The Flood and the Closing of the Door

God says “righteous” but leaves out the “perfect” of 6:9. Rashi, following Genesis Rabbah, drew a lesson from the omission: a man is given only part of his praise to his face. “In this generation” narrows the verdict to his own people and time, the dorot of 6:9.

“The male and his female” is literally “a man and his wife”, ish and ishto, words for people, used of animals only in this verse. The clean and unclean distinction is simply assumed, with no word of how Noah was to tell one from the other.

The Hebrew does not call these birds clean; the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Greek add the word to match verse 2. “Seed” is zera, the word of 3:15 and of Seth in 4:25, and here it means a breeding stock for the world after the water.

The first of Scripture’s forties: Moses will be forty days and forty nights on the mount (Exodus 24:18), Elijah will walk as long to Horeb, and Jesus will fast as long in the wilderness. “Living substance” is yequm, rare in Hebrew, “all that stands up”, whatever rises from the ground.

Shorter than 6:22, and the divine name has changed: there “God”, here “the LORD”. Source critics built much of their division of Genesis into strands on such alternations. Read as it stands, the two verses frame the building and the boarding with the same obedience.

There is no calendar in the world yet except a man’s life, so the flood is dated by Noah’s age. Later Scripture will date events by a king’s reign; here the whole history of the earth is counted in the years of one household’s head.

“Because of” is literally “from the face of” the waters, the language of fleeing. Genesis Rabbah took it hard: Noah believed and did not believe, and did not go in until the water drove him. That reading is an inference from a preposition; the verse itself only says he went in.

A list with no verb of its own, hanging on the next verse: clean, not clean, fowls, creeping things. The creeping things are the telling entry, creatures that could not have been expected to travel anywhere, and they too arrive.

“Two and two” is a doubled Hebrew number, shenayim shenayim, which means “in pairs”, the manner of entering rather than the total. Read that way it sits easily beside the sevens of verse 2: every creature, clean or not, came in paired.

Literally “on the seventh of the days”. The week that ended in the rest of 2:2 now ends in the breaking of the deep, a reversal many readers have seen as deliberate, though Genesis does not say so outright.

The Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 11b) records Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua disagreeing whether this “second month” counts from the autumn or the spring. The deep is tehom, the word of 1:2, and the “windows” are sluices or lattices, the very phrase a doubting officer mocks in 2 Kings 7:2.

In 2:5 the LORD God “had not caused it to rain upon the earth”. This is the first rain the Bible records falling. The word here is geshem, heavy rain, and it lasts the forty days promised in verse 4 to the day.

“Selfsame day” is literally “the bone of this day”, a phrase kept for days that mattered: the day Abraham and his household are circumcised (17:23, 26) and the day Israel leaves Egypt (Exodus 12:41). The eight are counted, the four men by name and the four women by who they belong to.

Four classes, each “after his kind”, and then an odd closing phrase: “every bird of every sort” is literally “every bird, every wing”. Anything that flies is in. Genesis writes the roll call as if nothing living could be left off it.

“Wherein is the breath of life” is the phrase of 6:17, where it named the flesh the flood would destroy. The same words now mark the creatures going in to be kept. The line between saved and lost is drawn by a door, not by kind.

One verse, two names: they went in “as God had commanded him”, and then “the LORD shut him in”. The covenant name comes at the moment of closing. Whether Genesis means the change to be felt is an inference, but it is exactly where the name falls.

Three verbs lift the ark by stages: the waters increased, bore it up, and it was raised above the earth. “Lift up” is the 1611 past participle, “lifted”. The first forty days are the rain; after them the water goes on rising without it.

“Prevailed” is gavar, to be mighty, the root of the gibborim, the “mighty men” of 6:4. The mighty men are gone and the water is mighty. “Went upon the face of the waters” recalls 1:2, where the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters.

“Exceedingly” is the Hebrew doubled, me’od me’od, “very, very”. The creation was once “very good” with a single me’od. The same Hebrew word serves for hills and for mountains, so the King James “high hills” and the “mountains” of the next verse are one word.

Fifteen cubits is about twenty two feet, exactly half the ark’s thirty-cubit height. Some Jewish interpreters reckoned the loaded ark drew fifteen cubits, so that it cleared the highest peak with nothing to spare; that is their calculation, not the verse’s.

“Died” is gava again, breathed out, the word of 6:17. The list runs from the birds down to the creeping things and ends “and every man”. Humanity, made last in chapter 1, is named last among the dead.

“Of all that was in the dry land” is the limit the verse sets. The fish and the creatures of the sea are never said to die. What the flood undoes is the dry ground God called out of the water on the third day.

“Destroyed” is machah, the wiping clean promised in 6:7, now used twice. “Remained” is sha’ar, the root of she’ar, remnant, a word the prophets will make much of. This is its first appearance: a remainder of one household left when everything else is wiped away.

A hundred and fifty days is five months of thirty days, and 8:3–4 confirm it by running from the seventeenth of the second month to the seventeenth of the seventh. “Prevailed” is gavar for the fourth time in eight verses.