Bible Commentaries

THIRD SECTION

The Ark, and the Saved and Renewed Humanity

Genesis 8:1-19

1And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark; and God made a wind to pass over the earth and the waters assuaged.¹ 2The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained 3 And the waters returned² from off the earth continually [to go and return, חלוך ושוב]; and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated 4 And the ark rested³ in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the⁴ mountains of Ararat 5 And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen 6 And it came to pass at the end of forty days that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made 7 And he sent forth a raven which went to and fro⁵ until the waters were dried up from off the earth 8 Also he sent forth a dove from him to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground [הקלו, had become light or shallow, not had disappeared, as Lange says]. 9But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth; then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark 10 And he stayed (וַיָּחֶל) yet other seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark 11 And the dove came in to him in the evening; and lo, in her mouth was an olive-leaf plucked off; so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth 12 And he stayed [יְיָּחֶל Niphal] yet other seven days⁶ and sent forth the dove; which returned not again to him any more 13 And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dry 14 And in the second 15 month, on the seven-and-twentieth day of the month was the earth dried. And God16[Elohim] spake unto Noah, saying, Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons’ wives with thee 17 Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl and of cattle, and of every creeping thing, that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth 18 And Noah went forth, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him 19 Every beast, every creeping thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark.

EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL

1. Stages of the Flood as taken in their Order. a. To its highest point: 1. Seven days, the going in to the ark; 2. forty days of the flood-storm; 3. one hundred and ten days, thereupon, of steady rain, and of the steady rising of the flood—so in general one hundred and fifty days. Threefold grade of advance: 1. The ark is lifted up from the ground; 2. the ark’s going upon the face of the waters; 3. its rising fifteen cubits high above the mountains, b. To the disappearance of the waters: In the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, that is, after five months, or one hundred and fifty days, just as the waters begin to fall, the ark rests on Ararat. On the first day of the tenth month, that is, after two months and about twelve days (Knobel: seventy-two days after the settling of the ark), the mountain-peaks project⁷ above the surface of the water. After forty days Noah opens the window and lets fly the raven. Next goes forth the dove. It is not directly said how long after the flight of the raven was the first flight of the dove. The second flight of the dove, however, was seven other days after the first, and therefore it is inferred that there were seven days between the flight of the raven and that of the dove; the third flight, again, was seven days after the second. We must either reckon in here an unnamed portion of time, or the time between the flight of the raven and the flight of the first dove must have been longer than seven days. Hereupon follows the last section of time, from the first day of the first month to the seven-and-twentieth day of the following, or the period of the full drying of the earth. In the six hundred and first year, etc. Luther, following the Septuagint, and by way of explanation, adds, “of Noah’s age.”

2. Genesis 8:1-4. The first Decrease of the Flood to the Resting of the Ark upon Ararat. And God remembered Noah and every living thing.—God’s remembering must be understood in an emphatic sense. God has always remembered Noah; but now he remembers him in a special sense—that he may accomplish his deliverance. There comes a turn in the flood, and the ground of it lay in the government of God. To the rule of judgment upon the human world, succeeds the rule of compassion for the deliverance of Noah and humanity, as also of the animal-world. It is his compassion, not simply his grace. For God remembered also the beasts. Thus did he remember them all, as Elohim, in his most universal relation to the earth. Had there been a longer continuance of the flood, there would not only have been want in the ark, but the ark itself would have been destroyed. A wind must blow to disperse and dry up the flood, whilst, on the other side, the fountains of the flood were closed. With the shutting of the fountains of the deep, or with the restoring of the continental tranquillity of the earth, and of the equilibrium of the atmosphere, there ceases also the extraordinary rain; and besides, the windows of heaven were closed. It is an inexactness of the narration, but which gives it an unmistakable historic character, that the time of the flood’s advance is given as one hundred and fifty days, and that the point of time when the ark settles, and when, therefore, the actual sinking of the waters must have commenced, falls in like manner at the end of the one hundred and fifty days. For Noah, indeed, the first turning-point in the sinking of the waters, which had commenced already before the running out of the one hundred and fifty days, could not have been a matter of observation. For him, the first sure sign of the sinking of the waters was the grounding of the ark.—And the waters returned.—Here is the whole process preliminarily described—how the waters, in their undulations here and there, kept steadily settling more and more. Then follows the indication of the first decrease.—Upon the mountains of Ararat.—“אֵרָרָט is the name of a territory ( 2 Kings 19:37) which is mentioned Jeremiah 51:27, as a kingdom near to Minni (Armenia),—probably the middle province of the Armenian territory, which Moses of Chorene calls Arairad, Araratia. The mountains of Ararat are, doubtless, the mountain-group which rises from the plain of the Araxes in two high peaks, the Great Ararat, 16,254feet, and the Lesser, about12,000 feet, above the level of the sea. This landing-place of the ark is of the highest significance for the development of humanity, as it is to be renewed after the flood. Armenia, the fountain-land of the Paradise rivers, a ‘cool, airy, well-watered, insular mountain-tract,’ as it has been called, lies in the middle of the old continent. And Song of Solomon, in a special manner, does the mountain of Ararat lie nearly in the middle, not only of the Great African-Asiatic desert tract, but also of the inland or Mediterranean waters, extending from Gibraltar to the sea of Baikal,—at the same time occupying the middle point in the longest line of extension of the Caucasian race, and of the Indo-Germanic lines of language and mythology, whilst it is also the middle point of the greatest reach of land in the old world as measured from the Cape of Good Hope to Behring’s Straits—in fact, the most peculiar point on the globe, from whose heights the lines and tribes of people, as they went forth from the sons of Noah, might spread themselves to all the regions of the earth (compare Von Raumer, ‘Palestine’).” Keil. See also Delitzsch, p266. The Koran has wrongly placed the landing-place of Noah on the hill Judhi⁸ in the Kurd mountain-tract; the Samaritan version locates it on the mountains of Ceylon; the Sybillme books in Phrygia, in the native district of Marsyas. The Hindoo story of the flood names the Himalaya, the Greek Parnassus, as the landing-place of the delivered ancestor.” Knobel. Delitzsch and Keil agree in the supposition of the Armenian highlands.

