Genesis8chapter 8

Genesis 8:1

God remembered Noah: To say God remembered is not a statement about forgetting. The verb marks the moment God moves on a promise already made, and Genesis uses it again of Abraham when Lot is pulled out of Sodom at 19:29 and of Rachel when her barrenness ends at 30:22. The wind God sends over the waters is the same Hebrew word as the Spirit moving on the face of the deep in 1:2, and what follows it is dry land appearing again, as it did on the third day.

Genesis 8:2-3

Both sources are shut at once, the deep beneath and the windows above, and they are the same two openings named when the flood began at 7:11. In the Hebrew the waters go and return, a slow withdrawal rather than a sudden drop. The going down takes close to twice as long as the coming up.

Genesis 8:4-5

The word translated rested carries the root that stands behind Noah's own name, and that root sounds through this chapter three times, here, in the dove that finds no rest at verse 9, and in the savour of rest at verse 21. The ark settles months before the tops of the mountains come into view, so the family floats over a drowned world without being able to see it. Ararat in the Hebrew names a region rather than a single peak, and the dating stays exact to the day, as it has since 7:11.

Genesis 8:6-7

At the end of forty days Noah opens the window he had built into the ark himself, and forty days is the span the rain fell at 7:12. He sends a raven, a bird the law will later name among the unclean, and it goes to and fro without settling and without bringing word back. Nothing is learned from a bird content to live off what the flood left behind.

Genesis 8:8-9

The dove is the opposite of the raven, a clean bird that will not light on carrion, so what she does carries information a raven's wandering cannot. She finds no rest for the sole of her foot, the same root that had just said the ark rested, and Noah puts out his hand and pulls her in. Moses uses that phrase again of Israel scattered among the nations with no rest for the sole of the foot.

Genesis 8:10-12

Noah waits in sevens, and sevens have governed this account since the seven days of warning at 7:4 and the clean beasts taken aboard by sevens at 7:2. The dove comes back at evening with an olive leaf freshly plucked, which says that something is growing again rather than only that ground is exposed. On the third sending she does not come back at all, and that silence is the answer he had been waiting for.

Genesis 8:13-14

Noah removes the covering, looks out, and sees dry ground on the first day of the first month, which reads like a new year opening on a new world. He then waits nearly two more months before the earth is called dried. Counting from the day he went in at 7:11, the older commentators reckon he was shut inside for a complete solar year.

Genesis 8:15-16

God had shut him in at 7:16, and God is the one who opens the matter now by speaking. Noah had seen dry ground more than two months earlier and had not moved, which is why the commentators read this as patience rather than delay. Peter looks back on the eight souls carried safely through the water and calls the whole scene a figure of baptism.

Genesis 8:17-19

Breed abundantly, be fruitful and multiply are the words spoken over the creatures on the fifth day at 1:22 and over man at 1:28, and God will say them to Noah himself at 9:1. The book restarts the world in the same language it used to start it. What differs is that this beginning is handed to a family that has watched the judgment fall.

Genesis 8:20

This is the first altar named in Scripture, and the first recorded act of the new world is worship. The clean beasts are available because seven of each were taken aboard at 7:2, so provision made before the flood was made for this. The altar now becomes the mark of the men who walk with God, Abram at Shechem and Bethel in 12:7-8, Isaac at Beersheba in 26:25, and Jacob at Bethel in 35:7.

Genesis 8:21-22

The Hebrew behind sweet savour is a savour of rest, the same root that brought the ark to rest and gives Noah his name, and Paul uses the Greek of that phrase for Christ offering himself a sweetsmelling savour to God. Then God gives his reason for never sending another flood, and it is the charge that brought this one, that the imagination of man's heart is evil, spoken at 6:5 as the ground of judgment and here as the ground of mercy. Seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter are set to hold while the earth remains, which Jeremiah later calls God's covenant of the day and of the night.