Chapter 8 begins with the phrase that God "remembered" Noah. God had not forgotten Noah! This is where idioms are needed to be known in order to get the meaning of the text. To "remember" someone in the old Israelite culture meant to express concern and/or act with loving care toward someone. (NIV text note)
Then we see that the waters receded when a wind blew over them. The word translated 'wind' here is 'ruah,' used 379 times in the Old Testament and translated as 'spirit' 176 of those times!
Was it the Holy Spirit or a wind? Or both?
Then we see that both the springs of the deep and the 'windows of heaven' or the 'floodgates of the heavens' had been closed up. And the water receded.
I learned from Dr. Bernard Northrup, a Hebrew scholar, that there is something interesting in Genesis 8:3 that none of the translators of any of the editions evidently understood. The KJV says "And the waters returned from off the earth continually..." The NIV states, "The water receded steadily from the earth." The 'continually' and 'steadily' were their way of dealing with the fact that the verb indicating the recession of the waters is repeated.
Dr. Northrup feels that the intent of the writer was to indicate a back and forth motion of the receding waters, a coming and going.
The Bible says that after the 150 days of the water rising (from chapter 7), the waters immediately started to recede, or go down. This can be easily understood if one realizes that the areas under the crust where the water had been stored and heated were now empty and the crust itself would have to settle into them. This sort of movement is referred to as "downwarping." And the waters would have started to settle quickly into the downwarped areas.
But there was a LOT of water to drain off the earth now as the crust settled in places. The Bible says that in the seventh month the Ark touched bottom somewhere in the mountains of Ararat (and people are still looking for its remnants!), but we see in verse 5 that the tops of the surrounding mountains did not even become visible for another two and a half months!
And I keep thinking about the desperation Mrs. Noah must have felt with all those mice and rats populating into the hundreds and thousands in a year! Ychhh!
Eleven months after he and his family and all those animals boarded the Ark, Noah sent out a raven. It just kept flying back and forth! So Noah switched birds and sent out a dove. The dove found no place to land the first time and came back. But the second time Noah sent out the dove, it returned with a fresh olive leaf! Things were growing out there in that new land! Noah's heart, and the hearts of his family must have leapt with hope and the thought of an end to their floating zoo.
A week later, Noah sent out the dove again, and this time it did not come back.
It has now been a year since Noah and crew boarded the Ark. Noah took the covering off the Ark. The sky must have looked so beautiful to him after all that time! What the Bible mentions, though, is that he saw the land was dry. Evidently it was only 'relatively' dry, however, for Noah waited another month and a half before the ground was completely dry.
But then it was God who told Noah to get off the Ark. Get off and go, all you animals and people, and replenish the earth!
And so they all disembARKed (ever wonder where that word came from?).
And Noah, righteous man that He was, immediately built an alter to the Lord and sacrificed some of the clean animals on it.
The Lord's reaction to this is to be pleased. And the Lord says something interesting at this point:
"Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood." The Lord has more to say than that, but pause there for a moment.
Many people say the Flood was to destroy evil. Obviously that is not what happened! For evil continues to be the steady inclination of man's heart from the time he is little! Keep in mind that if something is inclined in one direction, it is a struggle -- it takes work -- to keep it from going that way. We do expect all people to learn to exert self-control over their evil desires, but the fact that so many laws are needed, and our jails are so full, shows that these inclinations often rule our lives and we simply don't always have what it takes to keep fighting them! It is not until Christ kills the old nature and grants a new nature with a spiritual rebirth that a person's heart no longer inclines toward evil, but rather toward the good, wanting, finally, to please God.
So while the Flood may have wiped out some of the effects of evil, it did not wipe out evil itself.
I would want to add a point here. Many times I have heard challengers to the Bible say how cruel God was to kill all the little babies and children as well as the adults in the Flood.
Think about this from God's point of view, though. The world has become so violent and so evil that there is only ONE man who is different! What chance would any of those children have of growing up to know about God? They would be irreversibly condemned to a live learned to be cruel, violent, and evil. The option to this? Take them now to heaven before that can happen. As Peter will say several thousand yars later, God is not willing that one should perish.
And so the children were killed along with all the other people. And then in heaven with the Lord. Safe, secure.
The final comment on this chapter is, from the point of view of science, a very important one.
Here is what we read, with only slight variations, in all the English translations:
"As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease."
There is a strong consensus among many creation scientists that the earth's axis was tilted at the time of the Flood. This would cause seasons where there were none before. The mechanism for the tilt could be a meteorite hit and/or the force of the explosions of sub-crustal waters at the time of the onset of the Flood. Because there was one large supercontinent at that time, the waters exploding over land would all be one one side of the globe while waters exploding upwards under the seas would lose some of their propelling power due to the water buffering them. This could easily, with that kind of force, have the necessary power to shove the earth over a little.
Is this what the words of the Lord are indicating by reference to the seasons? It didn't make sense to me because of the "day and night" at the end, which had been instituted on the first day of creation week!
So I called my husband in Australia (we have the Pacific Puddle between us right now!) and mentioned my query. Why were 'day and night' there?
He looked at the oldest manuscript he has -- a print of the Alexandrian Septuagint. This was translated by Hebrew scholars themselves from paleo-Hebrew into Greek about a hundred years before Christ was born.
Here is what it says:
"All the days of the earth,
seed and harvest, cold and heat, summer and spring, shall not cease by day or night."
