The Big Questions About the BibleSample

Has Noah’s Ark Been Found?

Noah’s Ark is the world’s most famous cargo ship. The Bible says God told Noah to build to save himself, his family, and the world’s animals during the worldwide flood that the Bible describes.

At the end of the flood that destroyed the world, the Bible says, “on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat” (Gen 8:4, NIV).

The tradition that the remains of Noah’s Ark existed and were able to be visited goes right back to antiquity. Mount Ararat is in Armenia, and the long-standing tradition is that the Ark is there on Mount Ararat.

The history of modern expeditions to try to find the Ark goes back to the early nineteenth century. The results of these generally fall into three categories.

First, you have unsuccessful expeditions. For example, James Irwin was a US astronaut who experienced a conversion to faith during the Apollo 15 mission. He later led two expeditions to Ararat in the 1980s to try to find the Ark, where he was once kidnapped.

Other expedition groups are those resulting in inconclusive or unsubstantiated claims. There is a story that Tsar Nicholas II of Russia sent an expedition of 150 men to Mount Ararat in 1916 to explore a large object, and I quote, “as large as a city block.” At the same time, the Russian Revolution was breaking out as the reports were given to Leon Trotsky, the communist leader, who destroyed them. We don’t know whether that’s true.

The third group of expeditions can probably be classified as outright hoaxes, like a joint Turkish-Hong Kong expedition in 2007 that claimed to have found a massive petrified wooden structure well above the vegetation line. However, for various compelling reasons, this supposed discovery is widely considered a hoax.

Many people still want to go to Mount Ararat to search for Noah’s Ark, but there’s one big problem. In 1920, there was a war between Turkey and Armenia, the two countries Mount Ararat straddles, and the area is now a restricted military zone. It’s almost impossible to get permission to visit Mount Ararat.

Is Noah’s Ark up there? I want to think so, but lots of questions remain. It would be nice to find it, but I don’t need it to believe or to be able to tell someone, “I told you so.” If someone did find Noah’s Ark one day, that’d be one more Big Question answered!

– Eliezer Gonzalez