3. Genesis 8:5-12. The time of the Signs of Deliverance, and of the increasing Hope, from the first Decrease until the Disappearance of the Flood. The first sign of deliverance was the resting of the ark upon Ararat. Now it continues still until the first day of the tenth month (Tammuz), or from seventy to seventy-three days, when there appears the second sign: the peaks of the Armenian highlands become visible; at all events, the ark, on their summit, had become free from the influence of the water. Noah, however, is not satisfied, until after forty days more, that the flood will not return; and then he opens the window (חַלּוֹן) of the sky-light (צֹהַר). Fresh light and air awaken, or rather gradually reanimate, the torpid animal-world, and Noah’s longing desire sends forth the raven through the opened window. (It is to be remarked that the ark had only one male raven, because from the unclean animals there was taken but one pair. From the staying out or returning of the raven Noah might, at all events, draw inferences; but this bird is noted for his appetite, that which makes all life in the ark strive for freedom. The raven, therefore, may be first ventured on this craving flight, since he can find food from the dead bodies left by the flood upon the mountains. “In the ancient world, the raven was regarded as a prophetic bird, and was therefore held sacred to Apollo. Something of this appears ( 1 Kings 17:4; 1 Kings 17:6) in his connection with the prophet Elias. He was thus esteemed among the Arabians, who assumed to understand the voice and flight of the birds. Especially was he regarded as a prophet of the weather, as inferred from his flight and cry. Pliny describes him as a wild and forgetful bird,⁹ who forgets to come back to his nest. And so he came not back to the ark; but Noah could know from this that the earth was no longer wholly covered with water.” Knobel. We may refer here to the two ravens on the shoulders of Odin. Without returning into the ark, he flew here and there between the ark (to which he was bound by fear and sympathy, the attraction of his mate perhaps, and on the outside of which he could rest) and the emerging mountain-tops, where he found food and freedom.—And he sent forth the dove.—The raven lights everywhere; therefore his remaining out furnishes no proof of the drying of the lower places. But the dove lights upon the plains, and not in the slime and marsh; therefore does its flying abroad give information whether or no the plains are dry. The Septuagint translates מֵאִתּוֹ by ὀπίσω αὐτοῦ, the Vulgate, post eum, Luther correctly, from himself. (So the English translation, from him.) It is perhaps indicated that he had to drive it from him. The time of sending away is reckoned by Baumgarten, Knobel, and others (after Aben Ezra and Kimchi), as being seven days after the sending of the raven; because it is said, Genesis 8:10, he waited other seven days. The delicate dove finds no place fit for her lighting, because all the lower lands are yet covered, and so she turns back. And Noah drew her back again into the ark. The question may be asked: Since the top of Ararat was free from water, why did not Noah go out with the beasts? It is, however, a truthful characteristic that he did no such thing; since a hasty disturbance of the beasts might have yet brought the whole in danger of destruction. But the second sending forth of the dove, after seven other days, brings to him the fourth and fairest sign of deliverance: the dove returns with a fresh olive-leaf in its mouth. “וַיָּחֶל fut. Hiphil from חיל,¹⁰ to be in trouble, to wait painfully and longingly.” Delitzsch. “The olive-tree has green leaves all the year through, and appears to endure the water, since Theophrastus, Hist. Plant. 48, and Pliny, Hist. Nat. 13, 50, give an account of olive trees in the Red Sea. It comes early in Armenia (Strabo), though not on the heights of Ararat, but lower down, below the walnut, mulberry, and apricot tree, in the valleys on the south side (Ritter, “Geography,” 10. p920). The dove must, therefore, have made a wide flight in search of the plains, and on this account have just returned at evening time. This olive-leaf,—which was not something picked up on a mountain-peak, where it might have been floated by the water, but (טרף) something torn off, and, therefore, fresh plucked from the tree,—taught Noah what was the state of things in the earth below. It was the more fitting here, since the olive-branch was an emblem of peace ( 2 Maccabees 14:4; Dion, Halic, Virg, Liv.), and yet in the text it is not an olive-branch (Symm, Vulg.), but only an olive-leaf.” Knobel.—The sign gave intelligence that at least the lower olive-trees, in the lower ground, were above the water; the olive-loaf, moreover, in the mouth of the dove, was a fair sign of promise.—Yet seven other days.—This time the dove returns no more. The attraction of freedom and the new life outweighs the desire to return; in which it is presupposed that it is an attraction which the others will follow. “The dove is found also in the classical myths. According to Plutarch (De Solert. Animal. 13), Deucalion had a dove in the ark, which indicated bad weather by its return, and good weather by its onward flight.” Knobel. It was, in like manner, a prophetic bird at Dodona, according to Herodotus and others; and the ancients were also acquainted with its use as a letter-carrier, according to Ælian and Pliny. On the significance of the dove in the New Testament, see the account of the baptism of Jesus.—In the six hundred and first year.—This reckoning completes the old life of Noah. His seventh hundred is the beginning of his sabbath-time.—In the first month, in the first day, etc.—This date looks back to the beginning of the flood, in the second month of the previous year, on the seventeenth day. Now Noah removes the covering of the ark, and takes a free look around and upon the new earth. The waters, no longer flowing back, were evaporating from the earth, and the ground was in the process of becoming dry. Yet still he waited a month and twenty-seven days, that he might not too hastily expose to injury the living seminarium of the ark, the precious seed of the new life that had been entrusted to his care. But he waited only for the clear direction.—And Noah removed the covering of the ark.—מִכְסֶה. Because this word is used elsewhere only of a covering made of leather and skins with which they covered the holy vessels on the march ( Numbers 4:8; Numbers 4:12), and of the third and fourth covering of the ark of the testimony ( Exodus 26:14, etc.), it does not follow, as Knobel supposes, that the author had in view a similar covering. The deck of an ark on which the rain-storms spent their force, must surely have been of as great stability as the ark itself.—And God (Elohim) spake to Noah.—It is Elohim, because this revelation belongs to the universal relation of God to the earth. “The time of the flood, according to verse14, amounted to twelve months and eleven days, that is, three hundred and sixty-five days, or a full solar year; consequently in the course of one full circuit of the natural change or period (שָׁנָה), does the earth become destroyed and renewed. In the fact that Noah might not leave the ark from his own free, arbitrary will, there is expressed his preservation of the seal of the divine counsel, and of the divine work.” Baumgarten. New blessings upon the creatures, similar to those which were pronounced at the creation, are connected with his going forth at the divine command; it is the beginning of a new world. “As in creation the beasts were blessed before man, so is it here.” Baumgarten. In the beasts going out of the ark in pairs there is given to us a clear idea of the stability of the new order in nature, and of the security for its continuance.

[Note on the Week, and on the Seventh Day Observance in the Ark.—“And he waited seven days,” Genesis 8:10. “And he waited seven other days.” Dr. Lange gives little attention to the important question connected with this language, as he passes over, with a very few remarks, the whole question of the sabbath in Genesis 1. There is certainly indicated here a sevenfold division of days, as already recognized, whatever may be its reasons. Of these, no one seems more easy and natural than that which refers it to the traditionary remembrance of the creation, and its seventh day of rest, although some of those who claim to be “the higher school of criticism” reject it. Had such a reference to a sevenfold division been found in some ancient Hindoo or Persian book, and along with it, or in a similar writing closely connected with it, an account of a hexameral creation with its succeeding day of rest, they would doubtless have discovered a connection between the ideas. But here they do not hesitate to violate their own famous canon, that “the Bible is to be interpreted like any other ancient writings.” Now it may be regarded as well settled that such a division of time existed universally among the Shemitic and other Oriental peoples. (See this clearly shown in the article Week, in Smith’s “Dictionary of the Bible.”) It is a fact, too, well established, that a similar division existed among the Egyptians, as is particularly stated, with the names given to the days of the week, by Dion. Cassius (Hist. Rom. xxxvii18). They are the names of the seven celestial bodies, and yet there are no astronomical phenomena that could of themselves have given rise to it. It is evidently an after-thought. The things named must have been known before, and when the original reason of the division was lost, the planetary series was adapted to it, although it had to be taken in an irregular and disproportioned manner. This was to give it mystery and interest, and to accommodate it to the astrological superstition, which early came in, of lucky and unlucky days. The same names came into the Roman (ecclesiastical) and Saxon calendars. They could not so readily have found place, had there not been some previous ground in the Occidental heathen ideas (Roman and Scandinavian), although they do not appear in classical literature.

But how shall such a division be explained? The reference to the lunar phases seems plausible, but will not bear close examination. It is true that a lunation (about twenty-nine and one-half days) is approximately divisible into four parts, of nearly seven days each, but the beginnings and endings, especially of the second and fourth quarters, are so obscure, and incapable of easy determination, that it could never have been adjusted with the required practical precision to any settled weekly reckoning of definite days. Besides, in that case, the week would have had its series commence and end with the divisions of the lunation. But we find nowhere any such reckoning. The week has no reference to the month. Such a day, of such a month, is in all calendars, but first or second week, of such a month, is nowhere found. Again, there were adjustments of the months to the solar year by admitted inequalities and intercalations, but there is no trace anywhere of any such attempts to regulate the days of the week with reference to the month. A seventh portion of time computed from an ever-shifting beginning would have been of no use, or would only have introduced confusion. The week, therefore, must have had, and did have, its reckoning from some point entirely independent of any annual, monthly, or even astronomical calculus. It must, too, have been from some remote period, fixed in itself (or supposed to be so fixed), just as we reckon our weeks from the day of Christ’s resurrection, in a series continuing steadily on, though there has been, since then, repeated rectifications of the month (or moons), and even a change of style in respect to the year. The weekly series has been unbroken.

The Jewish reckoning of the seven days, and of the sabbath, we know, was thus independent. In Exodus 16:23, we find the particular sabbath there mentioned as coming on the sixteenth day of the second month (the day after they came to the Wilderness of Sin), and on the twenty-third following, as reckoned without reference to any monthly or annual beginning. It comes on such a day, but computed by itself, and seems to have been thus known as something dating from some ancient, remote period, and kept in remembrance even during the ignorance and debasement of a servile bondage. It must have come by tradition from their patriarchal ancestors, and was probably the same seventh day which was recognized by the Egyptians (their day of Saturn, Remphan, Hebrew כִּיּוּן, Arabic كَيْوَ ان see Amos 5:26, Septuagint version, and Acts 7:43), although with them the observance may have lost its original idea and reason, and become wholly idolatrous or superstitious. Therefore does Moses tell the Jews to remember, and keep it holy, calling back their minds to the primitive ground of its institution. So Kimchi and Aben Ezra, in their comment on Amos 5:26, say “that כִּיּוּן (Kiyun) is the same with שַׁבַּתַּי, Shabbatai (Saturn, or the sabbath-god), for they made tohim an image, whilst another interpretation makes it to be כוֹכַב שַׁבַּתַּי, the star of Saturn, and so is he called כיואן, Khivan, in the tongue of the Arabians and the Persians.” In the earliest Egyptian mythology, as in the most ancient Greek derived from it, the dynasty of Saturn (Κρόνος = χρόνος, time), or the old creative, generative power, was before that of Ζεύς, the light, or the Sun; that is, his day (dies Saturni) was before the dies Solis, or, sun-day, the primitive dies Jovis.¹¹ So does the darkened mirror of heathenism give to all these early things both a pantheistic and a polytheistic hue. The Hebrew revelation alone preserves them truthful, pure, and holy. The silence of the Scriptures in respect to the patriarchal observance of the sabbath, religiously or otherwise (unless this that is said of Noah be an exception), furnishes no answer to the strong inference to be derived from Exodus 16, 20. See remarks on this in Note on the Sabbath, page197.

