King James Version · Before the nations
Genesis 7
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And said unto , Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen before me in this generation. Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of that are not clean by two, the male and his female. 3Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep alive upon the of all the earth. For yet seven days, and I will cause it to upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the of the earth. And did according unto all that commanded him. And was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth. And went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood. 8Of clean , and of that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth, There went in two and two unto into the ark, the male and the female, as had commanded . And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of ’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of were opened. And the was upon the earth forty days and forty nights. In the selfsame day entered , and , and , and , the sons of , and ’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark; They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort. And they went in unto into the ark, two and two of , wherein is the breath of life. And they that went in, went in male and female of , as had commanded him: and shut him in. And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole , were covered. Fifteen upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, . And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the ; and they were destroyed from the earth: and only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark. And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Before the nations, 2600 BC to 2100 BC ›
The opening chapters, from creation to Babel, told on a scale that covers the whole earth before the story narrows to one family.
- The neighbours' own stories
- Mesopotamia told its own versions of these events. Atrahasis and the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh tell of a flood, a survivor, an ark, and birds sent out to find land. Enuma Elish tells of a world made from a defeated sea. The resemblances are close enough that scholars have argued about them for a century and a half, and the differences are where the argument gets interesting: Genesis has no quarrel among gods, no accidental humanity, and a flood sent for moral reasons rather than because people were noisy.
- Babel and the ziggurat
- A tower with its top in the heavens, built of brick and bitumen on a plain in Shinar, describes a Mesopotamian ziggurat exactly. Dozens were built, the best known at Ur and Babylon, of mud brick because southern Mesopotamia has no stone. The detail about brick instead of stone is the kind of thing someone writes who has actually seen one.
- The wider world
- If these chapters are placed anywhere in ordinary chronology, the surrounding centuries are the age of the Egyptian pyramids, the Sumerian city-states, the Indus Valley cities, and the first phase of Stonehenge. Writing was a few centuries old and existed in two places on earth.
All of Genesis