First, Tim Clarey's article he comments on:
2,200-Year-Old Roman Ship Reveals True Nature of ''Pitch''
BY TIM CLAREY, PH.D. | THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2026
https://www.icr.org/article/a-2200-year-old-roman-ship-reveals-true
Then Joel Duff:
Interesting Pitch: ICR Says NO to Plain Reading of Noah's Ark
Dr. Joel Duff | 1.VI.2026 (31.V.2026?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUedAW-sEHo
1) It doesn't say oil.
2) One very traditional meaning of "tar" or, for that matter, the Latin word "pix, picem" from which we have "pitch" is cooked resin.
3) The Hebrew 3724. kopher is a deverbial noun from the verb 3722. kaphar, where one listed meaning is to cover (specifically with bitumen) — tar cooked from pine resin is used in exactly the same way.
4:29 Douay Rheims, Ronald Knox, and, for what it's worth, King James, all have the word "pitch" ... which in Latin etymology and I don't know how long in the loan means "tar" = cooked pine resin.
5:06 If Akkadian "kupra" means uniquely petrol based bitumen, it may be because Iraq has more petrol and less trees than Lebanon.
5:10 "same area of the world"
Wait a second ... we are nowhere told exactly where the Ark was prior to the Flood, except it was built on the highest mountain on Earth. (15 cubits reads like Ark beginning to float if the waterline was halfway up, which is a pretty usual thing).
If you want my guess, it was erased by the Flood to make the plain now called the Meseta, in Spain.
5:31 If the Israelites uniquely used bitumen of a petrol based type as opposed to pine based tar, that may be an accident of their location.
6:29 In tar [as a coating], pine sap vastly outweighs bees wax.
Now, I'm sure Hebrew has another word for bees wax than kopher, I'm not looking up, but I am really at a loss to the word pine sap, especially as cooked to tar, other than using the functional equivalent bitumen.
6:47 If you are unaware, bitumen and pine sap cooked to tar are not easy to tell apart to eye or touch.
Maybe some difference in smell.
Just noting:
"Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon, obtained from a wide variety of organic materials through destructive distillation. Tar can be produced from carbon-rich materials such as coal, wood, petroleum, peat, and other organic matter."
7:23 Henna is a thing that Oriental women use to paint some kind of decorations on their skin.
It looks, not unlike "bitumen" like ... tar. Dark brown liquid.
7:36 No, I don't think they are homonyms.
Village, because houses in a village are painted in tar, together, presumably at the same occasion.
Henna is dark brown and used to tinge a surface (in this case human skin)
8:41 "in the Mesopotamian region"
That's not where the Ark was built, you can't build an ark on the highest mountain on earth by staying there, especially as it is now in post-Flood times ... the Bible 1) doesn't say the Ark was in Mesopotamia before the Flood, and 2) as to after, it was actually East or North of Mesopotamia, depending on which parts.
- NinjaMonkeyPrime
- @NinjaMonkeyPrime
- In one of your numerous comments you said that we aren't told where it was built, but here you seem confident where it wasn't built.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @hglundahl
- @NinjaMonkeyPrime Indeed.
If it had been built in the plain of South Mesopotamia or even the mountains around North Mesopotamia, as they are now, the Ark would not have been built on the highest mountain, and Noah would not have known if the highest mountain was covered, let alone if it was 15 cubits high.
But with an overall height of 30 cubits, 15 cubits is a probable water line.
So, a water line of 15 cubits + building it on the highest mountain, means = you exactly know when the water covers it (and all other less high mountains) at least 15 cubits = when the Ark begins to move.
If the Ark had been built anywhere lower, it would have been dashed to pieces during the earlier 40 days of the Flood.
10:08 I have no problem with the Exodus tevah being petroleum based in the kopher covering.
Egypt is still a petrol exporting country and, unlike Lebanon, poor in trees.
So, if the Genesis one was tree based, that doesn't strike me as a radical difference, the substances are used in exactly the same way.
10:08 [bis] It would seem that the more specific words in Exodus are 2564. chemar and 2203. zepheth.
In Genesis, 3724. kopher seems to be a more general term.
If you don't actually have a word for wood based tar, why not use the more general term?
11:23 "to create a greater meaning"
Sure.
If I recall correctly, both the Flood and the crossing of the Red Sea are read in the Easter Vigil and this as types of Baptism.
And Moses was, as a babe singled out for leading Israelites through the Red Sea.
But is it any difference to this greater meaning that one vessel uses pine based tar and the other petroleum based asphalt? We know there is a difference in size, which is far more obvious.
- NinjaMonkeyPrime
- There should be some obvious meaning behind someone who seeks to bend modern day evidence and observation to accommodate a story from an old collection of books that wasn't intended to be taken literally.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @NinjaMonkeyPrime Where do you get "that wasn't intended to be taken literally" from?
