What Does Genesis 6:15 Mean?
And this is how you shall make it. Its length shall be three hundred forearms, its breadth fifty forearms, and its height thirty forearms.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.THE KEY
The Hebrew word for “ark” also names the little basket that carries Moses, joining a vast refuge and a child’s vessel in the same pattern of life held amid threatening waters.
THE MEANING
Here, refuge has a precise shape: length, breadth, and height are measured so life has room to be held. The verse speaks now of protection made concrete, a bounded space that carries life through overwhelming waters.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that refuge is only an abstraction: here, protection has measurable length, breadth, and height.
THE ROOT
רָחְבָּהּ
raḥbāh
GROWS FROM
רחב
r-ḥ-b
to be wide or spacious
The Hebrew word names a measurement, while its root also carries the sense of spaciousness and room opening around something. The ark’s breadth is literal space shaped to hold life.
ALSO GROWS
raḥav: wide, spacious
רָחָב
The adjective makes explicit the spaciousness carried within the verse’s word for breadth.
merḥav: a broad place, open space
מֶרְחָב
This branch shows the root’s image of room to move or dwell, echoing the ark’s measured space for life.
אֹרֶךְ
ʾorekh
GROWS FROM
ארך
ʾ-r-kh
to be long; to lengthen or prolong
The word for a vessel’s length shares its root with language for prolonging. In a refuge built to preserve life, physical extension and life continuing meet in the same Hebrew seed.
ALSO GROWS
ʾarokh: long
אָרֹךְ
This adjective carries the same root from the measured length of the ark into the quality of being extended.
heʾerikh: lengthen, prolong
הֶאֱרִיךְ
This verb extends the root from space into duration, resonating with the ark’s role in preserving life.
THE PATTERN
Scripture repeatedly pictures life being carried through threatening waters in a refuge that holds it beyond the danger.
And every standing thing that was upon the face of the ground was wiped out, from humankind to cattle, to the creeping thing, and to the birds of the heavens, and they were wiped from the earth. Only Noah, and those with him in the ark, were left.And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of reeds, and smeared it with bitumen and pitch, and set the child in it, and set it among the rushes on the lip of the river.who once refused to yield, while the slowness to heat of God waited in the days of Noah, as the ark was being built, in which few, eight living souls, were delivered through water.THE THREAD
And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of reeds, and smeared it with bitumen and pitch, and set the child in it, and set it among the rushes on the lip of the river.Genesis and Exodus use the same Hebrew word, תֵּבָה (tevah, ark or vessel), for Noah’s refuge and Moses’s basket. The scale changes from a vast vessel to a small one, while both hold vulnerable life amid threatening waters.
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