Genesis7chapter 7

Genesis 7:1-3

God says come rather than go, which reads as an invitation into a place where he already is. The clean and unclean distinction is named here for the first time in Scripture, long before Leviticus 11 sets it down, and the seven pairs of the clean are what make sacrifice possible when the waters go down and Noah builds the first altar in the book at 8:20. Verse 3 states the purpose of the whole loading in four words, to keep seed alive, which is the business Genesis has been about since the promise of the seed in 3:15.

Genesis 7:4-5

A week stands between the announcement and the rain, with the ark loaded and the door open in plain sight of everyone. Forty days and forty nights appears here for the first time in the Bible, and the span afterwards becomes the settled measure of testing, from Moses on the mount to Israel in the wilderness to Christ in the desert. Verse 5 answers with the same formula chapter 6 closed on, that Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him.

Genesis 7:6-10

His age dates the flood to the year the genealogy of chapter 5 had been counting toward, and the years of that world are reckoned by the lives of the patriarchs rather than by the reigns of its rulers. The week passes, the loading finishes, and nobody outside the family comes. Peter calls Noah a preacher of righteousness, and the older writers read these seven days as the last space given for repentance, but nothing in the text says anyone took it.

Genesis 7:11-12

the fountains of the great deep: The water comes from below before it comes from above, and the text says both sources opened on the same day. Genesis 1 had divided the waters under the firmament from the waters above it on the second day, and here the great deep is broken up and the windows of heaven are opened together, so the division that made the world habitable is taken back. The account fixes the date to the day, the second month and the seventeenth day of Noah's six hundredth year, and 8:14 will date the going out the same way.

Genesis 7:13-16

The eight are named one at a time, Noah and his wife with Shem, Ham and Japheth and their three wives, and Peter counts them the same way, eight souls saved by water, and calls the ark a figure of baptism. Every nation in the table of chapter 10 comes out of the three sons named in this verse, and the line of promise runs on through Shem at 11:10, so the whole world after the flood is standing on this boat. Then the LORD shut him in, and the older writers would not leave that clause alone, since the act that sheltered the eight is the same act that closed the door on everyone else.

Genesis 7:17-18

The waters bear up the ark and lift it above the earth, and it goes upon the face of the waters without being steered anywhere. Genesis gives the ark no rudder, no sail and no oars, and nothing in these chapters has Noah doing anything once the door is shut but wait. The same rising water that drowned the world is what carried the eight.

Genesis 7:19-20

The waters rise until all the high hills under the whole heaven are covered, and the depth above their tops is given as fifteen cubits. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read that measurement over the mountain summits as language a local flood cannot carry, while other readers take the whole heaven as the whole sky in view and the earth as the world Noah knew. Peter treats the event as history on either reading, calling it the world that then was, being overflowed with water.

Genesis 7:21-24

The dying is stated and never described, with no scene of it anywhere in the chapter, and the single line of hope inside it is that Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark. Jesus took these days as the picture of his own coming, that they ate and drank and married until the day Noah entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came and took them all away. The chapter closes on a hundred and fifty days of standing water, and the next words in the book are that God remembered Noah, the same verb Genesis uses when God remembers Rachel at 30:22 and moves.