Genesis 7

Genesis 7 - Thursday 31MAR11

• 1 And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.

Noah was reckoned by God as righteous, despite the absence of the Mosaic Law by which to measure that righteousness. Thus it is possible for man to please God without the Law or Christ, because Noah did it.

• 2-3 Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

This is where God amends his original commandment for Noah to gather animals by twos. Now he wants clean animals and birds to be loaded into the ark by sevens. This is a problem because as St. Paul says much later, no animal is unclean in itself. But there are animals which are ritually unclean according to the Levitical laws, which come much later than Noah. Clearly, what we have with this sudden obsession with sevens and ritual purity is a retelling of the Noah story by the post-Exilic priesthood, and sometimes the seams between the original source material still shows.

• 4 For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

And oh, by the way, Noah has seven days to round up the extra five animals of the clean species and the birds, because that's when the Flood is scheduled.

• 5-7 And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him. And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth. And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.

Up to this point, Noah did everything that God told him to do, but in the very next two verses, Noah clearly disobeys God:

• 8-9 Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth, there went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah.

No, that's wrong, Noah, God said seven of the clean beasts and fowls, and two of everything else. Apparently Noah thought the last-minute change by Yahweh was silly, so he went back to the original plan, and loaded the ark with the animals he already had, whether they were clean or unclean.

Friday 01APR11

• 10-12 And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

When the Earth was created, the firmament (heaven) divided the waters above from the waters below. Now a set of windows were opened in this solid dome, which allowed all the waters above the earth to drain out. Additionally, all the waters below the Earth bubbled up to the surface.

• 13-16 In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark; They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort. And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life. And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.

These verses are a pure repetition of verses 7-9, affirming that they went in "two and two of all flesh" rather than by sevens for some of them.

• 17-20 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.

When the flood came, the waters prevailed to the top of the highest mountain, plus another fifteen cubits (23 feet) above that. Mount Everest is 5.5 miles above sea level. The Earth has an area of 200 million square miles. This means the Flood required 1.1 billion cubic miles of water. This is not a problem, because the water was pre-positioned during Creation. The problem comes later, explaining where the water went.

• 21-23 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.

The strata where we find fossils of dinosaurs are explained as layers of mud laid down by the flood, and the progression of animals, where we find the highest-developed animals higher in the strata is explained by the mechanism of animals competing for the high ground, the weaker and less successful animals would have had to settle for the flats and they would have been buried first. There is a big problem right there: At a certain level of the strata, we find trilobites. And they have the same frequency no matter if they are dug up in Kansas City or in Spokane or in Australia. People who compress 300 million years of evolution into as many days fail to see the implication of that: the antediluvian world must have been wall-to-wall trilobites, let alone chock full of all the other animals we find.

• 24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.

The flood lasted one hundred fifty days in Genesis 7:24, forty days in Genesis 7:17, and ten months in Genesis 8:5.