a kind of timber, no longer identifiable, that Noah is told to build the ark from; most likely cypress or some other resin-yielding evergreen
This word appears exactly once in the whole Hebrew Bible, in the boat-building instructions given to Noah: make an ark of "wood of gopher." Nothing else in Scripture uses it, and no ancient writer explains it. Its meaning was already out of reach by the time the Hebrew Bible was first translated into Greek, roughly two centuries before Christ, so every rendering since has been a reconstruction rather than a report.
The ancient translators disagreed so widely that their disagreement is itself the evidence:
- The Greek translators wrote "squared timbers," describing how the wood was worked rather than naming any tree.
- Jerome's Latin version followed the same instinct and wrote "smoothed woods."
- The Aramaic versions, and the Talmud after them, all settled on cedar (אֶרֶז), the most prestigious building timber of the age.
- The Syriac version chose boxwood, and one early Greek reviser chose "sulfured wood," hearing an echo of the Hebrew word for brimstone.
Modern scholars work from two clues. The stronger one is sound: the consonants of this word match those of the Greek and Latin words for cypress, and all three may descend from one older Mediterranean name for the tree, borrowed around the coasts. That would neatly explain a long-standing oddity, namely that the ordinary Hebrew word for cypress (בְּרוֹשׁ) is not the word used here. The second clue is the verse itself, which rings four times on one cluster of sounds: the ark is made of gopher, and it is coated inside and out with pitch (כֹּפֶר). Older reference works took that as a family resemblance and read the word as "pitch-bearing wood," which fits every tree the ancients guessed at, since all of them yield resin.
What can be said with confidence is narrow. It is a timber. It is durable and water-resistant enough for a large boat. And its name belonged to a specialized shipwright's vocabulary, shared with Israel's neighbors, that faded out of use not long after the story was written down.
Disputed
Which timber the word names.
- majorityThe reference is simply unknown: an unidentified species of tree used for building the ark, with the ancient versions offering guesses rather than knowledge.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. גפר; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. גפר; DCH (Clines, ed.), s.v. גפר; NIDOTTE, s.v. גפר; Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Word Biblical Commentary); Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17 (NICOT)
- minorityThe word denotes cypress, a borrowed Mediterranean tree-name sharing an origin with Greek kyparissos and Latin cupressus; this explains the absence of the ordinary Hebrew term ברוש and fits attested shipbuilding practice.; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary); Benjamin J. Noonan, Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible (Eisenbrauns/Penn State University Press, 2019); Robert S. P. Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Brill, 2010), s.v. kyparissos; Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary
- minorityThe word is etymologically kin to כפר ("pitch") and means resinous or pitch-bearing wood generally, without naming a species.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. גפר; Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan); Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11 (Continental Commentary)