Genesis 8: The Flood Subsides

(Read Genesis 8 here.)

Noah and his family and the animals have been in the ark for some time. At the end of Chapter 7, it says that the waters prevailed on the earth for 150 days. In Chapter 8, God sends a wind over the earth, and the waters start to recede.

• Where did the waters go? Seems like this would have raised the sea levels or something. 

We are told that the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat on the seventeenth day of the seventh month. We read in the previous chapter that the rain started on the seventeenth day of the second month. So they were all in the ark for about five months. This is consistent with the 150 days that the waters were on the earth.

However, everyone stayed in the ark for a while longer; it says the waters continued to abate until the tenth month, when they first saw the tops of the mountains.

We read that “at the end of forty days, Noah opened the window of the ark…” and let a raven out.

• Was this forty days after the mountaintops appeared?

The raven never returned.

• I guess he was content to live on the mountaintops until the waters receded further.

Next Noah lets out a dove, to see if there was any dry land. The dove comes back, so Noah waits another week and lets it go again. This time she comes back with a freshly plucked olive leaf. Noah waits one more week and lets her go again, and this time she stays gone.

The next section (verse 13) says that the waters were finally gone from the earth on the first day of the first month of the six hundred and first year.

• I assume this is the 601^st year of Noah’s life, since we are told in Chapter 7 that the flood began in the 600^th year of his life.

But apparently it wasn’t dry yet – verse 14 says that “on the twenty-seventh day of the (second) month, the earth had dried out.” It was only then that God told Noah to get out of the ark and let everybody else out too. So it seems that they were all in that boat for a total of one year and ten days.

• Of course, that’s probably not accurate, since they certainly weren’t using the Gregorian calendar.

So Noah, his wife and sons and daughters-in-law, and all the animals went out “by families” from the ark.

It’s tough to believe that at this point there were only eight human beings on the planet. Earlier in Genesis, it seems easier to believe that there were other humans besides Adam and Eve and their sons. But this flood was intended to destroy every living creature on the earth. How would one family repopulate the planet? Wouldn’t that wind up being somewhat incestuous, since Noah’s grandchildren would basically have to marry their cousins? Even if the flood was regional, or contained to the Middle East, it’s not likely that they would have traveled far and wide to find spouses and start families, since traveling was particularly difficult. Perhaps I’m overanalyzing this, and I said I was reading to see what exactly was in the text. I suppose it’s impossible not to wonder about some of this, though…and I’m thinking there will be questions like this for which there are no answers within the actual text.