You’re not paying attention in the correct way to the correct things.
Look, suppose I wrote up a chemical experiment. I’d talk about what equipment I used, what ingredients, how I measured them and made sure none of them got away, what procedures I followed, what happened. I’d also include all the scientific method stuff, making predictions and seeing how they worked out, and trying to explain the whys and hows.
So then, suppose a person who didn’t understand chemistry read my article. Suppose this person’s primary way of understanding the world was poetry. The person would comment about the imagery, the motifs, the beauty of the word “milliliter”. He’d complain about all the liberties I took with iambic pentameter, and compare it to the works of other poets to understand my influences. On the whole, he’d probably decide that my “poem” wasn’t very good and didn’t ring true. Nothing but fakery and pretense.
I of course would be very indignant. I hadn’t lied or made anything up! I told exactly what happened in my experiment, using the language of science. But someone reading it with the eyes of a poetry reader wouldn’t understand that. Certain things would seem crazy and senseless, even impossible.
Noah is a true story about real people and events, but it’s told in a way meant to emphasize the moral of the story and the relationship between God, humans, and the natural world of creatures – not to mention all the prophetic stuff meant to foreshadow future events and tell all its readers various things important to them.
If the Ark is described as being a certain shape with sides of a certain length, it’s not because the authors had blueprints; it’s because the symbolism of the shape, and the numbers used, describes the meaning of whatever is there, and shows how that’s related to the Ark of the Covenant and everything else with that meaning. If, historically, the Ark really did look that way, it would have worked because God wanted to get that symbolism in there, not because it would normally be a good or bad way to build a boat. The author (the Holy Spirit and the human author) isn’t interested in telling you things the way you want him to tell them, at least in this particular part of this particular book; but that doesn’t make him a liar or unhistorical or a credulous idiot or whatever.
Put it another way – if I tell you a story about how my dog defended me from danger and was as brave as a lion, and you worry about whether lions are brave and why I’m claiming that my dog has feline DNA, you’d have totally missed the point. If you fixated on what “danger” was, you could have a lot of fun speculating. But you would never be able to tell whether the danger was a rapist or a rabid raccoon if that didn’t come into what I said, and it would be kinda pointless to speculate about what the “real historical events” were (unless you could ask me). But people read the Bible in this way all the time, totally missing the point.
However, if you insist on a nuts and bolts approach to a story that’s not in the least about zoological and logistical details, assume that the Ark was provided by God with a pocket universe, a supply of all the world’s animals, and perpetually renewed stores of food (such as the manna in the wilderness or Jesus’ feedings of various crowds). Or you could assume that the Ark traveled through a pocket alternate universe where the Earth was totally covered by water, and that Noah was brought back afterwards. You could assume what a lot of Jewish folks through the ages did assume – that back in Noah’s time, humans still had many special powers over the created world (left over from their guardianship of Eden) which today’s humans have lost, and therefore assume that Noah was running around demanding of the gopherwood that it become a Tardis, and teleporting animals into the Ark. If you’re going to make it a story about marine engineering, you may as well go all the way and allow God to be omnipotent in a way pleasing to your aesthetic.
For example… there’s a medieval Spanish drawing of Noah’s Ark which shows the artist’s idea of why the raven didn’t come back, Instead of being out in the trees on dry land or something, it was eating one of the corpses in the water. (Perhaps optimistic after forty days, but the artist liked drawing a raven picking at a floating corpse – and his context was a manuscript using Noah’s Ark as a picture of the Church, so the corpse was really a person not alive in Christ, and the raven meant something symbolic also.)
