Myth #44:

The Ark landed on the mountains of Ararat.

The Myth: And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat. (Gen. 8:4)

The Reality: The mountain in the flood story originally referred to the primeval mountain in Egypt. After the Israelites moved to Canaan, they changed the location to the mountains of Ararat, believed to be the highest point in the world.

According to Genesis 8:4, Noah’s ark landed on top of the mountains of Ararat. Most people who refer to this event speak of the location as Mt. Ararat, but the Bible says only that it was one of the mountains of Ararat It doesn’t say which one. The area encompassed by ancient Ararat now crosses the borders of modern Turkey, Russia, Iran, and Iraq.

Genesis 11:2, however, implies that the survivors of the flood landed at a far different location. According to that verse, the survivors traveled from some unidentified location east of Babylon and moved westward towards Babylon. It was in the plain of Shinar, the territory surrounding Babylon, that those survivors incurred God’s wrath by attempting to build the Tower of Babel.

Ararat, however, is way to the north and slightly to the west of Babylon. The survivors would have had to travel southeast of Ararat, not west, to get to Shinar.

If you are at Ararat, you can’t get to Shinar by traveling towards the west. You have to go southeast. That the travelers came from the east reflects the flood story’s origins as a variation of the Hermopolitan Creation myth. In the Egyptian story, the Creator god Re first appeared as a young child floating on a lotus. When he became an adult, he initiated the acts of Creation. This means young Re traveled west on his lotus leaf, growing older as the sun moved through the sky .

The mountain where the ark landed would have been the primeval mountain in Egypt, the first land where the Egyptian Creator stood and performed his acts. When biblical editors no longer identified the flood story with Egyptian Creation myth, they moved the ark to a mountain range believed to be higher than any other. Since the biblical story has a different mountain name than in the Babylonian flood myth, the change of locale from Egypt to Ararat probably occurred before Babylon conquered Israel in 587 B.C.