A Box That Floats (Gen 6:14)

The Flood

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¹⁴ Make yourself a box out of … עֲשֵׂ֤ה לְךָ֙ תֵּבַ֣ת

If you are waiting for God to tell Noah to build a ship to ride out the Flood in, I’m afraid you are in for a disappointment. All Noah has been told so far is that the Earth is to be destroyed. (Earth with a capital E because it is half of the Earth/Sky pair that came into being on Days 2 and 3 of Creation.) Now Noah is getting instructions on how to survive the catastrophe. Instruction 1: make a box.

Noah had no clue what was coming, but we do, and perhaps you are wondering, why not “Build a boat”? The Mesopotamian Flood heroes Ziusudra, Utnapishtim, and Atrahasis did that. Isn’t there a word for boat in Biblical Hebrew? There is, of course; in fact, there are several:

• אֳנִיָּה oniya, an ocean-going ship like those Solomon sent to Ophir in 1 Kings 9

• סְפִינָה s’fina, a hapax legomenon in Jon 1:5 meant to evoke the phrase yarketei tzafon

• צִי tzi, a kind of ship identified with Cyprus in Num 24:24 and elsewhere

• שְׂכִיָּה s’khiya, another hapax legomenon, parallel to oniyot in Isa 2:16

All of these last three are rare or literary (and there may even be one more of them), but oniya is a perfectly normal word. Why not tell Noah to make one of these?

The slightly goofy yet quite significant answer is that the box Noah is being told to build is a particular kind of box, one that …

• floats in the water; and

• saves someone who will be responsible for a new creation.