Noah’s Ark v. Noah’s Box

Around 250 B.C.E., some Jewish scholars translated the Pentateuch of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. This translation is known as the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX). Although English possesses several words like “boat,” “box,” “basket,” and “bier,” these objects can be described with one or two words in Hebrew, as they are all essentially wooden receptacles used to preserve important objects. Translating these Hebrew words into Greek based on their context hundreds of years later often led to confusion, especially since the Septuagint commonly uses the same Greek word to translate two different Hebrew words. Below is a chart of the different words used to describe various “arks”. Hebrew is orange; Greek is blue.

—BOB CARGILL, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA