Genesis 7 continues the flood account.
1 And the Lord said unto Noah, “Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before Me in this generation.
Time to load up.
2 “Of every clean beast thou shall take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.
3 “Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and his female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth”.
It isn’t clear if this is seven and two animals or pairs. I lean towards the pairs myself, because of how it is worded… “by two, the male and his female.” Compare this with chapter 1 verse 27; “So God created man in His Own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.”
In chapter one God appears to think of the man and woman as one unit. This is reaffirmed in chapter 2 verse 24; “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.” The wording is the same here with the animals.
So, fourteen of all land animals that chew the cud and have split hooves, and of all birds that are not predators, and of all locust-type creeping things. “Clean” is not defined for us until the Books of The Law (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), but it appears Noah understood. That or else the author assumed we knew what it meant and didn’t bother defining it.
4 “For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.”
God is warning Noah that there are only seven days left until the end of the earth as he knows it. It probably took the whole seven days to load all the animals and supplies onto the ark.
5 And Noah did according unto all that the Lord commanded him.
6 And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.
Year 1656AH (2390BC).
Most ancient people have flood traditions. They vary in details from one human on board to more than twenty, from two of each animal to ten of each, from the flood lasting a year to it lasting a month.
If the flood really happened as the Bible says, we would expect to have “flood stories” from all of Noah’s decedents, though they would corrupt with time just like a game of telephone (where the first person whispers something to someone and they pass it to the next person and so on until the last person tells what they heard. The last person seldom says the same thing as the first.) If the flood didn’t happen, where would all the ancient people get such an absurd idea?
The Chinese king list is often sighted as proof of an earth older than the Bible says, but if you look at that list you find a fairly normal progression back until about 2300BC where they list a great king who saved all humanity from a flood. The list before that has kings who ruled 900-1000 years each. I find it far more likely the pre-Flood list of kings has been corrupted from the list of names and ages in chapter 5; not a list of consecutive kings but a list of concurrent ancestors overlapping greatly in their life spans.
7 And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.
8 Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of everything that creeps upon the earth,
9 There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God commanded Noah.
This says the animals went in. God sent the animals to Noah.
Many have said the ark could not possible hold all the animals. Let’s break it down:
There are an estimated 5 to 30 million species in the world, depending on how you divide “species.” For example, some say the Alaskan Grizzly is a different species than the Montana Grizzly, while some say that any two animals that can breed and produce fertile offspring are the same species and the differences between regions is different “breeds.” This would not only make all “grizzlies” one species but Brown Bears and Polar Bears, in fact, at least all big bears, one species.
Half of these 5-30 million species are insects. I seriously doubt that Noah provided cages for the roaches. Most likely most of the insects, (and maybe even the smaller rodents), simply found themselves corners to nest in. Many insect species could have easily survived as eggs floating in the water. This would have significantly reduced the number of species he actually needed to provide for.
Small mammals, reptiles, and birds would have been housed in stacking cages, also reducing the required floor space.
The estimated number of species also includes the sea creatures. Noah did not take fish on the ark. I would not expect him to take seals, penguins, or walruses either. They are really sea creatures who only come to the land to breed. In fact, they probably enjoyed most of the flood year.
Noah would not have taken one of each of the more than 200 breeds of horses we have today, plus donkeys and zebras. He would have only taken two equine pairs which would be the ancestors of all of today’s equines- the Equine “Kind.”
He would have only taken two pairs of canines, not two wolves, two dogs and two coyotes.
The variations we see today are because of a loss of genetic coding, not the creation of new codes as evolution says. Donkeys don’t successfully breed with horses (their offspring are sterile) because somewhere along the way the information necessary to do so was lost, a sign of Adam’s curse.
(Evolution says there is more information all the time added by mutations.)
When we take this into account, the number of “kinds” falls to an estimated 16,000 that needed to be on board, and remember, most of those were insects and rodents.
The average size of animal is less than the size of a sheep (put a mouse and elephant together...). The ark could have held 522 railroad stock cars. The average stock car can hold 240 sheep. That equals over 125,000 sheep, more than enough space to hold fourteen of each “kind,” and most “kinds” are unclean so there would have only been four of them.
They were on the ark.
The biggest dinosaur comes from an egg just bigger than a football. Noah would not have taken the biggest specimens of each species, as these would have also been the oldest. He would have taken ones that were just barely old enough to reproduce (or maybe even not quite old enough.) The largest dinosaur on the boat would have been smaller than an African elephant at this age. In fact, the average size of a dinosaur is only the size of a chicken. And there are only about fifty known “kinds.”
First of all, we have no proof that anything ate meat yet. God didn’t give humans permission to start eating meat until after The Flood. It is possible that the same applied to the animals. (He knew they would eventually eat meat and so supplied them with the teeth and digestive tracks to do so at Creation.)
