This page was originally written in December 2016.
Below is a translation I’ve made of Genesis 8, following the Masoretic Text, along with comments on the chapter by Dillmann, and notes addressing text-critical stuff mentioned by Kittel. To find the original PDF source of the Dillmann stuff, see here. I’ve taken a few liberties with Dillmann: I’ve expanded some of his many abbreviations into unabbreviated forms, and transliterated his Hebrew phrases, often leaving out vowels. I’ve added brief explanations of some things in brackets, and hyperlinks. I’ve got the sections that quote Dillmann indented to the right.
According to Eugene Ulrich’s The Biblical Qumran Scrolls: Transcriptions and Textual Variants, the Dead Sea Scrolls do not preserve any part of Genesis 8.
1 And God remembered Noah, and every wild animal, and all the domestic animals which were with him in the ark. God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters decreased [škk, Dillmann sank down]. 2 And the fountains of the deep and the windows of the sky were stopped, and the rain from the sky was restrained. 3 Gradually the waters receded from the land, and after one hundred fifty days they had lessened [ḥsr].
Chapter 8, verse 1. Then, after 150 days, and after everything living on the land had expired, God remembered Noah. wyzkr, as in Genesis 19:29, 30:22, and Exodus 2:24.
Therefore He caused a wind to blow over the earth, so that the waters sank down, began to decrease (Numbers 17:20 (5)). One expects the statement of the second part of this verse only after verse 2; but it need not on that account be regarded as a gloss [4], for according to the idea of the author the rising of the wind and the checking of the overflow (verse 2) may be thought of as contemporaneous, or the second part of verse 1 may have been transposed by the redactor to this position from its place after the first part of verse 2, because he wished after verse 2a in verses 2b and 3a to introduce Jahwist material.
[4] Hupfeld, Die Quellen der Genesis, 133.
If Genesis 1:2 is interpreted as including a “wind from God sweeping across the water,” then the wording of Genesis 8:1 echoes the creation. The mention of šmym (‘sky’) and thwm (ocean/’the deep’) in verse 2 do as well.
After the reference to Numbers 17:20, I am not sure what Dillmann means with the number (5) in parentheses. In Numbers 17:20, the word translated as rid or put a stop to or similar is the word translated as decreased in Genesis 8:1, above, and which Dillmann renders with sank down.
Verse 2. The locking up of the fountains of the deep and of the windows of heaven is the correlative to Genesis 7:11, and therefore from the Priestly source. On the other hand, the second part of the verse, with its reference to 7:12, comes from the Jahwist. The conjecture that verse 6a stood before it in this writing [5] is doubtless correct (compare 7:4). Like verse 2b and verse 3a [6] — and the water returned from the earth, a going and a returning, i.e. gradually [1] — also belongs to the Jahwist, seeing that the same meaning is sufficiently expressed by the Priestly source in verses 3b and 5. On the other hand, verses 3b-5 are certainly by the Priestly source. Against the opinion that in verse 4 wtnḥ htbh ʿl hry ʾrrṭ belong to the Jahwist [2], see Budde, Urgeschichte, p. 269 f.
[5] Wellhausen, Budde, Die biblische Urgeschichte, 267. [6] Hupfeld, Schrader, Budde, Die biblische Urgeschichte, 268. [1] Gesenius, Grammatik, 113. 3b. A. 2; compare verse 7 and chapter 7, verse 9. [2]: Hupfeld, Die Quellen, 16; Böhmer, Reuss.
The words wtnḥ htbh ʿl hry ʾrrṭ are separated: wtnḥ htbh ‘and the ark rested’ is at the beginning of verses 4, while ʿl hry ʾrrṭ ‘on the Ararat mountains’ is at the end of the verse, with other words between. The reference to Grammatik can be found in English translation here, in subsection 113u.
Verse 3. mqṣh ḥmšym wmʾt ywm, ‘at the end of one hundred fifty days.’ According to Kittel, the Samaritan Pentateuch reads mqṣ instead of mqṣh. The two are equivalent, meaning ‘at the end’ in this context. Kittel recommends that one should read mqṣ hḥmšym instead of mqṣh ḥmšym, which would change the text from literally at the end of a hundred fifty days to at the end of the hundred fifty days.
4 The ark came to rest in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the Ararat mountains. 5 And the waters kept on lessening [ḥsr] until, in the tenth month, on the tenth day of the month, the mountain-tops were visible.
According to Kittel, the Septuagint reads “twenty-seventh” instead of “seventeenth.”
[Rather than completing this post, I will probably sweep this up and incorporate it into my main project on my second pass through, if I get that far.]