Genesis 6:14, What Is An Ark?

Posted on Thursday, October 23, 2014 in Bible Commentary | 0 comments

Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

//The word tevah, translated into the English word Ark, occurs in two stories in the Bible. Today’s verse is one of the two: Noah’s ark, in which all life on earth was saved from the flood.

Can you guess the second occurrence of the word? If you said the Ark of the Covenant, you’re…

Wrong. That’s an entirely different word in Hebrew. The other occurrence of tevah is the little basket that the baby Moses was placed in when his mother turned him loose in the Nile.

This is not a coincidence. We are meant to tie the two stories together. Recall that Moses’s mother, in a desperate attempt to keep him alive, carefully prepared her “ark”:

And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.

Did you catch it? Both arks were waterproofed with pitch. They were named the same (tevah), waterproofed the same, and held a similar purpose … to protect their precious cargo from the raging waters. Any ancient listener of the story of Moses’s rescue would know it’s patterned after the rescue of Noah.

Just as Noah was the savior of the world, so is Moses heralded from his birth as a savior of his people.