Mountains of Ararat
The highlands where Genesis says Noah’s ark came to rest. The text names a region, not a single peak. The mountain now called Ararat, in eastern Turkey, is the site of later tradition.
Genesis says that the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat, in the plural (Genesis 8:4). Elsewhere in the Old Testament Ararat is a country: the sons who murder Sennacherib of Assyria escape to “the land of Ararat” (2 Kings 19:37), and Jeremiah lists Ararat among the kingdoms summoned against Babylon (Jeremiah 51:27). It is the highland kingdom that Assyrian texts call Urartu, around Lake Van. Josephus, in the first century AD, puts the landing on a mountain in Armenia and quotes Berossus, who placed the remains of the vessel in Armenia, at the mountain of the Cordyaeans (Josephus, Antiquities 1.90–95). The pin marks Mount Ararat (Ağrı Dağı, 5,137 metres), the peak that later tradition named as the landing place. Genesis itself does not single it out.
What happened here
- undatedThe Flood and the Covenant with Noah
Genesis tells how God sends a flood on a violent world and saves Noah, his family and the animals in an ark. Afterwards God makes a covenant with every living creature, with the rainbow as its sign.
Primary sources
Jewish Antiquities
- Josephus, Antiquities 1.90–95lexundria.com