Mount Ararat or Mount Judi?

mt_judi

My take is that the oldest source is the most trustworthy – unless a more recent source can disprove the earlier one.

Long before Christian traditions cited Mt Ararat as the landing place for Noah’s Ark, there was Mt Judi:

In the book, Antiquities of the JewsJosephus wrote:

the ark rested on the top of a certain mountain in Armenia … However, the Armenians call this place, αποβατηριον ‘The Place of Descent’; for the ark being saved in that place, its remains are shown there by the inhabitants to this day.

That was written in AD 93 or 94.

The identification of Mount Judi as the landing site of the ark persisted in Syriac and Armenian tradition throughout Late Antiquity but was abandoned for the tradition equating the biblical location with the highest mountain of the region, Mount Ararat.

It makes sense, given the enormity of the alleged flood, that the legend is changed so that the highest mountain in region becomes the official landing place.

The most ancient descriptions of the ark story come to us from (modern day) Iran. Mt Judi is far closer to Iran than Mt Ararat.