Genesis 6:13-16
God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make a ship of gopher wood. You shall make rooms in the ship, and shall seal it inside and outside with pitch. This is how you shall make it. The length of the ship will be three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. You shall make a roof in the ship, and you shall finish it to a cubit upward. You shall set the door of the ship in its side. You shall make it with lower, second, and third levels.
The Ark was a very big ship. Cute Sunday School material and wallpaper has misrepresented the size by illustrating animals with their heads sticking out the roof and windows of a boat that looks like an overgrown bathtub. Fortunately, God didn’t leave this up to our imagination. He gave us the dimensions here. It is commonly understood that a cubit was the distance between the tip of a man’s fingers and his elbow.
I am using a long cubit of about 20.5 inches. I assume that Noah’s cubit was pretty big because these guys were healthy and obviously lived a long time. When you use this measurement, you get the dimensions of about: 51 feet high, 85 feet wide, and 510 feet long. That’s quite a bit bigger than an American football field. The Bible tells us that it had three levels so that’s a lot of square footage.
The Bible also tells us that it was sealed, had a roof, and a side door. It was made out of a type of wood that we may not have anymore since scholars don’t know what it is. My understanding is that it was translated: “gopher wood” because we no longer know what kind of wood it was.
Notice that God tells Noah that He was planning to destroy the earth and the people on it. This wasn’t to be an average flood. It was intended to destroy the whole earth not just humans and not just one location on earth. It is easy to understand why a type of wood, such as “gopher wood,” may have ceased to exist after this kind of catastrophe.