Genesis 7 -- part of an old project

...

1 Then Yahweh said to Noah, Go, you and all your household, into the ark, because I have seen that you are upstanding before me among this generation. 2 Of all the permitted animals take for yourself by sevens, a male and its mate, and of all the animals that are not permitted two, a male and its female.

1 Yahweh. Notice that from 6:9-22 we were in one of the stretches where the deity is called ʾElohim (“God”). Now begins a stretch of Yahwehs which will extend through parts of chapter 7. This is relevant to the Documentary Hypothesis.

Yahweh. According to BHK, instead of the expected “Lord” (for Yahweh) the Septuagint reads “Lord God” (as if for Yahweh Elohim). Instead of Yahweh, two Masoretic manuscripts, along with the Samaritan Pentateuch and Syriac, read Elohim (“God”).

ark. A Hebrew term, tebah, used only in this story and in the story of Moses' infancy. Both "arks" are covered in bitumin for water-proofing and save an individual from death.

2 permitted. Hebrew ṭhwr, pronounced ta-HOR. Though the traditional rendering is clean, the Hebrew word does not refer to animals that are clean in the sense of ‘not dirty,’ nor does it refer to ritual purity as opposed to ritual impurity. In the regulations of the Pentateuch, ṭhwr animals are the animals which it is permitted to eat, such as goats, sheep, oxen, etc. Some other animals, such as pigs or shellfish, are not ṭhwr.

The use of this term in the context of the Flood story seems anachronistic, as Genesis 1:29, 30 and 9:3 would seem to imply that a vegetarian diet was commanded before the Deluge, and that even after the Deluge all kinds of animals were permitted for human diets. The laws governing the concept of ṭhwr do not appear till the time of Moses, who according to the Bible’s timeline is to be located roughly a thousand years after Noah. Rashi picks up on this anachronism, and uses it as “proof” that Noah studied the writings of Moses.

permitted animals . . . by sevens. In the previous account, in which the deity is called Elohim, we read only of animals being sent in twos (6:19, 20). However, here, in a passage associated with Yahweh, we another account in which Noah is commanded about taking animals into the ark, and the animals are divided into twos for forbidden and seven for permitted animals. These and other details are part of why the Noah story is considered a classic showcase for the Documentary Hypothesis.

by sevens. Literally, seven seven, a male and its female. There are two opinions on the import of this phrase as used here. One is that Noah is to take a total of seven animals of each kind, the other that he is to take a total of fourteen (seven males, seven females). The footnotes to the NET (2005) indicate that the question is still not settled.

In the Yahwist material this business of sevens appears, while in the Priestly source, "one pair of every kind is taken, and nothing is said of the distinction between clean and unclean animals" (Driver). The text does not say why one would want more clean animals, but suggestions include that only clean animals can be sacrificed and eaten (Driver). "It is to be noticed that J assumes for the patriarchal age the Leviticual distinction of 'clean' and 'unclean' animals, as he also speaks of sacrifices offered, and altars built, during the same period ... P, on the contrary, never attributes Levitical institutions and distinctions to the pre-Mosaic age; he regards all such as creations of the Sinaitic legislation.

two. Although the verse contains the expression (literally) “seven seven” the Masoretic Text reads simply two when describing the unclean animals. However, in parallel with the expression seven seven, the Samaritan Pentateuch, Septuagint, and Syriac read two two.

3 Also of the birds of the sky, by sevens, male and female, to keep alive their seed on the earth, 4 because after seven more days I will bring rain upon the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will blot out all beings that I made from the surface of the ground. 5 And Noah did everything just as Yahweh commanded him.

3 Also of the birds of the sky, by sevens, male and female. BHK suggests that this portion of verse 3 might be a later addition to the story. I imagine this could have been done by a copyist who noticed that birds weren’t addressed in the version he was copying from, and who decided to “fix” it.

The Masoretic Text as it stands does not here distinguish between clean and unclean birds, but has the "sevens" taken of all birds. However, as Driver points out, the distinction between clean and unclean birds appears in 8:20). He says perhaps we should follow the Septuagint here in reading, "of fowl also of the air that are clean, seven and seven, and of fowl that are not clean, two and two".

birds. The Pentateuchal regulations make a distinction between permitted and forbidden birds, but apparently the Flood account does not.

seed. That is, their lineage.

4 forty days and forty nights. In this Yahwistic passage, the duration of the Flood is given as forty days. Later, in a verse often attributed to the Priestly source (7:24) the duration is given as one hundred and fifty days. There are other chronological details as well that complicate the picture further. This is generally attributed to the messiness inherent in the editing process by which two versions of the Flood story were joined and then revised.

all beings. Hebrew yqwm (ye-KUM), a word which appears three times in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 7:4, 23; Deuteronomy 11:6). Driver reads "every subsisting thing".

