Genesis chapters 6 through 9 chronicle the story of Noah's Ark. Jehovah, the God who created all things in the world, saw the earth full of corrupt, violent, and lawless evil, and planned to destroy the wicked with a flood. At the same time, he also discovered that there was a good man named Noah among human beings. The Book of Genesis records that "Noah was a righteous man, and he was a perfect man in his time." Jehovah God instructed Noah to build an ark and to take his wife, son (Shem, Han and Japhet) and daughter-in-law. At the same time, God instructed Noah to bring animals such as livestock and birds to the boat, and must include both females and males.
When the ark was built, the flood began, and Noah, his family, and the animals had entered the ark. The Book of Genesis describes the flood as follows: "When Noah was six hundred years old, on the seventeenth day of February, the fountains of the Great Abyss were cracked, and the windows in the heavens were opened. Forty days and forty days and nights heavy rain fell on the ground.". The flood flooded the highest mountain, and all the creatures on land died, and only the life of Noah's family and the Ark survived.
After 220 days, the Ark stopped near Mount Aare and the flooding began to recede. After another 40 days, the summit of Mount Aare was revealed. At this time, Noah released a crow, but it did not find a land place to inhabit. Seven days later, Noah released the pigeon again, this time immediately bringing back the branches of the olive tree, and Noah knew that the flood had dissipated. After another 7 days of waiting, Noah released the pigeon for the last time, this time not returning to the Ark. Noah's family and various animals walked out of the ark.
After leaving the Ark, Noah offered a sacrifice to the gods. The Lord, smelling the aroma of the sacrifice, decided not to destroy the world with the flood anymore and created a rainbow in the sky as a guarantee. In genesis, God assures, "When I make the clouds cover the earth, there will be a rainbow in the clouds, and I will commemorate my covenant with you and all the living creatures of flesh and blood, and the water will no longer flood and destroy all things of flesh and blood."
In the Transcaucasia, there have been many places claiming to be the anchorage of Noah's Ark, or there are related folklore circulating, among which the more famous one is Nakhchivan.
In the early 2000s, Leung Yan-shing, a Christian academic speaker in Hong Kong, examined popular legends and satellite images circulating at the time and concluded that the Ark had finally stopped at the summit of Mount Al-Aar on the border between Turkey and Armenia. To solve the mystery of the Ark, christian Noah's Ark International Ministry has planned to explore the Ark since the first Chinese exploration team first climbed the mountain in 2004 to find the Ark. In August 2006, an ethnic Kurdish explorer found an unidentified object in a cave on Mount Aare, suspected to be a wooden block. He immediately contacted the members of the Hong Kong Exploration Team, who were acquainted, and sent the samples to Hong Kong for scientific analysis in September. The Centre for Applied Earth Sciences, Department of Earth Sciences, The University of Hong Kong conducted a lithofacy analysis of the sample and identified it as a petrified timber structure. According to this study, the guidebook in Hong Kong's Ma Wan Park Museum treats Noah's Ark as history, causing public dissatisfaction.
On April 28, 2010, foreign media reported that expeditions from Hong Kong and Turkey said that they found the wreckage of the legendary Noah's Ark near Mount Ale in eastern Turkey, and tests found that the wreckage dates back to 4800 years ago, that is, the existence of Noah's Ark described in Genesis. Hong Kong director Yang Yongxiang said: "Although we can't be 100% sure that it is Noah's Ark, the probability is 99.9%. ”。 But this claim has also been influenced by Nicholas Berger, a lecturer in ancient history at oxford university in the United Kingdom. Psell questioned, saying: "If Eurasia had been covered by floods more than 3,000 meters deep in 2800 BC, how could the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, which had existed for centuries before that, survive?"
On May 1, 2010, a religious professor named Randall Price called this is all reported to be a fake. His emails pointed out that the photos were all taken somewhere in the Black Sea, and in the summer of 2008 10 Kurds told him that a guide Chinese had hired them to move wooden beams near the Black Sea to caves in Mount Aar.
