Kejadian 7:4-11

7:4 For in seven days ¹  I will cause it to rain ²  on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the ground every living thing that I have made.”

7:5 And Noah did all ³  that the Lord commanded him.

7:6 Noah ⁴  was 600 years old when the floodwaters engulfed ⁵  the earth. 7:7 Noah entered the ark along with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives because ⁶  of the floodwaters. 7:8 Pairs ⁷  of clean animals, of unclean animals, of birds, and of everything that creeps along the ground, 7:9 male and female, came into the ark to Noah, ⁸  just as God had commanded him. ⁹  7:10 And after seven days the floodwaters engulfed the earth. ¹⁰ 

7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month – on that day all the fountains of the great deep ¹¹  burst open and the floodgates of the heavens ¹²  were opened.

[7:4]  ¹ tn Heb “for seven days yet,” meaning “after [or “in”] seven days.”

[7:4]  ² tn The Hiphil participle מַמְטִיר (mamtir, “cause to rain”) here expresses the certainty of the act in the imminent future.

[7:5]  ³ tn Heb “according to all.”

[7:6]  ⁴ tn Heb “Now Noah was.” The disjunctive clause (conjunction + subject + predicate nominative after implied “to be” verb) provides background information. The age of Noah receives prominence.

[7:6]  ⁵ tn Heb “and the flood was water upon.” The disjunctive clause (conjunction + subject + verb) is circumstantial/temporal in relation to the preceding clause. The verb הָיָה (hayah) here carries the nuance “to come” (BDB 225 s.v. הָיָה). In this context the phrase “come upon” means “to engulf.”

[7:7]  ⁶ tn The preposition מִן (min) is causal here, explaining why Noah and his family entered the ark.

[7:8]  ⁷ tn Heb “two two” meaning “in twos.”

[7:9]  ⁸ tn The Hebrew text of vv. 8-9a reads, “From the clean animal[s] and from the animal[s] which are not clean and from the bird[s] and everything that creeps on the ground, two two they came to Noah to the ark, male and female.”

[7:9]  ⁹ tn Heb “Noah”; the pronoun has been used in the translation for stylistic reasons.

[7:10]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “came upon.”

[7:11]  ¹¹ tn The Hebrew term תְּהוֹם (tÿhom, “deep”) refers to the watery deep, the salty ocean – especially the primeval ocean that surrounds and underlies the earth (see Gen 1:2).

[7:11]  sn The watery deep. The same Hebrew term used to describe the watery deep in Gen 1:2 (תְּהוֹם, tihom) appears here. The text seems to picture here subterranean waters coming from under the earth and contributing to the rapid rise of water. The significance seems to be, among other things, that in this judgment God was returning the world to its earlier condition of being enveloped with water – a judgment involving the reversal of creation. On Gen 7:11 see G. F. Hasel, “The Fountains of the Great Deep,” Origins 1 (1974): 67-72; idem, “The Biblical View of the Extent of the Flood,” Origins 2 (1975): 77-95.

[7:11]  ¹² sn On the prescientific view of the sky reflected here, see L. I. J. Stadelmann, The Hebrew Conception of the World (AnBib), 46.