Author : Tom Rainwater
QUESTION: I have two questions from Genesis: Who did Cain marry? How big was Noah’s ark?
ANSWER: Hi! Thanks for your questions. I’ll answer them both in the order you asked.
“And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch…” (Genesis 4:17)
Cain would have married another of the children of Adam and Eve. After God created Adam and Eve, He told them to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Evidently they did so. The Bible doesn’t tell how many children they had or even if Cain and Abel were their first ones. We’re told about Cain and Abel because of the lessons to be learned from what they did. Abel is an example of faith and obedience to God (Genesis 4:4; Hebrews 11:4). Cain is an example of disobedience (Jude 11) and brotherly hatred (1 John 3:12), illustrating the consequences of not resisting sin (Genesis 4:7,10-12). We should not assume that just because the Bible focuses on Cain and Abel that there were no other children at that time.
For the generation after Adam and Eve to multiply, at least one of Adam’s sons had to marry one of Adam’s daughters. Probably all marriages of that one generation were brother-sister marriages. It’s likely that mutant genes were not yet present in the human race so that no genetic harm came out of marriages to close relatives. It wasn’t until a great many generations later in the time of Moses that a sexual relationship between a brother and sister was forbidden. (Leviticus 18:11; 20:17; Deuteronomy 27:22).
“Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.” (KJV)
The measurement of a “cubit” was theoretically the distance between the elbow and forefinger of a man of average height. A conservative cubit length would be about 17.5 inches.
Noah’s ark was 300 cubits long (437.5 feet), which is longer than a football field. It was 30 cubits high (43.75 feet), which is as high as a modern four or five-story building. It was 50 cubits wide (72.92 feet), which is half as wide as a football field’s width.
It had three decks inside. It had approximately 95,707.5 total square feet, which is about the size of 20 basketball courts. That would have been about 31,902.5 square feet per deck level. The ark’s capacity would have been 1,395,734.3 cubit feet, which is over 520 boxcars worth of space. As you can see, the ark had an incredible amount of space — plenty for lots of animals.