Also, the drastic temperature drop brought on by the flood (with a little help from God) may have triggered hibernation in many animals. Hibernating animals don’t need to eat.
Remember that the Bible tells us they already knew how to work brass and iron (Genesis 4:22). Noah may have had some pretty hefty cages.
He may have fed any meat eaters (if there were any and they were awake) small animals that reproduce quickly (rabbits, mice, etc. They had to keep from being overrun somehow!) and sea creatures caught by fishing.
Hibernating animals don’t need much care. Those that didn’t hibernate (cows, chickens, etc), would only have needed bare minimum care and a little exercise.
They probably used the deep straw method of bedding (simply let the manure and bedding accumulate for the whole year. Not unreasonable or unusual in animal management. Many farmers throughout history have only cleaned their barns once per year.) Or they could also have easily designed the ark where any manure fell through to the bottom floor through slates, if they didn’t want all the muck to hang around on the living levels for a whole year.
Feeding could easily have been accomplished with shoots designed to deliver feed from one, central location. This would have taken less engineering than the ark itself.
“The Noah’s Ark Feasibility Study” did the math and discovered that even without any of these labor-saving ideas, caring for all the animals would have taken less than 672 hours per week. That is less than twelve hours per day per person. In fact, the numbers from this book make it sound like Noah’s family probably had a bigger problem with boredom than overwork.
10 And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
There were two water sources: the fountains of the great deep and the windows of heaven. The first were probably geysers, possibly also volcanoes as 90% by volume of what comes out of a volcano is water. Either way, there was a great deal of seismic activity.
The “windows of heaven” were probably the collapse of the water canopy mentioned in chapter one as “the waters above the firmament.” This would have been triggered by massive amounts of dust being thrown into that canopy from the volcanoes and geysers, or a shower of meteorites.
12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
An eighteen-inch water canopy (the estimated depth) would have taken about a month and a half to completely rain out. This would have been no little shower, but more like standing under a waterfall.
(A water canopy of this size would have filtered out all harmful radiation and kept the planet at a constant temperature. This would explain the longer lifespans.)
13 In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark;
God gave them just enough time to finish loading up.
14 They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort.
15 And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.
God told the animals to go into the ark. This must have been some sight; a parade of animals walking in an orderly manner, boy by girl, up the ramp into the boat.
16 And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the Lord shut him in.
God shut the door.
17 And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.
It rained for forty days (almost a month and a half). The ark began to float.
The animals near the ocean would have been caught and buried first, often on top of water animals caught in mudslides. The slower and more water loving the animal, the lower in the layers of mud they would be.
On the other hand, natural sifting would have caused the smallest creatures to filter down to the bottom. Mammals and birds, which are fast enough to avoid the rising flood waters the longest, would not have been buried at all (or very rarely). They would have drowned and floated until they were either eaten by aquatic scavengers (i.e. sharks) or decayed. In fact, even the slower animals would have mostly just floated.
The seismic activity that accompanied the Flood Year would have then mixed up most layers of remains, even tossing the first ones buried on top of the later ones.
The “Geological Column” that shows the “Ages” of earth history only actually exists in one place on earth; textbooks.
You seldom find more than two “layers,” and never more than five, in real life. And half the time, those layers are in the “wrong” order. More often, in fact, there are no “layers,” but just a jumbled mess, with the animals preserved in the tortured position of those who drowned.
So, what we actually find in geology fits what we would expect to find if the Flood happened the way the Bible says it did, not the way we would expect if there were long geological ages gradually laying down layer after layer.
Add to this, they are finding unfossilized bones with unfossilized hemoglobin still in them more and more often in dino digs. Observation of decay tells us bone and hemoglobin cannot possibly survive more than 5000 years without either decaying or fossilizing. The Flood happened about 4390 years ago. The poor dino’s they are finding in their digs are the ones that didn’t make the cut for the Ark!
And does this make evolutionists question their “Old Earth” theories? No, of course not. They question the observations of decay that humans have made for the last 4000 years instead. They invent stories that allow bones and hemoglobin to survive millions of years without decaying instead of questioning their religiously held belief of origins.
18 And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters.
19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.
20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
The mountains were covered more than fifteen cubits (twenty-two and a half feet) deep. This would have been the greatest depth possible to measure from a sounding from the Ark. It was a minimum number, not the maximum.
21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth, and every man:
22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
All in the dry land died. No mention of the sea animals.
23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth; and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.
The waters rose for 150 days. Even after the rain stopped, the fountains of the deep kept the water level rising for nearly half a year.
1 And the Lord said unto Noah, “Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before Me in this generation.
Time to load up.