The more we examine these acts of Noah, the more it will strike us that they must have been of a religious nature. He did not take such observations, and so send out the birds, as mere arbitrary Acts, prompted simply by his curiosity or his impatience. God had “shut him in,” and as a man of faith and prayer he looks for the divine directions in determining the times of waiting. Every opening, therefore, of the ark, and every sending forth of the birds, may be regarded as having been accompanied. or preceded by a divine consultation. He “inquired of the Lord,” as the Scripture records other holy men as having done. What more likely, then, than that such inquiry should have its basis in solemn religious exercises, not arbitrarily entered into, but on days held sacred for prayer and religious rest. When this was done, then the other, or more human means of inquiry that were in accordance with it, would be resorted to. In this point of view, the sending forth of the raven and the dove may be reverently regarded as divine auspications. (See remarks in marginal note, p310.) They immediately followed such stated religious exercises, and hence his periods of waiting would, in the most natural and appropriate manner, be regulated by them. On any other view, his proceedings would seem wholly reasonless and arbitrary. The idea gives an interest to the life of this lonely, “righteous man,” during his long sojourn in the ark. He did not forget God, nor God’s ancient hallowing of a certain day in seven, and, therefore, is there the stronger emphasis in what is said Genesis 8:1, that “the Lord remembered Noah.” See Lange’s most striking and beautiful remarks on this expression, p309.

There must be reasons for such a seven-days’ waiting, and what more natural and consistent ones could there be than those here stated? It amounts to nothing to say that seven is a sacred or mystic number. How came it to be such? Though afterwards thus used in Scripture, there could have been nothing of this sacredness at that early day, unless it had come from the still earlier account of the creation. It must have been founded on some great fact; for, of all the elementary Numbers, seven may be said to have the least of any mathematical or merely numerical interest, such as gave rise to peculiar speculations in the earliest thinking. There was a mystery about the number one, as the fountain of the infinite numerical series, or as representing a point, the principium of all magnitude. Two had an interest as representing the line, and as the root of that most regular of all series, the binary powers. Three was the binding of unity and duality, and represented the triangle, the simplest or most elementary plane figure in space. Four (the tetractys of Pythagoras) represented the tetraedron, or the most elementary solid. Five was the number of the fingers on the hand, and thus became the origin of the universal decimal notation. Six was the double triad, and so on. But it is not easy to find any such mathematical or numerical peculiarity in seven that could have drawn special attention to it, as having, in itself, anything mystical or occult. It is not a square, nor a power of any kind; it is not what is called an oblong number, or one that can be divided into factors. It represents no figure that, like the hexagon or pentagon, can be geometrically produced. Its sacredness, or mystery, therefore, could only have arisen from some great historical truth, or institution, supposed to have been connected with it; and if we “interpret the Hebrew books like other ancient writings,” this origin could have been no other than a belief in the great events mentioned Genesis 1, as laying the foundation for all subsequent veneration of the hebdomadal number and period.—T. L.]

DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL

1. The great turning. As the first half of the flood pictures especially the judgment of death, so the second half presents the redemption from judgment, as it goes forth in its gradual development, with its redemptive and anticipatory signs.

2. God remembered Noah. Everything (every affliction of the pious) endures its time; the goodness of God endureth forever. God’s remembering in a special sense. His righteousness makes a special knowledge, and a special beholding, inside of his general omniscience and omnipotence; so his mercy and his compassion make a special remembrance within his consciousness, wherein there are known to him all his works from the beginning. That is, God is a living, personal God, showing himself to be such in his government, and in his revelation which makes joyful again the believers in his grace, after they had been exposed to temptation. Each deliverance, each help, especially each experience of salvation, rests upon a remembrance of God. God’s remembrance of man and man’s remembrance of God meet each other, as eye meets eye, in the actual manifestation of saving acts. The compassion of God embraced also the animal-world, but conditions itself through the grace that embraces believing men.

3. As the spirit of God moved over the waters at the beginning of creation, so goes forth here, over the floods of the deluge, the wind that saved, as an emblem of the same divine spirit. It was a wind of life—a vernal wind—for the new earth.

4. As the fountains of the deep were broken up before the windows of heaven were opened, so also were they closed before them. In order that the rain might cease at Ararat, it was necessary that before this the evaporation in the opposite regions of the earth should have come to an end.

5. Ararat. The home of Adam, the home of Noah. Our first home the heights of Paradise, our second home the salvation hills of Ararat, our third home Golgotha, our everlasting home the highest heavens.

6. The salvation is unfolded gradually, and announced in a gradual series of saving signs: 1. The resting of the ark; 2. the appearance of the mountain-tops; 3. the flying forth of the raven; 4. the olive-leaf of the dove; 5. the dove’s not returning. Thus it is that the time of deliverance is a time of patience, and of alternate desire and hope. “Blessed in hope” ( Romans 8).

7. The raven and the dove. The sympathy and the co-operation of the beasts in the kingdom of God. The unity of the raven and the dove, and at the same time their contrast, denotes the community of creaturely interests, as well as the contrast between the interests of the creature generally, and the kingdom of God in particular; for the raven is a figure of the universal life, the dove an emblem of the church.

8. The signs of hope increase from seven to seven days—an indication of the idea of the Sabbath and of Sunday.

9. “The fresh leaf from the olive-tree is the first sign of life from the buried earth. A significant sign: for the oil, as a gentle yet penetrating substance, is the symbol of the anointing of the Holy Spirit. This is brought by that purest bird of the heavens, which even among the heathen is held sacred (see Herod255). The green olive-leaf in the mouth of the dove is a sign that the earth is not merely laid waste (we may rather say purified), but also consecrated by the waters.” Baumgarten. And yet we must distinguish between the symbolic significance of the oil, of the olive-tree, and of the olive-leaf. The oil denotes the spirit, the olive-tree (11–14; Revelation 11:3-4) denotes spiritual men, the holy Israel; and in correspondence with this the olive-branch denotes the partakers of the spirit ( Romans 11), the blossoms of the spirit, the signs of love and peace.

10. “If we take the human race and the earth as a totality, the flood is the dividing of the old from the new. The old earth, with the humanity that had become flesh, the ἀρχαῖoς κόσμος,¹² is destroyed, but even this destruction is the preservation of the righteous man, of Noah, in that he is delivered from the corruptive community of the flesh. On this account is it said, 1 Peter 3:20, ‘eight souls were saved by water,’ and even there ( Genesis 8:21), the flood is named a type of baptism. The water of the flood is, therefore, the baptismal water of the earth, which drowns the old whilst it preserves and quickens the new. This view of the flood, moreover, has passed over into the consciousness of the Church. In the prayer for the consecration of the baptismal water in the Sacramentarium Gregorianum it is said: Deus qui nocentis mundi crimina per aquas abluens, etc.” Baumgarten.

11. As baptism makes a distinction between the old and the new man, so did the flood make a distinction between the old and the new humanity, which were, therefore, types on both sides. So did the Red Sea divide the children of Israel from the Egyptians, who were drowned in the same ( 1 Corinthians 10:2).

12. As Noah went into the ark at the command of God, so also must Hebrews, at the same command, go out. That be was in no perturbation, did not wilfully and hastily go forth from the ark, is a sign that we must not anticipate the hour of God’s help, nor throw ourselves hastily out of the ark of the church in sectarian impatience, but wait the Lord’s time in which to go out of the ark into a new world.

13. The renewal of the blessing of propagation upon the creature is a confirmation of the first blessing ( Genesis 1), a repeated expression of God’s goodness, and of his complacency in life. Contrast as against dualism and a sickly asceticism.

HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL

See the Doctrinal and Ethical. The figures of the coming salvation1. The resting of the ark, the firmly grounded church; 2. the emerging of the mountain-tops, the mountains of God as the sign of heaven; 3. the flight of the dove, “the longing of the creature;” 4. the dove with the olive-leaf, the spirit of life, with the announcement of peace; 5. the remaining out of the dove and the opening of the ark, the free intercourse between the church and the consecrated world; 6. the going forth from the ark, the passing over of the church into the new world.

