Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and today we're gonna do something a little bit different for a biblical theology podcast. And we're gonna talk about the location of Noah's Ark. And while that is not really a biblical theology topic, I hope that you'll be able to see that the way I'm approaching it is going to be quite in parallel with the way that I'm approaching other things.
[00:00:40] And also it's going to be beneficial to our understanding of global flood myths and how the Bible in its own context, relates to the wider world and the wider mythology from around the world. Because when we're thinking about the Bible as a text and as a tradition, and as an oral- written work, that's going to be very parallel to how we understand traditions and memory at large. And the location of Noah's Ark is part of that whole matrix of things. At least that's how I'm going to approach it in my episode today.
[00:01:20] I'm not gonna dwell on the archaeology and things like that, and I'll explain why. But first a caveat. I do not care where the Ark is. I do not care where you or anyone else think the Ark is. My point is not to dismantle your ideas or to give you an idea. My goal here is not to determine exactly where the Ark is. What I do care about is that people are not bamboozled by shiny sensationalist claims. Now, that's not to say that shiny sensationalist claims can't be actually accurate because you know, sometimes maybe they are.
[00:02:00] I'm not saying that that's not at all the case ever, but what I am saying is that there are a lot of people who just go for those shiny things because they're attractive in various ways, and that's not even necessarily a problem, except that it arrests their ability to think critically. When you want to believe this or that idea, and you're not challenging that idea, you're not coming to it with skeptical questions, then you're really just not going to see it accurately.
[00:02:31] Every claim should have backing that is evidential in some form, and some claims have more backing than others. And that is kind of my point here in this episode today. I'm gonna tell you that I think that skepticism is going to do you some good here because it does lead to critical thinking to find the weak points of a claim and not just gravitate toward the strong points or what you think are strong.
[00:03:00] We've talked about this a number of times before and I've explained how we have evidential weight to certain things and there's always more evidence than we think that there is. At least usually there is. I mean, if somebody's just making up an eyewitness claim, then no, we're not gonna have a whole lot of evidence to that.
[00:03:22] And that's part of my point. If we can build up a claim where it is based on more than one pillar of foundation, where it has perhaps eyewitness accounts, where it has tradition backing it, where it has some physical evidence, where it has textual evidence, where it just makes sense logically and a whole bunch of things that could form the foundation, then a claim with more pillars is going to be a firmer claim.
[00:03:53] But what we often do is we choose our evidence based on what we prefer. If we prefer scientific claims, then we're gonna go with claims that are based in science. But if we're skeptics about science, then we're going to not put as much weight into that evidence. Some of us put a whole lot of weight into evidence from an eyewitness or somebody's personal account. And so we're gonna put more weight in that piece of evidence than we will in another piece of evidence.
[00:04:29] And this is fair enough; this is what people do. This is what we're gonna keep doing, and that's fine. But if you want to really tackle a claim in its entirety, then you are going to want to look at all of its foundational pillars and to give it particular weight according to what that means.
[00:04:49] Your evidential weight is probably not gonna be the same as my evidential weight, and that is just the way people are. I'm not complaining about that. I'm not saying there's anything necessarily wrong about that, but I am saying that it is helpful if we're transparent about that because then it will help us to navigate and to interpret for ourselves what other people are saying. We might rank somebody's analysis of something depending upon how they are weighing their evidence.
[00:05:22] I just think that clarity and transparency and honesty in all of that is going to do us a whole lot of good.
[00:05:29] And all of this topic fits very naturally with what I've been talking about regarding oral tradition because traditions are not preserved as though people are passing around photographs and excavation reports. They're preserved through memory, through retelling, through localization of ideas, through the concept of sacred geography within a particular people and within their communal identity.
[00:05:56] And then you balloon that out into national politics, which is going to play its part in things like archeology and that colors things radically. And so this all means that the Ark question is not only about whether someone has found a boat on a mountain, it is also about how a broad memory becomes anchored to particular places over time. And also how those locations and details will shift and change through time. We should expect them to and it is natural for them to.
[00:06:30] That same set of questions is going to be useful later when we turn to global flood stories because there, too, we will need criteria for asking what kinds of details are stable, what kinds are flexible, and how traditions connect themselves to landscapes and communities.
[00:06:47] Alright, so regarding the location of the Ark, the biblical text does not name one single peak. Genesis says that the Ark rested on the mountains of Ararat. This is in Genesis eight, verse four. And this is already broader than the popular assumption that Genesis must be referring to the modern volcanic Mount Ararat specifically.
[00:07:12] So here's our first controlling fact for our conversation. The text itself gives a mountain region horizon and it's not narrowing it to a particular summit. So we are going to start our question as a problem of historical geography before we enter into the conversation of archaeology and modern discovery. This is necessary because we are rooting our story of the flood within the authority of the biblical text. So with that as our anchor point here, the word Ararat is tied to a wider region. And so that is the frame of our conversation to start with.
[00:07:58] And if that's the case, then later mountain identifications have to be judged in relation to that frame and not the other way around. But the problem with that is that people will still take this phrase mountains of Ararat, and they'll try to narrow it down into a very specific set of mountains so that they can get to their preferred location of Noah's Ark. But the region we have in mind here is just too broad to even tie it down to a particular mountain range.
[00:08:31] All right, so we are not treating all location claims as belonging to the same evidential tier. That's our first point of conversation here. But we do have different levels of data, we might say, and we could rank them in some form. And this is my suggestion of how we might rank these levels of information we have.
