The Flood
The Flood
Final Instructions
Then Yahweh said to Noah, “Board the ship with your family, for I have seen that you are the only one among the people of this generation who does what I say is right. Take with you seven pairs of all the clean animals, each one with its mate. Take one pair of all the animals that are not clean, each one with its mate. And take seven male and female pairs of the birds in the sky. Do this to preserve their offspring throughout the earth.
“Only seven more days remain before I send rain that will fall on the earth night and day for forty days. I will wipe from the land everything I made.”
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Noah faithfully completed his assigned tasks of building a ship and gathering food. Yahweh saw the great lengths his chosen servant was willing to go to obey him. Only one task remained: boarding the ship. So Yahweh gave Noah his final instructions and seven days to complete them.
For the first time, Yahweh told Noah to distinguish between clean animals and those that were not clean. He had to take fourteen of each of the clean animals and birds, seven males and seven females, so some would be available for making sacrifices while others were left to reproduce. The animals not suitable for sacrifices needed only one pair.
God told Noah to do this not for the sake of the animals themselves but for the sake of a zeraʿ (“seed, offspring”). For forty days and nights, rain would inundate the earth and destroy all land life. But within the ship, God would preserve the seed of all creation, human and animal, so that life would continue on a new earth washed clean.1
The greater detail given in Genesis 7:1–4 in no way contradicts Yahweh’s initial instructions in 6:13–21. Rather, the differences reflect what Noah needed to know at each point in time. At first, he needed to know only the details of how to build the ship. He didn’t need to know how to get the animals on board or exactly how many of each to take until the time came to get them on board. That time had come.
Clean Animals
“Take with you seven pairs of all the clean animals.”
Image by Daniel Sandvik from Unsplash
The Hebrew word tahor (“clean, pure”) is a key term in the covenant between Yahweh and Israel. It’s most commonly associated with the animals Israel was permitted to eat under the dietary laws in Leviticus. But this early reference to clean animals does not indicate that those laws applied even before the exodus and the covenant at Mount Sinai.
Although Noah was clearly familiar with the concept of clean animals, he could not have understood them as animals fit for eating because Yahweh had not permitted preflood humanity to eat any animals.2 The consumption of meat became permissible only after the flood, when God permitted Noah and his descendants to eat “anything alive that moves.”3 After the flood, humanity was allowed to eat all animals, not just clean ones.
The base meaning of tahor actually has nothing to do with food. It refers to anything fit to appear before God in his sanctuary. In this sense, it can refer to ritually cleansed human beings and even inanimate objects. Unclean animals defiled those who touched their carcasses, rendering them unfit for God’s presence.4 Scripture contains ample evidence of a sacrificial system practiced before the covenant at Sinai, dating all the way back to Cain and Abel.5 So for Noah, clean animals were those considered acceptable as sacrifices to Yahweh.
Final Preparations
Noah did everything exactly the way Yahweh commanded him. He was six hundred years old when the flood inundated the earth. At that time, he boarded the ship with his sons, his wife, and his daughters-in-law to escape the floodwaters along with some of the clean animals, some of the animals that are not clean, and some of the birds and the creatures that glide along the ground. Two at a time, they came to Noah, and each male and female pair boarded the ship, just as God had commanded him.
Image by Moody Publishers from Free Bible Images
Noah was 600 years old when God commanded him to board the ship. Once again, he faithfully obeyed, and his family followed him. All three of Noah’s sons had married, but it seems none had children yet. These eight survivors, four men and four women, began the final preparations for their long stay on board the ship.
Although God commanded Noah and his family to board the ship seven days before the flood started, they did not simply board immediately and then sit there waiting for the next week. Rather, God’s command marks the beginning of the boarding process, which took up the entire seven days. During that time, the animals steadily came to Noah two at a time, and Noah and his family worked to get them on board, along with over a year’s worth of food.
Yahweh never commanded Noah to gather the animals that would board the ship. That task belonged to Yahweh himself, who sent the animals to him. Noah merely had to get them on board and settled in their stalls, a task he finally completed on the very day the flood started.
Uncreation
After those seven days, the floodwaters inundated the earth. On the seventeenth day of the second month, when Noah was six hundred years old, the springs of the great deep were split apart, and the floodgates of the sky were opened. The downpour inundated the earth night and day for forty days.
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By the end of the seventh day, Noah, his family, and the animals with them had safely boarded the ship. Then, just as Yahweh had said, the great flood began. Suddenly, water started pouring out of the “springs of the great deep” and the “floodgates of the sky” simultaneously. While there were two difference sources of the floodwaters, one above and one below, there is no point in trying to precisely identify the “springs” and “floodgates.” The language is poetic, not scientific.6
The dual sources of the flood recall the division of the primordial deep into “the water under” the sky and “the water above” the sky. On the second and third days of creation, God subdued the water by dividing it into two parts and confining the sea to strict boundaries so that dry land could appear.7 The flood undid these acts of creation by reuniting the two waters. For forty days, the rain fell, the sea rose, and the dry land gradually disappeared. The earth was covered in water once again.
