Question: Shalom! I was watching a special on the Discovery channel. They made the claim that Noah’s ark would have sank under it’s own weight. There was a brief discussion about accepting that G—d held the ark together. Would you please help to elaborate on the answer. A related question: Noach saved only a couple hundred species. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of species today? How is this possible? Another related question: How many people were there on the ark? Noah’s three sons and their wives but how many total?

Answer: Well…it seems as though you’ve “discovered” something really important about the way Judaism looks at the entire episode of the flood! You see, the general approach that you must take to understand the whats and wherefores of the flood is to understand a fundamental concept of Jewish Philosophy.

Jewish Tradition teaches us that there exists a Creator Who created the entire universe and that He is intimately involved with all that goes on down here. The story of the flood is one of many occurrences in history where G-d “changes” the laws of nature for the purpose of helping a righteous individual.

This approach can answer the questions that you have with this particular incident.Yes the ark, left to the laws of science, would have never been able to last in such a tumultuous storm. But that’s only true if we’re bound by the laws of science. G-d is not.

This also explains how Noah was able to fit every animal that existed at that time in a boat of finite proportions. Just the fodder for the animals’ nourishment (for an entire year!) was enough to fill up the ark, let alone all the animals themselves!

The fact that the animals came onto the ark voluntarily, through miraculous means guaranteed that Noah would not leave any behind. Once again, a miracle.

As I said, there are many points in this story and others in the Torah that cannot be explained using the laws of science. G-d, who created the world and all the laws of nature, can abrogate those laws whenever He sees fit to do so.

Regarding your final question, there were a total of 8 individuals in the ark—Noah and his wife, his 3 sons and their wives.

Thank you for you answer! Not to be argumentative but why doesn’t the Torah doesn’t say that the ark would be too small to contain all of the animals without G-d’s help? That type of statement seems to fit stylistically with G-d showing his hand to us. The creation story would be a great example of G—d showing us HIS existence.

The Torah is replete with miraculous incidents. However, much detail is left out because it can be found in other sections of the Torah, i.e. The Oral Law. The reason for certain things being included in the Written Torah and others in the Oral Torah are beyond our comprehension, but one thing is for certain…without the Oral Torah, we would be not only clueless as to how to understand the Written Torah, we would be totally wrong on many occasions. Think of the Written Torah as a “cliff-notes” of sorts to the full lecture that can be found and learned in the Oral Torah. The Talmud, consisting of over 60 volumes(!) is just some of the commentary on the Written Torah.

Another important part of answering your question is to realize that G-d “tries” to hide Himself as well as possible—-in order to give us a fair choice in doing his will. If we had overt experiences of G-d all the time, it would reduce our ability to choose NOT to obey Him. Therefore, you may find as you learn through the Chumash (Five Books of Moses) you will find that when G-d performs a miracle, he conceals it through the framework of natural causes—-all so that our free-will remains intact.

There are some instances, though, where G-d will perform an overt miracle (as can be found by the plagues in Egypt of the splitting of the Red Sea). This is usually for one of two reasons:

(a)If a righteous individual needs immediate assistance and needs a miracle done for his sake, or
(b) If G-d wants the entire Jewish nation to learn a fundamental lesson for eternity. An example of this is G-d’s revelation on Mount Sinai, where the entire nation needed to witness G-d speaking to Moses to learn that G-d can and DOES communicate with man.

All these issues are very deep and a lengthy explanation is beyond the scope of this e-mail. Please continue you research of Torah & Judaism and you will discover many answers to your questions. Good Luck!

(Reposted from the Archives)