[00:08:54] First of all, I think we should mark as primary, the biblical and regional data first and foremost, because the Bible is our authoritative text.
[00:09:05] Second of all, I think we can rank early tradition as being our next kind of step here. So if we have early traditions and early texts that suggest that the Ark is in a particular area or on a particular mountain, we should give that more weight. That's still not as heavy as the biblical weight that we have, but it should still be fairly prominent in our minds. At least that's how I rank these things, because I'm approaching it in the same way that I am approaching biblical theology in general. And that is with the idea that we should understand early tradition as being part and parcel to how we interpret things.
[00:09:47] Now, our third level, we might say, is that we have later symbolic or national identifications. Now these are going to hold less weight, perhaps, because they're gonna be tied to current day national politics at the time. Those may or may not tie to the early tradition locales.
[00:10:09] And then finally, the last thing I would rank here in my category of data are all of the claims of modern discovery. Now, I know that the claims of modern discovery are gonna be tied to scientific investigation.... in theory. Or perhaps they're tied to eyewitness accounts. And so naturally, as modern people, we do tend to take either eyewitness accounts or claims that come from technological discovery, we're gonna rank those pretty high in our evidential claims.
[00:10:46] And I'm ranking it pretty low, and I'm not claiming that this is the only way you can rank the data. I'm just being transparent at the way that I am doing so. For myself, I think that the location has to be tied to the biblical location. And while the early traditions might be wrong, the fact that we're working within an oral world still, then that's going to give us more weight for oral tradition.
[00:11:13] That doesn't mean it's right. It could be entirely wrong. They could have had their own reasons for deciding a particular location that has nothing to do with an ancient tradition. That's entirely possible.
[00:11:26] But here's the thing about my last rank that is connected to modern discovery claims. If you want me to be confident in your scientific discovery, if you want me to be confident in your eyewitness account, then those are gonna have to accord to certain parameters. And frankly, the parameters we have regarding the eyewitness accounts or the modern technological discoveries, they just don't pass muster. There's not enough information in them for me to be confident about them.
[00:12:01] And let me go ahead and back up here again because I really wanna make it clear that the evidential field that we have, all of the evidence we have, every bit of it: from the Bible to early traditions, to historical interpretations, to modern discoveries, all of it is uneven. It just has to be. That's just the way evidence is.
[00:12:25] And so, again, I'm putting each of these categories and giving them different weight because of where they're stemming from and the fact that I can either be more or less confident. If there was more scientific data to draw upon, if the eyewitness accounts were backed up by either real material or further investigation, then I could put those as a higher evidential rank. But frankly, that is not what we have in the data.
[00:12:55] So I am treating all of those modern sites as being up in the air because of all of that. If we had more data, if we had more science, if we had more evidence from the eyewitness accounts that don't change over time, by the way, and most of them do. If we had more data, then I could put that last layer a little bit higher in my evidential weight. But since we don't, I'm ranking it pretty low.
[00:13:22] Now all of this really exposes how sacred geography gets built over time. And our modern tendency is to just collapse it all. It's to say, look, people have built shrines here on Mount Herman for thousands of years, and therefore all of that goes back to Genesis six. Well hold your horses here. What evidence do we actually have that claims something like that?
[00:13:47] Why does it all have to stem from one place instead of everybody deciding, Hey, look, there's this really high mountain over here. It obviously reaches into the heavens, and the heavens are where the gods are, so therefore this is a sacred place. That could be as much of a reality to why we have shrines in certain places, as the idea that it all stems from exactly one story.
[00:14:13] And so our modern seekers try to turn these inherited memories that may come from different places, and we try to force it into archeological or apologetic proof of something that we want to prove. And the Ark question is therefore not only about one landing place, it's also about how texts, memory, geography and evidential claims all become entangled together.
[00:14:42] And personally for myself, that's what drives my question. I used to be a lot more interested in the actual location of the Ark, like many people, but so much of the methodology I saw was unstable. So much of the claims were just based on not enough data. And the modern interest in Ark locations is often driven by the hope of material confirmation. And you know, I get it. That's kind of what we do today.
[00:15:13] And so that's why we have all of these locations that are very attractive to us, and that we want to decide on one or the other. And all of those locations matter pretty deeply because they shape popular imagination. They shape apologetic discourse, even if the underlying evidence is weak, disputed, or is just methodologically bad. All of those ideas are going to matter because of how they shape our imagination.
[00:15:41] So I said that I don't really care where the Ark is or what your opinion is on it, and I'm not trying to convince you one way or another of a particular location. My second caveat for this episode is that I don't want to turn this into a simple insider versus outsider framing of the whole issue.
[00:16:01] The recurring concern is not whether a claim comes from an academic source or a layperson or an enthusiast, but again, whether the claim has the kinds of evidence that is needed to bear good weight. So we are looking at the provenance of the idea. We're looking at the chain of custody of any artifacts. We're looking for independent verification. And even if you're not in the academy, you can get independent verification of things. We're also looking at environmental plausibility and strong control against alternative explanations.
[00:16:41] Just because you are a lay person, just because you're an enthusiast doesn't mean you can't come up with really good evidence and really good scholarship even outside of the academy. Two good examples of that are George Smith, who brought us the Babylonian texts of Gilgamesh. And then of course, we have the Dead Sea Scrolls, first found by a bedouin shepherd. So it's not that outsiders are a problem. The problem comes when we have unverifiable or weak claims that are not controlled by anything exterior to the person who found it or who claims it.