It wasn't meant to be taken only literally, but that doesn't mean it was meant not to be taken literally.
The literal meaning is the basis, like St. Thomas Aquinas argues in Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Quaestio I, Article 10. Whether in Holy Scripture a word may have several senses?
- The answer
- is outside the scope of this discussion, and merits a post of its own.
12:19 As I skim through Exodus 2 in the interlinear, I actually don't see that this certainly petroleum based thing is being ever described as "kopher" ...
But I did note that the verb kaphar is named for the action, which is exactly the same in pine based pitching as in petroleum based one.
15:04 "dating back 4500 years BC"
Here is the sentence and its follow up:
In the Middle East, where there are ample oil seeps. Conventional scientists have found evidence of the use of bitumen as a boat sealant as far back as 4500 to 3700 BC. Creation scientists realize these radiometric dates are not accurate.
Count me in.
But I'm more specific:
- 2097 BC
- 74.949 pmC, dated as 4481 BC
- 1982 BC
- 80.546 pmC, dated as 3770 BC
- 1965 BC
- Serug died
- 1959 BC
- 81.656 pmC, dated as 3634 BC
Petroleum based boat sealant ... 2097 to 1959 ... did it fall out of use after "3700 BC" alias 1959? No, actually not. 4500 to 3700 is only the Ubaid period, and the cited work
Adhesive coatings in naval archaeology: molecular and palynological investigations on materials from the Roman Republican wreck Ilovik–Paržine 1 (Croatia) is not specific of when in it.
Anyway, that's about 900 + years after the Flood, just before Abraham.
- NinjaMonkeyPrime
- Bitumen as Hafting Material on Middle Paleolithic Artifacts from the El Kowm Basin, Syria
January 2002
[Link found]
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @NinjaMonkeyPrime Now, Middle Palaeolithic just might be a problem, if it had been dated by superposed lava (from the Flood).
I would say, the 36000 BP date is post-Flood and the Mousterian and Levallois styles, despite being pre-Flood, were either iimitated or reused (tools taken along on the ark) after the Flood.
I didn't read any indication that people found there had been identified as pure Neanderthal or Homo erectus, which would also have been pre-Flood.
- The answer
- is outside the scope of this discussion, and merits a post of its own.
15:36 "than what the Romans are doing, far, far away"
As said, the Bible nowhere specifies that the pre-Flood coordinates where the Ark was built match post- or pre-Flood spaces between Hiddekel and Frat. Nowhere.
Croatia is closer to the Meseta than what Mesopotamia is, and the Meseta is my candidate for the highest pre-Flood mountain peak. Either there or the Ural, somewhere.
Post-Flood humanity has admixture of pre-Flood races Neanderthal and Denisovan, and those are found in both Spain and the Ural region. As far as I know, nothing in pre-Flood Mesopotamia shows its pre-Flood humanity.
Accordingly, nine paleoecological maps for the Southern Mesopotamia are made to represent the age intervals between 22000 B.P. to 1000 B.P.
22 000 BP = c. 20 000 BC
= between:
- 2738 BC
- 11.069 pmC, dated as 20,933 BC
- [and] 2725 BC
- 14.329 pmC, dated as 18,786 BC
- NinjaMonkeyPrime
- What are you trying to say with these "pmc" numbers? You started by saying that 20,000 BP is 20,000 BC, but that's already wrong. It would be 18,051 BCE or BC. Everything after that is just gibberish.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @NinjaMonkeyPrime I said 22 000 BP is roughly 20 000 BC. Just 50 years off. "Present" is uniformly 1950 in this context.
pmC is the level of carbon 14 back then and accounts for the extra years. 11.069 pmC "means" 18200 years old (when it was recent) and 14.329 pmC "means" 16050 old (when it was recent).
If you add c. 17 000 years to c. 3000 BC, you get 20 000 BC or 22 000 BP.
- Well actually
- I can be more precise.
11.069 pmC means 5730 * log(0.11069) / log(0.5) = 18 195 extra years
14.329 pmC means 5730 * log(0.14329) / log(0.5) = 16 061 extra years
From 2738 BC I'd need 17 262 extra years, between the two.
From 2725 BC I'd need 17 275 extra years, between the two.
From a year between these I'd need a number of extra years between the two.
16:18 "rewrite the Hebrew dictionary"
Let's see what modern Hebrew uses for "tar" ... surprisingly, modern Hebrew uses for Norwegian pine resin that's been cooked the word "zephet" ... like for Moses' basket. Even if we are sure that Moses' mother used petroleum based pitch.
But dictionaries are fluid, like you showed yourself, about English, when you basically deny that pine sap cooked in tar kilns qualifies as tar.
