Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.
Make thee an ark of gopher wood - ark х teebaah (H8392) - old Hebrew or Chaldaic, Gesenius], a hollow chest or boat (cf. Exodus 11:3). Bunsen traces the word to an Egyptian root, while Dietrich thinks it is a contraction for de'baat), from a word signifying 'reeds' used in Job 9:26 for the Nile boats. The Septuagint uses kibootos (G2787). It was to be made of "gopher wood." Our translators have retained the original term. The Septuagint renders it ek xuloon tetragoonoon, of wood squared or smoothed with the plane. But this interpretation is generally rejected by modern scholars, who consider the timber referred to was either a species of resinous tree, as Gesenius, the pine, fir, cedar; or, as Bochart and others, the cypress, a wood remarkable for its durability, and abounding on the Armenian mountains, while other kinds of wood are scarce in all that region. Arrian relates that Alexander the Great built a fleet at Babylon in after-ages of this wood. While straight and easily worked, this wood is also hard, compact, and indestructible, the mummy cases of the ancient Egyptians having been composed of it, and the cypress doors of St. Peter's at Rome have now remained undecayed for upwards of a thousand years, ('British and Foreign Evangelical Review,' vol.
xlvii.)
Rooms shalt thou make - i:e., cells, or chambers; literally, nests. At the time when the English translation of the Bible was made, 'room' and place were synonymous terms (cf. Psalms 31:8; Luke 14:8).
And shalt pitch it within and without (with) pitch. [Hebrew, koper (H3724)] - a material for covering or overlaying. It is supposed to have been bitumen, asphalt, or it might be the chips of the cypress, whose resinous timber could easily be converted into tar with which to pitch the sides of the ark, and which, when smeared over and become hardened, would make it perfectly water-tight.