Why I Love Reading the Sunday Paper

[Justtristo]

What's gopher wood,and what's the bet they are not quite sure of the actual length of a cubit?


I can understand how a tribe of dessert dwelling,bronze age nomadic goat herders could imagine there are only a few dozen species of animal,but-----

My guess is that gopher is probably Lebanese Cedar. although it could be interwoven willow branches and palm leaves, coated on the outside with bitumen. I wonder how if an "ark feasibility" study has been done with an supertanker sized ship whose hull was made out of interwoven willow branches and palm leaves.

[KichigaiNeko]

What's gopher wood,and what's the bet they are not quite sure of the actual length of a cubit?


I can understand how a tribe of dessert dwelling,bronze age nomadic goat herders could imagine there are only a few dozen species of animal,but-----

My guess is that gopher is probably Lebanese Cedar. although it could be interwoven willow branches and palm leaves, coated on the outside with bitumen. I wonder how if an "ark feasibility" study has been done with an supertanker sized ship whose hull was made out of interwoven willow branches and palm leaves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_wood

http://www.noahsark-naxuan.com/arkmodel.htm

http://strongsnumbers.com/hebrew/3724.htm

How convenient.

[Justtristo]

http://www.noahsark-naxuan.com/arkmodel.htm

No bronze age boat or ship looked anything like that ark model. I am in no way criticizing the ship building skills of the bronze age, however there has been nothing discovered with the type of design described in that webpage.

Maybe the minimalist can inform us better on this.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, Thor Heyerdahl gave us a proof of concept regarding the seaworthiness ancient boat designs when he sailed the Ra (a large reed sailing vessel based on egyptian "river barges") across the Atlantic. There are plenty of bronze age boat designs that relied upon a framework which was then covered by skins, for example. The main limiter of size being the skins themselves (watertight stitching, not so common).

They seem to be advocating a pitch covered "super-canoe". Fair enough. You're right in saying that no bronze age boat looked like that. Believers will simply say its a pitch canoe with a wooden frame made larger, but just taking a boat and making it bigger (and then loading it with cargo) is a pretty well understood no-no. The model there is based off of techniques available to people of the time, but corrected with knowledge that was not available.

In any case, a pitch boat like that would have been found by now, what with tiny pitch canoes found in the Netherlands that date to 8200-7600 BC. Something that well constructed (it would have to have been) and covered in tar.....would still be sitting on top of whatever mountain it ended up on. The "exact specifications" of the ark probably ended up weaseling their way into the narrative as generations of people interrupted the storyteller with a "wait a fucking minute..how big WAS this boat?". That thought always puts a smile on my face.

http://www2.ulg.ac.be/archgrec/IMG/aegeu...orgiou.pdf

---

I may have to modify that statement above. The techniques for building a pitch canoe were available to them, but a pitch canoe of that size? Nothing short of a miracle. Notice a canoe's nasty habit of tipping with inexperience operators? A small boat is relatively easy to balance. A boat of that size, imagine how precise and identical the frame timbers would have to have been milled to keep it from capsizing under it's own weight. Then you have the issue of load on the frame, and the action of the flood, he would have needed some here-to-fore un-theorized joining techniques to keep the thing from ripping itself apart while it was busy not capsizing.

In short, it would absolutely have been a miracle, in which case, the specs are irrelevant, not that god should have needed a boat to save what he chose to save in the first place. The guy can part waters yes?

[Minimalist]

Over at Archaeologica we frequently ( once or twice a year ) lapse into a discussion of ancient boats. We've got one group who insists early man walked every where and others (myself included) who maintain that Homo Erectus must have had seafaring capability. Walking overland is not a day at the park without roads or bridges. The skin frame boat makes the most sense or even a hollowed log with an outrigger for balance.

The other obvious problem with building a large craft in the Early Bronze Age is that you would only have early Bronze Age tools to do it with. In Egypt, at roughly the same time that the morons think the whole world was flooded the Egyptians were building the pyramids ( and kept on building them even though they were all drowned!) with copper chisels and stone hammers.

Archaeologists have discovered the Abydos Fleet in Egypt a collection of 14 boats made of wood planking and buried...for some reason...in the desert which is the only thing that preserved them.

http://www.abc.se/~pa/mar/abydos.htm

Entire careers will be spent studying this find but the boats themselves are at most 75 feet long and 7-10 feet wide with a very shallow draft which indicates that they were for river use.

Aside from that we have the Giza Boat Pits which led to the finding of a much larger boat of 142 feel in length with a 16 foot beam but still only a depth of 5 feet which again indicates river use rather than sea-going.

http://www.ancient-egypt.co.uk/giza_boat/index.htm

This was also planked and this time it was made of Lebanese Cedar for sure but it is 1/5 the size of the alleged ark and again designed for use on the rather sluggish Nile - not for surviving the greatest storm of all time.

The ark story is simply technologically absurd.

[DeistPaladin]

Perhaps they could take two of each phyla though they'd have to rely somewhat on evolution in the event of a global flood.

Of course, then we're talking not just about evolution by hyper evolution, since we'd only have about 4000 years to fill out the variety of species we see today.

[Skeptic]

Perhaps they could take two of each phyla though they'd have to rely somewhat on evolution in the event of a global flood.

Of course, then we're talking not just about evolution by hyper evolution, since we'd only have about 4000 years to fill out the variety of species we see today.

I was referring to this crazy crew, not the original fairytale. I think they'd be waiting a long time...

[The Grand Nudger]

4000 years ago? Is that the timeframe we're dealing with? So the ark would then be older than the oldest known seagoing vessel ever found? And a few thousand miles outside of its only known area of existence. Fantastic. Quite the theory they have there. Hell, if the early hebrew people were capable of building such a boat it's a wonder we don't all speak yiddish..lol.

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If anyone has a legitimate interest in seagoing vessels

http://www.doverdc.co.uk/museum/bronze_age_boat.aspx

[Minimalist]

Bishop Ussher, the nut who came up with the 6,000 year old earth, put the flood at 2348 BC which is around the junction point of the 5th and 6th Egyptian dynasties. They seem to have gone right on building pyramids in spite of the fact that they were all dead which is quite a trick!

[downbeatplumb]

There’s one thing I never understood about this theory. If the Earth was formed from the same disk of materials as the meteorites, why was it necessary for the early Earth to be seeded? The same materials should already have been here.

But the earth got much hotter than the asteroids because of its size making for a sterile dry place it stayed hotter longer too. Hence the need for outside organic material.