Noah's Ark and the Great Flood

Genesis 6-9 tells the story. The Lord sees that human wickedness is great and the earth filled with violence, and regrets having made humankind; only Noah finds favor. God commands him to build an ark of gopher wood, coated inside and out with pitch: 300 cubits long, 50 wide, 30 high, with three decks, a door in its side, and an opening of one cubit at the top. Noah enters with his wife, his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their wives, taking seven pairs of every clean animal and one pair of the unclean, with birds and creeping things after their kinds. Then the fountains of the great deep burst open, the windows of heaven are opened, and rain falls forty days and forty nights, until the high mountains are covered and every breathing thing on dry land dies.

As the waters recede, the ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat on the seventeenth day of the seventh month. Noah sends out a raven, which goes to and fro; then a dove, which finds no rest and returns; seven days later the dove comes back at evening with a freshly plucked olive leaf in its beak; after seven days more it does not return. Leaving the ark, Noah builds an altar, and God promises never again to curse the ground for humankind's sake, setting the rainbow in the clouds as the sign of a covenant with all flesh.

Mesopotamia preserves older parallels. On the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim builds a boat at divine warning and releases a dove, a swallow, and a raven to test the waters; the earlier Atrahasis epic tells an almost identical tale of destruction and survival. George Smith's decipherment of the flood tablet at the British Museum in 1872 electrified European scholarship. In Islam, Nuh ranks among the great prophets, and sura 71 of the Quran bears his name. Claims of ark remains on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey have recurred for centuries; none has withstood scrutiny.