Starke: It is certain that God had not forgotten Noah; but the Scripture is wont to speak after the manner of men, namely, as man, sometimes, represents to himself God as speaking. According to this, God’s remembrance denotes the revelation of his gracious will and pleasure, according to which he reveals to the wretched that help which before was hidden (Hieronymus). A life of faith is the most difficult of all,—such a life as Noah and his sons must have lived, who could only cling to the hope of aid from heaven, since the earth was covered with water, so as to give them no ground of trust. It was, therefore, no vain word when the Holy Spirit says that “God remembered Noah.” For it shows that from the day in which he first went into the ark, God had not spoken to him, nor made to him any revelation. He could see no ray of the divine mercy, but must sustain himself alone upon the promise he had received, whilst, in the meantime, the waters of death are raging all around him, as though God had indeed forgotten him (Luther). The leaf represents the gospel, for oil denotes compassion and peace, of which the gospel teaches.—Bibl. Wirt: “O, my Christian friend, hast thou been a long time confined in a wearisome ark, whether it be of some difficult calling, or some painful state; ask not counsel of the charmer, but wait with patience until God, through righteous means, shall bring thee help therefrom.”

Gerlach: God does, indeed, remember all his works, in all times, and in every way, but the prayer “remember me” ( Psalm 25:7; Luke 23:42) goes forth from the image of God in man; and by reason of this we have no rest until we can rejoice in all the attributes of God through an inward, personal communion with him. The word here denotes the trials of Noah, when God hid himself, and the enjoyment of his gracious favor, when he again reveals himself.

Calwer Handbuch: The olive-leaf has been ever held as a symbol of peace.

Schröder: God had exercised Noah’s faith and patience (Calvin). What is said of the raven, Luther makes to correspond, allegorically, with the office of the law. [“In the blackness of the raven is a sign of sorrow, and its voice is unlovely. Song of Solomon, therefore, are all preachers of the law who teach the righteousness of works; they are ministers of death and sin, as Paul names the ministry of the law ( 2 Corinthians 3:6; Romans 7:10). Nevertheless, Moses was sent out with this doctrine even as Noah sent forth the raven. And yet such teachers are nothing else than ravens that fly round the ark, bringing no certain sign that God is reconciled. But what Moses says of the dove is a very lovely figure of the gospel.”]

[Excursus on the partial extent of the Flood, as deduced from the very face of the Hebrew text.¹³—This account of the flood furnishes a happy illustration of what may be called the subjective truthfulness of the Scripture narratives. There is meant by this that the language is a perfect representation of an actual, conceptual, and emotional state in the mind of the author. By the author is meant the one in whose soul such emotions and conceptions were first present, from whatever cause, outward or inward, they may have been derived. Whether this was ecstatic vision, or a conviction in the mind supposed to come from a divine influence, or an actual eye-witnessing, it is all faithfully told, just as it was conceived in vision, impressed upon the thought, or seen by the sense. The words are in true correspondence with such a state of soul, an honest imprint of it, according to the influences felt, and the degree of knowledge by which those influences might be affected, or the choice of language controlled. In either case, too, may the term inspiration be applied to it, if we admit the idea of a divine purpose as specially concerned in the communication. It is a special series of divine acts in the physical world, and in the souls of men, that makes revelation strictly, or in that higher sense to which the term is limited in connection with the scriptural narrations. It is this extraordinary doing, whether in nature or above nature, commencing with creation and continued in a series through the whole history of the Church, which constitutes the real manifestation of the divine in the human, of the infinite in the finite, in distinction from that ordinary course in nature and history which cannot thus reveal God personally, because it is merged in the totality, or the one general movement, of the universe. This common movement may be called a Revelation, but it is addressed to the universal reason, and reveals only a general intelligence having nothing special for man, either as a race or as individuals. The other is a special epistle to humanity and to individual men, having our name throughout, attested by chosen witnesses taken from a chosen people who are the spiritual first-born, or representatives of the race. But still it is this extraordinary doing which is the revelation properly, whilst the biblical writings are only the human record of it, sharing in the finity of the medium, or more or less imperfect according to the necessary imperfections of knowledge, conception, and language, in those to whom such recording is given. Had writing never been invented, it might have been a purely oral or traditional account, and then it would have been still more imperfect, but the actual revelation would have remained the same, to be ascertained in the best way we could amidst the deficiences and obscurities of such oral or monumental modes of transmission. Surely the absence of writing could no more have prevented God’s having his witness in this world, than the absence, for so many centuries, of the art of printing; and the want, neither of types nor of alphabets, could have been an absolute bar to that witnessing being in the human, and through the human, as well as to the human. Now in such record of revelation the great thing required for the satisfaction of our faith is a conviction of this perfect subjective truthfulness on the part of the human media. It is a far higher thing, a much more precious thing, than any scientific correctness, or any outward verbal accuracy, which, even if it could be secured through human language and human conceptions, could only be by a mechanical, automaton-like process, or with the loss of all that is truly human in the transmission. It would not be a Revelation, or the history of a Revelation, given to men through men, and so it would not be truly God speaking in humanity. The element of most value, through which we most truly draw nigh unto God, and He unto us, would be lacking in the process. With this distinction between the revelation strictly, and the record of such Revelation, we are the better prepared to understand the import of that third term which is so often confounded with them. Inspiration has respect to the manner and means by which such human conceptions are called out and employed, whilst still remaining strictly human. This may be in various ways, and we may apply the terms higher and lower to them, but with danger of error, if in so doing we make any one of them to be less a true inspiration than the other. All the faculties of man may be used for this purpose. God may employ the imagination (the ecstatic imagination, for that is still human, and in another state may be ordinary and normal), the mental convictions impressed by a divine power, or, when no other means are required, the sense and memory of holy, truthful men, whose holiness and truthfulness, in such case, are as much an effect of divine inspiration as any afflatus more immediately affecting what are called the higher or deeper faculties of the soul.

Thus may we believe that all the Scripture is inspired, that it everywhere has this subjective truthfulness, whether it appears in holy visions of the past and future, or in rapt devotional exercises, or in the sublime doctrinal insight of souls drawn heavenward, or in the pictures it gives us of musing, soliloquizing minds, presenting now their exulting faith, and then again their fears and sad despondencies in view of the dark problems of life. It shows itself in its plain, unpretending, unsuspicious narratives of events, whether it be the supernatural, the great natural, or that filling in of the ancient home-life which, though so far from us, we recognize as so true and so consistent, calling out the feeling that it is indeed a reality that lies before us, and that these words represent actual scenes and actual emotions as true and vivid as any that now occupy our own minds. Thus may we believe all Scripture to be an honest record from beginning to end, from the most astoundingly marvellous to its minutest historical, geographical, biographical, and genealogical details. This view, although admitting human imperfections of language and conceiving, is very different from that theory of partial inspiration that assumes to choose what portions it shall accept, rejecting others as fabricated, false, and legendary. It is all faithful, all θεοπνεύστος, all given to us for our “instruction in righteousness,” constituting in its totality the plenary word of God, the honest human record of that great series of divine doings in the world, in nature, in history, and in the souls of men, to which we give the special name of a divine revelation. Thus received and firmly held in its truthful human aspect, the belief in a great objective truth corresponding to it is irresistible for all sober, thoughtful, truly rational souls. The human in the Bible compels the acceptance of the divine; the ordinary and the natural in its life-like narratives demands the supernatural as its complement. We are forced thus to believe or to admit that the very existence in the world of such a record so kept, so attested through the ages, so lying in the very heart of human history, is as great a marvel for the reason, as any supernatural or miraculous which it contains for the sense.

It is this subjective truthfulness of the Scriptures that furnishes the matter of interpretation. The great end is to get at the conceptual and emotional states which the words originally represented in the minds of the first narrators. The objective truth they represent in the natural or supernatural belongs to the theological reasoning as guided in its inferences by the general truths of the Scriptures, or other knowledge we may have of nature and of God. The one interpretation is to be according to the laws of rhetoric and language in their widest sense, the other according to “the analogy of faith,” in all by which God makes himself known to the human mind.¹⁴

Thus should we aim at interpreting the Scripture narrative of the flood. We have, as an outward ground, the world-wide tradition of such an event far greater than any inundation of waters, or change in nature, recorded in any later or more partial history. The classical story, the Indian, the Persian, etc, are well known; but it is found everywhere. In the remotest and most isolated region to which the traveller penetrates, there meets him this tradition of a great catastrophe by water, and of a “righteous man” who was saved in an ark. It is told with the same general features, and often with a surprising similarity of detail, whether it be in the wilds of Siberia, by the rivers of southern Africa, or in the isles of the Pacific. No other event ever made such an impression on the ethnological memory; and hence it has survived through wastes of historical silence in which other facts, however great their local or tribal interest, have utterly perished. One of two conclusions is inevitable: either the catastrophe was of vast extent, reaching almost every portion of the globe as now known, or it took place in the earliest times of the human existence, when men were confined to a comparatively small part of the earth, whence each wandering people carried it, localizing it afterwards in their own history, their own geography, and ascribing the deliverance, each one, to the ancestral head of their own race.

