We all know about the Ark, which the animals entered two by two (well, fourteen by fourteen if they were yaks or goats - look at Gen 7:7 if you don't believe me!) By building it, Noah was able to save himself and his family - and the animals - from the flood that washed away his more wicked contemporaries.
The story books picture it as a rather fat and top-heavy boat, with a sort of house on top with a sloping roof. The only description in the Bible concentrates more on its size: roughly the same as a modern Cross-Channel ferry, but with a lower superstructure and only three decks. Any clearer description was way beyond the writer's power to convey.
So if it was designed to float, why not call it a boat? What is an ark anyway? Well, in English, an ark is a chest, a wooden box, and the same is true of the Latin word, arca, from which it comes. And that reminds us that there was another ark in the Old Testament which was just as important, the Ark of the Covenant.
This ark was certainly a box and not a boat. It stood some 80cm high, was 80cm broad and 130cm long, and was made of acacia wood, covered all over with gold. On its lid was a gold cover, the mercy seat, incorporating a golden cherub at each end. (Cherubim were not the chubby winged babies of a Botticelli painting, but winged creatures with features of a lion, an ox, an eagle and a man.) The wings of the cherubim covered the mercy seat, forming a throne from which God could speak. Inside the ark, as the name suggests, were the two tablets of stone with the commandments which were the "testimony" of God's covenant with Israel. According to the Letter to the Hebrews, the ark also contained a four litre jar of the manna which had sustained the wanderers in the desert, and Aaron's staff, which had budded and borne fruit as a token of the priestly privileges God had given to the tribe of Levi. However, the Old Testament merely said that these lay "in front of the testimony".
Nobody could confuse a boat and a box. The symbolic meaning of the two arks is quite different too. Noah's ark is a symbol of safety. The first letter of Peter is probably an address to candidates for baptism. 1 Peter 3:20-1 recalls how Noah and his family's escape in the ark prefigures our own rescue through baptism. The ark itself is a symbol of the church which we enter when we are baptized. Throughout the Bible, storms and floods are images of chaos, from which we are rescued only by God's strength. Remember how in the Creation narrative, God first banishes darkness, and then forces the chaotic waters apart to create dry land. The Church is God's own dry land, kept safe from the frightening chaos outside it.
The Ark of the Covenant, on the other hand, is a sign of God's holiness and glory, so holy that it could not be touched, and had to be carried on two poles thrust through four golden rings on its sides. It was kept in the holiest part of the Temple, which the High Priest could enter only on the Day of Atonement. It was also a sign of God's protection, both leading the wanderers through the wilderness and through the Jordan, and giving victory in battle, as at Jericho.
Two things, one word. But in Hebrew, Noah's Ark was a tebah, the Ark of the Covenant an aron. However, when the Old Testament was translated into Greek some three centuries before Christ, the writers used only one word, kibotos, and it is this word that the New Testament uses for both. (To confuse things further, the reed boat in which Moses' mother hid him in the Nile was a tebah in Hebrew, but a thibis in Greek - a word used only here and perhaps a sign that the translators were stuck for a word and just used the Greek form of the Hebrew word!)
If they used one word, they must have thought there was something in common between the two arks. In English, the word safe comes to mind. Noah's ark kept God's creatures safe from the destructive chaos of the Flood. The Ark of the Covenant was a safe for Israel's most valuable possession: the physical testimony to their relationship with their Creator. But in English, safes don't float!
One lesson from this is that even a simple word can mean different things to different people. Thoughts can easily get lost in translation, and when we read our Bibles, we are looking at the writer's thoughts in the equivalent of a misty mirror. Over the centuries, people have studied and restudied the Scriptures, drawing out more and more of their meaning. For, like prayer and sacrament, the Scriptures are an inexhaustible well of insight into God's love for the world, which is itself inexhaustible.
HD