence.
ruined. Where verbs formed by the Hebrew word šḥt appear in this passage, I am translating them all by the English word ruined in order to preserve the worldplay found in the Hebrew text. The instance in verse 11 and the first instance in 12 are niphal verbs, while the second instance in 12 and the one in 13 are a hiphil verbs.
way. Hebrew derek. This word for behavior also partakes in the walking metaphor mentioned above: the way one lives is the path on which one walks.
they have filled the earth with oppression. Literally, the earth is filled with oppression owing to them.
ark. A rare word, used only of Noah’s ‘ark’ and the ‘ark’ in which Moses was placed as a baby. In both cases the word refers to a vessel, covered in bitumen some kind of stuff, which saves its cargo from death by drowning.
gpr. Some word of wood, species unknown. It is mentioned only in this verse, so there is no way to know for sure what type of wood was intended. Gesenius guesses that the word gpr is synonymous with kpr, the ‘pitch’ smeared on the ark to make it watertight. On his interpretation ‘__gpr wood’ refers to lumber from resinous trees, such as cypress.
Of compartments. Hebrew qnym, which means normally nests. I am not at all confident that compartments is the right interpretation of it in this context.
bitumen. Hebrew kpr, used only here as referring to a construction material. Compare Exodus 2:3, which uses a different verb and noun but describes the same process being done to Moses’ ark. Of the use of kpr in Genesis 6:14, Burton Scott Easton wrote in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia:
pich: The translation of the noun kopher, and the verb kaphar, in Ge[nesis] 6:14 and of the noun zepheth, in Ex[odus] 2:3; Isa[iah] 34:9. In Ge[nesis] 6:14 the words are the ordinary forms for “covering,” “cover,” so that the translation “pitch” is largely guesswork, aided by the Septuagint, which reads asphaltos, “bitumen,” here, and by the fact that pitch is a usual “covering” for vessels. The meaning of zepheth, however, is fixed by the obvious Dead Sea imagery of Isa 34:9-15–the streams and land of Edom are to become burning bitumen, like the sites of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Ex 2:3 zepheth is combined with chemar, which also means bitumen (Ge 14:10; see SLIME), and the distinction between the words (different consistencies of the same substance?) is not clear.
cubit. The Bible knows of at least two cubit lengths, one being about a sixth longer than the other (2 Chronicles 3:3, Ezekiel 40:5). Unfortunately, the Bible does not specify Noah’s cubit. Based on the biological concept of a cubit (distance from elbows to fingertips) and on archaeological finds, we can guess that the cubit intended in Genesis 6 was probably between 17 and 21 inches. Using, say, an 18 or 20.7 inch cubit we get an ark 450′ or about 518′ length, 75′ or about 86′ wide, and 45′ or about 52′ high. Whatever the cubit, this is outside the range of ship sizes possible in antiquity.
For anyone interested in a field trip, a bunch of creationists have built a nifty full-sized model ark in Kentucky. The displays inside go deep into pseudoscience, but it’s a lot of fun to see.
ṣhr. A word used only here, at least in this singular form. Because ṣhrym means noontime, the most common theory is that a ṣhr is some sort of window, but there is no evidence from usage to prove that this is the case.