Two Arks - Creation Moments

Exodus 2:3

“And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.”

Few people realize that the Bible actually speaks of not one Ark but two! The Hebrew word for Ark is tebat (תֵּבָה), and it appears 28 times in the Old Testament. 26 of those entries are in Genesis 6 through 9, where we are being told about Noah’s Ark, and how God used it to save eight people, and every kind of land and flying vertebrate, from the judgment of the Flood.

The other two entries for the word tebat are in Exodus 2, where it refers to the birth of Moses.

Moses’s mother gave birth to Moses at a time when Pharaoh had ordered the death of new Israelite babies. The people of Israel were living in the region of Goshen, in Egypt, because that is where Joseph had settled his father and his brothers when they came to Egypt because of the famine. He was a new king, who “did not know Joseph”.

Moses’s mother kept her new baby secret for three months, but then something had to be done. So she placed Moses in a waterproof basket and floated him down the river. The Hebrew word, which most translations render as basket, is, in fact, tebat. Hence, the KJV states that Moses’s mother placed him in an ark. Like the more well-known Ark, Moses’s Ark was a means of salvation and, therefore, a type of Christ, especially as Moses was to be the prophet and leader of God’s people through the wilderness.

Prayer: Thank You, Lord, that Your plan of salvation has always been in place, down through the generations – never to be thwarted! Amen.

Author: Paul F. Taylor

Ref: Two Arks, <https://www.faithgateway.com/two-arks-moses-noah-common/#.XIBWWbiIaUk >, accessed 3/1/2019. Image: Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1904), The Finding of Moses, Public Domain.