There is a ground of truth in all these stories. No rational mind can doubt it. The most sceptical of the German critics have felt themselves compelled to admit its substantial verity. Now let any one compare them all with this sublime scriptural narrative, and then let his reason, his rhetorical taste, his judgment of the truthful in style, the subjectively real in conception, and the life-like in narration, determine which is the original, severely simple in its chasteness and grandeur, and which are the legendary copies,—which is the editio princeps, preserved (by some strong influence in opposition to the ordinary human tendency) from grotesque exaggeration, from mythical indistinctness and confusion, from false embellishment, from interpolated deformities, from all that characterizes the story-telling, wonder-making style—and which are the spurious addenda, betraying, by all these marks of their secondary character, that they are the far-off, dimly-seen, and monstrously disproportioned impressions of what, to the scriptural narrator, was an actual scene full of a soul-awing and fancy-restraining emotion.

The Bible story has nothing of the wonder-making about it. It is too full of the overpowering real to allow of such a secondary excitement of the mind and the imagination. The emotion is too high to admit of any play of fancy. It is contemplation in its most exalted state, having no room for anything but the great spectacle before it, and that as seen in its grandest features. Hence so calm and yet so full of animation, so severely chaste yet so sublime. It is a telling from the eye, and it speaks to the soul’s eye of the thoughtful reader, giving the impression of an actual spectacle. The style throughout is adapted to produce such impression. It is a truthful effect, or the narrative is to be regarded as a most skilful fiction, a most ingenious forgery, exhibiting a life-like power of painting and invention utterly inconsistent with any antiquity to which it can be ascribed. The writer or relator is one who stands in mediis rebus. The awful spectacle is present to his absorbed sense or to his vivid memory. He is startled by it to abruptness of description. Though long expected, the catastrophe is sudden in its coming. Torrents descend from the heavens like bursting clouds; chasms are seen in the opening earth, and floods issuing from their subterranean reservoirs. A writer less interested, less awed by the actual scene, would have used comparisons here, or indulged in redundancy of language. The Scripture historian gives it all in one brief verse: “The fountains of the great abyss (the tehom rabba) were broken (נִבקְעוּ, were cloven), the windows of heaven were opened.” The attempt to reconcile this with any scientific correctness is worse than trifling. To resolve it into a poetical metaphor, or any rhetorical artifice of language, takes away all its emotional power. He speaks according to his conception as grounded on the state of his knowledge. He evidently had the old idea of waters above the firmamentum, now descending through the parted barrier. How ill-judging the interpretation that, for any fancied reconciliation with present knowledge, would obliterate the marks of this precious subjective truthfulness, so full of evidence for the great antiquity of the account, and the actuality of the scene as conceived and described. One all-absorbing image of power is before him. The deluge from above and the eruptions from the earth, whatever may have been their cause, have an awful rapidity of effect; and with what graphic touches is this set forth in the vivid Hebrew idioms! The ark is lifted clear from the earth (מֵעַל הָאָרֶץ), and goes forth (תֵּלֵךְ walks forth), עַלְ־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם, on the face of the waters. וַיּגְבְּרוּ הַמַּיִם, the floods prevail exceedingly, מְאֹד מְאֹד, stronger, stronger—higher, higher—הָלוֹךְ וְגָדֵל, “go and increase” constantly waxing, gradual but irresistible, steadily visible in their rise as measured by the submerged plains, the disappearing hills, until to the remotest extent of the visible horizon, תַּחַת כָּל הַשָּׁמַיִם, “under the whole heavens,” it is water everywhere as far as eye can see, one vast sky-bounded waste, shoreless and illimitable as it appeared to the absorbed and wondering gaze of the one from whose sense and memory this story has come down to us. This is what he saw, and this is all that the interpreter can get from his language. What he may have thought, we know not. He may have supposed the flood to be universal. Probably he did so; but then his universality must have been a very different thing (in conception) from the notion that our modern knowledge would connect with the term. He knew of no land that was not covered by water; he had been told that God meant to destroy the human race, and so far as the extent of the flood was necessary for that purpose, he doubtless supposed the judgment executed.¹⁵ But we have only to do, as interpreters, with what he actually saw, the language in which he has recorded it, the necessary conceptions which it suggests, and by which it was itself suggested. We have no right to force upon him, and upon the scene so vividly described, our modern notions, or our modern knowledge of the earth with its Alps and Himmalayas, its round figure, its extent and diversities, so much beyond any knowledge he could have possessed or any conception he could have formed. It may be said that such idea of terrestrial universality is included in his words, such as ארץ earth,—“under the whole heavens,” תחת כל השמים,—“all the high mountains under the whole heavens;” but then the question arises, On what scale of knowledge are they to be interpreted? If we say the modern, calling it the absolute sense (on the supposition that such absolute scale has even yet been reached), then we make him a mere mechanical utterer of sounds whose intended meaning lay not in his understanding, or a writer of words representing, in their truthfulness, neither the emotions felt, nor the spectacle that lay before his eye. A very slight change in our English translation, and that a very justifiable one, greatly affects this impression of universality. Read land for earth wherever the word occurs, as, for example, the whole land, or the face of the whole land, and the scale, to our imagination, is at once reduced. Thus we actually have, in one place, Genesis 7:23, אדמה instead of ארץ, and yet nothing is more evident than that in the previous chapters the first word is used of the Eden-territory and the region adjacent. In like manner is this word אדמה used in the account of the general corruption of the race by the intermarriages of the Sethites and the Cainites, Genesis 6:1 : “When men began to multiply upon the face of the adamah,” עַל פְּנֵי הָאֲדְמָה. It is not only without any warrant from Scripture, but in the face of the fair inferences to be drawn from its artless language, that some have regarded the antediluvian human race as spread over the wide surface of the earth according to our present knowledge. Equally, too, against the impression to be fairly derived from the account, is the idea of a vast population as in any way to be compared with that which has since existed and now exists. We know nothing of any physical or moral reasons that may have accelerated or retarded it. The Scripture simply says, in its introduction to the account of the flood, that men began to multiply, הֵהֵל לָרֹב, evidently implying that they had not been very numerous before in either line, and that the mixture and the multiplication were, at the same time, cause and effect of the corruption. The fair inference, therefore, is, that it took place, together with the judgment that followed, whilst they were yet confined to this tract, whatever may have been its extent. It was the open, easily cultivated part of the earth (though it had already become sterile in the days of the Sethite Lamech), to which the early men in their gregarious habits yet adhered. There had not come the roving, migrating, pioneering impulse which was first given after the flood, and for the very purpose of breaking up the gregarious tendency which again manifested itself in the plain of Shinar. This reluctance to leave the adamah, or the old homeland of the race near Eden, shows itself in Cain’s language, Genesis 4:14 : “Behold thou art driving me forth this day, מֵעַל פְּנֵי הָאֲדָמָה, from the face of the adamah, that I may become a wanderer בָּאָרֶץ in the (wide) earth,” as distinguished from the fatherland where the protecting divine presence (פָנֶיךָ) was supposed still to dwell. Cain, bold and evil as he was, felt this. The thought, even though coming from his own vengeance-haunted imagination, was a terror to him, and we may rationally suppose that the feeling was still more strongly shared by his descendants, whom the account represents as still living near the Sethites and corrupting them by their vicinity. All great movements in the world have come from a superhuman impulse, breaking up previous habits, and strangely changing those fixed conditions of human society into which races, when left to themselves, are ever tending; sometimes even when their talk is loudest of progress and change as ever coming from themselves. The course of history is marked by such new movements, unaccountable in their beginning from anything in the previous human (which may probably have been tending strongly in the opposite direction), yet afterwards, from the very fact of sequence, seeming to fall inductively into the natural flow of events. At all events, if we take the Scripture text for our guide, there is no reason to believe that any of the antediluvians (with the exception, perhaps, of a few solitary rovers), had ever crossed the deserts, or ventured upon the seas, or scaled the mountains, or penetrated far into the dense wildernesses that separated the primitive adamah from the vast unknown of earth around them. We may fairly suppose, too, that it was one of the designs of the deluge-judgment to prevent a race which had so dehumanized themselves, or, in the language of Scripture, “corrupted its way,” from spreading over the surface of the globe. But how different was it when the movement came which is recorded Genesis 11:8, whether we regard the “confounding of languages” there mentioned as the cause or the effect of the dispersion. It was, in either view, equally supernatural, or, if the term is preferred, an extraordinary divine intervention, deflecting the course of the human movement from what it would have been had it been left solely to the antecedent human tendency. They were settling down into the old adamah gregariousness, to be followed by the same impieties, not only (for that could be borne with), but by the dehumanizing vices that demanded extinction. “Wherefore the Lord scattered them from thence over the face of all the earth.” The Hebrew verb is a very strong one, וְיָפֶץ אֹתָם, “He drove them asunder”—He sent them far and wide—He broke them up. Compare Deuteronomy 32:8, Acts 17:26. Their reluctance to leave the old home-land, like that of Cain in the earlier time, is shown by the same word, and that strong particle פן so expressive of caution and alarm; Genesis 11:4, פֶּן נָפוּץ עַל פְּנֵי כְּנֵי כָּל הָאָרֶץ, “lest we be scattered over the face of the whole earth,”—the wide earth, the unknown, unbounded earth. We must take the language according to the feeling and knowledge of the day. It was der unabsehbare Bann, as Lange expresses it, No15, p264, the illimitable exile in space which had something of the terror des endlosen Bannes, of the endless exile in time. But though the pioneering effort needs something extraneous to start it, it is afterwards carried on by its love of novelty, which, when once excited, ever feeds the impulse, overcoming the sense of insecurity until it becomes a passion instead of a dread. Thus, as the terror of the unknown gives way, the new impetus soon acquires a rapidity more strange even than the former reluctance, as is attested by other and more modern examples in the world’s history. In the long stagnation of the middle ages geographical knowledge, at least among the Europeans, had actually receded. Less was known of the world in the days of Bede and Alcuin than in those of Ptolemy. But how soon after the start given to Di Gama and Columbus, and by these to others, was the state of things, in this respect, wholly changed! The orbis terrarum immediately began to expand, and so rapidly was the horizon extended, that less than half a century added more to the knowledge and civilized occupation of the earth than a thousand years had done before. In less than thirty years after Columbus had seen the light upon the shore of the first West India isle, Magellan had advanced to the southern extremity of the American continent and accomplished the circumnavigation of the globe. It was not because the men of the tenth and twelfth centuries lacked vigor of body or mind, but because God’s time had not yet come.

