Who Helped Noah Build the Ark? The Bible Names No Helper

Q: What is gopher wood?

No one knows for certain. The Hebrew word, gopher, appears in the Bible only once, in Genesis 6:14, and the King James translators carried it into English unchanged. Blue Letter Bible's lexicon sums it up: "meaning and exact type unknown." The Catholic New American Bible calls gopherwood "an unidentified wood mentioned only in connection with the ark," and suggests: "It may be the wood of the cypress, which in Hebrew sounds like 'gopher' and was widely used in antiquity for shipbuilding." The New International Version and the New Revised Standard Version both translate it "cypress wood." The earliest translators and the rabbis made other guesses, and some did not guess a tree at all:

Q: What were the "rooms" and the "pitch"?

The "rooms" of Genesis 6:14 are in Hebrew qinnim, "nests," the word used for a bird's nest in Deuteronomy 22:6. The Vulgate made them mansiunculas, "little rooms," as the Douay-Rheims translates, and Rashi took them as "separate cabins for each kind of cattle and beast." The pitch is kopher, a coating of bitumen; the Greek translators wrote "asphalt" (asphaltos) and the Latin "bitumen." Strong's concordance takes the verb in "pitch it within and without with pitch" as kaphar, "to cover," the same word that elsewhere means to make atonement, and derives kopher from it, including kopher in the sense of a ransom (Exodus 30:12). The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon divides them: it lists the verb in Genesis 6:14 as a separate word formed from the noun "pitch," and the pitch itself as a word of the same spelling, which it compares with the Assyrian kupru.

Summary

The Bible names no helper. Genesis reports the work as Noah’s: “Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he” (Genesis 6:22). It never says whether his sons or anyone else helped.
Noah’s sons were born after he was 500 and the flood came when he was 600 (Genesis 5:32; 7:6), so they could have shared only the last hundred years of the work or less.
Jewish tradition pictures Noah planting and felling cedars for 120 years while his neighbors mocked (Genesis Rabbah 30:7; Sanhedrin 108b); 1 Enoch 67:2 says angels were making the ark.
The Syriac Cave of Treasures has Noah call workmen with a striking board, English preachers of the 1500s and 1600s warned against being like “Noahs Carpenters,” and Answers in Genesis and Reasons to Believe think he probably hired workers; the Institute for Creation Research says he may have.
No one knows what gopher wood was: the word appears only in Genesis 6:14, and it has been read as cypress, cedar, square timber and smoothed wood.
The ark’s “rooms” are in Hebrew “nests,” its pitch was bitumen, and its Hebrew name, tebah, is the word used for the basket of the infant Moses (Exodus 2:3).
The Bible does not say where the ark was built; Genesis 8:4 names only where it came to rest, “upon the mountains of Ararat.”

The Bible names no one who helped Noah build the ark. Genesis says only that Noah did “according to all that God commanded him” (Genesis 6:22), and never says whether his sons, his wider family or hired hands helped. Jewish and Christian tradition has filled that silence with cedars, angels, carpenters and a wooden board struck three times a day.

Who built the ark, according to the Bible?

Every instruction in Genesis 6 is spoken to one man: “Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch” (Genesis 6:14). The “thee” and “thou” of the King James Version are singular, and so is the report of the work: “And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him” (Genesis 7:5). The New Testament keeps the same single figure in view: “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house” (Hebrews 11:7).

Genesis is exact about who went into the ark. “In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark” (Genesis 7:13), and Peter counts them: “few, that is, eight souls were saved by water” (1 Peter 3:20). Of who cut the timber it says nothing.

Did Noah’s sons help build the ark?

They may have, but Genesis does not say so. “Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth” (Genesis 5:32), and he was six hundred when the flood came (Genesis 7:6). So however long the building took, his sons could have shared only its last hundred years or less. When God first gave the command, he already spoke of “thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee” (Genesis 6:18). Tim Chaffey of Answers in Genesis reads that as a sign that the order came after the sons were grown and married.

The Book of Jubilees, a Jewish retelling of Genesis whose date the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907 put anywhere “between 135 B.C. and A.D. 60,” names no helper either. It repeats Genesis: “And Noah made the ark in all respects as He commanded him” (Jubilees 5:22). Athanasius Kircher in the 1600s and John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research today both take it that the sons helped; Morris assumes they “within a few years were able to help.” It is a reasonable guess, and Genesis leaves it a guess.

Did anyone else help Noah build the ark?

