The Puzzle of Noah

            The story of Noah and the Ark is one of the most well-known, retold stories that appears in the books of the Bible.  Most children’s bibles include the story, even when much of the rest of Genesis is left out, and there have been countless film adaptations of it.  This trend, I believe, stems from the fact that the actual text of the story in the Bible is both rather vague, and oddly specific.  Noah receives his instructions to build an ark of exactly 300 cubits, for two each (and seven of the clean) of every animal on the earth, except a few specific ones, he does so, the floods come, recede, and the world is new.

The version that is in the Bible is such a bare-bones text, dotted with specifics, it nearly begs to be embellished.  This has given rise to works like Barnes’s The Stowaway, a ‘true’ telling of the Ark narrative from the point of view of a serpent, hiding on one of the arks.  Versions like this add elements of humor and answer questions that are not pointed out in the text of the Bible, like how the animals were chosen, how they all fit in the ark (or in Barnes’s case, arks).  The lack of detail has also allowed other writers to explain the non-existence of some animals as the Irish Rovers do in their song The Unicorn (the animals, tragically, do not make it onto the ark). 

The logistic puzzle and the sporadic details that the Ark story provides are extraordinarily tempting, and have given rise to countless retellings and calculations to posit just how Noah could have pulled this off.