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Fringe Writers Shocked By Text from Dead Sea Scrolls Claiming Noah's Ark was Pyramid-Shaped

7/1/2016

25 Comments

 
Fringe writers have gone a bit bonkers over a recent news report that research on the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that the author of one of the scrolls considered Noah’s Ark to be pyramidal in shape. According to Dr. Alexey Yuditsky, a researcher working on the scrolls, new high-resolution photography allowed him to read words in a fragment of an interpretation of Genesis previous illegible. The new words say that the Ark’s “tallness” was “gathered” together at its summit, implying that the Ark was shaped like a pyramid. 
Fringe sites like Ancient Origins and Ancient Code jumped on this as a shocking “new” fact that challenges all of our beliefs about the Biblical Flood story. In so doing they revealed that they are utterly unfamiliar with the subject matter that they claim to investigate. It’s frustrating, really, that fringe writers are so terrible at research that they miss the bigger story every time.
 
The claim that Noah’s Ark was pyramidal in shape shouldn’t be a shock to fringe writers. It’s in fringe literature, typically as part of a conspiracy theory. For example, Scott Creighton described it in his book The Secret Chamber of Osiris (2015) in which he imagined that the pyramid-shaped ark on the doors of the Florentine Baptistery’s Gates of Paradise by Lorenzo Ghiberti was secretly depicting Khufu’s pyramid. Ramesh Ramsahoye wrote an article about the same piece of art in UFO Magazine in September 2003, where he claimed that Graham Hancock’s research helped him to realize that Noah’s Ark was really the Great Pyramid of Giza, and that it must have contained secret knowledge from before the Flood.
The story of Noah placing two of 'every living thing' within the Ark could be a poetic metaphor for 'everything being stored inside'. If an advanced civilisation knew that it was going to be devastated by an impending catastrophe, then it would make perfect sense to attempt to preserve its scientific knowledge and culture.
It’s rather surprising that Ramsahoye, who lacked any knowledge of the medieval Coptic-Arabian account of Surid or Hermes building the pyramids in just that way somehow stumbled upon the idea by working from some of the same sources as the inventors of that story.
 
What is especially interesting is that Ancient Origins actually used pictures of Ghiberti’s work to illustrate the story, seemingly without curiosity as to what Ghiberti depicted and why.
 
Ghiberti was actually depicting a widespread Jewish and early Christian belief about the Ark. Origen, in Genesis Homily 2, Philo in Questions and Answers on Genesis 2.5, and Clement in Stromata 6.11 all claimed that the Ark was pyramidal in shape. They derived this from the account in Genesis, which claimed that the Ark is 300 by 50 cubits at the base, but rose to a window embedded in a peak but one cubit square. They concluded, therefore, that the ship must be pyramidal to fit those measurements.
 
The Dead Sea Scrolls were deposited, scholars believe, between 300 BCE and 100 CE, overlapping the time when Philo was active and therefore proving that the belief was widespread enough to have popped up in multiple places around the ancient Judeo-Christian world. In other words, the Dead Sea Scrolls did not reveal a “new” interpretation of Noah’s Ark at all.
 
The claim that the Ark was pyramid-shaped had an unusual side effect. It must have led Late Antique Coptic Christians to try to explain why Egypt’s pyramids bore the same shape as the Ark. It is quite possible that this was one reason that the earlier legend that Hermes had encoded secret knowledge into the temples of Egypt to guard against the prophesied destruction of the Earth by fire and flood transformed into the idea that scientific knowledge had been saved from Noah’s Flood in stone versions of Noah’s Ark. The story then passed into the hands of the medieval Arab scholars. Ibrahim ibn Wasif Shah, the medieval writer quoted by al-Maqrizi, makes this connection rather clear when he parallels Surid’s efforts to save knowledge inside the pyramids with the Egyptian priest Philemon’s efforts to save people from the flood by finding Noah’s Ark. “Yes, whoever wants to be saved must go to reach the master of the Ark,” angels are made to say to Philemon.
25 Comments
Only Me
7/1/2016 12:59:02 pm

Interesting. That pyramidal ark-Egyptian pyramids connection would also help lead to the belief the pyramids were granaries built by Joseph, wouldn't it?