[00:17:20] So my question is, what is being claimed and how does it fit within the regional model, within ancient tradition, within the symbolic status of different nations and locations and language, and how high are the standards of proof here?
[00:17:38] It is important to know who is making the claim. It is important to know what the data type is because a photograph is not as good as a radar scan. But a radar scan is only gonna give us so much because it could be uncovering geological formations instead of manmade formations. Do we have any soil chemistry done? Do we actually have a wood sample? Do we have an artifact? Do we have any kind of excavation report? And is that excavation being shared with anybody who is not in the inner circle of the provinance to begin with?
[00:18:14] If we do have artifacts, what is the chain of custody of those artifacts? Where are they now? Who handled those? Is there anybody outside the original group or people who found the artifact? Are they testing them? Are they verifying them in any way? If you want to make a scientific claim, then you need to seat it within scientific principles, which does include some sort of control factors.
[00:18:41] We need independent verification, and that does not have to happen within an academy setting. So the idea that, oh, the academy is silencing things, well, they can silence things within peer review perhaps. But the people who are just like, well, I have this evidence and I have this information, but the academy is silencing me.
[00:19:04] The question is, have you even tried to get it peer reviewed? And if you get pushback within one academy, then are you going anywhere else to try and get it independently verified? Because people just don't. They like to claim that they're being silenced and that the academy is against them. But it's not like there aren't independent labs that have nothing to do with the academy that they're complaining about. It's not like they couldn't just invite outsider observers in who don't own any of the donkeys in the circus that they're trying to promote.
[00:19:40] if you're an investigator and you are just going somewhere with your own team and you are not bringing along any skeptics, then I'm going to be skeptical of what you're doing. I just am. I don't care about what the academy is doing. You can find somebody who is skeptical. You can bring them along and you can have them verify what you're doing.
[00:20:03] If you're not doing that, then I'm frankly just not going to trust the science that you're doing because I'm not sure you're doing science.
[00:20:12] And anybody who brings forth a claim who is honest, ought to be exploring the alternative explanations to their own claims. That's the person I'm gonna trust the most. Are you considering that the formation you see might be just geology? Maybe it's pareidolia. That's the concept where we will tend to see images that are not there. You see the face in the wall out of random patterns. You see an Ark in a bunch of rocks and it happens to be the shape and the size of the Ark. And so it confirms what you think you're seeing.
[00:20:48] But it's also a bit ridiculous because you'll see the complete perfect formulation of the Ark in some of these pictures. But then they will go on to claim that, well, yes, of course the wood is not there anymore. Well, which is it? Is it there or is it not? So if the claim isn't consistent across what you're saying, well, I'm going to be skeptical of it.
[00:21:11] Are we controlling for the intrusion of modern wood versus ancient wood? Are we controlling for contamination factors? Are we watching for misdating? Are we dating using various methods and not just one? Are we accurately reading radar or scanning output? If you're doing really good science, you're gonna make sure you're doing all of those things right. And you're gonna put in as many controlling factors as you possibly can. It's just, it's good practice, first of all. That's what science should be. And it's going to provide a buffer for people who are going to be critical of you. And you should just presume that people are going to be critical of you. So do the work to limit those critiques as much as possible. If you're not doing that, then I'm just not gonna trust you very much.
[00:22:06] There is a certain discipline people should have in place if they're going to make a big claim. But of course, maybe they really don't care if people believe them or not, so they're going to be lazy. They're going to not care about having independent verification. Because they know that a certain segment of the populace will believe them no matter what.
[00:22:28] Science is constrained and there's only so much that a scientist can claim with certain amounts of data. And so this is partly why I find the mytho historical traditions a little bit more interesting. Because we can actually look at the texts, we can look at the language, we can look at transmission history, and we can look at those things in context and study all of that.
[00:22:54] And it's not reliant upon people who are just not giving us really great science because they didn't put all the controlling factors in place that they needed to. If they did, I would be absolutely fascinated and riveted by their exploration. But since we don't have that, then I think that the next good thing we can look at is the tradition history.
[00:23:17] And so that's why I have the methodological model that I have in place because it prioritizes things in the way that I am already prioritizing things. I prioritize the biblical text. I prioritize tradition in a way that understands that it will change through time and that the earliest traditions are probably a little bit closer to the actual textual understanding. That is my approach to Scripture. This is my approach to Christian history and Christian theology in general. And so this is also my approach to the location of Noah's Ark and other archeological finds.
[00:23:57] So let's go through a little bit of this information. I do not intend for this episode to be exhaustive in looking at all of the possibilities because I am interested in giving you a methodology that you can use, that you can consider, and feel free to adjust for your own needs as if I could stop you anyway.
[00:24:17] So the phrase, "mountains of Ararat" is the basis of what we have in Genesis. Now, of course, we could expand it a bit and seat Genesis eight within the context of Genesis one through 11. And people have done that and they've decided that maybe the mountains of Ararat are less in Turkey and they're a little bit more east. And they do that because of what's going on later on with the people in Mesopotamia in Genesis 11.
[00:24:49] So there's a little bit of flexibility here, a little bit of indeterminablity where w e can't quite exactly say where the mountains of Ararat even are, but it is quite likely in the wider Uratu horizon in ancient Near Eastern geography. And we put that there, especially because an ancient Israelite or Judean reader would have understood it in this certain context. They probably would not have stationed it more east or in other words, more towards Mesopotamia.
