by
Damien F. Mackey
A tentative theory, which may provide nothing more than just a nice symmetry.
Introduction
When it comes to the place where Noah built the Ark there appear to be no firm traditions to offer us any helpful clues.
This I find surprising, considering the significance of the event.
It may simply be that, down through the ages, it has been presumed that the great Flood was so total that it destroyed every single vestige of anything on the ground that had preceded it. A complete tabula rasa effect.
And, whereas that was also my early opinion, it is not any more.
For instance, the four rivers of Genesis 2:10-14, far from having been erased from the face of the earth, were still flowing as late as Sirach’s day (Sirach 24:25-27), conventionally estimated as being the C2nd BC (about two millennia after the Flood).
Indeed, they still flow to this very day (16th May, 2025).
More significantly, from the testimony of Jesus Christ we learn that the Jerusalemites, who murdered the prophets down through time, were located geographically where Cain and Abel had been, in Eden/Jerusalem (Luke 11:50-51):
‘Therefore this generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the beginning of the world, from the blood
of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible for it all’.
This would be unfair had there been no tangible connection between the two epochs.
What it also means is that the great Genesis Flood did not cause any irrevocable disconnection between the antediluvian and postdiluvian worlds.
Here I propose to suggest another pre-Flood/post-Flood connection, namely between the place where Noah built the Ark and the place where we know that Moses, considered by some to have been a second Noah, built the Ark of the Covenant.
This will have a nice symmetry to it, but it is not a view that I can insist upon with any certainty at this stage, it being nothing more than tentative.
If my proposal has any weight, then how ironic would be the taunt aimed at professor Emmanuel Anati about his claim to have found the holy mountain of Sinai, or Horeb: ‘Next you should look for Noah’s Ark’.
As I have previously written on this:
Professor Emmanuel Anati’s emphatic view that Mount Har Karkom - and not Jebel Musa - is the true biblical Mount Sinai, received this taunt from some of his colleagues, as he tells: “We became used to sarcastic comments such as ‘Did you find the broken Tablets of the Law?’, or, 'Next you should look for Noah’s Ark’.”
These colleagues may have been right, though unwittingly, in referring to Noah and the Exodus in the one breath, given the view of certain scholars that the Exodus story of Moses is a miniature Flood story.
On this, see e.g. my article:
Moses as a second Noah
(3) Moses as a second Noah
I, however, have recently shifted away from Har Karkom - to an un-named mountain (Mount 788) in the middle of the Karkom valley - as likely being the sacred mountain:
Mysterious mountain in the Karkom valley may be the sacred Mount Horeb
(3) Mysterious mountain in the Karkom valley may be the sacred Mount Horeb
Why was this mountain (Horeb) holy?
Contrary to professor Anati’s estimations of this un-named mountain as being of late interest (Hellenistic) as a sacred mountain, Flavio Barbiero and his brother, Claudio, who worked with the professor, found evidence that this sacredness dated right back to the Stone Ages (to Chalcolithic).
Flavio Barbiero has written of it in his ground-breaking article:
THE CAVE OF TREASURES ON MOUNT HOREB
(3) THE CAVE OF TREASURES ON MOUNT HOREB
Pp. 78-79 (emphasis added):
…. Isolated as it is in the centre of the valley, with its unmistakable silhouette, it constitutes a unique natural landmark, so conspicuous that the Israeli Air Force had used it as a target for its live-fire exercises. They placed a wooden target right on the small temple and shot against it. The collapsed stones of the wall were riddled with machine gun fire. All around, on the rocks, the signs produced by the missiles’ explosion could be seen. We had also found missiles’ parts along the climbing path, which we had been careful not to touch in compliance with the permanent instructions that had been given to us on the day of our entry into Har Karkom.
We were under strict orders to stay away from anything that wasn't archaeological. We immediately made a transgression for that target fixed to the temple: we dashed it down into the valley. We devoted the rest of the day to a first inspection of the site. All around the acropolis, both at its base and at half height, there was a series of shelters and small caves. We collected much pottery, inside and around the temple and also at the base of the rock.
In the evening, we made a full report on the discoveries of that extraordinary day. There was excitement among the camp members but also a subtle vein of embarrassment. Another sacred mountain right in front of Har Karkom? Because there was no doubt that it was a holy mountain. How did it reconcile with Anati's hypotheses?
Anati immediately found the solution to the problem. The pottery we brought back from the Acropolis belonged to the Hellenistic period. Even the small temple, with its square plan and a construction technique that had no comparison in the area with BAC constructions, was, according to Emmanuel, Hellenistic. Finally, the acropolis was connected to the Hellenistic site BK 480, the location of which was chosen to be as close as possible to the access path. According to Anati, Mount 788 had only become sacred in the Hellenistic era, and there was no evidence that it had already been so in the time of Moses. He was wrong. We later found evidence that it had been sacred since Chalcolithic times, at least three thousand years earlier. ….
[End of quote]
For some proper biblical perspective, Late Chalcolithic En-gedi has been firmly determined by Dr. John Osgood to have been contemporaneous with the patriarch Abram and the invasion of the four kings of Genesis 14, resulting in the demise of Ghassul IV in Palestine. It also corresponds to the Gerzean phase in Egypt.
Was Noah ever in Egypt, or whatever it may then have been called?
As with the place where Noah built the Ark, there is precious little to go on here.
I have read a vague tradition that Noah had gone to Egypt to escape violent men.