6 And Noah was six hundred years old when the deluge was waters on the earth. 7 Noah, his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives with him went into the ark to escape the waters of the deluge. 8 From permitted animals, and from animals which are not permitted, and from the flying things, and all things that crawl on the ground, 9 two by two they came to Noah, to the ark, male and female, as God had commanded Noah. 

(7:6) six hundred years old. In conjunction with the numbers in Genesis 5, this gives the date of the deluge as 1656 years after the creation.

the deluge was waters upon the earth. If this strikes you as awkward in English, it also strikes me as awkward in Hebrew. The notes to the BHK suggest the possibility that instead of reading mayim (“waters”) we should read miyam (“from the sea”), giving the meaning the deluge came from the sea onto the earth. Where the Masoretic Text reads, literally, the deluge (or flood) was waters upon the earth, some translators have rearranged the phrase to give a smoother English reading, like the flood of waters was upon the earth (Revised Version).

The word translated deluge (mabbul) is, according to Driver, used in the Bible only for the flood of Noah, although there is a usage in the Psalms which may or may not refer to Noah's flood.

waters is omitted in the Septuagint.

(7:7) to escape. Hebrew mpny (mi-PNE), literally away from or because of.

(7:8) and from the flying things. According to BHK, this phrase is omitted in the hexaplaric recension of the Septuagint.

and all things (Hebrew WKL, ve-KHOL). According to BHK, we should instead read and from all things (WMKL, umi-KHOL), following the Samaritan Pentateuch, Septuagint, and Peshitta.

crawl. I render forms of rmś with corresponding forms of crawl. However, some translations (archaically) use creep, a term which now has connotations of sneakiness that do not reflect what the Hebrew term meant. It seems to denote small animals in particular, and according to SDBH refers to “small animals with short or no legs”.

(7:9) God (Hebrew Elohim). According to BHK, one Masoretic manuscript, along with the Samaritan Pentateuch, Septuagint, some manuscripts of the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, and the Vulgate, all read Yahweh instead of God. Driver recommends reading Yahweh here.

10 Seven days passed, and the waters of the deluge were on the earth. 11 In the sixth hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of the sky were opened. 12 The rain was on the earth forty days and forty nights.

(7:11) in the second month, on the seventeenth day. According to Driver, this likely refers to the time of the year, not to months and days as reckoned from Noah's birthday, because the Priestly source consistently counts date from a new year in the month of Aviv. Driver gives for comparison "the Babylonian story ... according to Berossus", according to which the flood "began on the 15th of Daisos (=June)."

(7:11) seventeenth. The Septuagint reads “twenty-seventh” (Kittel, NETS).

deep: Hebrew tehom, which appears in the creation story as the primeval ocean from which land was separated. Because this story is an ‘uncreation,’ if you will, the world returns to a watery state unsuitable for life. Where the Hebrew reads great deep (tehom rabbah), the Septuagint omits the word “great.”

windows of the sky: In the Genesis 1 creation story, the solid sky-dome held back the waters of the mythical ocean above. In the Flood story, the sky ceases to perform the important function of holding back those waters.

(7:12) rain. Hebrew gešem, which according to Driver refers specifically to heavy rain.

13 On that very day Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, came into the ark; 14 they and all the various kinds of wild animals, and all the various kinds of domestic animals, and all the various kinds of crawling things that crawl on the land, and all the various kinds of flying things, every bird, every wing.

(7:13) On that very day. On which very day? The story suddenly backtracks. The story told in verses 6-12 now gets largely repeated, for no obvious reason, in verses 13-18. For a peek at how the text could have gotten this way, see here.

with them. According to Kittel, we should read “with him,” following the Septuagint and the edition Urmiensis (1852) of the Peshitta.

came into. The entry into the ark has already been narrated in verses 7-9. The previous entry is that narrated by the Priestly source, while 13-16 represent the entry according to the Yahwist.

(7:14) they. This word is omitted by the Septuagint.

all the various kinds of flying flying things, every bird, every wing. This three-fold repetition (Hebrew wkl hʿwp lmynhw kl ṣpwr kl knp, read ve-KHOL ha-OPH lemi-NE-hu kol tsi-POR kol ka-NAF) strikes me as odd and a bit awkward. The KJV translates it in a somewhat less repetitive way: every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort, where “wing” becomes “sort” to lessen the awkwardness, I imagine. Depending on how one takes knp, Dillmann suggested two possible renderings. One rendering: take knp as meaning wing or feather, taking kl ṣpwr kl knp__, then, as every bird of every wing (feather), a restatement of the phrase all the various kinds of flying things. The second rendering: ʿwp is a general word for flying things (both birds and insects) while ṣpwr is specifically birds. Take knp to mean flying insects, and you get all the various kinds of flying things: every bird and every flying insect.

 kl ṣpwr kl knp is omitted by the Septuagint.

