Remembering, Waiting and a Renewed Earth

The same verb recurs when God remembers Abraham and sends Lot out of Sodom (19:29), remembers Rachel (30:22) and remembers his covenant with Israel in Egypt (Exodus 2:24). “Asswaged” is shakhakh, used in Esther 7:10 of the king’s wrath cooling. The water subsides as an anger does.

The verse undoes 7:11 in the same order, the fountains first and then the windows. Read beside 7:12, it also says something easily missed: the rain fell for forty days, but the fountains and windows stayed open until now, well past the rain.

“Continually” is a Hebrew idiom, literally “going and returning”, the water ebbing back the way it came. The same pairing of verbs describes the raven’s flights “to and fro” in verse 7. “Abated” is chaser, to lack or diminish, the water running short.

“Rested” is vattanach, from nuach, the verb that sounds in Noah’s own name: the ark of Rest comes to rest. Ararat is the Hebrew form of Urartu, the Assyrian name for the kingdom around Lake Van, and the King James renders the same word “Armenia” in 2 Kings 19:37.

The ark grounded in the seventh month, but no peak showed until the first of the tenth, about seventy four days later. So it came to rest on a summit still under water. “Decreased continually” is again the Hebrew “going and lessening”, a slow fall measured in months.

The forty days here count from the first peaks appearing, a second forty after the forty of rain. The window is challon, a casement that opens and shuts. Noah now does what the ark has not needed of him, and looks out.

The raven is an unclean bird in Leviticus 11:15, a scavenger that could live on what the flood left floating. “To and fro” is “going out and returning”: it came and went without coming back in. In the Babylonian flood tablet the raven is sent last and does not return; Genesis sends it first.

The dove is yonah, the name of the prophet Jonah, and a clean bird later offered on the altar (Leviticus 1:14). The test is set with care: not the earth, but “the face of the ground”, adamah, soil where something might grow. That is what the olive leaf will answer.

“Rest” is manoach, the root of Noah’s name once more; the bird of the man called Rest finds none. Deuteronomy 28:65 uses the same words for Israel scattered among the nations: “neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest.”

“Stayed” is a verb of waiting with expectation, the word Job uses in 13:15, “yet will I trust in him”. “Other seven days” assumes a first seven, perhaps between the raven and the dove, which the account never mentions.

Evening is when birds come home to roost. “Pluckt off” is taraf, torn, the word Jacob uses in 37:33 when he cries that Joseph is torn in pieces. The olive does not grow high on mountains, so a fresh leaf means lower ground is clear; that last point is an inference from the tree, not the text.

The waiting is counted in weeks, a unit Genesis has not used since the seven days of creation, and the dove goes out three times at seven-day intervals. The last message is an absence: a bird that stays away because it has found somewhere to stay.

The date is New Year’s Day, the first of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, so the drying earth begins a new year. The “covering” is mikseh, the word Exodus 26:14 uses for the hide covering over the tabernacle.

Counted from the seventeenth of the second month in 7:11, the flood lasts a year and eleven days. A lunar year of 354 days plus eleven makes 365, a solar year, as has long been noticed. “Dried” is yavesh, the word of the “dry land” God called up in 1:9.

The last words God spoke were in 7:4, before the rain. For more than a year in the ark Genesis records nothing said to Noah. He saw the dry ground in verse 13 and still did not open the door; now the silence breaks.

“Go forth” is yatsa, the verb of every going out that matters in the Pentateuch: God will say to Abram “I am the LORD that brought thee out of Ur” (15:7), and it becomes the word for Israel leaving Egypt. The command pairs each man with his wife.

“Breed abundantly” is sharats, to swarm, the word used in 1:20 for the waters teeming with life. It is now said of the creatures of the land. Be fruitful and multiply, spoken to the animals on the fifth day, is spoken again.

God said “thou, and thy wife, and thy sons”. Noah goes out in the order they went in (7:7): himself and his sons, then his wife and his sons’ wives. The command and the obedience differ only in the order of names, and Genesis records both.

“After their kinds” here is not the usual word. The Hebrew says “by their families”, mishpachot, the word that will order the nations in 10:5 and the clans of Israel. The animals leave the ark grouped as households.

Nothing Noah has done in these chapters has gone uncommanded, and this does. The altar is the first in Scripture, mizbeach, “place of slaughter”. “Burnt offerings” is olah, “what goes up”, the whole animal given to the fire, where Abel’s had been called a minchah, a gift.

“Sweet savour” is reach hannichoach, “a smell of soothing”, and nichoach is built on nuach once again, the rest in Noah’s name. The phrase recurs throughout Leviticus. “Said in his heart” answers 6:6, where the LORD was grieved at his heart.

Four pairs of opposites, eight words, and “cold and heat” are paired nowhere else in Scripture. “While the earth remaineth” is literally “all the days of the earth”, which implies the earth has days to run. “Cease” is shavat, the sabbath verb of 2:2: these shall not rest.