[00:25:22] And then we go on and we look at translations of the biblical text. The Latin Vulgate in particular is interesting because it renders Genesis eight verse four with the sense of the mountains of Armenia. So that's even a little bit more particular, showing an early reception pattern that treats the phrase as a broader mountainous territory rather than a particular summit. But it does narrow it down just a little bit.
[00:25:50] The book of Jubilees also helps that. So we have already some earlier interpretations, which kind of constrain the mountains of Ara to a more particular place, but it's still not a mountain and it's still not even a particular mountain range. It's a fairly large region, even so. And a lot of our modern archeological claims do fit within this realm.
[00:26:17] And it seems like what we have here in the Genesis text is it locates the Ark in a recognizable northern highland region, but it also leaves enough openness for later local traditions to specify the mountain in particular. Whether or not they're accurate, we can't really judge that without more evidence.
[00:26:38] That is why we will bring in things like archeology and other traditions as well. Again, this is about the weight of the evidence. But a major implication here is that Genesis isn't going to solve our larger problem of our main contenders for where the resting place of the Ark is. It's the later traditions that kind of do the work of actually locating it in particular areas.
[00:27:05] And what's really interesting is that if you trace this through history, it does seem like we have a trajectory path where there is a location that is a little bit more firm and that location is not the later location that is designated as Mount Ararat.
[00:27:24] So let me just get into that very briefly for a moment. We have two of our major contenders. We have Mount Ararat, as the named volcanic mountain. It's a very imposing mountain on the landscape in the area. And so if you're in this area, you're like, yeah, well, obviously this is where Noah's Ark landed because look at this high mountain. When you're thinking about the waters receding, then the tendency, I think, is to consider that, well, of course Noah's Ark is going to rest on the highest mountain.
[00:27:57] The idea is that Noah's Ark is going to rest on the first mountain that comes out of the flood. And I don't think we can really presume that, first of all, because the dove found something living, something growing. So when Noah sends out the dove and the dove comes back with the green branch, then that means we already have a portion of the mountains that are showing above the flood, just logically thinking about the story. And that our tallest mountains do not have green plants just living on the very top of them.
[00:28:31] So when Noah's Ark comes to rest, it does not have to be resting on a high mountain. In fact, it would be really weird if it was. It's quite likely that it's resting on a smaller mountain than the highest ones. That doesn't negate the Mount Ararat location. And of course we can understand plate tectonic shifting and the fact that just because a mountain is permanently covered by ice and snow now doesn't mean it has to have been covered by ice and snow back then, and so on and so forth.
[00:29:04] But it does mean that we should not presume by necessity the Ark is going to rest on the highest mountain. Because after we have the waters receding, it was quite some time still before the Ark actually rested. So it's perfectly fine for the Ark to rest on a lower mountain.
[00:29:24] So we have on one hand this really impressive mountain, Mount Ararat, and it has going for it the fact that it's just named Mount Ararat. And then on the other hand, we have another really solid option of Mount Judi. And Mount Judi has a lot going for it as far as tradition. It seems to be earlier attested than the Mount Ararat location. We have earlier traditions holding more weight in my hierarchy, but it is much less impressive than Mount Ararat.
[00:29:59] So you can kind of see how we have different ideas going on and different ways that people are gonna be thinking about this. But either way, Genesis does not settle the matter between Mount Ararat and Mount Judi.
[00:30:13] Now, of course, we're gonna go look at the ancient Near Eastern flood mountain. And in the Epic of Gilgamesh, we have it recorded as Mount Nisir. And some people will actually want to say that Mount Nisir is the resting place of Noah's Ark, even though this is from the Epic of Gilgamesh and not from the Book of Genesis.
[00:30:33] Now, the reason that they would be doing that is because they have a different hierarchy of priority than I do. I am prioritizing the Book of Genesis and after that I'm prioritizing the earliest traditions. But if you put the earliest traditions as the top part of the hierarchy, then you're gonna want to go with Mount Nisir.
[00:30:55] Again, this is just how different people are going to weigh the evidence in different ways. But it's clear Genesis and Gilgamesh are not preserving the same mountain. And that's significant because there's overlap and divergence. Overlap in the broad flood mountain pattern. Divergence in the actual location. And it could be that this shows how different traditions and different people groups will localize the account in different ways. That's going to matter with our later and less weighty options.
[00:31:30] Now Mount Nisir is also important to show that ancient flood traditions are not merely interested in the water coverage and the first mountains that are going to be uncovered. But where the vessel comes to rest and how the world is reentered into and the location of the recreation of the world, basically, that's going to matter to different people in different areas because they're gonna want that to be in their general locale.
[00:31:59] Now, if you map that over into our global flood stories, that's gonna also be an interesting point to consider. And all of these bits of data are kind of why I've really backed away from even caring about the specific location of something and really getting into the nitty gritty details of literal material history because to me it's more interesting to understand how are people thinking. How are they seeing this story? How are they using the story in their own culture, in their own identity?
[00:32:32] Now, some people will try to collapse Genesis and the ancient Near Eastern material. And again, this is just our tendency. We want to collapse the data. We want to harmonize the data. That is our tendency. And from my perspective, that's reductionary. We are giving ourselves less data to work with, less information, and so our claims are less firm.
[00:32:57] Another point I want to bring out is that the textual tradition can outlast the precision on a map. A mountain can remain important in literary memory, and that memory can shift to different mountains. Later readers can be uncertain about exactly how to map something onto modern geography, so they're gonna map it onto the geography they have in front of them.
[00:33:23] So I think that helps to explain why later Ark traditions can become both geographically persistent and geographically fluid at the same time. And this is why we're gonna have different ideas, and sometimes we can't really tell the difference between the two without more data.