15 And they came to Noah, to the ark, two by two, of all flesh in which is the breath of life. 16 And those that came in were male and female; of all flesh they came to him just as God had commanded him. And Yahweh shut the door behind him.

16 Note the switch: from “God” to “Yahweh.” According to Dillmann, the second half of the verse, containing “Yahweh,” shows the anthropomorphism typical of the Jahwist source. Dillmann says that And Yahweh shut the door behind him was found in front of verse 12 in the Jahwist source.

17 And the deluge was forty days on the earth, and the waters multiplied, and they lifted up the ark high up off the earth. 18 The waters prevailed and multiplied greatly on the earth, and the ark moved across the surface of the water. 19 The waters prevailed exceedingly high on the earth, and all the tall mountains under the sky were covered.

(7:17) forty days. Kittel raises the possibility that this is a later addition to the verse. The Septuagint reads forty days and forty nights.

exceedingly high: literally very very much (Hebrew mʾd mʾd, pronounced me-OD me-OD).

mountains. The Hebrew word is hrym (ha-RIM, plural of hr, har) and it is true that hr is used more broadly than the English mountain, including the “hill-country” of Judah for example, in this verse it should be translated as “mountain,” because “hill” would imply that the verse only has in mind hills as opposed to mountains. But the phrase “all the tall hrym under the sky” clearly intends to include all the mountains. To tell a tale of a worldwide flood destroying “all the tall hills in the whole world” simply doesn’t jive with the logic of the story. So the King James Version’s “all the high hills” is unfortunate (at least today).

20 Fifteen cubits upward the waters prevailed, and the mountains were covered.

After verse 19 related that the mountains were covered, why does 20 raise the waters another fifteen cubits, specifically? Both Dillmann and Driver explain it this way: The ark, according to 6:15, is thirty cubits tall. If the flood is to be just tall enough for the ark to move over the tallest mountain-tops, and on the assumption that the ark is half-submerged, then we need another fifteen cubits of water to let the ark move freely. Then, as soon as the waters start to recede, the ark will immediately come to rest on the top of the Ararat range, presumably the tallest mountains in the world in the author’s view.

For those who try to square Genesis with science, this is a tricky problem. Mount Everest is 29,029 feet above sea level. Add fifteen cubits, and you need enough water to raise the sea level 29,041 feet above where it is now all around the world. Certainly there’s not enough water in the atmosphere to produce that much rain. The Bible’s theory about this is that there is a massive amount of water kept above the sky, and that holes in the solid sky-dome allowed that water to pour down. As most modern creationists do not believe in the Bible’s model of an above-sky ocean held back by a solid sky-dome, but they still insist on believing the Bible about the flood, they’ve had to come up with a variety of creative solutions, none of them reasonable. The solutions are simple. Either abandon trying to square the flood narrative with science (and try to deal with whatever theological questions that raises) or else accept the flood narrative at its word, and believe in a solid sky-dome holding back the great blue ocean of the sky.

21 All flesh expired which crawled upon the earth: among flying creatures, and domestic animals, and among wild animals, and among all the swarming things that swarm upon the earth, and all humanity. 22 Everything that had the breath of the spirit of life in its nostrils, all that was on dry land, died. 23 He wiped out all beings which were on the ground: from humans, to domestic animals, to crawling things, to birds of the sky. They were destroyed from the earth, and only Noah and those who were with him in the ark survived.

(7:21) expired. As in verse 17 (Driver).

(7:22) breath of the spirit of life. According to Driver, this expression occurs only here, "being a combination of the phrase of J (ii. 7) with that of P (vi. 17, vii. 15)." Driver thinks the word "spirit" is a later addition to this verse.

(7:23) He wiped out. In Hebrew, this is an active verb (wayyimah, a qal verb) and the implied subject is God. all beings takes the object marker (et) indicating that it is the object of the sentence. If it were pointed differently (wayyimmah, a nifal verb) one could read it as passive. Then you would get something like the KJV’s were destroyed instead of he destroyed. The passive interpretation is followed by KJV, NIV, RV, YLT. You’ll find the active interpretation in NLT, ESV, NASB, Holman, NET.

all beings. This is the (relatively) uncommon noun yequm mentioned in verse 4 (see the note there), and not the more common hay “living thing.” Most translations translate yqwm here as “living things,” which is fine as far as giving the gist. I simply chose a different word because the Hebrew word is different from the usual one.

24 The waters prevailed over the earth one hundred fifty days.

Here we have the Priestly source’s account of how long the flood lasted (150 days). In the Jahwist’s version (verse 17), the duration is 40 days. And, finally, in the present form of the text, various lengths of time are all awkwardly put together to create a flood a little over a year in length (compare 8:13-14 with 7:11).