Was de ark van Noach een ronde boot?

Abstract

In 2010 the British newspaper The Guardian reported on the find and decipherment by the curator Irving Finkel of an Old-Babylonian clay tablet that referred to the story of the flood. This tablet even mentioned the name of the Babylonian flood-hero Atraḫasīs who was ordered to build a circular boat to escape the forthcoming disaster. Claims were made in the press that the Ark of Noah would have been, by implication, a circular boat too. In this article the authors investigate the Ancient Near Eastern traditions of a great flood and the building of a rescuing-vessel concluding that the Biblical stories, although adopting many features from the Mesopotamian traditions, cannot be read as presenting a circular boat. In the Hebrew appropriation, the noun tēbāh is used, containing an intended intertextual allusion to the story of Moses as a child in Exodus.