[00:33:42] But that doesn't make them useless because what they are going to be really useful for is understanding the current time. Understanding the people who are mapping these things.
[00:33:53] Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about Mount Judi. This is often treated as the strongest early concrete locale. It's not a modern guess attached to an impressive mountain, but it's embedded in Jewish, Syriac, Christian, and Islamic memory. This is Noah's Ark's resting place in the Quran. And I know we might not wanna take Islamic information into account here. But again, we're just looking at early tradition.
[00:34:25] The strength of the Mount Judi tradition is not just a single proof text, but convergence across multiple traditions. When several different communities preserve a similar locale, that carries a whole lot more historical and evidential weight than a later isolated claim.
[00:34:45] So Mount Judi matters because it's part of that broad reception trajectory. And this includes Berossus and includes Josephus. They're not eyewitness reports, but they matter as early witnesses to the idea of the Ark tradition.
[00:35:02] I'm not gonna go through each individual piece of information ' cause that's not really what I'm trying to do here in this episode. The benefit of this is that it's not just seated within the Armenian locale. This is not just as simple as saying that this is the local Armenian memory.
[00:35:20] And this also has a different evidential weight from the modern claims and the modern locations because we have the depth of tradition. We have it connecting to scriptural reception, to geographic continuity, to the idea of cross confessional memory, to different groups that are not even within the same confessional state.
[00:35:43] So here's our strongest claim that fits within Genesis. It fits within the earliest tradition, and it kinda fits within that symbolic and national identity as well. The only question is whether or not now we can ask fairly whether or not it fits within the archeological claims, but again, I personally think we need a whole lot stronger of archeological claims to make any claims of archeology at all. The Mount Judi location has the benefit of the memory of pilgrimage for a long time, monastery tradition, and sacred topology for many groups.
[00:36:24] Now, if we go to the idea of that specific Mount Ararat, I have said it's a later tradition. And as far as I can see, that is the case. The location of Mount Ararat is just later in history. And so it is very caught up in modern popular imagination, but it doesn't map onto the earliest tradition. It's very visually prominent. And if you're in the local area, it's really the most obvious location for the resting place of Noah's Ark.
[00:36:54] The Mount Ararat is tied to Armenian Christian memory. It's certainly tied to sacred geography, certainly tied to local identity and regional symbolism. And so it's a historically understandable perspective. I am not dismissing the location as a possibility just because it's later. It just has less evidentiary weight, even though it has some local stories tied to it.
[00:37:21] In particular, we have George Hagopian, who claims to be an eyewitness to seeing the Ark on Mount Ararat. He saw a large structure. But his story changes through time. It does not remain consistent. It does not have any independent verification to it. So the quote unquote traditional mount Ararat location is gonna be more probable for people who hold more weight to eyewitness testimony. Personally, I think it's a little bit strange to have that high of a priority on eyewitness testimony when the Ark is thousands of years old and wood just isn't gonna last that long, especially if it's exposed to the elements. And especially if it's tied to sacred geography and it's going to be a place where people are going to be pillaging that place for relics.
[00:38:13] But we can see how Mount Ararat's current dominance is tied to modern Ark hunting and the modern imagination and all of these things. It just is not scoring high as a proven archeological site for the Ark. And I have a hard time believing that we have pretty much zero evidence. This is the kind of documentary you get over and over on modern American tv, and it either goes along with saying, aha, we found the Ark , or it will just turn around and say, no, we can't find the Ark, and here's the reasons why.
[00:38:50] I know that I said I'm not trying to find the location of the Ark or tell you which one you should think. And so maybe you're asking why I'm saying that Mount Judi is a more probable place than mount Ararat. It goes back to my hierarchy of evidence.
[00:39:07] But really in the end, I don't think multiple memories are a problem to be eliminated, because I don't think it's all that necessary to find Noah's Ark, first of all. And second of all, even if you rank all of the evidence in a really sensible way, that doesn't mean that the answer you come out with at the end is the right one. And so I'm still not telling you which location I think you should believe in. I am telling you which location is more likely, but something being more likely doesn't necessarily make it true.
[00:39:42] So let's take a few minutes and talk about the modern Ark discovery culture that we have today. It's kind of a distinct phase in the whole history of the question. Because we've been talking about biblical context, we've been talking about the geography that the Bible is set within, and we've been talking about tradition history, but now we're moving from the idea of inherited sacred locations and moving into the idea of material proof claims.
[00:40:14] And that matters because the evidentiary standards are gonna change once people move from the traditional locations to, we've found actual physical remnants. And we're not treating them as relics. This is not the same as a monastic tradition that encourages pilgrimages and so on.
[00:40:36] This is about science. And so because it's about science, I'm going to insist that it actually exists within the realm of scientific discovery.
[00:40:48] There's a few different types of evidence we have in this scientific realm. We have claims of visual formations. This looks like Noah's Ark. And these visual formation claims also will go on to measure the actual formation and so on and so forth.
[00:41:07] So that's visual, measured evidence. And it kind of goes along with various types of imagery claims, whether that's photography or whether that's some sort of radio scan that penetrates the ground without digging. Again, we're looking at visual imagery. We're looking at things that are measured. And when you're doing kind of a radio scan, it can tell you about structures under the earth, but it's not telling you the composition of those structures and so on and so forth.