Later writers answered in very different ways:

Source	Who builds the ark
Genesis 6 and 7	Noah; no helper is named
Jubilees 5	Noah; angels bring him the animals
1 Enoch 67	Angels, making “a wooden (building)”
Genesis Rabbah 30, Tanhuma, Talmud (Sanhedrin 108b)	Noah, planting and felling cedars while his neighbors mock
The Cave of Treasures (Syriac, probably 6th century)	Noah and workmen, called by a striking board
English sermons, 1581 to 1646	“Noahs Carpenters,” who built it and drowned
Athanasius Kircher, 1675	Noah as architect; sons, grandsons, carpenters, smiths and masons
Ark Encounter (Answers in Genesis), Reasons to Believe	Noah’s family and, most likely, hired workers
Institute for Creation Research	Noah and his sons; others, or hired workers, possibly

Neighbors who watched

The rabbis pictured the building as a slow, public warning. Genesis Rabbah, a commentary on Genesis compiled in the land of Israel around AD 400, says that for 120 years “Noah would plant cedars and chop them down.” When people asked why, he answered: “So said the Master of the world, that He is bringing a flood upon the world.” They scoffed: “If He brings a flood, it will come only upon the house of that man!” In the Tanhuma, a collection of rabbinic sermons on the Torah compiled between about AD 500 and 800, Noah plants the cedars and lets them grow, and when he is asked “What are these cedars for?” his neighbors hear the answer and “laughed at him and ridiculed his words.” The Talmud gives their question in a line: “Old man, why are you building this ark?” (Sanhedrin 108b).

Rashi, the medieval French commentator, asked why God gave Noah so slow a task at all, when he could have saved him in many ways. His answer: “So that the men of the generation of the Flood might see him employed on it for 120 years and might ask him.” The point was the asking: “perhaps they might repent.” None of these passages gives Noah a helper; his neighbors only watch, ask and mock.

Angels in 1 Enoch

One ancient Jewish book gives the work to angels. In the Parables, a section of 1 Enoch whose date is disputed but which many scholars place before AD 70, God says to Noah: “And now the angels are making a wooden (building), and when they have completed that task I will place My hand upon it and preserve it” (1 Enoch 67:2, in R. H. Charles’s translation). The same chapter promises to imprison “those angels, who have shown unrighteousness,” the fallen angels whom 1 Enoch elsewhere calls the Watchers “who have left the high heaven.” So 1 Enoch does not have the Watchers building the ark. Its builders are the angels who kept faith. Jubilees keeps the angels to a smaller task. Its narrator is an angel, and Noah goes into the ark with “all that we brought to him” (Jubilees 5:23).

Workmen and carpenters

Christian storytellers were readier to imagine a crew. The Cave of Treasures, a Syriac Christian retelling of the Bible’s early history that its translator, E. A. Wallis Budge, dated to the sixth century, has God tell Noah to make a striking board of wood that will not rot and to beat it three times a day: “Once in the morning that the workmen may be gathered together for the work of the ark, and once at midday that they may eat food, and once at sunset so that they may cease from their labour.” When people heard the blows and asked what he was doing, Noah was to answer: “God is going to make a flood of waters.”

English preachers of the 1500s and 1600s turned the hired builders into a warning. “Noahs Carpenters may build a good Arke to save others, though themselues be drowned for not entring,” John Bury told the clergy of Exeter in a sermon printed in 1631. James Bisse at Paul’s Cross in London (printed 1581) and Walter Cradock before the House of Commons in 1646 used the same picture: men who built the ark and drowned outside it.

The fullest picture came from the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, whose Arca Noë appeared in 1675. Kircher could not believe that a revered old man had hewn the timbers himself. He made Noah the architect and gave him a workforce: his sons, many of his grandsons and great-grandsons, and carpenters, smiths and masons, with crews sent to Mount Lebanon to fell cedars and along the Euphrates to the plain of Babylon for bitumen. He admitted that Holy Scripture mentions none of this.

What Christians say today

Ministries that read the flood as history mostly share Kircher’s instinct. The Ark Encounter in Kentucky, built by Answers in Genesis, shows about two dozen people at work in its picture of the ark under construction. Tim Chaffey explains why: “Notice that the Bible tells us how many people were on board the Ark, but it does not tell us how many people were involved in building it.” He names Noah’s extended family and his father and grandfather, Lamech and Methuselah, as possible helpers, and adds: “The more likely possibility is that Noah hired people to help him build the Ark.” Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe, which holds that the flood wiped out humanity without covering the globe, agrees: “It is likely that in addition to employing his seven relatives, that Noah had hired many other workers.”

Could Noah have built the ark alone?

The ark was 300 cubits long, 50 wide and 30 high (Genesis 6:15), about 450 feet long at the common cubit of 18 inches; how big Noah’s ark was sets those numbers beside ships and a football field. John D. Morris of the Institute for Creation Research once worked out a worst case, with Noah and his three sons alone. He assumed that a fifth of the hull’s volume was timber and that the four men fitted 15 cubic feet of it a day, six days a week. His answer was about 65 years: “A big job, yes, but Noah was a faithful man, and accomplished the task.” He also allowed: “It may also have been that Noah hired construction workers to help.”

