This page was originally written in December 2016. To navigate back to the index on Genesis, see index-genesis.
There is a claim that gets passed around in Christian pop culture, and perhaps in other circles, that Noah’s flood was the first time it ever rained in human history, according to the Bible.
I don’t think this claim stands up to scrutiny. The Bible does not explicitly make this claim.
The claim rests upon a particular interpretation of the relationship between Genesis 2 and the Flood narrative. In Genesis 2, verse 5, the world prior to the growth of plants and the creation of humans, is described as being barren because God had not yet sent rain. Then verse 6 describes something, exactly what I am not sure, watering the whole earth.
Following this, humans are created, and then 1656 years of human history unfold, followed by a worldwide flood. When the flood begins is the first time the Bible mentions rain falling on the earth. The interpretive leap that is made is to assume that, because the Bible did not directly mention rain, we are to imagine that no rain fell at any point for 1656 years. The murky watering mechanism of 2:6 is assumed to have continued, then, over centuries.
This assumption is by no means certain. In fact, it is a big claim to make, that no rain fell for 1656 years. It is possible to read this as being implied by Genesis 2:5-6, but it is also possible to read the opposite implication into the text. Here’s the opposing argument.
Genesis 2:5, when it describes the barren state of the land, says that the land was barren before the creation of humans because no rain had fallen yet. As the text records vegetation growing after the creation of humans, the natural assumption is that the land is now fruitful because there is now regular rainfall.
Now, one could counter-argue that the verb in 2:6 is repetitive in meaning, and that one can then infer that some exceptional non-rainy form of watering continued to be operative after the creation of humankind for 1656 years. But that seems like a pretty big claim to balance upon a verse as unclear as Genesis 2:6. The mode of watering in 2:6 is by means of ed, a rare word which appears elsewhere only in Job 36:27.
And Job 36:27 is a verse which uses the word ed in a description of how raindrops are produced. So, whatever ed might be, it seems far from clear that watering via ed excludes the existence of rain. The Job passage pushes in the opposite direction. And even ed-_watering does exclude, there is nothing in Genesis to say that the watering by _ed continued beyond the immediate period described in the Genesis 2 creation story.
There is an argument from silence involved. No rain is explicitly mentioned as happening before the Flood, so the first mention of rain must be the first actual historical rain. But no lumber is mentioned prior to the Flood either. Yet we do not assume that the Ark was the first structure built out of wood.
So the claim that it did not rain prior to the Flood requires an interpreter to make several unclear judgment calls. In the absence of any explicit word on the matter in Genesis, it would be best to pass around the idea that it didn’t rain before the Flood as one possibility. It’s just one possible interpretation, certainly not an inevitable or obvious one.