[00:41:41] You might presume that something is made by humans because it looks really regular. It looks like it's constructed and so on. But we do know that just creation itself can be very ordered even without human intervention. So that is a caution we have to have with all of those imagery claims.
[00:42:01] So again, we have the formation claims that focus on terrain features that appear like a boat shape or that appear just really regular, or that seem unusually regular. These claims usually begin with visual patterns. These claims usually begin with visual pattern recognition, like there's a ridge, there's a mound, or there's a depression or some sort of geological formation that matches the general dimensions or silhouette that you would expect from the Ark.
[00:42:32] Durupinar is the prime example of this category. But the problem is that a suggestive outline is not the same as artificial construction or proof of an Ark. And again, I've seen claims of this that are really contradictory. It's like, look at this ridge, and the ridge is showing the ribs of the boat. But then the same people, the very same people in the same documentary will turn around and say, well, yeah, the wood isn't there anymore, but we've also found these metal rivets.
[00:43:06] And it's like, well, how do you have the shape of the boat if there's no boat there to actually produce the shape?
[00:43:14] And the formation claims are tied to the imagery claims, as I said, where we are relying on photographs including aerial photography, satellite images, drone footage, or some sort of radio scan that seem to show the hidden structure. All of that gains a lot of traction because images feel really persuasive and a really strong piece of evidence. And when you have it overlaid with a graph and all of these things, it looks really formal and really official and very definitive.
[00:43:49] But just like a text, an image must be interpreted. A radio scan has to be interpreted. You could have rock formations or you could have somebody who's built something and that could look the very same.
[00:44:03] And we have to remember, wood is soft. Even if Noah's Ark would have been such a sacred object that they wouldn't immediately do something with it, well, we know the tendency of people and the fact that people love to pillage sacred locations. So if the Ark is just kind of barely under the surface to the point where you can see the outline of it, it's very hard to see how that would remain there throughout history in such a way as to produce these kinds of images.
[00:44:36] So we have the idea that something looks like it. That's not really very firm, right? We have imagery, which seems a little bit more substantial, still not firm. But then we have the claims of artifacts, either wood or metal. But if somebody is making a scientific claim, I'm going to insist that they ought to apply scientific standards. We need controls, we need independent verification. We need a chain of custody that is very clear. And we need to tackle the alternative explanations.
[00:45:13] If we are not demanding that the strongest non Ark explanation stay on the table, then we're not really dealing with the data in an honest way. Not until we have even more firm evidence than we do now.
[00:45:29] I have never seen a single documentary on finding the location of the Ark that is fully honest. I'm sorry, but I have not. What I do see is that they'll show a picture of this metal rivet that somebody found and then they'll go on to show a scan that seems to show that, look, we have all of these rivets in the ground in this regular fashion. We don't have any of the wood, even though this is the location that is supposed to be evidence of the formation, so I'm not sure how we're getting a formation without anything that actually formed there.
[00:46:07] But I've just never seen a documentary that doesn't play fast and loose with the data that tries to show and prove a location. I have seen more skeptical documentaries which will provide the location ideas and usually they end up saying, well, we can't really know because the wood is not gonna last, because it was so long ago, because people are gonna scavenge it and so on and so forth.
[00:46:32] But again, there is just not enough accessible data. There's not enough work done. And the explanations often state more than they possibly can state. Just because we have something that appears to be rooms does not make them rooms.
[00:46:49] And if you're trying to prove something from the perspective of apologetics to say, look, the flood really happened. Noah really built a boat. It really is right here, and we can see it. Well, if that's your goal, then in my opinion, you ought to be more ruthless about the kinds of data that you're going to allow. Be cause if you want to prove something to a skeptic, you're going to need bulletproof evidence. And you're gonna need a lot of it.
[00:47:18] If, however, your goal is just to suggest things and to convince people who aren't going to ask for high amounts of data, well, that's another story, isn't it? And it's going to be an easier road for people.
[00:47:32] So that's why we have the locations like Durupinar. Durupinar again rose to prominence after aerial and photographic attention highlighted its outline that looks like a boat. And then people went there and they measured it and they said, hey, we think this is the same length as Noah's boat. As long as you use a royal, Egyptian, they say cubit.
[00:47:55] This location has gotten a lot of prominence because of the publishing of Ron Wyatt and also quite a few later promoters. And it's a pretty simple attraction. It looks like it. It's measured like it. There's claims that evidence has been found. And there are visual scans, but we haven't had any digging there. And we haven't had any independent verification.
[00:48:20] And so I'm gonna bring up the idea of pareidolia here again. The tendency to see meaningful structure in ambiguous or random patterns. This seems to be a textbook case for this. And once somebody points out that this looks like something, then it's harder for other people to see it as anything but that.
[00:48:41] But because of the fact that wood is not going to stay the same shape and that it's going to not be there after all this time, certainly not all of it, then the alternative explanation of it being a natural geological formation is simply a stronger one.
[00:48:58] And again, just want to mention that every time you do some sort of ground scanning, those images have to be interpreted. I don't know if you've ever been a new parent and you see the first ultrasound of your tiny little baby. Well, if you have never seen an ultrasound before and you're not used to interpreting them, then there is no way you're going to be able to see that baby. You have to have the nurse who's doing the ultrasound point out, look, here's its head, here's its spine, here's the legs, and so on and so forth.
[00:49:32] If you have no experience interpreting a scan, then you could make it into whatever you want it to be. When you do a scan of some sort, it doesn't come with labels attached to it. It has to be read. It has to be interpreted, and that interpretation can easily be steered by prior assumptions.
