Forget the nursery picture of a cute wooden boat with a giraffe poking out the window. Depending on which ancient text you read, the legendary ark was a windowless rectangular box, a stepped pyramid on a raft, a giant woven coracle, a perfect cube, or a teak ship shaped like the belly of a bird. This deep dive builds a biography of Noah and his vessel, from Mesopotamian flood heroes through Genesis, rabbinic, Christian, Islamic, Gnostic and Baha'i traditions, to Renaissance engineers and modern expeditions to Mount Ararat.

We decode the Genesis dimensions of 300 by 50 by 30 cubits, the mysterious gopher wood and its likely Akkadian roots, and the Hebrew word teva, which means container rather than ship and is otherwise used only for the basket of baby Moses. The episode compares Noah with the Sumerian Ziusudra, Babylonian Atrahasis and Utna ...