So was it when the first great dispersion of mankind commenced. Before the flood, there is no evidence that even Egypt was known or inhabited—we mean scriptural evidence; and notwithstanding the assertions of Bunsen and others, we think it can be shown (in its proper place) that there is no reliable evidence of any other kind. Dwelling as they did, mainly, in the region between the Euphrates and the Indus, the antediluvians had never ventured upon the wide desert that intervened, nor attempted the long way up the rivers and by the mountains of the North. But now the tribes of Ham are streaming down the Persian Gulf, following the Gihon as it winds round Southern Arabia, until they reach the narrow part of the Red Sea. The new impulse soon carries them over into upper Egypt or the ancient Æthiopia, whence they find their way down into Mitzraim (the Narrows), the country of the lower Nile, whilst others start off again for the vast regions of Central Africa. One branch of the sons of Japheth direct their course to the dense Northern wilds, and thence dividing, begin their long march through Middle and Northern Europe in the one direction, or through Middle Asia and towards the American continent in the other. Another branch of the same family roam through Asia Minor, one part crossing at the Bosporus (βοος πορος, as the Greeks afterwards translated the old name, in accordance with one of their fables), the ancient Ox-ford, or cattle-passage, whence they proceed into the Thracian and Danubian forests; whilst another host of pioneers make the Ægean isles their stepping places to Greece, Italy, and Spain. The bold sons of Canaan have ventured upon ships, and are making their way to the extremities of the Mediterranean and even to the Atlantic. In the mean time the descendants of Shem keep nearer to the old homeland, barely diverging into Elam (Persia) and Assyria, moving mainly up the Euphrates to Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and thence to Northern Arabia. There is every reason to believe that under this mighty impulse that drove them from Shinar, more was done in two or three centuries towards settling the earth than had been accomplished in the1,600 or2,000 years of the antediluvian period; and this fact alone, when taken in connection with its divine causality, is a sufficient answer to those who think that the Hebrew chronology does not give time enough for the great historical beginnings that so soon made their appearance. The world has ever moved by starts, and races, like individuals, oftentimes do more, and live more, in very short periods than they do in others comparatively long.

This is dwelt upon here as having a bearing upon the position of the human race, and the spread of its population, before the flood. The emphasis with which the new movement is announced in the 11 th chapter, and more fully described in the 10 th (see especially Genesis 8:32), furnishes the strongest reason for believing that nothing of the kind, or on such a scale, had ever taken place upon the earth before. “From these (מֵאֵלֵּה) were parted (were divided, נִפְרְדוּ, isolated), the nations in the earth after the flood.”

In the antediluvian period there seems to have been a distinction between ארץ and אדמה, but the former word had not acquired the greater definiteness of after usage. In fact, it must have been utterly indefinite. This is safely inferred from the views we are compelled to form of the primitive territorial notions of mankind. In the earliest times the conception of the earth must have been that of unlimited extent, and of an undivided wild or waste. Nothing to the contrary had been made known, either by experience or by revelation. It was simply the contrast of the sky above and the ground beneath, like the conception presented in the earliest Greek antithesis of οὐρανὸς and χθών. We must ever bear this in mind when we attempt, as we ever ought to do in interpreting, to get back into the conceptions of the ancient narrator. In no other way shall we get the image of which the language is the necessary as well as the only adequate reflexion. There had not even come in the greater definiteness which belongs to the Greek γαῖα, although the Noachian conception, with its heaven above and its abyss below, resembles very much that which is presented in the Homeric oath, Odyss. v. Genesis 184:

̔́Ιστο νῦν τόδε Ταῖα καὶ Οὐρανὸς εὐρὺς ὕπερθεν,

καὶ τὸ κατειβόμενον Στυγὸς ὕδωρ—

still less was it (in conception, at least, whatever may have been the speculative thought), the tellurian idea (see Cicero’s use of the word tellus, Repub. vi17, tellus media et infima et in quam feruntur omnia), of a body, whether spherical or otherwise, lying in a limited space with space all around it. This is not rationalizing against the authority of Scripture. We must judge of this old writer’s conception by his knowledge, real or supposed, which we have no reason to think was in any way changed by that divine afflatus of truth and holiness which made him the faithful recorder of this wonderful scene. This is the very ground on which we trust its graphical correctness, as representing, not a mechanical knowledge (connected with no sense-experience or actual memory in the narrator), but a vivid seeing, with a corresponding vividness of emotion.

The same may be said of other parts of the account, which carry an air of absolute universality, simply because we interpret them by the absolute or scientific notion of our own day. Thus the expression already referred to, “under the whole heaven,” is the primary optical language for the visible horizon.¹⁶ It might have been regarded as the real horizon, but if so it would only be the writer’s thought, his speculative notion, and we have no right, as interpreters, to substitute this for what he actually sees and evidently means to describe as seen. If any will insist upon this language as denoting an absolute tellurian universality (as Wordsworth, Keil, and Jacobus have done), let them turn to the same words, Job 37:3, where they are applied to the thunder and the lightning, and connected with other language still more suggestive of extent in space. “Hark, the trembling of his voice, and the deep muttering (הֶגֶה) that goeth forth from his mouth; under the whole heavens, תַּחַת כָּל הַשַׁמַיִם, he directeth it, and its lightning, עַל כַּנְפוֹת הָאָרֶץ, to the wings (or extremities) of the earth.” It is the long reverberating roar that is heard all round the sky, and the vivid flash which for a moment lights up the whole horizon. There are other passages where the expression would seem to take in more than the immediate sense, but it never goes beyond the conceptual limit which is determined by the knowledge, real or supposed, of the utterer, or of those to whom it is addressed. As in Deuteronomy 4:19 : it means there generally the nations far and near, according to the geographical ideas of the times. Its absolute universality would require us to believe that there is not an island in the Pacific, nor a region in the Arctic or Torrid Zone, to which the Jews were not to be dispersed. And so in Deuteronomy 2:25, where the same wide words, “under the whole heavens,” are used in a still more limited sense of the nations immediately surrounding the Jews, though in every direction,—around them on all sides.