2 “Of every clean beast thou shall take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.
3 “Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and his female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth”.
It isn’t clear if this is seven and two animals or pairs. I lean towards the pairs myself, because of how it is worded… “by two, the male and his female.” Compare this with chapter 1 verse 27; “So God created man in His Own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.”
In chapter one God appears to think of the man and woman as one unit. This is reaffirmed in chapter 2 verse 24; “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.” The wording is the same here with the animals.
So, fourteen of all land animals that chew the cud and have split hooves, and of all birds that are not predators, and of all locust-type creeping things. “Clean” is not defined for us until the Books of The Law (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), but it appears Noah understood. That or else the author assumed we knew what it meant and didn’t bother defining it.
4 “For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.”
God is warning Noah that there are only seven days left until the end of the earth as he knows it. It probably took the whole seven days to load all the animals and supplies onto the ark.
5 And Noah did according unto all that the Lord commanded him.
6 And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.
Year 1656AH (2390BC).
Most ancient people have flood traditions. They vary in details from one human on board to more than twenty, from two of each animal to ten of each, from the flood lasting a year to it lasting a month.
If the flood really happened as the Bible says, we would expect to have “flood stories” from all of Noah’s decedents, though they would corrupt with time just like a game of telephone (where the first person whispers something to someone and they pass it to the next person and so on until the last person tells what they heard. The last person seldom says the same thing as the first.) If the flood didn’t happen, where would all the ancient people get such an absurd idea?
The Chinese king list is often sighted as proof of an earth older than the Bible says, but if you look at that list you find a fairly normal progression back until about 2300BC where they list a great king who saved all humanity from a flood. The list before that has kings who ruled 900-1000 years each. I find it far more likely the pre-Flood list of kings has been corrupted from the list of names and ages in chapter 5; not a list of consecutive kings but a list of concurrent ancestors overlapping greatly in their life spans.
7 And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.
8 Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of everything that creeps upon the earth,
9 There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God commanded Noah.
This says the animals went in. God sent the animals to Noah.
Many have said the ark could not possible hold all the animals. Let’s break it down:
There are an estimated 5 to 30 million species in the world, depending on how you divide “species.” For example, some say the Alaskan Grizzly is a different species than the Montana Grizzly, while some say that any two animals that can breed and produce fertile offspring are the same species and the differences between regions is different “breeds.” This would not only make all “grizzlies” one species but Brown Bears and Polar Bears, in fact, at least all big bears, one species.
Half of these 5-30 million species are insects. I seriously doubt that Noah provided cages for the roaches. Most likely most of the insects, (and maybe even the smaller rodents), simply found themselves corners to nest in. Many insect species could have easily survived as eggs floating in the water. This would have significantly reduced the number of species he actually needed to provide for.
Small mammals, reptiles, and birds would have been housed in stacking cages, also reducing the required floor space.
The estimated number of species also includes the sea creatures. Noah did not take fish on the ark. I would not expect him to take seals, penguins, or walruses either. They are really sea creatures who only come to the land to breed. In fact, they probably enjoyed most of the flood year.
Noah would not have taken one of each of the more than 200 breeds of horses we have today, plus donkeys and zebras. He would have only taken two equine pairs which would be the ancestors of all of today’s equines- the Equine “Kind.”
He would have only taken two pairs of canines, not two wolves, two dogs and two coyotes.
The variations we see today are because of a loss of genetic coding, not the creation of new codes as evolution says. Donkeys don’t successfully breed with horses (their offspring are sterile) because somewhere along the way the information necessary to do so was lost, a sign of Adam’s curse.
(Evolution says there is more information all the time added by mutations.)
When we take this into account, the number of “kinds” falls to an estimated 16,000 that needed to be on board, and remember, most of those were insects and rodents.
The average size of animal is less than the size of a sheep (put a mouse and elephant together...). The ark could have held 522 railroad stock cars. The average stock car can hold 240 sheep. That equals over 125,000 sheep, more than enough space to hold fourteen of each “kind,” and most “kinds” are unclean so there would have only been four of them.
What about the dinosaurs? How do they fit in to this story?
They were on the ark.
The biggest dinosaur comes from an egg just bigger than a football. Noah would not have taken the biggest specimens of each species, as these would have also been the oldest. He would have taken ones that were just barely old enough to reproduce (or maybe even not quite old enough.) The largest dinosaur on the boat would have been smaller than an African elephant at this age. In fact, the average size of a dinosaur is only the size of a chicken. And there are only about fifty known “kinds.”
How did Noah keep the lions and T-Rexes from eating everything else?