Safety
On that same day, Noah had boarded the ship with his sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—his wife, and his three daughters-in-law. With them was every kind of wild animal, every kind of livestock, every kind of creature that glides along the ground, and every kind of bird and winged creature. Some of every creature that has the breath of life came to Noah and boarded the ship two at a time. Males and females of every creature came just as God had commanded Noah. Then Yahweh shut the door behind him.
The flood inundated the earth for forty days. As the water rose, it lifted the ship up above the earth. The water triumphed over the earth, rising dramatically, but the ship floated on the surface of the water.
Genesis portrays the flood as a battle between the floodwaters on one side and the earth and its inhabitants on the other. Although the water initially prevailed, one small band of survivors remained. On the same day the flood began, Noah, his family, and the animals with them had finished boarding the ship. Then Yahweh himself shut the door to seal them in, signifying his divine protection over all on board. Even in this time of crisis, he alone remained in complete control of the situation.
Those on the ship, however, had no control. They had no way to launch or steer the ship but could only sit helplessly as the storm raged, the water rose, and the ship began to float and drift away. But while it triumphed over the earth, the flood had no power over those Yahweh protected. It could only lift them higher and higher above the fray. Only those who had put their trust in Yahweh remained safe.
The Water’s Triumph
The water triumphed so completely over the earth that it covered all the highest mountains under the entire sky. The water triumphed until it covered the mountains by fifteen cubits. Every creature that moved on the land died—the birds, the livestock, the wild animals, the creatures that glide along the ground, and all of humanity.
Everything on dry ground that lived by breathing the breath of life died. God wiped out all existence from the surface of the ground. The humans, the animals, the creatures that glide along the ground, and the birds in the sky were wiped from the earth. Only Noah and those with him in the ship remained. The water triumphed over the earth for one hundred and fifty days.
Outside of the ship, the water triumphed completely, wiping out the earth and its inhabitants. The reunion of the primordial deep drowned all of the land animals, including all of humanity.8 By the end of the forty days and nights of rain, the water covered the tops of the highest mountains by fifteen cubits (about twenty-two and a half feet). Half the height of the ship, the extra fifteen cubits gave it enough clearance to drift unhindered while also ensuring that nothing outside survived.
The water’s triumph lasted 150 days, which includes the 40 days of rain plus 110 days during which it maintained its full height. Most scholars understand the 150 days as five months of thirty days each, ending on the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the same day the ship ran aground.9
This seeming discrepancy leads to two common mistranslations of Genesis 8:3. One creates a second period of 150 days, during which the water receded. The other states that by the end of the 150 days, the water had already started receding. Neither of these translations reflects what the Hebrew actually says. Also, the first does not fit within the given dates, and the second directly contradicts 7:24.
The confusion stems from the use of two different systems for counting. Modern Westerners count days beginning with the day after an event starts, but the Israelites (among others) counted days beginning with the day during which the event began.10 They would begin counting with the seventeenth day of the second month, the day the flood began, as the first day. So, assuming thirty-day months, the 150th day was the sixteenth day of the seventh month, not the seventeenth. The water actually started receding around sunset the day before the ship ran aground.
Remembered
Then God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and livestock with him in the ship.
At the end of the 150 days that the water triumphed, God “remembered” Noah and the creatures with him in the ship. This is the first mention of God remembering someone in the Bible. Elsewhere, he remembers Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rachel, Hannah, and Hezekiah, all during times of deep distress.
This key concept does not mean God had previously forgotten his people. Rather, the phrase marks the turning point in each story, when he acts to save them against all odds. When God remembers, despair turns to hope as he frees slaves, forgives sinners, opens barren wombs, and saves those in peril.11
While God cleansed the earth, the seed of creation had been holed up in the ship and helplessly tossed about by the waves for five months, with no sign of an end to the ordeal. They probably felt like Yahweh really had forgotten them. But he had not, and the time to act had finally arrived.
Re-creation
God made the wind blow over the earth so the water would recede. The springs of the deep and the floodgates of the sky closed, and it stopped raining. The water on the earth returned gradually and receded starting from the end of the one hundred and fifty days. On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ship ran aground in the mountains of Ararat. The water continued receding until the tenth month. On the first day of the tenth month, the tops of the mountains could be seen.
Image by Amateur Pic from Public Domain Pictures
The restoration of the cleansed earth began with God sending a wind (ruah) to blow over the water. This parallels the ruah ʾelohim hovering over the primordial deep in Genesis 1:2.12 Both creation and re-creation began with a ruah over the water.
As the wind helped speed up the evaporation process, the two sources of the floodwater were closed. Apparently, sporadic rainfall had continued to keep the flood at full height even after the initial forty-day inundation. But all rain now stopped, and the water began to separate and return to its assigned boundaries in the sky above and the seas below.
The day after the water started receding, the ship ran aground high up in the mountains of Ararat.13 Two and a half months later, the land finally started reappearing.
The ship running aground in the seventh month does not contradict the mountaintops appearing in the tenth month. In fact, the order of events depicts the nature of boats quite accurately. Even small boats don’t run aground on dry, visible land, because they all have some draft, the distance the hull sits underwater.14 A vessel as large and heavy-laden as Noah’s would sit deep underwater, and with the water gradually receding, the bottom would logically hit ground long before that ground was visible.
