Gen 6:14-15 describes the Ark in detail. Noah was told to “Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood, you shall make the ark with rooms, and shall cover it inside and out with pitch. And this is how you should make it, the length of the ark 300 cubits, its breadth 50 cubits, and its height 30 cubits.” The long cubit was 20.4 inches, and the common cubit was 17.5 inches. Using the long cubit, the ark was 510 ft long, 85 ft wide, 51 ft high which is a volume of 1,518,750 cubic feet. That is a massive ship as anyone who has visited the Ark Encounter in Kentucky can attest to. Gen 6:16 says that this massive ship had “lower, second, and third decks.” Thus, it is like three huge barges stacked on each other. The question is whether it can hold all the animals God instructed to enter?

The Phyletic Classification System was first established by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist who is considered the Father of Modern Taxonomy. Taxonomy is an attempt to classify or distinguish organisms according to their traits.  His system of classifying life forms included 6 levels of categories: Life, Domain, Kingdom, Class, Order, Genus, Species. Two new categories were added: Phylum, between Kingdom and Class, and Family between Order and Genus. Gen 6:19-21 is very clear as to what animals were to go on the Ark, “of every LIVING (nephesh) thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every KIND into the ark, to keep them alive with you, they shall be male and female. Of all birds after their KIND, and of the animals after their KIND, of every creeping thing of the ground after its KIND, two of every Kind shall come to you to keep them alive.” Gen 7:2-3 adds the following “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; also, of the birds of the sky, by sevens, male and female.” No where was Adam instructed to take two of every species, only kinds.

The question is what is a ‘kind?”  Linnaeus’ father was a Lutheran minister who taught him scriptures and Latin. Linnaeus used the Latin term Genus for the Bible’s term Kind and Species which was Latin for special. Creationist feel that a ‘kind’ may be better approximated by the category of ‘Family’ which was not in Linnaeus’ original system. There are over 1 million species today but the best guess at this time is that there are only around 1,400 kinds today. But not all kinds had to be on the Ark, only land animals with blood (life); not aquatic animals or animals without blood.

There are some 1,072,300 species today but Noah was told to only take animals from the Classes: mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles, and not the other 9 Class groups like fish, Mollusk, sponges, etc. There are only about 510 Family types in these 4 Classes so 1020 animals if taken by two of every Family group. Only about 30% of all Family groups that ever existed are alive today, which would make a total of 1,700 Family groups to take onto the Ark at the time of Noah. Still, this would only be 3,400 animals if taken by twos.