In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark (Genesis 7:13)
And the ark rested ... upon the mountains of Ararat. (Genesis 8:4)
- Noah
- The ark that protected Noah's family from the flood
- The mount upon which the ark came to rest
- The tabernacle in the wilderness
- The ark of the covenant
- The everlasting covenant
- "entering in" (either to the ark, the covenant, or His rest)
- "swearing in His wrath"
- Enoch testifying from "the hills and the high places"
- The city of Zion
I'll say as I begin that I only have a few loose ideas where this study will take me, but I'm confident it will be worthwhile based on some discoveries I've already made.
We've previously discussed King Noah from the Book of Mormon and Mormon's clever description of his wickedness in connection to the meaning of his name in Hebrew, "rest." You can read that here. That is part of a larger series on the subject of "entering into His rest" written by Stisa (the other parts of that series are found here and here). All of that is important background, but I'll be taking this connection a little bit deeper and focusing my attention on the Noah of Genesis and how his story and his name connect to the concepts of "enter[ing] in" at the strait gate.
The two arks
Let's begin with the similarities between the ark that Noah built and the tabernacle in the wilderness built by Moses, at the center of which rested the ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies. Jeffrey Bradshaw points out in this paper on that topic many important connections:
- Noah's ark is the only man-made structure mentioned in the Bible whose design was directly revealed by God.
- It was designed in three tiers with dimensions paralleling the tabernacle.
- The ark was to be made of "gopher wood" which is taken by modern scholars to mean cypress wood, which is the same material used to build some temple doors.
- "Gopher" also sounds similar to the word for "pitch" (kopher) which is mentioned in the same verse as a covering of the wood. Kopher derives from the same Hebrew root for atonement.
- Both instances of "ark" (Noah's ship and the object at the center of the tabernacle) eventually came to be known by the same term in Hebrew (tevah).
- The waters of the flood dried up on the the first day of the new year, similar to the day of the dedication of Solomon's temple.
Having established these connections between the tabernacle and Noah's ark, I'll push forward in the next posts with many interesting symbols connected to Noah's ark, Enoch, and the temple covenant. In the next post we'll begin with Enoch's vision found in the Book of Moses and how that connects to Noah and "rest."