THE ARK

The geographical direction of different families in accordance with Genesis 10
 
In the dispersion families were grouped together and for the most part migrated in one general direction. To illustrate, the following is a selected list of names from the genealogies of each of Noah's sons with the general geographical location associated with each, from the historical record.

The Descendants of Japheth
: The Indo-European of western Asia and of Europe. (Gen. 10:2-4) Gomer: Probably the Cimmerians which are mentioned by Homer as the people of the far north (Odys. xl. 14). They are believed to be identical with the Cimmerians of Roman times and the Cymry of Wales.12 Magog: Josephus and Greek writers generally relate them as the Scythians of Southern Europe. Also associated with the Tartars of Russia.13 Madai: Medes who lived in area of Caspian Sea.14 Javan: Comes from the term Ionian which means Greeks.

 The Descendants of Ham: The Egyptians, Ethiopians, Libyans and Canaanites. Gen. 10:6-20. Cush: Peoples of central and Southern Arabia.15  The Ethiopians are shown as being inhabitants of both sides of the Red Sea. Also, they had a skin of a different appearance. (Jer. 13:23) Pictures on monuments show that they were a mixed race, some Negro, some Semite and some Caucasian.16 This is a very important fact and will be referred to later. Mizraim: Refers to areas of upper and lower Nile River of Egypt thus a reference to Egyptians. Phut: Generally associated with the Egyptians and more specifically Libya.17 Canaan: The area settled by Canaan and his sons was west of the River Jordan. His first born Sidon (Zidon) name stood for the whole Phoenician coast.18

The Descendants of Shem: The peoples of the Middle East and Southern Asia. Gen. 10:21-32. Eber: Abraham was the sixth generation of Eber who settled in Mesopotamia in the area of Ur of the Chaldees (Gen. 11). Elam: Geographically the region beyond the Tigris River, east of Babylonia. The Elamites became a strong nation and were recognized as sovereign by the Babylonian states.19 Asshur: The Assyrians of the head waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Lud: The Lydians of Asia Minor. Aram: Aramaeans of Syria and Mesopotamia. From these observations it seems that Shem's progeny settled in the Middle East, Ham's people went south into Africa and Japheth's descendants migrated north into Western Asia and Europe.

Marco Polo, about whom you read in your history books, was a famous explorer. Many pay homage to this man for his accomplishments He said, "I saw Noah's Ark."

 In 1955, there was a man by the name of Fernando Navara. a French explorer.. He brought back a piece of wood that was coated with a bituminous compound. He had been up at 14,000 feet on Mt. Ararat, There is no wood within 300 miles. The age of the beam was estimated to be between four and five thousand years old.

According to the Turkish government, there was a team of workers that entered three of the Ark's compartments; they recorded this in 1840. There was also a man by the name of Dr. Noui; he was the Archdeacon of Jerusalem in Babylon. He sighted the Ark in 1892. There was a Russian pilot by the name of Vladimir Roscovitski who, just prior to the Russian Revolution went with a military expedition to find the Ark. He reported that plans were drawn and complete measurements as well as photographs were taken. These records were destroyed during the Russian Revolution.

Some of the Wooly Mammoths that have been found in the Arctic still have green foliage in their mouths. These animals were destroyed suddenly by massive water action.

The size of the Ark according to the scriptures was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. Now, 45 feet high is about five stories tall. It would have taken 17,000 species of animals to sustain all life on the earth. So, in other words, they would have needed 35,000 plus animals (male and female) to fit into the ark The average size of an animal is the size of a sheep. If you took sheep and put them in boxcars, it would take 146 railroad boxcars to hold 35,000 sheep. The ark actually had a capacity of 522 boxcars. Noah and his family had almost four times the room necessary to house all of the animals.

In 1853 H. Rassam, while excavating at Ninevah, uncovered the palace of King Ashur-Bani-Pal. There he found a priceless clay tablet which reads, "I, Ashur-Bani-Pal, within this palace, learned the wisdom of Nebo, the entire art of writing on clay tablets of every kind. I made myself master of the various kinds of writing. I read the beautiful clay tablets from Sumer and the Akkadian writing, which is hard to master. I had the joy of reading inscriptions on the stone from the time before the flood."

  Many Ancient non-Jewish or Christian civilizations have passed down accounts of the flood. One of the world's oldest tribes of people, the Miao or Miautso of China, has passed down this story from generation to generation:

"So it poured forty days in sheets and torrents. Then fifty-five days of misting and drizzle. The waters surmounted the mountains and ranges. An earth with no earth upon which to take refuge! A world with no foothold where one might subsist! he people were baffled, impotent and ruined, Despairing, horror stricken, diminished and finished. But the Patriarch Nuah was righteous."
According to an article in the January 1999 issue of Discover magazine, titled "Forty Days and Forty Nights, More or Less," a great flood of possibly Noahatic proportion did take place in ancient times." A flood poured ten cubic miles of water a day - 130 times more than flows over Niagara Falls - from the Mediterranean Sea into the Black Sea, abruptly turning the formerly freshwater lake into a brackish inland sea ..."The evidence has been slowly accumulating over the past five years. In 1993, William Ryan and Walter Pitman of Columbiana University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory dug up cores of sediment from the bottom of the Black Sea. The core samples showed that the sea's outer margins had once been dry land and that it had been two-thirds its present size. Furthermore, over the entire sea bottom was a thin, uniform layer of sediment that could only have been deposited during a flood. .."This past year even more evidence came to light when researchers collected sediment samples from several new, nearby sites. 'If there had been a flood, there would have been a flood everywhere,' says Ryan, 'so we know that we had to find the same features - the same evidence that the Black Sea had once been smaller.' The new samples are consistent with that story."

In a 1999 story titled Evidence of Ancient Disaster Found, an account of a huge pile-up of dinosaur bodies in Shell, Wyoming, was reported. Kirby Siber, director of a dinosaur museum in Switzerland, believes the fossils represent a remarkable Jurassic catastrophe, such as a huge hurricane, flood or similar natural event.


Take a Free Bible College Class