World English Bible · Before the nations
Genesis 8
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remembered , all the animals, and all the livestock that were with him in the ship; and made a wind to pass over the earth. The waters subsided. The deep's fountains and windows were also stopped, and the from was restrained. The waters continually receded from the earth. After the end of one hundred fifty days the waters receded. The ship rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on mountains. 5The waters receded continually until the tenth month. In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were visible. At the end of forty days, opened the window of the ship which he had made, and he sent out a raven. It went back and forth, until the waters were dried up from the earth. He himself sent out a to see if the waters were abated from the surface of the ground, but the found no place to rest her foot, and she returned into the ship to him, for the waters were on the surface of the whole earth. He put out his hand, and took her, and brought her to him into the ship. He waited yet another seven days; and again he sent the out of the ship. The came back to him at evening and, behold, in her was a freshly plucked olive leaf. So knew that the waters were abated from the earth. He waited yet another seven days, and sent out the ; and she didn't return to him any more. In the six hundred first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth. removed the covering of the ship, and looked. He saw that the surface of the ground was dry. In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry. 15 spoke to , saying, "Go out of the ship, you, your wife, your sons, and your sons' wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of , including birds, livestock, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply on the earth." went out, with his sons, his wife, and his sons' wives with him. 19Every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, whatever moves on the earth, after their families, went out of the ship. built an to , and took of every clean animal, and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the . smelled the pleasant aroma. said in , "I will not again the ground any more for man's sake because the imagination of man's is evil from his youth. I will never again strike every living thing, as I have done. While the earth , time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night will not cease."
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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