Genesis 8:14

Summary

Genesis 8:14 records a precise date — the twenty-seventh day of the second month — on which ha'aretz ("the earth", H0776G) reached a state of complete dryness after the flood waters had receded. The verse closes the flood narrative's chronological framework with a specific calendrical notation.

Key words

• chodesh ("month", H2320G) — masculine singular noun, appearing twice to frame the date (first with the ordinal "second," then repeated after the day-count, a common construction in Hebrew date formulas).
• sheni ("second", H8145) — masculine singular ordinal number, modifying chodesh and marking this as the second month of the year in the narrative's reckoning.
• shiv'ah ("seven", H7651) and 'esrim ("twenty", H6242) — cardinal numbers joined by the conjunction ve- ("and"), together forming "twenty-seven" through additive juxtaposition rather than a single compound numeral.
• yavshah ("was dry", H3001) — qal perfect, third person feminine singular, agreeing grammatically with ha'aretz. The qal stem here expresses a stative condition — the earth being/becoming dry — rather than an action performed upon it by an external agent.
• aretz ("earth", H0776G) — feminine singular noun, the grammatical subject of yavshah, appearing with the definite article ha-.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence follows the standard biblical date formula: preposition + article + noun (u-va-chodesh, "and in the month") + ordinal (ha-sheni, "the second"), followed by the day-count introduced by be- ("on/in"), with the numeral built from shiv'ah ("seven") joined to 'esrim ("twenty") by ve-, and closed by a second mention of chodesh ("of the month") with the preposition la-. This repetition of chodesh is typical of Hebrew date notation, bracketing the day-number between the month reference given at the start and repeated at the end.

The main clause, yavshah ha'aretz ("the earth was dry"), places the verb before its subject, following normal Hebrew verb-subject word order. Because yavshah is a qal perfect from a root describing dryness as a state, the clause reads as a simple assertion of completed condition — the earth had reached dryness — without indicating an agent or process by which this happened.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the verb as ἐξηράνθη, an aorist passive ("was dried"), and the Vulgate similarly uses arefacta est ("was dried," passive perfect). Both Greek and Latin versions employ passive constructions, which can imply an unstated external cause, where the Hebrew qal yavshah expresses a stative condition of the subject itself rather than passive voice.