In a similar manner are we justified in interpreting the seemingly universal terms which relate to the animals. They were all that the narrator knew. He receives the divine command as measured by his knowledge and convictions, and executes it accordingly. They were the familiar animals by which he was surrounded in the district where he lived. In the terror produced by the great catastrophe, they instinctively come to the ark; as in all great commotions of nature the most ferocious beasts are known to seek the protection of human shelter. Or we may rationally suppose (taking the supernatural as an essential part of the account), that they were determined by a peculiar divine instinct, which would be, to the lower nature, in analogy with the prophetic insight given to the higher. So far as mere natural signs are concerned, their keener and more instinctive senses would discern the coming on of the deluge in its terrestrial and aërial symptoms sooner than it would become manifest to the human cognition, and as they crowd towards the ark or flutter around its protecting roof, there would be given just that impression of universality which the language conveys. The conviction he had upon his mind of the divine command, though from the very nature of the case limited by his knowledge of the living things immediately around him, would express itself in the same general terms. He was directed to take of the בְּהֵמָה, the cattle, the common or domestic animals, clean and unclean.¹⁷ It was to be from all, מִכֹּל, a term general instead of distributive, and those taken of the בְּהֵמָה were to be in pairs of species. Thus regarded, the language is all truthful in the highest sense of the word truthfulness. It is subjectively truthful, that is, it gives the fact and the spectacle as it is seen and felt,—not as calculated, or with that logical and arithmetical precision whose tendency, in a matter of such indeterminateness, would have been to produce distrust rather than the confidence of faith. Greater precision would have betrayed the mere wonder-maker, or the mere story-teller, not speaking from any conceptual experience; whilst, on the other hand, the largeness of the terms, even where it looks like hyperbole, is evidence of the actuality and truthfulness of the emotion that produced them. Thus the impression made on the mind of the beloved disciple by his constant contemplation of the person and the acts of his adored Master: “And there are many other things which Jesus did, the which if they were written every one, I suppose that not even the world would contain the books that should be written.” What words could more truthfully convey this inward state of soul! “And all Judea, πᾶσα ἡ ’Ιουδαία, went out to him, and all the country round about Jordan, πᾶσα ἡ περίχωρος τοῦ ’Ιορδάνου, and were baptized.” Matthew 3:5. “And there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men, from every nation, ἀπὸ παντὸς ἔθνους, under the heaven.” Acts 2:5. The language in these cases is the true and natural expression of emotion produced by a vast and exciting spectacle. How much more worthy of our trust it is—how much stronger a conviction of an eye-witnessed actuality does it produce, than it would have done had the writers been more guarded and exact in their numerical proportions. So is it in the mode of representation that we find in the account of the flood. There is something in this subjective truthfulness far more precious for our faith in the old document than any objective or scientific accuracy could have been; whilst, at the same time, it leaves us perfectly free to draw, from other ideas connected with the event, such inferences of universality, or of partiality, as its relation to other theological truth, as well as to later knowledge, may demand.

Again: those parts of this account which relate the prophetic knowledge, or the prophetic conviction, present, indeed, something different from the optical representations, but are nevertheless to be interpreted substantially on the same principle of their subjective truthfulness, leaving the higher objective truth for which they stand, or of which they are the human language, to be interpreted by what we have called the higher method of theological exegesis. Now this is what we truly gather from the words given to us: A righteous and holy man, living in the midst of a profane and sensual generation,—a lonely man, holding high communion with God, and constantly in spiritual conflict with the earthly and the vile around him,—has impressed upon his soul a conviction that the end of the world, or of the race, is near. It is so strong, so deep, and constant, that he feels it to come from God. It does come from God. It is so vivid, that it is to him the actual divine voice to his inmost soul. It comes so near, that he recognizes in the sharp impression which it makes the very times in which the great catastrophe is to come, and has impressed upon his soul, as by a divine direction, the way and the means through which he and his family are to be preserved. Thus “warned of God in respect to things not as yet seen, he prepares an ark for the salvation of his house ( Hebrews 11:7), by which he condemned the world, and became an heir of the righteousness which is by faith.” These divine convictions are all truthfully told, just as they are truthfully felt, and given to us from the sense or memory of the first narrator. We cannot doubt that he was thus impressed, that he thus felt, that he thus acted, that the events following corresponded to this vivid impression, and that they are most faithfully narrated. Thus believing in the subjective, the conviction of an objective supernatural, and of a divine objective reality, and of a great divine purpose connected with the history of the world and the Church, comes irresistibly to the spiritual mind having faith in a personal God constantly superintending the affairs of earth through a constant superintending providence, both general and special.

As compared with other stories of the great flood, it is the very simplicity of the account which furnishes the convincing evidence of its having been an actual telling from the eye. Myths, so called, are never told in this way. There is no conceptual lying back of them, presenting the appearance of having ever come from any sense or memory. They arise, we know not how, like national songs that never had any individual composer. They represent ideas, notions, strangely combined, rather than conceptions having their ground in any sense-spectacle, real or supposed. In poetical picturing, on the other hand, or in rhetorical description, there is, indeed, a distinct conceptual, but it is one for the most part artificially made by the writer or narrator himself. However accurate its limning may be, it carries with it its own testimony that it never came from any actual or even possible seeing. Thus Ovid’s description of the flood is most vivid, and in some respects most true to nature, or what may, very probably, have been the actual state of things—such as fishes swimming among the branches of the elm, or the sea-calves sporting in the vineyards; but no eye ever saw this; it is wholly imagined, whilst the power of thus imagining, and of thus painting it in language, is wholly inconsistent with that emotion which belongs to the actual spectacle of such an event. Especially is this true of the more labored, or artistically poetical, in such descriptions. Ovid’s picture of the south wind is, indeed, most admirable, but we recognize in it only the highest style of art, wonderful, indeed, in its grouping and in its coloring, yet without feeling, and producing no impression of reality.

Madidis Notus evolat alis,

Terribilem picea tectus caligine vultum;

Barba gravis nimbis, canis fiuit unda capillis;

Fronte sedent nebulæ, rorant pennæque sinusque.

Metamorph. i264.

“The south wind flies abroad with humid wings, his dreadful face covered with pitchy darkness; his beard is loaded with showers; the flood pours from his hoary hairs; clouds sit upon his brow; his wings and robes are dripping with the rain.” We know at once that a man who writes thus never saw the flood, or anything like it. It is all poetry, not in the Bible style, as the name is applied to the more emotional portions of the Scriptures, but in the Greek sense of ποίησις, ποίημα, something made, a fictitious composition artificially colored and invented. Some have regarded the language, Genesis 7:11—“the windows of heaven” and “the fountains of the great deep,” as of this poetical or rhetorical kind. Thus Jacobus compares the first to an “eastern expression” denoting that “the heavens are broken up” with storms, and even Murphy speaks of it as a “beautiful figure;” but all such views detract from the real grandeur, as they also do from the truthfulness, of the account. This opening of the heavens, and breaking up of the deep, were realities to Noah, so conceived by him, and as honestly related as the lifting up of the ark and the disappearing of the mountains. The awful scene itself would never have called out such imagings as those of Ovid, or suggested such language. The Syrian tradition, as given by Lucian in the Syria Dea, comes nearest to the simplicity of the scriptural narrative; but even there, there are parts of the representation which we feel instinctively could never have come from any actual eye-witnessing. The rising of the rivers, for example, on which this tradition dwells, must have been a very insignificant part, if any part at all, of so sudden and terrific a spectacle, as it is set forth in the Bible, and as it must have been, from the very nature of the case, when the floods from above came like bursting clouds or water-spouts, and the breaking and sinking of the earth made a scene so different from anything that could have been produced by a freshet, even of the most extensive kind. Song of Solomon, too, in the Arabian tradition, though in most things closely resembling the scriptural, we find the same tendency to embellishment. See it as given in the Koran, Surat xi40. There is also a mingling with it of the romantic or sentimental which shows the legendary or mere story-making style of perversion. It represents Noah as having a fourth son who is an unbeliever, and it attempts to make an affecting scene between this lost child, who flies to the mountain, and his imploring father, as the ark is borne past him by the separating waters. The Chaldæan is evidently a magnified copy of the Hebrew narrative, but in its enlargement all proportion is lost sight of. The ark is represented as a stadium, or furlong, in length. It is in the same way they have treated the modest Hebrew chronology, keeping its genealogical division in the account of the ten generations before Xisuthrus, but running its decimals and hundreds into thousands and hundreds of thousands to agree with the excessive antiquity of their fabled annals. It is the Bible record swelled out by the inflated Oriental imagination, which everywhere, except in the case of the Hebrews, was unrestrained by any divine check upon the tendency of each nation to give itself a mythical antiquity.

