which mountain is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. they are wasting their time because the wood rotted away thousands of years ago.
which mountain is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. they are wasting their time because the wood rotted away thousands of years ago.
That's not something that anyone can say would and did happen, or even, is likely to have happened. There are organic plant material in museums in Egypt which are still intact and in excellent condition dating from around 5,000 years ago.
You can show examples of wood rotting in short order, and then you can show examples of wood (and other plant material) being preserved for thousands of years. So, it can go either way.
The Bible translators don't know what kind of wood that is, which is in the original language. It's pre-flood wood, and the conditions of the environment and the plants were certainly a lot different than they are now. It could very well be a species of wood that no one has seen in our time, being that it was pre-flood. The plant life was a lot more lush and grew a lot bigger in the distant past than it does now. With the atmosphere being like a hyperbaric chamber and a much higher oxygen content, it's very possible that it's a very dense, strong and rot-resistant wood.
In addition to that, the Bible talks about something being applied to the wood, and that's another unknown item in today's language. It's been translated as pitch, but we don't know exactly what it was.
BUT, there is one scenario in which the Ark wouldn't be around, that I think is somewhat plausible -- even with those details above. In the new environment, after the world-wide flood and the completely changed conditions (we can see the lowering life-span, quickly after that period of time, so it was a harsher environment) -- it's also possible that the Ark was used, over a period of time, for its wood, in order to build shelter and other necessary buildings for surviving in their new environment.
The Ark could have been gradually disassembled over a couple of hundred years and those materials used, as it was needed by the surviving people and their progeny.