Richard M. Davidson
You shall take with you of every clean animal by sevens, a male and his female; and of the animals that are not clean two, a male and his female. Genesis 7:2.
Some people have questioned the historicity of a worldwide flood because, among other things, they cannot imagine that Noah’s ark could have housed all the different species of animals in existence today. Therefore, they believe that only a local flood, somewhere in the Near East, is described in Genesis 7-9. The text, however, is clear, the Flood was worldwide and all the different species of land animals God had created were saved in the ark.
The size of the ark – First, one must realize the tremendous size of Noah’s ark, as indicated by the biblical data. According to Genesis 6:15, the ark was 300 cubits long, fifty cubits wide, thirty cubits high, and contained three decks. Assuming the length of a cubit as 17.5 inches (it could have been longer, but this is widely recognized as the length of the standard cubit for Egyptians and Israelites), the dimensions of the ark were 437.5 feet (ca. 133 m) long, 72.92 feet (ca. 22 m) wide, and 43.75 feet (ca. 13 m) high. John Whitcomb and Henry Morris calculate that this would provide a total deck area of approximately 95,700 square feet (8,891 m2), total volume of 1,396,000 cubic feet (39,530 m3), and gross tonnage of 13,960 tons.1 This size would place the ark well within the category of modern ships today.
Second, although the biblical text indicates that Noah was to take representatives of every air-breathing terrestrial creature into the ark, “to keep seed alive on the face of all the earth” (Gen 7:2, 3), it is not correct to assume that all the present species (in the modern technical taxonomical sense of the word) that are alive today were represented in the ark. Genesis 2:19 implies that at the time of Creation there were far fewer kinds of large animals (“beasts of the field”) and birds than today, since Adam was able to observe and name each one individually on the sixth day of Creation before the creation of Eve. Such was no doubt also the case with the other smaller terrestrial creatures that Adam did not name on the sixth day. By the time of the Flood each basic “kind” (Hebrew min) of animal created by God may have diversified somewhat into various sub-groupings, but still would not have approached the almost endless species and sub-species of terrestrial creatures that have developed today as different strains from the basic kinds at Creation.2 Given these basic restrictions, recent calculations3 indicate there would be more than sufficient room for the basic kinds of animals created by God in the beginning to be housed in the ark, along with the food for their sustenance.
What about the dinosaurs? – Although there is no specific Hebrew word that can be translated as “dinosaur,” the biblical Creation account does indicate that God created tanninim “great sea creatures” (Gen 1:21) and every behemah, “powerful animal” (Gen 1:24), that could, well have included what we today call dinosaurs. Each type of animal made by God would have been preserved on the ark (Gen 9:10), but the larger ones might have been represented by young animals who were still small in size.
Along with the animals that God made at Creation, there also seem to have existed some varieties of large, ferocious animals that were not specifically created by God, but came into existence as a result of changes occurring after the Fall and perhaps even through direct manipulation by Satan. Genesis 3:15 points to the ongoing work on earth of the “serpent,” Satan, from the time of the Fall, and Genesis 3:18 depicts the results of the enemy’s work in the plant world, with the appearance of thorns and thistles. Similar corruption of animal types also seems implied in Genesis 6:12, in which God observes that “all flesh [which in light of Genesis 6:17 and 7:21 includes animals as well as humans] had corrupted their way on the earth.” This corruption led to chamas “violence,” a strong Hebrew word often implying cruel, vicious, violence involving bloodshed. These corrupt animals that God did not create, no doubt including some dinosaurs, would not have been represented in the ark, but would have perished in the Flood.4
Ellen White’s insights – All these points, hinted at in the biblical text, are made more explicit by Ellen White. She notes that God “never made a thorn, a thistle, or a tare. These are Satan’s work, the result of degeneration, introduced by him among the precious things” (6T 186). “All tares are sown by the evil one. Every noxious herb is of his sowing, and by his ingenious methods of amalgamation he has corrupted the earth with tares” (2SM 288). Similarly, regarding the animals, she writes: “Every species [i.e., Genesis 1 ‘kind’, not the technical ‘species’ of modern taxonomy] of animal which God had created were preserved in the ark. The confused species which God did not create, which were the result of amalgamation, were destroyed by the flood” (3SG 75). She may have been referring to the dinosaurs (among other animals) when she states what had been revealed to her: “I was shown that very large, powerful animals existed before the flood which do not now exist” (3SG 92). “There were [sic] a class of very large animals which perished at the flood. God knew that the strength of man would decrease, and these mammoth animals could not be controlled by feeble man” (4aSG 121). While it is not possible to be absolutely certain that these inspired statements from Scripture and Ellen White refer specifically to the dinosaurs, there seems to be no compelling reason to exclude dinosaurs from these descriptions.5
1 John Whitcomb and Henry Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1961), 10, 11.
2 A. Rahel Davidson Schafer, “The ‘Kinds’ of Genesis 1: What is the Meaning of Min?” Journal of the Adventist Theological Society 14/1 (Spring 2003): 86-100.
3 John Woodmorappe, Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study (Santee, CA: Institute for