Genesis 7:12

Summary

Genesis 7:12 states that rain came upon the earth for a period of forty days and forty nights. The verse uses a simple narrative structure to mark the duration of the flood's rainfall.

Key words

• va-yHi ("and it was", H1961) — qal verb in narrative (wayyiqtol) form, the standard construction opening a new narrated event in Biblical Hebrew; here it signals the onset of the rain as a completed happening.
• Ha-Geshem ("the rain", H1653) — masculine singular noun with definite article, referring to a specific, known rain (the flood rain already introduced in the preceding narrative).
• ha-'Aretz ("the earth", H0776G) — feminine singular noun with definite article, the surface upon which the rain falls.
• 'ar.ba.'Im ("forty", H0705) — cardinal number, masculine plural form, repeated twice to modify both yom ("day", H3117G) and laylah ("night", H3915).
• ve-'ar.ba.'Im laylah ("and forty nights", H9002 + H0705 + H3915) — the second half of the paired time expression, joined by the conjunction ve ("and", H9002).

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built around the narrative verb va-yHi ("and it was", H1961), which introduces the clause as a sequential event in the flood story. The subject is ha-Geshem ("the rain", H1653), marked definite because it refers back to the rain already mentioned earlier in the narrative context. This rain is located 'al ha-'Aretz ("on the earth", H5921A + H0776G), a simple prepositional phrase indicating the surface affected.

The temporal extent is given through a paired numerical construction: 'ar.ba.'Im yom ("forty day[s]", H0705 + H3117G) ve-'ar.ba.'Im laylah ("and forty night[s]", H9002 + H0705 + H3915). Both yom and laylah appear in the singular form despite being modified by the plural cardinal number 'ar.ba.'Im ("forty", H0705) — a common pattern in Biblical Hebrew where singular nouns follow numbers above ten, understood distributively as "forty days" and "forty nights" rather than a single day and night. The repetition of 'ar.ba.'Im ("forty", H0705) for both units, rather than a single shared number, gives the phrase a balanced, formulaic rhythm typical of Hebrew narrative time expressions.

Differences between versions

The Septuagint text as given is truncated (κοντα νύκτας instead of a full τεσσεράκοντα νύκτας), but where legible it renders Geshem ("rain", H1653) as ὑετός and follows the same forty days/forty nights structure. The Vulgate renders the verb va-yHi ("and it was", H1961) as "facta est" ("was made/happened"), a passive-oriented phrasing, and translates Geshem as "pluvia" ("rain"), matching the Hebrew noun in sense and definiteness is not marked in Latin, which lacks articles.