If so, it is a situation that Noah would have shared in common with the Holy Family.
Following through on the hopeful symmetry with Moses, I can only suggest that Noah eventually migrated from Egypt to the Karkom valley region, which in those days would have been paradisiacal, and there with his family (and any supporters) built the mighty Ark - where Moses, the second Noah, would build the Ark of the Covenant.
Flavio Barbero, at least, has no doubts that Noah had once dwelt at this sacred site (op. cit., p. 116-117):
….
In the apocalypse of Moses, the sequence of burials in the cave of treasures is interrupted by Noah, because of devastation sent by God to punish the lineage of the priests, announced by Enoch:
"When Enoch saw that God intended to take him back with him, he called Matusala, Lamech, and Noah to him and said to them, 'I know that God is angry with our seed and will cause judgment without mercy to descend upon them'"
From the rest of the account it is clear that the author is referring to the destruction of Jerusalem and the subsequent Babylonian exile.
In fact, at the death of Methuselah, Noah
"anointed his body with myrrh and cinnamon Then Noah and his sons buried him in the cave of treasures... When they came down from the holy mountain, they erupted sobbing in tears, for they were deprived of the holy place of their fathers. They lifted their eyes to paradise, wept in sorrow, mourned desolately, and said: 'Rest in peace, holy paradise, abode of our father Adam, .... Even after death he is driven away from his country and cast out into a foreign land with his children, into a land of sorrows, where his children will be afflicted by pain, disease, work, fatigue and adversity."
This lament seems to echo the lamentations of the children of Israel forced into Babylonian exile. More than for the pains of exile, however, the Noah of the Apocalypse of Moses seems afflicted by the loss of the sacred mountain and the cave where his ancestors rest.
He continues: "Rest in peace, cave of treasures. Rest in peace, home and inheritance of our father ... Rest in peace, holy mountain! Rest in peace, port and abode of angels. O fathers, pray for us, in the pain of having been deprived of the connection with you!"
Did a Flood ever overlie the Karkom valley region?
Well, yes one did, but supposedly millions of years before any of this.
We find evidence for this in professor Anati’s book, The Mountain of God.
Previously I wrote about this:
….
Returning to hypothesis, might even the Eocene (Tethys?) Sea (supposedly to be dated somewhere between 56 to 33.9 million years ago) be connected with the Noachic Flood?
Terry Lawrence (N.Z.) has proposed a Flood-related revision of some of the Geological Ages and the Ice Age that, if realistic, would bring this closer to being a possibility:
Pick up a copy of Kummel’s History of the Earth and glance at pp.447-455 and you will see the fallacy of this time-gap.
The maps on these pages clearly show that during the Tertiary Age Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor were in a state of complete ruin, being mostly under water. Note in particular the Great Tethys or Central Sea which stretches 9000 miles from Spain to India and is up to 2000 miles wide.
On p.453 the map for the Oligocene subdivision of the Tertiary shows that the sea invasion of Europe plainly stops at the boundary of the area covered by the ice age in Scandinavia.
This is curious because under the conventional scheme the ice age does not occur for another 23 million years. During the Eocene subdivision of the Tertiary the sea covered the south of England up to a point where the later ice age reached, supposedly 38 million years later.
During the whole period of these disastrous sea invasions and large scale fresh water floodings the northern part of the British Isles along with Scandinavia was not touched. In North America it is a similar story for the Canadian Shield. While the rest of the continent was subject to sea incursions, rain storm flooding in the mid-west and volcanic eruptions in the Rockies and Central America all was tranquil in north-east Canada.
It is absolutely impossible that while the rest of the world was drowning, most of the British Isles, Scandinavia and Canada escaped. There can only be one solution, i.e. the ice age struck these lands at the same time as the Noachian Deluge. Conventional geologists have therefore reconstructed the ages of the past incorrectly by placing too much time between the end of the Tertiary and the ice age. If either follows immediately or happens at the same time as the subdivisions of the Tertiary i.e. the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene and Pliocene periods are all contemporary with one another). ….
Whether or not Lawrence has his model exactly right, I believe that he is on the right track, at least, by his use of the Flood sequence as an aid towards bringing some degree of sensible manageability to the grossly inflated Geological (Ice) Ages.
In a similar fashion we shall find later, when searching for the historical “new Noah”, Moses, in Egyptian history, that he, Moses, will serve to bring some manageability to the grossly inflated Egyptian history, its supposed Kingdoms and dynasties.
The Eocene Sea, which professor Anati has found to have only just covered Har Karkom (Mount Sinai), ought to be considered as a hydrographical candidate for the Flood inundation, I suggest, along with the Great Tethys Sea as referred to by Lawrence.
Dr. John Osgood, who (to my knowledge) has not ventured into those murky Geological Ages, has undertaken an important revision of the Stone Ages in relation to the Flood, however, identifying the latter’s watery traces in the very regions where I would expect these to appear, in Iraq and the Middle East, Anatolia, Sinai and Egypt – all pointing to, for him, the great Genesis Flood.
Conventionally-minded (often evolutionary-minded) geologists, palaeontologists, archaeologists and historians tend to adhere rigidly to an ‘Indian file’, or ‘chest-of-drawers’, linear arrangement – with little or no overlap amidst their neatly filed compartments.
Revisionist scholars on the other hand, such as Dr. John Osgood, have found that such an arrangement does not always reflect the testimony of the received data, and hence can be quite artificial. ….
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