Chapter 6

The Flood

(Genesis 7-8:15)

There is a grandeur and majestic simplicity about the scriptural account of “The Flood” which equally challenges and defies comparison. Twice only throughout the Old Testament is the event again referred to—each time in the grave, brief language befitting its solemnity. In Psalm 29:10 we read: “Jehovah sitteth upon the flood; yea, Jehovah sitteth King for ever,”—a sort of Old Testament version of “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and for ever.” Then, if we may carry out the figure, there is an evangelical application of this Old Testament history in Isaiah 54:9, 10: “For this is as the waters of Noah unto Me: for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth; so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee, nor rebuke thee. For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but My kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of My peace be removed, saith Jehovah that hath mercy on thee.”BHOTV1 37.1

The first point in the narrative of “The Flood” which claims our attention is an emphatic mention, twice repeated, of Noah’s absolute obedience, “according unto all that Jehovah commanded him.” (Genesis 6:22; 7:5) Next, we mark a “solemn pause of seven days” before the flood actually commenced, when “all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened;” in other words, the floodgates alike of earth and heaven thrown wide open. The event happened “in the sixth hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month;” that is, if we calculate the season according to the beginning of the Hebrew civil year, about the middle or end of our month of November.BHOTV1 37.2

Then Noah and his wife, his three sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—and their wives, and all the animals, having come into the ark, “Jehovah shut him in,” and for forty days and forty nights “the rain was upon the earth,” while, at the same time, the fountains of the great deep were broken up. The flood continued for one hundred and fifty days, ^{1Genesis 8:3, 4, compared with 7:11, seems to imply that the forty days of rain must be included in these one hundred and fifty days, and not added to them.} when it began to subside.BHOTV1 37.3

The terrible catastrophe is thus described: “And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.”BHOTV1 37.4

The remarks of a recent writer on this subject are every way so appropriate that we here reproduce them: “The narrative is vivid and forcible, though entirely wanting in that sort of description which in a modern historian or poet would have occupied the largest space. We see nothing of the death-struggle; we hear not the cry of despair; we are not called upon to witness the frantic agony of husband and wife, and parent and child, as they fled in terror before the rising waters. Nor is a word said of the sadness of the one righteous man who, safe himself, looked upon the destruction which he could not avert. But an impression is left upon the mind with peculiar vividness from the very simplicity of the narrative, and it is that of utter desolation. This is heightened by the repetition and contrast of two ideas. On the one hand, we are reminded no less than six times in the narrative (Genesis 6, 7, 8) who the tenants of the ark were, the favored and rescued few; and, on the other hand, the total and absolute blotting out of everything else is not less emphatically dwelt upon” (Genesis 6:13, 17; 7:4, 21-23). ^{2Mr. Perowne, in Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible, art. “Noah.”}BHOTV1 38.1

We will not take from the solemnity of the impressive stillness, amid which Scripture shows us the lonely ark floating on the desolate waters that have buried earth and all that belonged to it, ^{3Mr. Perowne quotes from Lyell’s Principles of Geology, as an illustrative instance of the effects of an inundation, of course, on quite a different scale, “what occurred in the Runn of Cutch, on the eastern area of the Indus, in 1819, when the sea flowed in, and in a few hours converted a tract of land, two thousand square miles in area, into an inland sea or lagoon.”} by attempting to describe the scenes that must have ensued. Only the impression is left on our minds that the words “Jehovah shut him in,” may be intended to show that Noah, even if he would, could not have given help to his perishing contemporaries.BHOTV1 38.2

At the end of the one hundred and fifty days it is said, in the peculiarly touching language of Scripture, “God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark.” A drying wind was made to pass over the earth, the flood “was restrained,” “and the waters returned from the earth continually.” On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, that is, exactly five months after Noah had entered it, the ark was found to be resting “upon the mountains of Ararat,”—not necessarily upon either the highest peak, which measures seventeen thousand two hundred and fifty feet, nor yet, perhaps, upon the second highest, which rises to about twelve thousand feet, but upon that mountain range. Still the waters decreased; and seventy-three days later, or on the first day of the tenth month, the mountain-tops all around became visible.BHOTV1 39.1

Forty days more, and Noah “sent forth a raven,” which, finding shelter on the mountain-tops, and food from the floating carcasses, did not return into the ark. At the end of seven days more “he sent forth a dove from him to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground,” that is, from the low ground in the valleys. “But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark.” Yet another week, and he sent her forth a second time, when she returned again in the evening, bearing in her mouth an olive-leaf. It is a remarkable fact, as bearing indirect testimony to this narrative, that the olive has been ascertained to bear leaves under water. A third time Noah put forth the messenger of peace, at the end of another week, and she “returned not again unto him any more.”BHOTV1 39.2

“No picture in natural history,” says the writer already quoted, “was ever drawn with more exquisite beauty and fidelity than this. It is admirable alike for its poetry and its truth.” On the first day of the first month, in the sixth hundredth and first year, “the waters were dried up from off the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry. And in the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, was the earth dried,”—just one year and ten days after Noah had entered the ark.BHOTV1 39.3

Thus far the scriptural narrative. It has so often been explained that the object of the Bible is to give us the history of the kingdom of God, not to treat of curious or even scientific questions, that we can dismiss a matter too often discussed of late in an entirely unbecoming spirit, in these words of a recent writer: ^{4Dr. Blaikie, Bible History, p. 29.} “It is a question among theologians and men of science whether the flood was absolutely universal, or whether it was universal only in the sense of extending over all the part of the world then inhabited. We do not here enter into this controversy; but we may notice the remarkable fact that the district lying to the east of Ararat, where the ark rested, bears traces of having at one time been under water. It is a peculiarly depressed region, lying lower than the districts around, and thus affording peculiar facilities for such a submersion.”BHOTV1 40.1

But there is another matter connected with the flood so marked and striking as to claim our special attention. It is that the remembrance of the flood has been preserved in the traditions of so many nations, so widely separated and so independent of each other, that it is impossible to doubt that they have all been derived from one and the same original source. As might be expected, they contain many legendary details, and they generally fix the locality of the flood in their own lands; but these very particulars mark them as corruptions of the real history recorded in the Bible, and carried by the different nations into the various countries where they settled. Mr. Perowne has grouped these traditions into those of Western Asia, including the Chaldean, the Phenician, that of the so-called “Sibylline Oracles,” the Phrygian, the Syrian, and the Armenian stories; then those of Eastern Asia, including the Persian, Indian, and Chinese; and, thirdly, those of the American nations—the Cherokee, and the various tribes of Mexican Indians, with which—strange though it may seem—he groups those of the Fiji Islands. To these he adds, as a fourth cycle, the similar traditions of the Greek nations. But the most interesting of all these traditions is the Chaldean or Babylonian, which deserves more than merely passing notice.BHOTV1 40.2

Though it needs not such indirect confirmations to convince us of the truth of the narratives in the Bible, it is very remarkable how all historical investigations, when really completed and rightly applied, confirm the exactness of what is recorded in the Holy Scriptures. But their chief value to us must always be this, that they tell us of that Ark which alone rides on the waters of the deluge, and preserves for ever safe them who are “shut in” there by the hand of Jehovah.BHOTV1 41.1