THAT makes sense! That may well be indicating a whole new world!
[ June 06, 2002, 12:38 PM: Message edited by: Helen ]
Then we see that the waters receded when a wind blew over them. The word translated 'wind' here is 'ruah,' used 379 times in the Old Testament and translated as 'spirit' 176 of those times!
Was it the Holy Spirit or a wind? Or both?
Then we see that both the springs of the deep and the 'windows of heaven' or the 'floodgates of the heavens' had been closed up. And the water receded.
I learned from Dr. Bernard Northrup, a Hebrew scholar, that there is something interesting in Genesis 8:3 that none of the translators of any of the editions evidently understood. The KJV says "And the waters returned from off the earth continually..." The NIV states, "The water receded steadily from the earth." The 'continually' and 'steadily' were their way of dealing with the fact that the verb indicating the recession of the waters is repeated.
Dr. Northrup feels that the intent of the writer was to indicate a back and forth motion of the receding waters, a coming and going.
The Bible says that after the 150 days of the water rising (from chapter 7), the waters immediately started to recede, or go down. This can be easily understood if one realizes that the areas under the crust where the water had been stored and heated were now empty and the crust itself would have to settle into them. This sort of movement is referred to as "downwarping." And the waters would have started to settle quickly into the downwarped areas.
But there was a LOT of water to drain off the earth now as the crust settled in places. The Bible says that in the seventh month the Ark touched bottom somewhere in the mountains of Ararat (and people are still looking for its remnants!), but we see in verse 5 that the tops of the surrounding mountains did not even become visible for another two and a half months!
And I keep thinking about the desperation Mrs. Noah must have felt with all those mice and rats populating into the hundreds and thousands in a year! Ychhh!
Eleven months after he and his family and all those animals boarded the Ark, Noah sent out a raven. It just kept flying back and forth! So Noah switched birds and sent out a dove. The dove found no place to land the first time and came back. But the second time Noah sent out the dove, it returned with a fresh olive leaf! Things were growing out there in that new land! Noah's heart, and the hearts of his family must have leapt with hope and the thought of an end to their floating zoo.
A week later, Noah sent out the dove again, and this time it did not come back.
It has now been a year since Noah and crew boarded the Ark. Noah took the covering off the Ark. The sky must have looked so beautiful to him after all that time! What the Bible mentions, though, is that he saw the land was dry. Evidently it was only 'relatively' dry, however, for Noah waited another month and a half before the ground was completely dry.
But then it was God who told Noah to get off the Ark. Get off and go, all you animals and people, and replenish the earth!
And so they all disembARKed (ever wonder where that word came from?).
And Noah, righteous man that He was, immediately built an alter to the Lord and sacrificed some of the clean animals on it.
The Lord's reaction to this is to be pleased. And the Lord says something interesting at this point:
"Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood." The Lord has more to say than that, but pause there for a moment.
Many people say the Flood was to destroy evil. Obviously that is not what happened! For evil continues to be the steady inclination of man's heart from the time he is little! Keep in mind that if something is inclined in one direction, it is a struggle -- it takes work -- to keep it from going that way. We do expect all people to learn to exert self-control over their evil desires, but the fact that so many laws are needed, and our jails are so full, shows that these inclinations often rule our lives and we simply don't always have what it takes to keep fighting them! It is not until Christ kills the old nature and grants a new nature with a spiritual rebirth that a person's heart no longer inclines toward evil, but rather toward the good, wanting, finally, to please God.
So while the Flood may have wiped out some of the effects of evil, it did not wipe out evil itself.
I would want to add a point here. Many times I have heard challengers to the Bible say how cruel God was to kill all the little babies and children as well as the adults in the Flood.
Think about this from God's point of view, though. The world has become so violent and so evil that there is only ONE man who is different! What chance would any of those children have of growing up to know about God? They would be irreversibly condemned to a live learned to be cruel, violent, and evil. The option to this? Take them now to heaven before that can happen. As Peter will say several thousand yars later, God is not willing that one should perish.
And so the children were killed along with all the other people. And then in heaven with the Lord. Safe, secure.
The final comment on this chapter is, from the point of view of science, a very important one.
Here is what we read, with only slight variations, in all the English translations:
"As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease."
There is a strong consensus among many creation scientists that the earth's axis was tilted at the time of the Flood. This would cause seasons where there were none before. The mechanism for the tilt could be a meteorite hit and/or the force of the explosions of sub-crustal waters at the time of the onset of the Flood. Because there was one large supercontinent at that time, the waters exploding over land would all be one one side of the globe while waters exploding upwards under the seas would lose some of their propelling power due to the water buffering them. This could easily, with that kind of force, have the necessary power to shove the earth over a little.
Is this what the words of the Lord are indicating by reference to the seasons? It didn't make sense to me because of the "day and night" at the end, which had been instituted on the first day of creation week!
So I called my husband in Australia (we have the Pacific Puddle between us right now!) and mentioned my query. Why were 'day and night' there?
He looked at the oldest manuscript he has -- a print of the Alexandrian Septuagint. This was translated by Hebrew scholars themselves from paleo-Hebrew into Greek about a hundred years before Christ was born.
Here is what it says:
"All the days of the earth,
seed and harvest, cold and heat, summer and spring, shall not cease by day or night."
THAT makes sense! That may well be indicating a whole new world!
[ June 06, 2002, 12:38 PM: Message edited by: Helen ]
