Genesis Chapter Eight, Part 2

8:4 And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountain of Ararat.

Contrary to secular skepticism, the ark that bore Noah to safety may indeed still be imbedded on the heights of Ararat in modern day Turkey. The Jewish historian Josephus wrote of its presence during the first century AD. Marco Polo also confirmed its presence in the mountains of Armenia. In 1876 Sir James Bryce, scholar and explorer, climbed Mt. Ararat and discovered at 13,000 ft (2000 feet above the timberline), a piece of hand-tooled wood that he believed was from the ark. George Hagopian (then a 10-year old Armenian boy in 1904) claimed to have also found the ark with his uncle. He described it as a flat-bottom, petrified barge without nails. He also claimed to have returned to the site a second time two years later. A Russian pilot in World War I claimed to see the ark; news which excited the Czar enough to send parties to search for it.

While it is claimed that they discovered the ark, the Russian Revolution of 1917 erupted, scattering the witnesses. Joseph Kulik, an alleged expedition member, was interviewed in 2000. In July of 1943 Ed Davis, a sergeant of the U.S. Army developed a close friendship with the Lourd tribe (the Lourds are related to the Kurds). He claims they showed him a cage door, latches, a metal hammer, dried beans, shepherd staffs, oil, lamps, bowls and pottery jars still containing honey in them; all allegedly removed from the ark. Davis also saw the ark laying broken on the side of Mt. Ararat; testimony which later passed a lie detector test in 1989. Many such witnesses and testimonies (some fraudulent, some much more genuine sounding) could be produced concerning the possible continued existence of Noah’s ark.

8:4 the ark
The ark had a minimum of 1,500,000 cubic feet of space within it to fit animals (including dinosaurs), Noah and his family, along with provisions for them that would endure for 1 year. From ancient times there are more than 230 Flood legends, containing many common elements that hearken back to an apparent single source. The ark (which the CIA apparently refers to as the “Ararat Anomaly”) was photographed by a fixed-wing aircraft in 1949, by a U-2 in 1956, and by satellites in 1973, 1976, 1990, and 1992. For more on this, I suggest Timothy W. Maier, “Anomaly or Noah’s Ark?” Insight, 20 November 2000, or Walt Brown’s excellent book, In the Beginning (presently in its eighth edition).

8:6 And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made
This would be forty days after the first day of the tenth month, when the tops of the mountains could be seen, verse 5. Noah waited forty days to see if the dry land had appeared and it was time to release the animals out of the ark, since they had been on the mountain side since the middle of the seventh month (verse 4), and now it would have been the first week of the eleventh month.