How Many Animals Were on Noah’s Ark? Estimates Run From 2,000 to 35,000

Genesis never says how many animals were on Noah’s ark. It says that two “of every sort” went in, male and female, and the clean beasts and the birds “by sevens,” each “after his kind.” Christian estimates run from about 2,000 to 35,000 animals, depending on what a kind is and how far the flood reached.

Genesis speaks of the animals again and again, naming the same groups each time: the beasts, the cattle, the creeping things and the birds. No passage gives a total.

Passage	What it says
Genesis 6:19–20	“two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.” Birds, cattle and “every creeping thing of the earth after his kind.”
Genesis 6:21	“take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.”
Genesis 7:2–3	“Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two.” The birds also come “by sevens.”
Genesis 7:14–16	“every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind,” and “every bird of every sort,” “two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.” Then “the LORD shut him in.”
Genesis 8:17–19	They go out again “after their kinds,” so “that they may breed abundantly in the earth.”

In the King James English, cattle are the tame animals and creeping things are the small ones that move along the ground.

Genesis 6 asks for one pair of every kind. Genesis 7 asks for more of some: the clean beasts and the birds “by sevens,” and only the beasts “that are not clean by two.”

Christians explain the difference in two ways. The notes in the Catholic bishops’ New American Bible take the view, common among scholars, that the flood story weaves together two older sources. In one, Noah takes “the minimum to preserve all species, one pair of each”; the other “requires additional clean animals (‘seven pairs’) for food and sacrifice.” Commentators who read it as one story from the start see a general rule followed by an exception, made, in the Pulpit Commentary’s words, “in the case of the few clean beasts used for sacrifice.”

The words “by sevens” raise their own question. The Hebrew repeats the number, “seven seven,” and readers have taken it as seven pairs or as seven animals, three pairs and one more. The Pulpit Commentary counts the Greek Septuagint among those who read seven pairs, and Augustine and Calvin among those who read seven animals.

Genesis does not say what made an animal clean. The rule comes later, in the law given through Moses: “Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat” (Leviticus 11:3). Genesis does show one use for the extra clean animals: after the flood Noah “took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar” (Genesis 8:20). BioLogos, a Christian organisation, takes the command as one sign that the story is not a plain chronicle, since the categories of clean and unclean “were not given to the Hebrew people until the time of Moses.”

The Hebrew word behind “kind” is min. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon defines it as “kind, species,” and it runs through the creation story: “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind” (Genesis 1:24). The ark passages use the same word, so the flood story counts the animals by the categories of creation. Genesis does not say how wide those categories are.

The answer sets the size of every estimate. Creationist ministries hold that a kind was wider than a species. The Ark Encounter in Kentucky, run by Answers in Genesis, says that “The created kind was a much broader category than the modern term of classification, species,” and that it “probably most closely corresponds to the family level in current taxonomy,” so that wolves, dingoes, coyotes, jackals and domestic dogs make one dog kind. Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe reads the Hebrew another way. In his view every animal on the ark belonged to the category Genesis calls nephesh, which he renders “soulish creatures,” animals able to bond with people, and “All bird and mammal species and a handful of the higher reptilian species are nephesh creatures.”

Genesis limits the passengers twice. They were the creatures “wherein is the breath of life” (Genesis 7:15), and the flood killed “all that was in the dry land” (Genesis 7:22). The Ark Encounter reads this as a line that “clearly excludes fish and other sea creatures, and it probably excludes the insects and other invertebrates.”

Augustine, bishop of Hippo from 396 to 430, drew much the same line in the City of God. The words “every creeping thing of the earth,” he wrote, show that “it was not needful to preserve in the ark the animals that can live in the water, whether the fishes that live submerged in it, or the sea-birds that swim on its surface.” Mules and other hybrids, he thought, were probably left out, since “it was counted sufficient to preserve their parents, to wit, the horse and the ass,” though, he added, they were there “if it was necessary for the completeness of the mystery.”

Each estimate rests on a reading of Genesis and of what a kind is:

Source	How it reads the flood and the kind	Estimate
John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood (1961)	Global; fewer kinds than modern species	No more than 35,000 vertebrates “at the outside”
John Woodmorappe, Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study (Institute for Creation Research, 1996)	Global; the genus as the kind	About 16,000 animals
Ark Encounter (Answers in Genesis)	Global; the kind probably near the family	1,398 kinds, or 6,744 animals in its “worst-case” count
Hugh Ross, Reasons to Believe	Regional, over the lands where people lived	1,000 to 2,000 pairs, about 2,000 to 4,000 animals
BioLogos	An actual event retold in Israel’s theology; no flood over the whole earth	No count
New American Bible notes (Catholic)	Two older sources woven into one story	No count

The three largest numbers come from Christians who read the flood as covering the whole earth. In The Genesis Flood, John Whitcomb and Henry Morris started from the 17,600 species of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians listed by the taxonomist Ernst Mayr, held that the original kinds were fewer than that, and concluded that “at the outside, there was need for no more than 35,000 individual vertebrate animals on the Ark.”