The Raven and the Dove
Forty days later, Noah opened the window he had made in the ship and sent out a raven. It flew around until the earth had dried. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water over the ground had abated. But the dove found nowhere to perch. It returned to Noah in the ship because the water still covered the earth. So he stretched out his hand and brought it back inside.
He waited another seven days and sent the dove out of the ship again. That evening, it returned to him holding a fresh olive leaf in its beak. In this way, Noah discovered that the water on the earth had abated. He waited another seven days and again sent out the dove, but this time it did not return to him.
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After first seeing the mountaintops, Noah waited forty days for the water to recede even further. At that point, he could no longer see the water level from inside the ship, so he sent out two birds on a reconnaissance mission. He needed to know if it was safe for those who could not fly to leave.
Through a window, he sent out a raven. Had the raven seen habitable land, it would have flown in that direction. Instead, it just flew around near the ship. Since ravens are omnivores that eat fish and carrion, it had plenty of food and did not need to return to Noah.15 However, it had to remain nearby because it had nowhere else to perch.
The same day, Noah sent out a dove, which also found nowhere to perch.16 But since doves primarily eat fruit and seeds, the dove could not find food and had to return to Noah inside the ship.17
Seven days later, Noah sent the dove out a second time. It returned in the evening with a fresh olive leaf in its beak, possibly for nesting material. This proved that the water had receded far enough below the tree line to allow the vegetation to start returning. However, the dove still had not found food. That took another seven days. When Noah sent it out a third time, it did not return. The trees had started bearing fruit, and the dove found everything it needed outside the ship.
Dry
On the first day of the first month, when Noah was 601 years old, the water no longer covered the earth. When Noah removed the covering from the ship, he saw that the surface of the ground was no longer covered in water. On the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the earth was completely dry.
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After the dove disappeared, Noah still waited over a month before he ventured to leave the inside of the ship himself. On the first day of the new year, he removed the protective covering from the ship so he could get a better view of the surrounding area.18 Finally able to look around, he saw the water was gone but the ground had not yet completely dried out.
Although the Hebrew verbs harav (8:13) and yavash (8:14) both mean “to dry,” when used together they refer to different stages of the drying process.19 Here, it’s clear that Noah first saw a world of muck and mire, no longer flooded but also not yet inhabitable. That’s why he didn’t leave the ship for almost another two months.
But finally, on the twenty-seventh day of the second month, over a year after the start of the flood, the land was completely dry. The time had come for the final stage of re-creation—the reintroduction of humanity and the land animals.
- See Blameless.
- Genesis 1:29.
- Genesis 9:3; see A New Reality.
- Leviticus 11:23–25, 41–45.
- Genesis 4:3–4; 8:20; 22:13.
- The phrase “the floodgates of the sky” doesn't mean the Israelites believed rain comes from holes in the sky any more than the phrase “raining cats and dogs” means that English speakers believe that felines and canines literally fall from the sky. Both are idioms for torrential downpours.
- Genesis 1:6–10.
- See The Second Day of Creation.
- It’s impossible to determine what calendar the flood story follows with any certainty. However, the closest known parallel used at the time of Moses appears to be the Egyptian civil calendar, which did indeed have thirty-day months and with which Moses would have been intimately familiar. See Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Egyptian Calendar,” last modified June 8, 2017, https://www.britannica.com/science/Egyptian-calendar.
- This system is called inclusive numbering because it includes both the first and last item in the series. When Jesus predicted he would rise from the dead after three days, he was including both the day he died and the day he rose, with one full day in between. According to Western counting, he was dead for only a day and a half.
- Genesis 19:29; 30:22; Exodus 2:24; 32:13–14; Leviticus 26:40–45; 1 Samuel 1:19; 2 Kings 20:1–6.
- See The Spirit above the Water.
- See The Water’s Triumph.
- ThoughtCo, s.v. “Vessel Draft,” by Paul Bruno, last modified July 19, 2018, https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-vessel-draft-2292989.
- Cornell Lab of Ornithology, s.v. “Common Raven: Life History,” in All About Birds, accessed June 5, 2020, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/common_raven/lifehistory; Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Raven,” last modified May 25, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/animal/raven.
- Many scholars assume an unmentioned seven-day period between Noah sending out the raven and the dove because 8:10 states that Noah waited another seven days before sending out the dove a second time. But the more natural reading takes this seven-day period to be in addition to the explicitly mentioned forty-day period that Noah waited before sending out both birds.
- Cornell Lab of Ornithology, s.v. “Rock Pigeon: Life History,” in All About Birds, accessed June 5, 2020, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Rock_Pigeon/lifehistory
- This covering is never mentioned during the construction of the ship. Elsewhere, the Hebrew word mikseh refers exclusively to coverings made of animal hide that were used to cover the tent of meeting, creating a parallel between the ship and the tabernacle. This covering over the wooden roof probably helped make it more waterproof (see Barnwell and Kuhn, Notes on Genesis 1:1–11:26, Gen. 8:13b).
- See Job 14:11; Isaiah 19:5.