Doors & Decks (Gen 6:16)
The Flood
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16 The opening to the box you should put in its side. וּפֶ֥תַח הַתֵּבָ֖ה בְּצִדָּ֣הּ תָּשִׂ֑ים
Just like the cartoons you’ve seen! There must be hundreds of them. My favorite is the one where Noah is telling two squirrels, “All right, but don’t take too long. I have another couple that are very interested.”
I’ll just note two points:
The syntax here, and throughout these instructions, is not straightforward. Our text more literally says “in its side you shall put.” I haven’t any idea why — so after bringing it to your attention, I will now shut up.
The box has a פֶּ֫תַח pétaḥ, literally “an opening.”
When we first saw that word, in 4:7, I wrote this:
Houses and buildings have doors; tents have “openings.”
How about ships? I don’t think any biblical ships have them; if they do, they are not mentioned in the text. Some scholars consider it significant that Noah’s, and at least one of the Mesopotamian Flood vessels, do have an opening. The point is that ancient boats would normally not have had a way to walk in; you would just climb up on deck (and then, if necessary, climb down into the hold). Let’s see what we can find.
I’ve written “opening” as the translation of this word simply because it obviously derives from the verb פתח p-t-ḥ ‘to open’. A more natural English word would be “entrance.” Here’s a quick summary from HALOT:
with אֹהֶל [tent] Gn 181 (12 times);
with אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד [the Tent of Meeting] Ex 294 (41 times, Ex 9 times, Lv 29 times);
with בַּיִת [house] Gn 1911 (20 times);
So a house can have an “opening” too. DCH notes that this word occurs in the Bible 164 times. There’s also such a thing as a דֶּלֶת délet ‘door’, which occurs 87 times, which a house (of course) can also have but a tent apparently cannot. It seems reasonable to assume that a pétaḥ is more like what we would call a doorway, the opening in which a solid door might or might not be installed. A chapter from now, in 7:16, YHWH will shut Noah & Company into the box — what exactly does he close? Stay tuned, and we’ll look into that more closely then.
Make it bottoms, seconds, and thirds. תַּחְתִּיִּ֛ם שְׁנִיִּ֥ם וּשְׁלִשִׁ֖ים תַּֽעֲשֶֽׂהָ׃
I’ve translated this literally (except for moving the verb to a more natural place) to remind you, as I like to do, that what you may be used to reading in English is not the Bible but a translation of it. Two points:
Biblical Hebrew is happy to use a noun or an adjective as if it were an adverb. The box is to be made “with” or “as” bottoms, seconds, and thirds, but Hebrew does not need to specify just how the word modifies the verb.
These are adjectives, so … uh … where is the noun? Bottom / second / third what?
Almost everyone simply writes “decks,” as if the word appeared there; it doesn’t. KJV uses “stories,” as if the box were an apartment building — which, okay, it kind of is. NETS translates rather elaborately as “you shall make it with ground floor, second story and third story chambers,” but the actual LXX it’s translating just replicates the Hebrew in Greek. The Targum adds a slightly different noun, מְדוֹרִין m’dorin ‘dwellings’.
As far as I can tell, there is no specific word in Biblical Hebrew for the deck of a ship. More precisely, there is no specific word in the Bible for one; we certainly do not have the entire vocabulary of the language in our possession. There’s one other place where you may find deck in your English Bibles:
Ezek 27:6 Of oaks from Bashan
they made your oars;
Your planking [קַרְשֵׁ֤ךְ] they made of ivory–inlaid cypresses
from the Kittean islands.
Moshe Greenberg explains in his Anchor Bible commentary:
planking. Heb qereš is a collective; in Exod 26:15 “planks” of the Tabernacle are mentioned. Is this planking for the deck or for the passenger cabin?
תַּחְתִּיִּ֛ם taḥtiyyim ‘bottoms’ almost always occurs only in the singular and with reference to the depths of the earth — sometimes, clearly, the underworld. The exceptions are Exod 19:17, when the Israelites stop at “the bottom” of the mountain, and Neh 4:7 [v. 13 in Christian translations], where Nehemiah is stationing people apparently in the lower parts of the fortifications of Jerusalem.
Steven Holloway writes:
Despite efforts made to understand the Mesopotamian and Genesis flood narratives as cosmogonies, the architecture and religious symbolism of the arks remain a scholarly embarrassment. Comparisons of the design of the arks described in Gilgamesh XI and Genesis 6 - 8 traditionally have focused on the sharp incompatibility of their dimensions. I shall attempt to demonstrate by a close reading of the cuneiform texts and use of parallel materials that the ark in Gilgamesh was conceptualized along the lines of a ziggurat, while that in Genesis was patterned on an idealized Solomonic temple.
Indeed, the Temple was three stories high:
1 Kgs 6:6 The lowest story was five cubits wide, the middle one was six cubits wide, and the third was seven cubits wide.
A “story” here is יָּצִ֨יעַ yatzía (or yatzua) a word that does not occur in our text or, indeed, anywhere else but 1 Kings 6, and “lowest” is תַּחְתֹּנָ֜ה taḥtona, related to but different from the word used in our verse. Since it has been suggested that there’s some link between the instructions for building the “ark” and those for building the Tabernacle in Exodus, we’ll keep an eye on this possible underlying meaning.
What are the three decks for, though? Rashi, the 11th-c. French commentator, explains (in my Commentators’ Bible translation):
The top deck for the people, the middle deck for the animals to live, and the bottom deck for the dung.
The 13th-c. commentator (and Rashi supercommentator) Hezekiah b. Manoah, a/k/a Hizkuni, clarifies:
The third, top, deck was for the people and the food.
Abraham ibn Ezra, the 12th-c. Spanish commentator (and rival of Rashi’s grandson Rashbam) adds an apparently idiosyncratic possibility:
Based on v. 15, we presume that each deck was 10 cubits high. But it may be, as some think, that the text is idiomatically saying that there were many, many decks.
Why would they think that? Because all these adjectives are plural. How many bottom, second, and third decks were there? Cassuto suggests that the plurals indicate “that there were many rooms on each deck,” implying that the missing noun is not “decks” at all but the nests that we got rid of back in v. 14.
The bottom line is that the practical arrangements, as interesting as we would find them, are not what the story is about. Those of you who are tired of boat-building instructions and have been yearning for some action will not have to wait much longer. First-time readers of this story don’t yet know what this box is for or what’s about to happen. That’s exactly what God is going to announce next time.