There is one point in the Scripture narrative of the flood which would seem to establish the fact of its limited extent, had it not been for that prejudgment of universality which has influenced so many commentators. In Genesis 8:19 the narrator seems to hurry towards the climax of the scene: “And the waters prevailed exceedingly, מאד,מאד, and all the high hills under the whole heaven wore covered.” The verse following explains and confirms this by an additional particular: “Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail (גברו, they were fifteen cubits strong, or, as we say, fifteen cubits deep), and the hills (the same word, הרים, thus rendered Genesis 8:19) were covered.” Now take this in connection with Genesis 8:4 of Genesis 8 : “And the ark rested (ותנח) in the seventh month, the seventeenth day of the month (at the end of five months, one hundred and fifty days, or at height of the flood) upon the mountains of Ararat” (הָרֵי אֲרָרָט in the plural—or one of the mountains of Ararat taken as the name of a range or mountainous country, one of whose peaks afterwards obtained the name by way of eminence.¹⁸ Here we evidently have the place from which these fifteen cubits were reckoned, and it furnishes the key to the right understanding of what the writer meant to convey as the extent of his knowledge and experience, whatever might have been his opinions as to anything beyond. There is no evidence that this was the high peak of Ararat; the impression (from the use of the plural) is all the other way. Taking all these things into consideration, the explanation is most natural and easy. The ark had drifted up the basin of the Euphrates and Tigris until it grounded on the highlands that formed its northern bank or border, and that, too, not far from a land of the olive and the vine. The surrounding mountains, or high hills, had previously been in sight, but at this time, or just before it, they disappeared. These are the same “mountains under the whole heaven” mentioned Genesis 8:19. Fifteen cubits strong were the waters, and the mountains were covered. When the ark rested, there was no land anywhere in sight. Noah ascertains the depth by measurement, or by his knowledge of the ark’s draught of water, and as it did not float again, he takes this time as the summit of the flood. He may have supposed the whole earth covered, as far as he knew anything about the earth as a whole; but we must take what he saw, what he knew, and what he describes as coming evidently from his experience. Without some such view we have no standard. It may be said, too, that this mountain on which the ark rested could not have been the high peak of Ararat, nor one from which that peak was in sight; since, in the one case, the surrounding mountains must have disappeared much earlier, and, in the other case, the declaration of their disappearance would not have been true. Again, had it been the high peak of Ararat, then, in the going down of the waters, a very large part of it must have been wholly bare before the others became visible (נראו), as is said Genesis 8:5; but this is contrary to the whole impression derived from that part of the account. All these difficulties (difficulties, we mean, on the face of the account) become greatly increased, if we suppose that the flood was not only above Ararat, or one of the mountains of Ararat, but also covered the whole globe, and mountains known to be twelve thousand feet, or more than two miles, higher than any in Armenia. In such case, besides there being no standard of measurement for the fifteen cubits, there would be a strangeness and inconsistency in the language, since this highest mountain would be as much covered by a rise of one cubit above its summit as by fifteen. The expression implies excess, as measured from some known condition, or it has no meaning. How did the describer know it?

This may be answered by saying that Noah knew it divinely, that is, by a knowledge and a memory having no basis in any actual knowing or sense-experience. It was an impression made upon his mind. Now, had it been so related, it would have been perfectly consistent with that subjective truthfulness on which we insist. Other things are thus stated among the immediate antecedents of the flood, but this appears in the midst of the vividly optical, and in direct connection with facts having every appearance of being described from sense. As a thing utterly unknown and unknowable without such divine intimation, or as a fact that might have been, but which sense necessarily failed to reach, it would be like Ovid’s “dolphins in the subaquean woods,” or his “sea-calves swimming in the vineyards,” except that it has an air of statistical particularity, which, as thus given, affects its credit, either as prose or poetry. There are other things that, on the supposition of universality, must have been utterly beyond experience, but which are very confidently stated, and vividly described, just as things would be that fall directly under the observation of the eye.¹⁹ A sphere of water covering the entire globe would have left no means of determining the time of greatest elevation, or the period of abatement before the hills again appeared. The Jewish commentators maintain the universality as essential to the honor of their Scriptures. But they are critics who overlook nothing, and they therefore keenly see these difficulties. In order to avoid them, they distinguish between what was known from the spirit of prophecy, נְבוּאָה, and what is narrated from sense, רְגִישָׁה, or experience. Our Rabbins, says Maimonides, were led to this from the knowledge (afterwards obtained) that there were mountains in Greece (Europe, he means) higher than Ararat, which, he tells us, was in the lower part of the earth-sphere (כִּידוֹר), not far from Babylon. To overcome the objection, he adopts the singular view,that the resting on Ararat, though at the height of the flood when the waters became even, was sometime after the highest mountains were submerged. This submersion, or rather supermersion, came from the great commotion, the tossing or boiling of the waters (רְתִיחָה),—the violent eruption from the earth causing them to dash and surge over the highest parts, thus covering them, but not as an even mass or œquor. He makes a distinction, which has some ground, between שכך, the calming of the waters, and חסר, their abating. It was after the going down of this wild commotion, or when the waters came to a level, that the ark happened to be (יקר מקרה) over the region of Ararat, and settled down upon it. It was also a part of this singular view that the ark, in consequence of its load and its great specific gravity, did not truly float, but was lifted up by the great force of the up-pouring waters, and this, he holds, is what is meant by the words Genesis 7:18, וַתֵּלֵךְ עַל פִּנֵי הַמָּיִם, “it went upon the face of the waters,”—wherever the waters drove it. Such views, from so sober a commentator, are only of value as showing the immense difficulties attending this opinion of universality—difficulties that come not more from outside objections than from the face of the account itself, if we depart from the plain optical interpretation.

The whole argument may be briefly summed by a careful consideration of the three main aspects of the Noachian account: 1. The divine communications warning Noah of the impending judgment, and directing him to prepare an ark for the saving of himself and his house. Whether these were made in vision, or by vivid impressions upon the mind, they are truthfully received and truthfully related, that is, translated into human speech as representing the conceptions and knowledge of the relator in respect to the subjects of such divine communication. The human race were to be destroyed, and the earth, or land, they inhabited, was to be covered with water. In such warning, God did not teach him geography, nor give him the figure of the earth, nor the height of the unknown, far-distant mountains2. The directions in respect to the animals. These are to be interpreted in the same way, and with the same limitations of knowledge and conception. He was to take of the living thing (or the animals) under the threefold specification of the behéma (the cattle), the fowl, and the creeping thing. They were the animals with which he was familiar, as belonging to the region in which he lived. He was aided by a divine instinct in the creatures, supernaturally given in the beginning, and now supernaturally excited. But God did not teach him zoölogy, nor the vast variety of species, nor is there any evidence that animals came from the distant parts of the unknown earth, such as the giraffe from Southern Africa, the elephant from India, or the kangaroo from Australia3. The actual event itself, and this under two aspects: a. The flood as optically described by some one in the ark (Noah or Shem). Here we have certain data which seem unmistakable in the inferences to be deduced from them. If we look steadily at the connections of events as they are most artlessly narrated, the conclusion appears almost unavoidable, that the mountains mentioned, Genesis 7:20, as covered by fifteen cubits, and that come again in sight, Genesis 8:5, as seen from the same place whence they disappeared at the height of the flood, and when the ark grounded on the seventeenth of the seventh month, are the game “high hills under the whole heaven,” that are mentioned Genesis 7:19. We have here what Noah saw, or knew from sense,—the visible objects around him, the grounding, the disappearing, the reappearing—all referring to the same phenomena, one part being as much optical as another, and the knowledge of any one of these facts, as they appear on the face of the narrative, as much referrible to experience as that of any other, b. The inferred extent. Noah had no means of measuring the distance to which the ark drifted. We judge of it from what can be ascertained of its termini. It started from a place near the old Eden-land (in the neighborhood of the Persian Gulf), and it struck on one of the mountains of Armenia in the north. This could not have been the high Ararat, for then the lesser Ararat, which is only seven miles distant, and four thousand feet, or nearly a mile, lower, must have been long under water, contrary to the vivid impression made by what is said Genesis 7:20 and Genesis 8:5. It could not have been the lesser peak, for then the higher (only seven miles distant) would have been clearly visible, and four thousand feet above the water during the whole time of the ark’s resting. It must, therefore, have been some high land on the borders of the mountainous region, and at quite a distance, S. or E, from either. This distance of the ark’s sailing before it grounded (taking into view the fact that there was no land then visible from it in any direction, although there had been just before) would give a flood which probably covered the old adamah, together with Babylonia, Assyria, the neighboring parts of Persia and Media, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Arabia, and a good portion of. Asia Minor, with peaks, perhaps, here and there, projecting above its surface. Subsequent events seem to confirm this view. From the unknown, rugged, mountainous region where the ark rested, the Noachidæ soon found their way back (at a time, too, when, as appears from Genesis 11:4, the flood was in fresh remembrance) to the plain of Shinar. To this they were led by the primitive gregarious tendency (see remarks, p317), and their aversion to being driven into the unknown, until there came that remarkable divine impulse which, for the first time, sent them far and wide to the remotest regions of the earth. Each pioneering family carried with them the story of the terrible judgment, locating it in different lands according to the traditions of their ancestors, and each distorting or embellishing it after their own mythical or legendary fashion. The Bible alone gives us the veritable account, truthfully and vividly told, carrying every mark of being an actual eye-witnessing, and furnishing the best data for determining its locality, its probable extent, its true chronology, and, what is of greater value than all else, its theological bearing, as one of the great divine interventions in the history of the world and of the church.—T. L.]

Footnotes