Addenda 2 The Capacity of the Ark
In order to preserve both human and terrestrial animal life on the earth, God instructed Noah to build a huge barge-like structure called an ark, in which the occupants would be saved from destruction in the coming Flood. According to God's instructions, the Ark was to be designed for capacity and floating stability rather than for speed or navigability. The dimensions were to be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high.
The question is: how long is a cubit? The Babylonians had a royal cubit of about 19.8 inches; the Egyptians had a longer and a shorter cubit of about 10.65 and 17.6 inches, respectively; and the Hebrews apparently had a long cubit of 20.4 inches (Ezekiel 40:5) and a common cubit of about 17.5 inches. Another common cubit of antiquity was 24 inches. Most writers believe the Biblical cubit to be 18 inches.
To be very conservative, assume the cubit to have been only 17.5 inches, the shortest of all cubits, so far as is known. In that case, the Ark would have been 438 feet long, 72.9 feet wide, and 43.8 feet high. It can be shown hydro-dynamically that a gigantic box of such dimensions would be exceedingly stable, almost impossible to capsize. Even in a sea of gigantic waves, the ark could be tilted through any angle up to just short of 90o and would immediately thereafter right itself again. Further- more, it would tend to align itself parallel with the direction of major wave advance and thus be subject to minimum pitching most of the time.
With the dimensions as calculated, the total volumetric capacity of the Ark was approximately 1,400,000 cubic feet, which is equal to the volumetric capacity of 522 standard livestock cars such as used on modern American railroads. Since it is known that about 240 sheep can be transported in one stock car, a total of over 125,000 sheep could have been carried in the Ark.
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Henry M. Morris, Ph.D., The Genesis Record, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1976, p. 181.
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