Noah's Ark Trivia
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99 free Noah's Ark trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Noah's Ark trivia questions with answers. Noah's Ark is one of the most retold stories on earth, and most people know less of it than they think: how long the rain fell, which bird went out first, what the ark was sealed with, and where the story came from before Genesis. This Noah's Ark trivia quiz covers the biblical narrative in Genesis 6-9, Noah's family and his 950-year life, the Mesopotamian flood heroes Utnapishtim and Ziusudra, Mount Ararat, the long history of ark-hunting, the Quranic version, and the modern afterlife of the story in Ark Encounter, Aronofsky's Noah and Evan Almighty. The 99 questions start with details Sunday-school kids know and climb to ones for scholars of the ancient Near East, so it works for church groups, classrooms and pub quizzes alike. Every answer is checked against the text of Genesis and documented scholarship rather than tradition or trivia lists.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who does Genesis 5 name as Noah's father?
Lamech
Lamech named his son Noah, saying the boy would bring comfort from the toil of the ground God had cursed.
Q 02According to Genesis, how long did rain fall during the flood?
Forty days and nights
Forty days and nights of rain fell, yet the earth took over a year to dry, so Noah's family stayed aboard the ark until then.
Q 03In Genesis, what did the dove carry back to Noah, showing him the waters were going down?
An olive leaf
An olive leaf, freshly plucked; Noah waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, and this time it never returned.
Q 04What are the names of Noah's three sons?
Shem, Ham and Japheth
Shem, Ham and Japheth: Genesis 10 traces the nations of the earth to these three, and Abraham's line runs through Shem.
Q 05What did God command Noah and his sons after the flood, repeating his blessing on Adam and Eve?
Be fruitful and multiply
Be fruitful and multiply, God told them, and he also put the fear and dread of humans into every beast, bird and fish.
Q 06Genesis gives the ark's size in cubits; what was a cubit originally based on?
The forearm
The forearm, from elbow to fingertip, so a cubit's length varied between peoples and over the ages.
Q 07Genesis 7 tells Noah to take which animals aboard by sevens rather than a single pair?
Clean animals
Clean animals came in by sevens, and after the flood Noah built an altar and burned some of them as offerings.
Q 08From what material was Noah told to build the ark?
Gopher wood
Gopher wood is found nowhere else in the Bible, so the King James Version left it untranslated; guesses have ranged from cedar to cypress.
Q 09With what was the ark to be sealed inside and out?
Pitch
Pitch, probably bitumen: Genesis uses koper, thought to be borrowed from Akkadian kupru, and the Babylonian hero Utnapishtim seals his boat with bitumen too.
Q 10Besides Noah's Ark, what is the only other object the Hebrew Bible calls a 'tevah'?
Moses's basket
Moses's basket, set among the Nile reeds, is the only other tevah, which is why the King James Version calls it an 'ark of bulrushes'.
Q 11Under God's covenant with Noah after the flood, what were humans permitted to eat for the first time?
Meat
Meat was allowed from then on, but never with its blood, and the same covenant made killing a human a crime to be paid for with the killer's life.
Q 12Which giants does Genesis 6 say were on the earth in the days before the flood?
The Nephilim
The Nephilim, mighty men of old; oddly, the Book of Numbers later has Israel's spies report seeing giants descended from them in the Promised Land.
Q 13What sign did God set in the clouds as a pledge never again to destroy all life by flood?
A rainbow
A rainbow; Genesis has God say that whenever he sees it he will remember the covenant, so the sign is a reminder to God himself.
Q 21What shape was the ark of the Babylonian flood hero Atrahasis?
Circular
Circular: a cuneiform tablet read by the British Museum's Irving Finkel gave enough detail for a team to build a copy.
Q 22Which Babylonian priest retold the Mesopotamian flood story in Greek in the 3rd century BCE?
Berossus
Berossus dedicated his history of Babylonia to the Seleucid king Antiochus I, but it is lost except for passages quoted by later writers such as Eusebius.
Q 23Which son of Prometheus is often compared to Noah for surviving a flood in an ark?
Deucalion
In one telling, Deucalion built a chest on his father's advice, and after the flood he and his wife Pyrrha repopulated the world by throwing stones that became people.
Q 14In the Quran's flood story, who refuses to board the ark and drowns?
One of Noah's sons
One of Noah's sons says a mountain will save him; when Noah pleads for him, God replies that the son is not of his family because of his deeds.
Q 15Which of Noah's grandsons was cursed after Ham saw his father naked in his tent?
Canaan
Why the curse fell on Canaan rather than Ham has puzzled commentators since antiquity.
Q 16Which mighty hunter, whose kingdom began at Babel, does Genesis name as a great-grandson of Noah?
Nimrod
Nimrod later became, in Josephus and the Talmud, the man who led the building of the Tower of Babel, though Genesis never says so.
Q 17Which Mesopotamian poem has the flood story closest to Noah's, told by Utnapishtim?
Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh's flood tablet so thrilled George Smith when he read it in 1872 that he reportedly leapt up, ran around the room and began undressing.
Q 18In the Babylonian flood story, Utnapishtim frees a dove and then a swallow; which bird does he free last?
A raven
A raven, which finds food and never comes back, telling Utnapishtim the waters have fallen; in Genesis, Noah sends his raven first.
Q 19After the Babylonian flood, what do the gods grant Utnapishtim and his wife?
Eternal life
Eternal life, which is why a grieving king later seeks Utnapishtim out to learn how to escape death, only to fail a test of staying awake.
Q 20Who is the hero of the Sumerian flood story known from a tablet found at Nippur?
Ziusudra
Ziusudra, a king of Shuruppak, overhears the god Enki warning him of the coming flood by speaking to a wall beside him.
Q 24In which modern country does Mount Ararat, traditionally identified as the ark's landing place, stand?
Turkey
Turkey: writers in the 1700s and 1800s reported that Armenians believed the ark still sat on the summit and that no one was allowed near it.
Q 25What kind of mountain is Mount Ararat?
A dormant volcano
A dormant volcano: its last eruption, in 1840, came with an earthquake and landslide that buried the village of Akhuri.
Q 26In Genesis, what does God see the earth filled with before deciding to send the flood?
Violence
Violence, Genesis says, and God regretted making humans at all, resolving to wipe out people, animals and birds alike.
Q 27In Fantasia 2000, which Disney character helps Noah load the ark to Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance?
Donald Duck
Donald Duck musters the animals, but along the way he and Daisy lose each other before they are reunited.
Q 28Which event about 7,500 years ago has been proposed as a real inspiration for the flood story?
A Black Sea deluge
A Black Sea deluge through the Bosporus was proposed by geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman in 1997, though later studies suggest a far milder inflow.
Q 29In Julian Barnes's novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, what creature narrates the Noah's Ark story?
A woodworm
A woodworm, one of a colony that sneaked aboard as stowaways, and it doubts that Noah was fit to be God's chosen man.
Q 30According to the Midrash Tanhuma, how much did Noah sleep during the year aboard the ark?
Not at all
Not at all: Noah and his sons had to feed every creature at its own hour, some by day and others deep in the night.