Waar landde de ark van Noach? Het Araratgebergte, maar welke top?

Genesis puts Noah’s ark “upon the mountains of Ararat,” the mountains of a land, not one named peak. Ararat is the Hebrew form of Urartu, an ancient kingdom in the highlands between the Aras and the upper Tigris, in what is now eastern Turkey, Armenia and north-western Iran. The verse never says which of its mountains held the ark.

Later tradition settled on two places. Armenian Christians and most modern searchers point to the great volcano now called Mount Ararat, which Armenians know as Masis. Jewish and Syriac readers of Genesis moved the ark south to Corduene, the hill country below Lake Van, and Syriac Christians and Muslim tradition fixed it on Mount Judi there, Cudi Dağı in Turkish, about 190 miles (300 kilometres) south-west of Ararat. The search for the ark itself goes on: burnt wood from a boat-shaped mound near Ararat is with laboratories in France and Turkey, and a radar report on the mound is due at the end of November 2026.

What does “the mountains of Ararat” mean?

“And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat. And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.” (Genesis 8:4–5)

Elsewhere in the Bible, Ararat is a country with kings. Jeremiah summons against Babylon “the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz” (Jeremiah 51:27), and the sons who killed the Assyrian king Sennacherib “escaped into the land of Armenia” (2 Kings 19:37), where the Hebrew has Ararat.

In Britannica’s words, Urartu was a kingdom that “flourished between the Aras and the Upper Tigris rivers from the 9th to the 7th century bce.” Its capital stood at Van, and the archaeologist Paul Zimansky finds its kings ruling the farmland around Lakes Van and Sevan and along the south-western shore of Lake Urmia. Bill Crouse, writing in the journal of Creation Ministries International, draws the conclusion: “The plural in the biblical text indicates that a specific mountain is not in view.” The note in the Catholic New American Bible is shorter: “There is no Mount Ararat in the Bible.”

The verses also hint at height. By the calendar Genesis keeps, the ark grounded on the seventeenth day of the seventh month, five months to the day after the flood began, and the tops of the mountains were seen on the first day of the tenth month, about 74 days later at 30 days a month. Answers in Genesis and the Associates for Biblical Research both reason from this that the ark came to rest high up, not in a valley or on a low ridge.

Christians who read the flood in other ways still take the landing from the same verse. Reasons to Believe, which holds that the flood destroyed all humanity without covering the globe, says that “Noah’s ark was likely floating in a region of the Persian Gulf or Mesopotamian Plain,” and that when the waters receded “the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat.” BioLogos reads the story as “an interpretation of an actual historical event retold in the rhetoric and theology of ancient Israel,” and holds that questions about the flood’s physical details are “missing the point of the story.”

Did the ark land on Mount Ararat?

Armenian tradition says so, and Christians still divide over it. The mountain most people picture is Greater Ararat, a snow-capped volcano in the far east of Turkey, near Armenia and Iran. At nearly 17,000 feet (5,137 to 5,165 metres, depending on the survey) it is Turkey’s highest peak, with Little Ararat beside it at about 12,800 feet. Armenians call it Masis, and Britannica notes that “Ararat is sacred to the Armenians.”

The 1911 Britannica explained how a country’s name could pass to a mountain: “It is only natural that the highest and most striking mountain in the district should have been regarded as that upon which the Ark rested, and that the old name of the country should have been transferred to it.” When that happened is argued. About the year 410, Jerome placed the ark on the highest peaks of the Taurus, above the plain of Ararat through which the Araxes flows. Friedrich Murad argued in 1900 that the Armenians told of an ark on Masis “at least as early as the first century,” a belief he found hinted at in Josephus, who says the Armenians called the landing place “The Place of Descent.” Murad also found no Armenian Christian writer who names Masis as Noah’s mountain before the 11th century. Rick Lanser of the Associates for Biblical Research, who favours Ararat, agrees that “The earliest extant historical documentation of the Ark being on Ararat (called Masis by the Armenians) traces back to the 11th century,” and notes that the silence before it has been put down to Gregory the Illuminator, who is said to have destroyed almost all records of Armenia’s pagan past.

By the 1250s the tradition was settled. The Franciscan friar William of Rubruck, near Nakhchivan in the winter of 1254–55, wrote of two mountains “in which they say that Noah’s ark rests,” with the Araxes at their base. The Armenians, he wrote, “call the mountain Massis,” and an old man told him that “No one … ought to climb up Massis; it is the mother of the world.” Marco Polo’s book, from about 1298, puts the ark “on the top of a certain great mountain” in Armenia without naming it.

Many Christians still look there. Lanser writes, “In my estimation, the best candidate for the location of the Ark is Mount Ararat,” and John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research led a dozen expeditions up the mountain in the 1970s and 1980s. Others who read Genesis just as literally doubt that the peak was there when the ark landed. Tim Clarey of ICR argues that most of Ararat’s eruptions came after the flood, so that the mountain probably did not yet exist, and he places the landing on the Kağızman ridge, which runs for more than 100 miles west of the volcano: “The Ark did land in the ‘mountains of Ararat,’ just not on Mt. Ararat itself.”

Which mountain did St Jacob of Nisibis climb?

