Genesis 7

Genesis 7 narrates the flood itself with the methodical precision of the Priestly source combined with the older Yahwist narrative. God commands Noah and his household into the ark, along with seven pairs of clean animals and one pair of unclean animals, and seven pairs of birds. In seven days the waters will come. Noah is six hundred years old when the flood begins; the Priestly source gives the date as the seventeenth day of the second month of the six hundredth year of Noah's life. The fountains of the great deep burst open and the windows of the heavens are opened, and rain falls forty days and forty nights. The waters rise until they cover all the high mountains under the whole heaven, fifteen cubits above the highest peaks. Every living thing on the dry land dies.

The chapter's most devastating passage is also its most structurally deliberate. The text lists what dies — all flesh, birds, livestock, wild animals, swarming creatures, all human beings — and then adds, in what reads almost as a refrain: He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground. And only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. The word blotted out echoes God's stated intention in chapter 6 to blot out the human race, and its reappearance here signals that the verdict has been executed. The chapter closes with the waters prevailing on the earth for one hundred and fifty days, a Priestly figure that supersedes the Yahwist's forty days and frames the flood as a prolonged cosmic event rather than a storm.