310 On the Form of the Ark of Noah. 



to be expected that we are to believe this to the letter— we mustr 

 make some allowance for oriental exaggeration. 



It is needless to multiply examples, for I believe tliere is not 

 an officer who has been many years in India, who cannot l^eajfn 

 testimony to the frequency of hail-storras in that country. Pro«^- 

 fessor Olmsted's theory, therefore, even according to his own 

 account of it, must be abandoned ; or, at all events, it will only 

 apply to those falls of hail which occur in the temperate zones. 



On the Form of the Ark of Noah. 



fV E have a description of the Ark in the 6th chapter of Gene- 

 sis ; and our common translation, which is acknowledged to have 

 given, with comparatively few exceptions, the true sense of the 

 Hebrew and Greek originals of the Scriptures, has the follow- 

 ing rendering of this particular passage : " Make thee an ark 

 of gopher wood : rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt 

 pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion 

 which thou shalt make it of : the length of the ark shall be three 

 hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of 

 it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in 

 a cubit shalt thou finish it above ; and the door of the ark shalt 

 thou set in the side thereof: with lower, second, and third 

 stories shalt thou make it."" 



As, in this translation, there is no modification of the dimenl 

 sions of length, breadth, and height, very obviously expressed, 

 we are by it naturally led to conceive the form of the ark to 

 have been a parallelepiped, of which the opposite planes are re- " 

 spectively equal and similar. 



But there is a word in the Hebrew text, of which, there is 

 reason to think the English translators have not apprehended 

 the true meaning. The word is that which they have translated 

 vnndow, (in Hebrew "tzohar''), a different understanding of 

 which will lead us to important modifications of our conception 

 of the form of the ark. 



Several commentators have supposed that this word refers 

 rather to the peculiar form of the ark, than to any opening in it 

 analogous to a window, without however indicating in what 