[00:49:53] There's also the problem of media amplification. Durupinar repeatedly comes into the public conversation because of documentaries, websites, social media, and you have occasional "new evidence" announcements that have nothing to do with anything, and so repeated publicity can create an impression that a case for something is being strengthened over time, even though there is nothing there.
[00:50:20] And so the question we ought to be asking ourselves is, am I gravitating towards something because it looks interesting, because I've been shown it over and over, because the public landscape is kind of pointing in one direction? Or does it truly have evidential weight? It's very reasonable, very understandable for a visually striking site to attract study, attention, and for people to really just say, yes, this is it. But does it deserve the strong confidence of such a claim?
[00:50:55] The Durupinar case also illustrates how modern Ark discourse can detach from the earlier tradition history. Mount Judi is very strong because of that depth of older textual and memory streams, but Durupinar is prominent because of modern promotional interpretation and visual stimuli. And so they simply had a different pedigree and they don't function in the same way. Durupinar is a modern candidate site. It's not really seated within that ancient tradition.
[00:51:29] And the same could be said for the things that we see on Mount Ararat. Usually they are imagery claims. Sometimes we have these eyewitness reports of people who claim they see this or that, or who have taken pieces of the Ark and so on.
[00:51:45] But much of this evidence is based on photographs that are taken from far away, imagery from above. And again... interpretation, interpretation, interpretation. There's no excavation. Nobody's bringing forth the artifacts for independent testing.
[00:52:04] Another thing to note when you're particularly looking at images is that negative space within an image, and if you can only see part of something? Those are really, really easy to overread. So if there's snow, shadow, particular angle, or the rock patterns just line up in a certain way, then that can contribute to shapes that seem more coherent in images than they are if you are actually there.
[00:52:33] Again, I'm not trying to delve into all of the individual claims, but I should mention the Noah's Ark Ministries International claim. That claims to have found rooms and wooden structures and high altitude remains. They claim to have dated samples and footage even from inside enclosed spaces. And that seems like an awful lot of information and an awful lot of information that ought to be independently verified.
[00:53:01] And the question is, was it, has anybody even looked at it? And the answer is basically no. I'm going to repeat myself again. If you're making a stronger claim and you're claiming to have evidence, Then the demands for that evidence are much stricter. Artifact claims live or die by provenance and chain of custody and investigation.
[00:53:25] Where did they find the material? Who found it? Who handled it? Do we have outside specialists who had access to any of that? Do we have the site documented? Do we have materials independently reexamined? And who is doing the interpreting in the data?
[00:53:43] It's not that it's impossible that we could find some evidence in artifact. But they have not provided accessible data, and they've restricted the verification on any information they have. And so it's just not gonna be trustworthy. It's going to gain a whole lot of publicity, but we need to demand a high level of transparent examination and documentation from organizations like this.
[00:54:08] This seems to be a classic case study in how documentary style presentation can substitute for scholarly data. When you have interior footage and excited narration and claims of special access that nobody else has, then I think it's fair to ask what their goal is and what they even have to share.
[00:54:28] The stronger the claim, the harsher the scrutiny has to be, the more we should demand from it.
[00:54:36] And then of course, we have entanglements with trusting the promoting organization. If they're not allowing outside researchers access to the site, the materials and all of that, then, nobody should believe what they're saying.
[00:54:51] And the same goes for basically all of the work I've ever seen from Ron Wyatt. He is a central figure in popular biblical discovery culture, we might say. It's not that he's provided strong evidence, but he provides sensational evidence and he gives people what they want to see.
[00:55:11] If you want to prove that the exodus happened, if you want to prove that the flood narrative happened, people like Ron Wyatt are gonna come up and they're gonna show us dramatic claims with confident identification. And because they're telling us what we want to see, we're going to ignore the weaknesses in the position.
[00:55:32] He's kind of that classic biblical discoverer who claims access to truth that institutions and the academy, and experts and even skeptics have failed to see or have unfairly resisted. And this anti-institutional posture is part of why he remains influential in this whole discourse.
[00:55:55] And again, it's not that the academy can't silence and cancel people because they can. But the academy is not the only thing out there. And if you are relying upon the academy who's trying to silence you, and that is the only way that you are claiming that you don't need to have any independent verification. Well, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna think that you are a fraud. That is the kind of thing that a fraud would do.
[00:56:23] So if you're doing the things that a fraud would do, why should I not presume that you're a fraud? If you want us to think that you're not a fraud, then do things that a fraud would not do. Like attain independent verification, even if it's difficult, even if you have to go around the academy to do so.
[00:56:43] This is the recurring modern pattern that concerns me. The claim becomes compelling, not because the underlying evidence is unusually strong or even strong at all. But because the interpreter and the presenter is projecting confidence, they offer a dramatic explanation. They frame it in a way that we want it to be framed. And they speak as though skepticism itself is the problem.
[00:57:14] So they create this world where they are above scrutiny. They don't need the independent verification because they just already know. Look, don't we already know that Noah's Ark is here on this mountain and I found it, and here's the proof. And then we all just go along our merry way without challenging the ideas, without critically looking at them. And I just want you to resist that pattern.
[00:57:41] Being a skeptic doesn't mean saying that somebody is wrong, but it means demanding better evidence. Criticism of sensational Ark claims is not automatically secular. It's not anti-biblical. Because even conservative and creationist circles are critical of some of these things.
[00:58:02] One of the effects we have that is just ongoing is that we have been trained to expect a certain kind of discovery rhetoric. The Bible is right, the evidence has been found. Mainstream experts are missing or hiding the obvious, and a dramatic visual reveal confirms all of it.
