What Does Genesis 6:15 Mean in the King James?
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 analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
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 living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.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.Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.THE THREAD
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.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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