John Woodmorappe took the genus as the created kind, according to Glenn Morton’s review of his book and to Answers in Genesis. One pair from each genus, living and extinct, gives 7,428 mammals, 4,602 birds and 3,724 reptiles, 15,754 animals in Morton’s tally. The Ark Encounter counts kinds at about the family level, a wider group, and that is most of the gap between his 16,000 and its 6,744: Answers in Genesis notes that moving the kind from the family down to the genus brings the count to “approximately 16,000 animals total, as in the case study done by researcher John Woodmorappe.” On its own “worst-case” count, the Ark Encounter says, “Noah cared for 6,744 animals.”

Reasons to Believe holds that the flood “wiped out all humanity and associated animals, save those on Noah’s ark, without covering the globe.” Hugh Ross writes that “there would have been no need for Noah’s ark to rescue, for example, polar bears and emperor penguins,” and he puts the number at “some 1,000 to 2,000 pairs of nephesh creatures.”

BioLogos and the Catholic notes give no number, for different reasons. BioLogos reads the flood story as “an interpretation of an actual historical event retold in the rhetoric and theology of ancient Israel.” It holds that “there has never been a global flood that covered the entire earth,” and it reads the crowded ark as hyperbole, “not meant to challenge readers to figure out the practicality of such descriptions.” The New American Bible notes, which find two older accounts in the text, leave the count there.

Genesis makes the ark 300 cubits long, 50 wide and 30 high, about 450 feet long at the common 18-inch cubit; the numbers and comparisons are in how big Noah’s ark was.

Those who read the flood as global say the animals needed less room than the pictures suggest. The Institute for Creation Research says Woodmorappe’s 16,000 animals “would require merely one third of the ark’s volume, leaving plenty of space for provisions and people.” Answers in Genesis adds that many of the animals were “probably smaller than are shown in popular pictures.” Hugh Ross, counting far fewer animals, calls the ark “easily big enough to carry that many animals and the adequate provisions to sustain them.”

Genesis does not name dinosaurs, so Christians answer by their reading of the flood and of the age of the earth. Answers in Genesis says yes. Its writer Troy Lacey writes that “the estimated number of dinosaur kinds (of which only a pair of each was brought) may have been about 85,” so that “a maximum of 170 dinosaurs were taken aboard.” He argues that “It makes more sense to think that God would have sent to Noah juveniles (or sub-adults) or smaller varieties within the same kind,” since “they take up less space, they eat less, they create less waste.”

Reasons to Believe accepts the long timescale of geology, and BioLogos holds that no flood covered the whole earth, so neither places dinosaurs on the ark. Whether the Bible mentions dinosaurs at all is a separate question.

Genesis gives one instruction, to gather “all food that is eaten,” food “for thee, and for them” (Genesis 6:21). It says nothing about water, cleaning or the daily work, and the stay lasted about a year, as the flood’s calendar shows.

Readers have long filled the silence. Augustine thought the meat-eaters could have lived on other food, since “many animals whose food is flesh eat also vegetable products and fruits, especially figs and chestnuts.” In the Talmud, Noah’s son Shem remembers the work: “We experienced great suffering in the ark caring for the animals.”

Modern ministries have proposed practical answers. Woodmorappe’s study, Answers in Genesis notes, described “practical, labor-saving devices like food and water troughs, slatted floors for waste disposal, ventilation systems, and lighting.” Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research suggested in his study Bible that most of the animals slept through it: “After being installed in their respective ‘rooms’ in the ark, and after a good meal, most of them probably spent most of the Flood year in a state of hibernation.” Genesis itself says none of this. It says that “God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark” (Genesis 8:1).

Not in Genesis. The King James Version uses “unicorn” for a great wild beast the Hebrew calls the re’em: “Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow?” (Job 39:10). In Genesis Rabbah, Rabbi Yehuda says only its young went in; Rabbi Nehemya, citing that verse of Job, says Noah “tied it to the ark and it would dig furrows.” The Talmud’s tractate Zevachim gives three answers: its cubs went in, or only the edge of its nose, or “They tied its horns to the ark.” The tractate Sanhedrin adds a phoenix that never asked Noah for food.

God sent them out “that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth” (Genesis 8:17), and Genesis leaves the rest untold. Augustine, asking how wolves reached distant islands, allowed several answers: swimming, human hunters, angels sent by God, or the earth bringing them forth there “as at their first creation.” Answers in Genesis holds that one pair of a kind could give rise to many species: “Noah didn’t need to bring lions, leopards, and tigers onto the ark, just a single pair from the cat kind.” Reasons to Believe needs no such journeys, since on its reading the ark held only the animals of one region. BioLogos holds that today’s animals do not “descend from the passengers of a single vessel,” and that questions about “post-Flood animal migrations” miss the point of the story.

Before any of that, God made a promise, and the animals are named in it. He established his covenant with Noah and his sons, “and with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark” (Genesis 9:10), and he set his bow in the cloud as its token.

• How big was Noah’s ark?
• How long was Noah on the ark?
• What does the ark symbolize in the Bible?
• Does the Bible talk about dinosaurs?
• Can Christians eat pork? Clean and unclean animals
• Has Noah’s ark been found?