Make yourself an ark of gopher wood.  Make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. (Genesis 6:14)

Jesus says that 

The word translated ark is תֵּבָה tebah and it means a box or chest, which is why it came to English translations in this fashion; ‘ark’ derives from the Anglo Saxon ærc for casket – as clearly, God only tasks Noah to build a sea-worthy vessel, not a boat or ship.

Thus the word ‘ark’ stresses that essential nature of its purpose, as a container in which to safely store the creatures that God would preserve, while all others would be destroyed.  The ark’s purpose is not to transport anything, as it will have no means of propulsion, but to remain float and drift where God wills it.

The word is however loaned to Hebrew, possibly from Egyptian, because it is only used in one other context and that is Moses’ basket.  Moses’ mother could not keep her new born and escape the decree of Pharoah that all Hebrew male babies must be slain, so she build a tiny ark:

 When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes (or papyrus) and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank.  (Exodus 2:3)

The word translated basket is once more tebah, and note, its construction depends on the same waterproofing material, bitumen.  Also, like Noah’s ark, the basket’s purpose is as a life preserver and once afloat it will go where the currents take it.  While Moses’s sister Miriam keeps watch, she is helpless as the basket is found by Pharoah’s daughter, but was on hand to make an offer to obtain a wet nurse, Moses’ own mother.

God subverts Pharoah’s plans, as his rebellious daughter knowingly raises a Hebrew boy under her father’s very nose, and that with Moses’ mother as the nursemaid.

There is much in common in these stories of two different arks, and the common word retrofitted to Hebrew helps establish the common and unifying divine purpose.

In both cases Noah and Moses lived in the world when it is predominantly evil and burgeoning populations are troubling the order of things.

When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them,the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” (Genesis 6:1-3)

Then God thinks again:

“The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 

And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.”  (Ibid 6:5-7)

But God relents because there was one man who ‘found favour in the eyes of LORD’, ibid 6:8.  

Noah is that man, and because of him, his wife, three sons and their wives are not drowned in the deluge and flood.

On the hand, in the days of Moses, the Egyptian empire stretched across the known world, indeed raised alongside Moses as a prince is the same boy who would become Ramesses the Great; the most powerful of any Pharaoh.  In time, Ramesses would be forced to acknowledge the Hebrew God, but reject him and attempt to thwart his divine purpose, on other words, his actions were as evil as those of Noah’s generation.

In a deliberate inversion, it is the Israelites who multiply problematically, for Pharoah, that is, not God, of course.   For God has miraculously increasing their numbers from Jacob’s extended family of 70 to a 2.4 million in 430 years.  (A census taken shortly after the exodus from Egypt, Numbers 1:17-46, counted 600,000 men of fighting age, from which is extrapolated the larger figure to include all males very young and very old and every female – this population growth is impossible without divine intervention, but it does explain Pharoah’s alarm, if not his reaction).

“Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us.Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” (Exodus 1:9-10)

When forced labour did nothing but make the Hebrew nation stronger, he went for even more oppressive and cruel tactic, instructing the midwives to kill male children they deliver to Hebrew mothers.

Once more, those whom God would save comes down to preserving the life of one man.  Moses would eventually rescue the Israelites and face down the evil of Rameses.

While Jesus was doubtless speaking of the waters of childbirth, there is no doubt that God places commonalities in the Bible to draw attention to his purposes:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God….” (John 3:5)

Jesus, God born of woman, is himself the sole vessel of redemption, through his resurrection comes the means for all to have a new creation.  In this new earth, ‘the sea is no more’, (Revelation 21:1); but there is a river, just like the Nile providing life-giving water, here again as witnessed in a vision given to John:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. (Revelation 22:1-2)

And the commonalities can be further traced.

While Noah and Moses are saved by God from drowning, so that God’s purpose is worked through a single man, conversely God the Father does not save his own Son, who did drown – as the death induced by the crucifixion was as a result of the lungs filling with liquid (as is seen when Jesus’s side is pierced, John 19:34).  But from Jesus there is renewal, like Noah, and as with Moses, a people saved and taken to a realm of promise and riches. Christ is the both the progenitor and the ark for a redeemed humanity; and also, the estranged man who comes from afar to call his people out of evil.