[00:58:22] This is the pattern we have and the problem with the model is that it can make confidence look like evidence. It can make our presuppositions into a piece of evidence that is simply not warranted. And so we kind of tend to go with certain sites and certain interpretations because the interpreter is certain, not because we have analyzed the data and it's become clearer and it's strongest, and that it's tackled all of the critical questions.
[00:58:53] I just want us to demand that people do not overreach in their claims. Just because something is interesting and we might be drawn towards it does not make it credible. And that's gonna matter in the conversation about the Ark location. That's gonna matter about the parallels of global flood myths with the Bible and all kinds of things we might be looking at.
[00:59:17] I won't go into all of the details, but we know that hoaxes have happened. We know that certain people like to pull the wool over everybody's eyes. We like the sensationalist stories and some people will play to that.
[00:59:31] Alright. Okay. I think I've given you my point. I think you understand what I'm saying here and I will just land on a few points as to why finding the Ark is gonna be hard, even if it's there. Even if it is actually the right location. You probably already know all of this, but I'm gonna list it out anyway.
[00:59:52] The first obstacle we have is the material fragility of the wood. A large wooden structure is not like a stone monument. And even stone monuments collapse over time. So we have the wood that is vulnerable to rot, to moisture, to fragmentation, collapse, burial, scavenging, and human reuse.
[01:00:16] That's a lot of ways that a boat is not gonna stand the test of time over thousands of years, especially if it's in a location that people know about. And surely they would know about it at least for a while after the boat landed.
[01:00:31] The mountain environment adds another layer of difficulty. We have glaciers, freeze and thaw damage, erosion, landslides, seasons, plate tectonics. Sometimes we have volcanoes, and just general shifting surface conditions. We really should not presume that it's going to be in recognizable form, even if it existed.
[01:00:55] But human activity is surely a huge factor. If the boat was not repurposed to build things with originally, then people are going to treat it like relic material. It's going to be contaminated by pilgrims and by more building practices and other people coming along and using this space as sacred.
[01:01:17] And all of that complicates the expectations about scale, even from a visual perspective. Even understanding that the Ark was huge, if we're looking at it from the air, it's still gonna be pretty tiny, especially if any of it has collapsed or it doesn't look exactly like a boat anymore.
[01:01:35] Another problem is access. The mountain zones are not easy field environments for doing science and archeology. They're remote. We have severe weather. Altitude is a problem. They're unstable. and of course we have regional politics going on.
[01:01:52] And even if you were to do some sort of study, we still have that layer of interpretive ambiguity to get over. How do you separate what is the boat from what is natural features that look structured and so on.
[01:02:07] And then of course we have, chronology as a problem. When did the flood happen? How long ago did it happen? How much human habitation has happened since then?
[01:02:18] And so the absence of definitive evidence shouldn't surprise us. And it should kind of lead to easy confirmation claims when people think, well, I just need to find a little bit of evidence. That will be enough. But of course we have a range of evidence claims, from: i've just found a metal rivet, to: here's a little bit of wood, to: oh, we have found whole intact rooms that we can actually enter.
[01:02:47] The practical takeaway of all of that is that the Ark question sits inside a high difficulty evidential environment with perishable material, harsh conditions, immense time, human disturbance, limited access, and interpretive uncertainty. So that's kind of why I prefer the data from the traditions and things like that because frankly, that's a little bit easier to deal with even though it itself is not easy to deal with.
[01:03:19] Now, none of this means we have to be agnostic or not care about it. But we should be careful with the material we have. And if you want to go down these rabbit trails, more power to you.
[01:03:32] But I just suggest graded confidence. And not presuming that you'll just find the answer. Maybe we'll come to a time where we will have enough information where that will be the case, but currently that is not what we have. And skepticism doesn't mean doubt. It just means you are trying to do really good critical thinking. We need to challenge things in order to find their strengths and their weaknesses. That is just a practice of good investigation in general.
[01:04:05] So come up with your own weighted map of evidence and then plot things on there. At that point, you can come to what you can say strongly, what you can say provisionally and what you can really doubt highly.
[01:04:21] But at any rate, I think that is it for this episode. Thanks for joining me in this kind of rambling exploration of different things. I know you probably wanted a lot more detail about the different Ark locations and all of that, but that stuff is really easy to find in all of those really fun documentaries that you can watch.
[01:04:43] I wanted to provide a different kind of perspective and a different way that we might think about this. So I really hope that that is helpful to you. You can take what is helpful to you and use it. And I'm not saying that my evidentiary ladder is the only correct one. It's the one that I have because of the way that I treat the evidence. Your mileage may vary.
[01:05:09] But at any rate, I do thank you for listening to this episode, and I would ask you to share it with anybody who might be interested in this topic. I don't think that the location of the Ark is going to lack interest for a lot of people for pretty much ever. So if you have somebody who would be interested in hearing this perspective, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with them.
[01:05:31] You can also come on to my biblical theology community and talk about it there. I would love to discuss the different things that you think are more strong in favor of other things.
[01:05:42] I would love to have those conversations. So I will drop a link to my biblical theology community. It's called On This Rock. You can join for free and come and have conversations there. But thank you for listening and thank you especially to all of my financial supporters who support me on Patreon and PayPal and in my community. I really highly appreciate all of you guys. You help me do what I do here on the podcast, so thank you very much for that. But at any rate, that is it for this week, and I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.
