Genesis 7

1 Then the LORD said to Noah, “ Go into the ark, you and all your family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. 2 You are to take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate; a pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate; 3 and seven pairs of every kind of bird of the air, male and female, to preserve their offspring on the face of all the earth. 4 For seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living thing I have made.” 5 And Noah did all that the LORD had commanded him. 6 Now Noah was 600 years old when the floodwaters came upon the earth. 7 And Noah and his wife, with his sons and their wives, entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. 8 The clean and unclean animals, the birds, and everything that crawls along the ground 9 came to Noah to enter the ark, two by two, male and female, as God had commanded Noah. 10 And after seven days the floodwaters came upon the earth. 11 In the six hundredth year of Noah ’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month, all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And the rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights. 13 On that very day Noah entered the ark, along with his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and his wife, and the three wives of his sons — 14 they and every kind of wild animal, livestock, crawling creature, bird, and winged creature. 15 They came to Noah to enter the ark, two by two of every creature with the breath of life. 16 And they entered, the male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah. Then the LORD shut him in. 17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and the waters rose and lifted the ark high above the earth. 18 So the waters continued to surge and rise greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the waters. 19 Finally, the waters completely inundated the earth, so that all the high mountains under all the heavens were covered. 20 The waters rose and covered the mountaintops to a depth of fifteen cubits. 21 And every living thing that moved upon the earth perished — birds, livestock, animals, every creature that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind. 22 Of all that was on dry land, everything that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. 23 And every living thing on the face of the earth was destroyed — man and livestock, crawling creatures and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth, and only Noah and those with him in the ark remained. 24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth for 150 days.

✦ What the text says

## Summary Genesis 7 narrates the command to Noah to enter the ark with his family and paired animals, the onset of the flood on a precisely dated day, the rising of the waters until they covered the highest mountains, and the death of "all flesh" outside the ark. The chapter ends with the waters "prevailing" over the earth for one hundred fifty days. ## Key words - *tevah* ("ark", H8392) — feminine singular noun, the vessel into which Noah, his family, and the animals repeatedly "come" (*bo'*, H0935G), the verb used both for entering (v.1, 7, 9, 13, 15) and for the flood's arrival. - *mabbul* ("flood", H3999) — masculine singular noun with the definite article throughout, always paired with *mayim* ("waters", H4325G) as the grammatical subject of the destructive action. - *tzaddiq* ("righteous", H6662) — masculine singular adjective, the quality Yahweh states he has "seen" (*ra'iti*, H7200G, qal perfect) in Noah, using a verb of perception rather than one of judgment or declaration. - *shivah shivah* ("seven, seven", H7651 doubled) — the repeated cardinal number functions distributively ("seven pairs each," "seven of each"), a Hebrew construction that repeats the numeral rather than using a distinct word for "each." - *yimach* ("he wiped out", H4229A) — qal narrative form of the root also appearing as *machiti* ("I will wipe", v.4); its recurrence (v.4, v.23) frames the flood as an act of erasure bracketing the whole account. ## What the text says The chapter is carried by a chain of narrative (*wayyiqtol*) verb forms — *vayyo'mer* ("and he said"), *vayyavo'* ("and he went/came"), *vayyigberu* ("and they increased") — which sequence the events one after another without needing separate temporal markers; this vav-consecutive pattern is the backbone of the Hebrew narrative structure and cannot be fully replicated by English coordination alone. The dating formula in verse 11 ("in the six-hundredth year... in the second month, on the seventeenth day") uses construct chains (*shenat*, "year of"; *chayyei-Noach*, "life of Noah") that tie the flood's onset to Noah's biography with legal-document precision, while the passive niphal verbs *nivqe'u* ("were split open", H1234) and *niftachu* ("were opened", H6605A) present the "springs of the deep" and "floodgates of heaven" as acted upon rather than acting. The description of destruction in verses 21–23 piles up prepositional phrases ("from human to animal, to creeping thing, to bird of the he

This explanation describes the text using linguistic data; it adds no doctrine or confessional interpretation.