The Armenian Church tells of a fourth-century bishop who went looking for the ark. In the telling of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, St Jacob of Nisibis “ascended Mount Ararat. At the foot of the mountain, he grew weary and fell asleep. Upon awakening, he found beneath his head a cross-shaped fragment of the wood of Noah’s Ark, placed there by an angel.” The fragment, the Mother See says, “is preserved to this day” at Etchmiadzin. Theodoret’s church history names Jacob, as James of Nisibis, among the bishops at the Council of Nicaea in 325.

The earliest history to tell the story sets it elsewhere. The Epic Histories, an Armenian history written about 470 by an anonymous cleric, says Jacob “came to Sararad mountain which was in the borders of the Ayraratean lordship, in the district of Korduk’,” and that an angel stopped him “near the summit” with the words: “That which is beneath your head is part of the wood from the ark.” Korduk’ is Corduene, south of Lake Van. The historical geographer Robert Hewsen identified Sararad with the mountain later called Cudi Dağı, as the historian Michał Marciak reports; Murad, on the other side, judged the Korduk’ passage a later insertion.

By the 13th century the story was told of Masis. Rubruck heard of a monk who longed to climb it until “an angel appeared to him bearing a piece of the wood of the ark, and told him to try no more.” A monastery of St Jacob stood high on Ararat’s slopes until a landslide destroyed it in 1840. The same story has been told of two mountains.

Why do some say the ark landed on Mount Judi?

Mount Judi rises to about 2,100 metres (6,900 feet) east of the Tigris and the town of Cizre, in the hill country the ancients called Corduene, or Qardu. The case for it begins with that region. Where the Hebrew of Genesis 8:4 has Ararat, the Aramaic of Targum Onkelos has Kardu. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan sets the ark “upon the mountains of Qadron” and names two of them, “Qardania” and “Irmenia,” and the midrash Genesis Rabbah explains the verse as “on the Corduene mountains.” The Peshitta, the Bible of the Syriac churches, also reads Qardu. Like Genesis, these name a region, and they move the ark south to Corduene. Josephus quotes the Babylonian historian Berossus to the same effect: “It is said there is still some part of this ship in Armenia, at the mountain of the Cordyaeans.”

The Book of Jubilees, from the second century before Christ, names a single mountain: the ark “rested on the top of Lubar, one of the mountains of Ararat.” The church writer Epiphanius, retelling that verse, set Lubar between the Armenians and the people of Corduene.

It was Christians who fixed the memory on Cudi Dağı itself. In the fifth century the East Syriac Catholicos Dadisho took refuge on the mountain “in the monastery devoted to the cult of Noah’s Ark,” and a Syriac chronicle records lightning burning the Monastery of the Ark in the eighth century. Marciak concludes that the tradition “goes back to ancient times, at least to the 5th century CE.” The Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela, on a journey between about 1166 and 1171, found Cizre “at the foot of the mountains of Ararat,” four miles from “the place where Noah’s Ark rested.”

The Quran says the ark “came to rest upon (the mount) Al-Judi” (11:44, in Pickthall’s translation), and Muslim tradition places al-Jūdī on this mountain. How the name reached it is still discussed: the historian Amir Harrak allows either that the name of a mountain in Arabia was applied to Qardu because the two sounded alike, or that al-Jūdī is itself a form of Qardu.

The modern debate runs both ways. In 2008 Lanser argued that the written evidence for Judi goes back to Berossus and the Babylonian flood story, and that so low a mountain sits poorly with Genesis 8:5, since taller peaks nearby should have shown their tops first. In 2016 Bill Crouse argued for it: the land of Ararat, as the first readers of Genesis knew it, lay south of Lake Van, and “The site we have in mind today is called Cudi Dagh.”

Where else has the ark been placed?

Writers have proposed other sites, some inside the old land of Ararat and some well outside it. Those who look east rely on Genesis 11:2, where after the flood people “journeyed from the east” and “found a plain in the land of Shinar,” in southern Mesopotamia.

Lanser says nearly all researchers discount the Iranian peaks, which “are geographically outside of the ‘mountains of Arartu’ area,” and Crouse rejects the Zagros and the Elburz on the same ground.

Where is Noah’s ark now?

The search goes on at Durupınar, a boat-shaped mound about 18 miles (29 kilometres) south of Ararat’s summit, which a Turkish university team and the US group Noah’s Ark Scans drilled in 2026; at a symposium in Ağrı on 15 October 2026 the project’s leader, Professor Cenker Atila, linked radar layers in the mound to the ark’s three decks, while saying the data are not yet enough for a firm conclusion. Carbon-14 results on a small amount of burnt wood are expected from France around the end of October and from Turkey about three months later, the final radar report at the end of November, and a fuller scientific report in spring 2027. Until then of de ark van Noach is gevonden stays open, as Andrew Jones, the project’s deputy head, told Newsweek: “We have not identified any material as ancient wood or established its age,” because “no laboratory results are in yet.”

Gerelateerde artikelen

• Is de ark van Noach gevonden?
• Hoe lang was Noach op de ark?
• Hoe groot was de ark van Noach?
• Wanneer leefde Noach?
• Wat symboliseert de ark in de Bijbel?
• Bijbelverzen over Noach en de zondvloed