I can't help but wonder if a wooden pyramid would be able to float without toppling over, though.

Reply
Ken
7/1/2016 01:01:52 pm

The engineering theory behind the pyramidal design is that once afloat, the ark would flip 180 degrees, apex down, therefore becoming stable in the water.

Reply
Shane Sullivan
7/1/2016 02:03:00 pm

Huh, I thought because no matter which way it rolls, it's always flat-side down. =P

Reply
crainey
7/1/2016 03:26:45 pm

So the window at the "top" would become an underwater viewing portal. Interesting. Unless of course it had a very, very, very large keel.

Reply
Noah
7/1/2016 04:00:00 pm

You guys laugh all you want. Don't forget that God told be how to build it. If you have a problem, take it up with him.

Reply
Jamie Eckles
7/3/2016 06:48:12 pm

Noah, how long can you tread water?

Quedro
7/2/2016 06:23:52 am

The ancients were wrong
The present day fringe folk are wrong

Period.
Nothing to debate, yet there are 11 messages on this board.


Reply
orang
7/1/2016 01:56:47 pm

Too bad that the ark "replica" in Kentucky that's almost finished was built with the traditionally accepted but now questionable shape. I doubt that this will dissuade religious minded tourists, though.

Reply
DaveR
7/1/2016 02:42:23 pm

I had the same thought as well, perhaps they can change it to a pyramid.

Reply
Quedro
7/1/2016 02:41:19 pm

> the Ark

He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters.

Reply
Scott Hamilton
7/1/2016 03:28:27 pm

You have to go to some ridiculous length to explain how a 14th century fresco artist in Italy would have a better idea of what the Ark "really" looked like than people writing about the story thousands of years earlier, in the place where it was supposed to have happened. (If you're curious, Ramsahoye suggests Italian scholars somehow found really ancient texts and translated them, and then apparently kept their contents secret from everyone but the the guy decorating doors.)

Reply
David Bradbury
7/2/2016 06:08:11 am

Eh? What Jason is saying is that the pyramidal Ark was "a widespread Jewish and early Christian belief"- with examples from texts which are still known today.

Reply
Quedro
7/2/2016 06:26:34 am

There were no eyewitnesses alive when the story of Noah's Ark was committed to writing, a later version of the story of Ziusudra.

The Bible story is pure myth.
It's no better than the claim the Ark was pyramid shaped.

The whole Bible itself is nothing else but pure myth,

Quedro
7/2/2016 06:31:04 am

Noah's Ark was made from gopher
Nobody knows what kind of wood that was,
The identification is lacking.

Quedro
7/2/2016 06:34:49 am

Yes, I know, Bible-believers dispute that the story of Noah in the Bible was an adaptation of the story of Ziusudra, despite the fact that the Sumerian race was extinct at the time when the story of Noah was committed to writing in the Bible, The Book of Genesis is not the oldest book of the Old Testament according to the mainstream Biblical scholars.

Quedro
7/2/2016 07:48:09 am

Albert Einstein to philosopher Eric Gutkind in January 1954: "Religions are childish Fairy Tales".

Quedro
7/2/2016 07:54:40 am

The correct quote by Albert Einstein

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/word-god-is-product-of-human-weakness.html

""The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

Scott Hamilton
7/2/2016 12:50:05 pm

David Bradbury - I'm talking about the explanation given in the UFO Magazine article, whose author doesn't know all the rest of the stuff Jason is talking about. Jason doesn't mention that part, which I thought was kind of funny.

Jason - Can we do anything about the troll? I think those of us seriously interested in intelligent commentary wouldn't mind email verified accounts or more stringent moderation.

Ph
7/1/2016 03:39:10 pm

How much would a pyramidical roof (tented, pavilion roof, or hip roof) fit into the description?

