Q&A: The Animals in Noah’s Ark
The Animals in Noah’s Ark
Question
“It is well known that the animals are very numerous, and some of them are very large, such as elephants and wild oxen and others besides; and the creeping things that creep on the earth are very numerous; and the birds of the heavens are many kinds beyond number, as our Rabbis said: (Hullin 63) there are one hundred and twenty kinds of unclean birds in the East, and they are all of the kite species”—and the clean birds are beyond number. “So he would have had to bring in some of all of them so that they could reproduce their kind, and when you gather food for all of them to eat for a full year—this ark would not contain them, nor even ten like it…” (Nachmanides, Genesis 6:19)
The explanation Nachmanides gives is difficult (that a miracle occurred and a small space held a larger quantity), since this is a situation that cannot be, like a circular triangle. So how can this difficulty be resolved?
Answer
The simple resolution is that not all the animals entered the ark, or that there were not actually so many species (certainly not ones accessible to Noah).
By the way, the Ark of the Covenant, whose dimensions do not fit, raises the same problem. There one can think in terms of a change in perception and not in reality, unlike the case of Noah’s ark.
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Questioner:
So how did the other animals that didn’t go into the ark survive?
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Rabbi:
Who said they survived? The species we have today could be those that were in the ark and those that developed from them. Also, according to some commentators, the Flood was not over the whole world but only in the Near East. Species in other places survived.
Discussion on Answer
Fair enough. I gave a more extreme example.
A small amount holding a large amount is not like a circular triangle. There’s a difference between something that is logically meaningless and something for which we simply have no theoretical basis to explain it. A miracle of the second kind is certainly possible.