World English Bible · Before the nations
Genesis 7
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said to , "Come with all of your household into the ship, for I have seen your before me in this generation. You shall take seven pairs of every clean animal with you, the male and his female. Of the animals that are not clean, take two, the male and his female. 3Also of the birds of , seven and seven, male and female, to keep alive on the surface of all the earth. In seven days, I will cause it to on the earth for forty days and forty nights. I will destroy every living thing that I have made from the surface of the ground." did everything that commanded him. was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came on the earth. went into the ship with his sons, his wife, and his sons' wives, because of the floodwaters. 8Clean animals, animals, birds, and everything that creeps on the ground went by pairs to into the ship, male and female, as commanded . After the seven days, the floodwaters came on the earth. In the six hundredth year of life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and windows opened. It rained on the earth forty days and forty nights. In the same day , and , , and —the sons of —and wife and the three wives of his sons with them, entered into the ship— they, and every animal after its kind, all the livestock after their kind, every creeping thing that creeps on the earth after its kind, and every bird after its kind, every bird of every sort. Pairs from with the breath of life in them went into the ship to . Those who went in, went in male and female of , as commanded him; then shut him in. The flood was forty days on the earth. The waters increased, and lifted up the ship, and it was lifted up above the earth. The waters rose, and increased greatly on the earth; and the ship floated on the surface of the waters. The waters rose very high on the earth. All the high mountains that were under the whole sky were covered. The waters rose fifteen higher, and the mountains were covered. that moved on the earth, including birds, livestock, animals, every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every man. All on the dry land, in whose nostrils was the breath of of life, . Every living thing was destroyed that was on the surface of the ground, including man, livestock, creeping things, and birds of . They were destroyed from the earth. Only was left, and those who were with him in the ship. The waters flooded the earth one hundred fifty days.
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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