Reply
Quedro
7/2/2016 07:18:00 am

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.727615

Was Noah's Ark Shaped Like a Pyramid? Digitized Dead Sea Scrolls Reveal New Secrets

Nir Hasson | 
Jun 28, 2016 5:35 PM

The reinterpretation is being done by members of the historical dictionary department of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Their findings were unveiled at a conference now taking place at the academy for Dead Sea Scrolls researchers from around the world.

Dr. Alexey Yuditsky, for instance, discussed the section on Noah’s Ark, where a word following the words “the ark’s tallness” had previously been illegible. Now the scan has revealed it as ne’esefet, meaning “gathered,” which Yuditsky interpreted to mean that the ark’s ribs were gathered together at the top – or in other words, that its roof tapered to a point. He then cited various proofs to back this claim, such as the fact that the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Bible done in the third century B.C.E., used a Greek verb with a similar meaning.

Medieval commentators like Maimonides also concluded that the ark’s roof was pointed. But the new find reveals that this conclusion dates back 2,000 years.

Reply
Gary
7/2/2016 04:46:21 pm

The earliest flood story of Atrahasis described the ark as an actual boat, a coracle. They actually figured out the amount of materials needed. The later writers were just lazy, with their cubes and pyramids and such.

Reply
John Sawyer
7/5/2016 04:56:38 am

I'm guessing that a lot of people don't know how to picture things in their head when given dimensions to work with. How does a ship with a base that's 50 cubits wide by 300 cubits long resemble the base of a pyramid, which is square? 50/300 is a ratio of 1:6 (or if you prefer, 6:1), which makes for a long, narrow ship. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that the description of the ark wasn't meant to imply smooth-surfaced exterior walls from bottom to top, so a more likely construction still makes it pretty much some kind of more classic ship-shape, with a deck, from which may have been imagined to have risen a structure that would have reached a point at the top, resembling a big sail more than a pyramid.

Reply
Ramesh Ramsahoye
7/6/2016 05:24:18 am

http://grahamhancock.com/phorum/read.php?1,143363,318187#msg-318187

To be fair, I had, discusssed the text in Origen during a later debate on the Graham Hancock Forum. I refer to the above comment to a certain Martin Stower. In terns of the pyramidal form of the ark being suggested by the Bible text, I am not convinced that they are. For this reason, Ghiberti felt the need to stamp into the bronze on the respective sides of the ark tiny Roman numerals indicating the measurements stated in the bible (which indicate a longitudinal structure). If memory serves me correctly, the Epic of Gilgamesh also refers to the Ark having a square base, a fact supportive of the idea of a pyramidal ark.

Reply
Ramesh Ramsahoye
7/6/2016 08:18:36 am

http://grahamhancock.com/phorum/read.php?1,143363,318187#msg-318187

To be fair, I had discusssed the text in Origen during a later debate on the Graham Hancock Forum. I refer to the above comment, made to a certain Martin Stower. The whole thread may in fact be of interest to reaaders here. In terms of the pyramidal form of the ark being suggested by the Bible text, I am not convinced that it is. For this reason, Ghiberti felt the need to stamp into the bronze, on the respective sides of the ark, tiny Roman numerals indicating the measurements stated in the bible (which indicate a longitudinal structure). If memory serves me correctly, the Epic of Gilgamesh also refers to the Ark having a square base, a fact supportive of the idea of a pyramidal ark.

Reply
John Sawyer
7/10/2016 12:22:58 am

But since we're discussing Noah's Ark, not Gilgamesh's (and yes I know the two tales are linked), and the Bible says the ark was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high (440x73x44 ft), why would a (presumably) good Christian like Origen say the Bible is wrong and the dimensions were those of Gilgamesh's version? This is an odd mixing of two mythologies which makes no sense from a Christian point of view. I know there was a lot of New Testament apocrypha in the early years of the church, much of which was rejected only after Origen's time, but the Old Testament's Genesis was already pinned down and accepted long before his time, so wouldn't the early church consider Origen's preference for the tale of Gilgamesh to be worse than apocryphal?

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