Genesis does not say how long the work took. Augustine wrote that “the ark was an hundred years in building,” and the rabbis spoke of 120 years.

Christians who read the flood differently put the question differently. BioLogos, a Christian organization that accepts mainstream science, reads the account as “an interpretation of an actual historical event retold in the rhetoric and theology of ancient Israel.” The notes in the Catholic bishops’ New American Bible say the story “is commonly regarded as a composite narrative based on separate sources woven together” and add that “one should read the story as a coherent narrative.” Read either way, the account is not concerned with who held the tools, and neither BioLogos nor the New American Bible notes takes up the question.

What is gopher wood?

No one knows for certain. The Hebrew word, gopher, appears in the Bible only once, in Genesis 6:14, and the King James translators carried it into English unchanged. Blue Letter Bible’s lexicon sums it up: “meaning and exact type unknown.” The Catholic New American Bible calls gopherwood “an unidentified wood mentioned only in connection with the ark,” and suggests: “It may be the wood of the cypress, which in Hebrew sounds like ‘gopher’ and was widely used in antiquity for shipbuilding.” The New International Version and the New Revised Standard Version both translate it “cypress wood.”

The earliest translators and the rabbis made other guesses, and some did not guess a tree at all:

Source	What it makes of “gopher wood”
Greek Septuagint	“square timber” (in Brenton’s English)
Latin Vulgate	lignis laevigatis, “smoothed wood”; the Douay-Rheims has “timber planks”
Targum Onkelos, an Aramaic translation traditionally dated about AD 80 to 120	“cedar wood”
Genesis Rabbah 31:8	kardinon, Rabbi Natan’s word for it
Talmud, Sanhedrin 108b	wood of the mavliga tree, “and some say” willow
New American Bible note, NIV, NRSV	cypress

What were the “rooms” and the “pitch”?

The “rooms” of Genesis 6:14 are in Hebrew qinnim, “nests,” the word used for a bird’s nest in Deuteronomy 22:6. The Vulgate made them mansiunculas, “little rooms,” as the Douay-Rheims translates, and Rashi took them as “separate cabins for each kind of cattle and beast.”

The pitch is kopher, a coating of bitumen; the Greek translators wrote “asphalt” (asphaltos) and the Latin “bitumen.” Strong’s concordance takes the verb in “pitch it within and without with pitch” as kaphar, “to cover,” the same word that elsewhere means to make atonement, and derives kopher from it, including kopher in the sense of a ransom (Exodus 30:12). The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon divides them: it lists the verb in Genesis 6:14 as a separate word formed from the noun “pitch,” and the pitch itself as a word of the same spelling, which it compares with the Assyrian kupru.

The ark’s Hebrew name, tebah, is used elsewhere only for the basket of the infant Moses (Exodus 2:3), and Augustine read the ark as a figure of the Church, saved by the wood of the cross.

Where did Noah build the ark?

The Bible does not say. Genesis names only the place where the ark came to rest, “upon the mountains of Ararat” (Genesis 8:4), and a vessel carried by the flood need not have landed near the place where it was built. Whether anything of it survives is a search of its own, and as of October 2026 no one has shown that the ark has been found.

Tradition has proposed building sites all the same. The Cave of Treasures has God tell Noah to “build it [in the plain] below [this mountain], in the encampment of the children of Cain,” and to cut its timber “[from the trees that are on] this mountain.” Kircher placed the shipyard on the plain of Eden between Lebanon and Mesopotamia, by the Euphrates. He leaned on a Syrian tradition that Noah had lived at the foot of Mount Lebanon, facing Damascus, and on a story in the Syrians’ history of hewn cedar logs uncovered nearby by an earthquake, from which, Kircher reports, it was inferred that the beams could be nothing other than timber left over from the ark. None of these carries the weight of Scripture, and the question stays open.

What did the long building say to the world?

In the New Testament the long work is itself a message. Peter writes that “the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing” (1 Peter 3:20), and calls Noah “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5). The Letter to the Hebrews says that by the ark “he condemned the world.” John Chrysostom, preaching on that verse, pictured a world with no warning in the sky: “the air was clear, there were no signs [of change]: but nevertheless he feared.” The world stood condemned, he said, “since they were not brought to their senses even by the preparation.”

Whoever held the saws and carried the pitch, the only builder Genesis names is Noah, who did all that God commanded him. When everyone was aboard, the last act was God’s: “the LORD shut him in” (Genesis 7:16).