For two years, the world’s only seaworthy life-size replica of Noah’s Ark has been wowing passengers traveling along Holland’s Maas River.
Built according to the specifications detailed in the Hebrew Bible, the 390-foot-long vessel towers to a height of 75 feet. It boasts enough wood to fell 12,000 trees. And its distinct form dominates the coastline of the small town hosting it deep in southern Holland’s so-called Bible Belt.
Dwarfing even some modern-day cruise ships, the ark instantly became an international tourist attraction when it was in 2012 after four years of construction.
But the man who built it, the devout Christian businessman Johan Huibers, can’t wait to take the mammoth to Israel—a country whose problems and successes, he said, are always on his mind.
“My preferred destination for the ark is Israel,” Huibers, 60, told JTA earlier this month on the forward deck, which features a life-size statue of a giraffe.
His love for the Jewish state and people, he said, flows from the same impulse that compelled him to raise nearly $5 million to build the ark.
“It may sound scary, but I believe everything written in this book, cover to cover,” he said while pointing at a copy of a translation into Dutch of the Hebrew Bible. “This is a copy of God’s ship. It only makes sense to take it to God’s land.”