First of all, we have no proof that anything ate meat yet. God didn’t give humans permission to start eating meat until after The Flood. It is possible that the same applied to the animals. (He knew they would eventually eat meat and so supplied them with the teeth and digestive tracks to do so at Creation.)
Also, the drastic temperature drop brought on by the flood (with a little help from God) may have triggered hibernation in many animals. Hibernating animals don’t need to eat.
Remember that the Bible tells us they already knew how to work brass and iron (Genesis 4:22). Noah may have had some pretty hefty cages.
He may have fed any meat eaters (if there were any and they were awake) small animals that reproduce quickly (rabbits, mice, etc. They had to keep from being overrun somehow!) and sea creatures caught by fishing.
How could eight people have cared for all those animals?
Hibernating animals don’t need much care. Those that didn’t hibernate (cows, chickens, etc), would only have needed bare minimum care and a little exercise.
They probably used the deep straw method of bedding (simply let the manure and bedding accumulate for the whole year. Not unreasonable or unusual in animal management. Many farmers throughout history have only cleaned their barns once per year.) Or they could also have easily designed the ark where any manure fell through to the bottom floor through slates, if they didn’t want all the muck to hang around on the living levels for a whole year.
Feeding could easily have been accomplished with shoots designed to deliver feed from one, central location. This would have taken less engineering than the ark itself.
“The Noah’s Ark Feasibility Study” did the math and discovered that even without any of these labor-saving ideas, caring for all the animals would have taken less than 672 hours per week. That is less than twelve hours per day per person. In fact, the numbers from this book make it sound like Noah’s family probably had a bigger problem with boredom than overwork.
10 And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
There were two water sources: the fountains of the great deep and the windows of heaven. The first were probably geysers, possibly also volcanoes as 90% by volume of what comes out of a volcano is water. Either way, there was a great deal of seismic activity.
The “windows of heaven” were probably the collapse of the water canopy mentioned in chapter one as “the waters above the firmament.” This would have been triggered by massive amounts of dust being thrown into that canopy from the volcanoes and geysers, or a shower of meteorites.
12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
An eighteen-inch water canopy (the estimated depth) would have taken about a month and a half to completely rain out. This would have been no little shower, but more like standing under a waterfall.
(A water canopy of this size would have filtered out all harmful radiation and kept the planet at a constant temperature. This would explain the longer lifespans.)
13 In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark;
God gave them just enough time to finish loading up.
14 They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort.
15 And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.
God told the animals to go into the ark. This must have been some sight; a parade of animals walking in an orderly manner, boy by girl, up the ramp into the boat.
16 And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the Lord shut him in.
God shut the door.
17 And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.
It rained for forty days (almost a month and a half). The ark began to float.
The animals near the ocean would have been caught and buried first, often on top of water animals caught in mudslides. The slower and more water loving the animal, the lower in the layers of mud they would be.
On the other hand, natural sifting would have caused the smallest creatures to filter down to the bottom. Mammals and birds, which are fast enough to avoid the rising flood waters the longest, would not have been buried at all (or very rarely). They would have drowned and floated until they were either eaten by aquatic scavengers (i.e. sharks) or decayed. In fact, even the slower animals would have mostly just floated.
The seismic activity that accompanied the Flood Year would have then mixed up most layers of remains, even tossing the first ones buried on top of the later ones.
The “Geological Column” that shows the “Ages” of earth history only actually exists in one place on earth; textbooks.
You seldom find more than two “layers,” and never more than five, in real life. And half the time, those layers are in the “wrong” order. More often, in fact, there are no “layers,” but just a jumbled mess, with the animals preserved in the tortured position of those who drowned.
So, what we actually find in geology fits what we would expect to find if the Flood happened the way the Bible says it did, not the way we would expect if there were long geological ages gradually laying down layer after layer.
Add to this, they are finding unfossilized bones with unfossilized hemoglobin still in them more and more often in dino digs. Observation of decay tells us bone and hemoglobin cannot possibly survive more than 5000 years without either decaying or fossilizing. The Flood happened about 4390 years ago. The poor dino’s they are finding in their digs are the ones that didn’t make the cut for the Ark!
And does this make evolutionists question their “Old Earth” theories? No, of course not. They question the observations of decay that humans have made for the last 4000 years instead. They invent stories that allow bones and hemoglobin to survive millions of years without decaying instead of questioning their religiously held belief of origins.
18 And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters.
19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.
20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
The mountains were covered more than fifteen cubits (twenty-two and a half feet) deep. This would have been the greatest depth possible to measure from a sounding from the Ark. It was a minimum number, not the maximum.
21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth, and every man:
22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
All in the dry land died. No mention of the sea animals.
23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth; and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.
The waters rose for 150 days. Even after the rain stopped, the fountains of the deep kept the water level rising for nearly half a year.