Thursday, November 07, 2013

The large ships of antiquity
by Larry Pierce
Each generation produces a fresh crop of sceptics who are legends in their own minds. C. H. Spurgeon wryly said about such men in his day:

‘It is but the shallowness of his mind that permits him to see the bottom of his knowledge.‘ ¹We should not be surprised that we are awash today with such experts, falsely so called. The Apostle Peter warned us this would be the case (2 Peter 3:3 ff.). It has become fashionable to scoff at anything biblical.

Noah’s Ark has never failed to be the target of sceptics and the butt of many jokes.² ‘Everyone knows’, for instance, that you cannot build a boat as large as Noah did from wood, even using today’s advanced technology. Only when ships were made of steel, in the last hundred years or so, we are told, has man been able to build a ship approaching the biblical dimensions of Noah’s Ark, (137m (450 feet) long, 23m (75 feet) wide, and 14m (45 feet) high).

But these so-called experts display their ignorance of history in making such statements. Let’s look at what ships the ancients actually built, some of which were almost as large as the Ark.

Read the rest of this article at Creation.com!

References and notes

1. Spurgeon, C.H., Sermon No. 239, New Park Street Pulpit, Pilgrim Publications, Pasadena, TX, USA, 5:113, 1991.

2. For powerful answers to the most common sceptical attacks on the Ark account, see Woodmorappe, J., Noah’s Ark: A feasiblity study, ICR, CA, USA, 1996. This book also gives other examples of huge ancient boats. For an expert study on the seaworthiness and stability of the Ark, see Safety investigation of Noah’s Ark in a seaway, CEN Tech. J., 8(1):26–36, 1994.