The Mystery of the Ark
(i) The provenance of Noah's Ark
Noah's Ark is a fascinating legend from the biblical book of Genesis. Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden for stealing the forbidden fruit. Adam lived to be 930 years old, and he and Eve had countless children, and their descendants were passed down from generation to generation, gradually spreading throughout the earth. After that, Cain cursed his brother and opened the prelude to the killing of human beings against each other. Mankind bears the brand of original sin, God curses the land, people have to work hard to feed themselves, and the resentment and evil thoughts of people of a fallen nature are increasing day by day. People are endlessly killing, fighting, plundering each other, and the violence and evil in the world are simply beyond reproach.
God saw all this, and He regretted that He had created man, and he was very sad about the sins committed by mankind. God said, "I will destroy from the earth the people and beasts and the insects and the birds of the air." Among the midst of the sinful crowd, only Noah was gripped before God's eyes. God thinks he is a righteous man and a man of duty; His three sons were not misguided under their father's strict education. Noah also often admonished the people around him to stop doing evil quickly and get rid of a life full of sin. But people didn't take his words seriously, and continued to do their own thing, blindly doing evil and enjoying themselves.
God chose the Noah family: Mr. and Mrs. Noah, their three sons, and their daughter-in-law, to be preserved as the seeds of a new generation of humanity. God told them to use the Flood to carry out the Great Destruction, and he told them to build an ark out of Gopher wood, one by one, and to smear rosin on the inside and outside. The ark is 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. There should be a window with light on the top of the ark, and a door should be opened next to it. The Ark should be divided into three layers. They immediately complied.
When God saw that the ark was built, he said, "Behold, I will make the flood flood on the earth and destroy the whole world, and all living things on the earth that have flesh and blood and breath will not die." But I will make a covenant with you, and you and your wife, son, and daughter-in-law will enter the ark. For all the clean animals, you shall bring seven males and seven females; Unclean animals, you have to bring one male and one female; Birds in the air should also bring seven males and seven females. These can be planted and will be reproduced on the ground in the future. ”
On February 17, Noah's 600th birthday, the fountains of the ocean cracked open, and huge columns of water spewed out from the ground; The windows in the sky were open, and the heavy rain did not stop day and night, falling for a full 40 days. The water, which had nowhere to flow, rose rapidly, 15 cubits higher than the highest mountain peak. All the animals that breathed on their lungs on the dry land died, leaving only the seeds of men and animals in the Ark unharmed. The ark floats on the boundless ocean with God's high hopes.
God, mindful of Noah and the birds and beasts of the ark, ordered that the rain and the wind should be stopped, and the wind blew the water, and the water gradually faded. Noah's Ark docked on Mount Ararat. After another few dozen days, Noah opened the window of the ark and released a crow to listen to the news, but the crow never returned. Noah released a pigeon again and asked him to see if the water on the ground had receded. Because there was water all over the place, the pigeon could not find a place to stay, and flew back to the ark. Seven days later, Noah let the pigeon out again, and at dusk the pigeon flew back with an olive leaf in its mouth, apparently pecked from a tree. After another 7 days, Noah released the pigeons again, and this time the pigeons did not come back. On January 1, the year Noah was 601 years old, the water on the ground dried up. Noah opened the door and watched, and the water on the ground receded. By February 27, the earth was completely dry. So God said to Noah, "You and your wife, children, and daughters-in-law can go out of the boat." Bring out all the birds, animals, and all the reptiles that are in your boat and let them multiply on the ground. So Noah's whole family and all the other creatures in the Ark came out according to the species. Later generations used doves and olive branches to symbolize peace.
This is the origin of the story of "Noah's Ark", although it is a legend, but because many of the things recorded in the Bible have been proven to be true, for example, in a war, an officer successfully found a secret trail in the mountains according to the biblical records, and through this trail suddenly appeared in front of the enemy and achieved a great victory. If it can be proved that "Noah's Ark" is also real, then this discovery will surely cause a sensation around the world. So, for many years, biblical archaeologists in many countries have wanted to unravel this age-old mystery.
(ii) The Ark may have run aground on a hillside facing the Black Sea
According to the biblical account, the ark was a huge wooden box with a displacement of 43,000 tons. As stated in Genesis 8, the Ark finally docked on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey. In the past, although there were many rumors that the Ark was discovered, they were only rumors.
In recent years, there has been a theory that the Ark ran aground on a slope facing the Black Sea in the Ararat Mountains, and was likely to sink to the bottom of the Black Sea because of the soaring level of the Black Sea, which aroused the great interest of the American deep-sea explorer Dr. Robert Ballard, who said in an interview with the media that the story of "Noah's Ark" has deeply attracted him since he was a child, especially after he has achieved some success in deep-sea exploration. He wished he had the opportunity to find out the whereabouts of the Ark. So when he heard the bold speculation that the ark might sink to the bottom of the Black Sea, he decided to go to the Black Sea for himself.
Ballard had found the ships of the Roman Empire and Phoenicians at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, and if he could find the Ark on the black seabed, it would be a sensational discovery that would even go down in history.
If the ark had sunk to the bottom of the Black Sea, it might have been intact
Ancient civilizations in the Near and Middle East have recorded great floods, and ancient Babylon, Greece, and Rome have similar stories of Noah's family being rescued, but geologists have never found evidence of a global flood. Some people think that Noah's Ark is just an ancient legend, but scientists have deduced from the natural environment along the Black Sea that there may indeed have been devastating floods.
Scientists estimate that The Earth's first ice age peaked 12,000 years ago, when global sea levels were much lower than they are today, and the Black Sea was just a freshwater lake, separated from the Mediterranean Sea by a natural that spanned the Bosphorus Strait in present-day Turkey.
As glaciers melt and fade, global sea levels rise, and the water level gap between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea gradually widens to about 500 meters. Later, it may be a heavy rain or an earthquake that causes the dike between the two to collapse, and the waters of the Mediterranean Sea flood into the Black Sea with 200 times the amount and momentum of Niagara Falls; It took two years for the water levels in the Mediterranean and Black Seas to reach equilibrium.
Although the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea have a waterway, but the Black Sea is basically a closed water, the Danube, Dnieper and Don rivers of water continue to flow into the Black Sea, in its upper layer to form a freshwater belt, in this area there are abundant fish and other organisms, the lower Layer of the Black Sea is a brackish water belt, this saltwater zone is different from the general lower ocean layer has currents, but is in a state of stagnation, thus forming a special "anaerobic" environment. Theoretically, it is almost impossible for living things to exist in this anaerobic environment, so once an object, shipwreck, or even human remains sinks into this body of water, it is as if it were thrown into a vacuum locker and will never decay. According to the Bible, the ark was built of "Gopher wood," and if it ends up on the bottom of the Black Sea, it may be intact.
Foreign body photos
In 1919, the public finally saw the first photograph of Noah's Ark: this photo taken by Russian pilot Rothkovsky, which could faintly see a blurry dark spot under the glacier. Subsequent geological expeditions using radar and deep probes showed that the spot was only an anomalous structure common to rocks in the Ararat region. The search for Noah's Ark resumed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Due to the declassification of military archives, the U.S. government released photos taken by the Eros satellite and U-2 spy aircraft. These photographs show a 3,000-meter elevation of a "foreign body" (technically known as a "bulge") looming beneath the year-round ice on the slopes of the Russian side of mount Ararat. But what exactly do these photos say?
Those who support Noah's Ark theory are quite sure: this is Noah's Ark. In fact, there are some strange coincidences: this "foreign object" is only a few hundred meters from where Navarre found the piece of wood, and the wood was found at the Echmi Azin Monastery near the "Ahra Canyon". However, in the eyes of geologists and the CIA, this could be a crater that erupted around 1000 AD, or an abnormal accumulation of snow due to a huge ice slide in a glacier all year round. However, this is not the only rebuttal to the existential theory of Noah's Ark. The most important of these counter-arguments is that it is absolutely impossible for such a flood to inundate a 5,000-meter-high mountain range. But those who believe Noah's Ark docked at Mount Ararat counter that after the Great Flood, in 3000 BC, some incredible tectonic movement of the Earth's crust may have lifted the mountain range.
As a result, Mount Ararat, especially the Parot Glacier on the western slope, the Ahra Gorge and the Abiko II Glacier on the northeast slope, became the favorite places of the researchers.
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