Genesis

[Bucky Ball]

Why is there "numerical data" in the flood story?

The dimensions of the Ark?

"After 17 days of the 2nd month ..."?

When I first read the Bible ... when I came to this ... I thought:

"It's a MAP of a voyage!"

So where did the Ark sail from and go to?

Answer: It went from Heliopolis to Patmos.

2,200 BC or so. A movement of people from Egypt during the chaos that followed the collapse of the Egyptian Old Kingdom.

The reference to Ararat suggests they later (generations later?) moved into the Black Sea.

... then, maybe, across into Northern Mesopotamia and then (as "Abraham") back to Egypt.

A round trip over several generations?

Whoever wrote Revelations may have known about this map.

Why ? Because the writers/editors of the myth were skilled at writing MYTHS.
The dimensions and instructions for the Ark are taken directly from the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, (they may be in chapter 11 ??) as well as many other elements of the Hebrew Flood MYTH, (the boat dimensions, the olive branch story, eyc etc, which they syncretically "borrowed"). There is no world-wide silt layer, thus no world-wide flood. Archaeologists have excavated in countless sites to below what would be that level ... no silt layer. It's not only the arc. There are many many other elements in the stories in Genesis they took from the Babylonian myth system, including Yahweh.
There probably would have been more than one "large" regional flood, one of which was when the sea level rose and the Tigris and Euphrates "backed up" and expanded around 6000 BCE, 
and forced the Babylonians to keep moving for a time :

"Accelerated rises in sea level rise, called meltwater pulses, occurred three times during the EHSLR. The last one, Meltwater Pulse 1C, which peaked c. 6000 BC, produced a rise of 6.5 metres in only 140 years. It is believed that the cause was a major ice sheet collapse in Antarctica."

There were hundreds of books of "revelations" see Elaine Pagels (Princeton). Making up Books of Revelations was a cottage industry. They are all a bunch of crappy fiction.