Oh, this is just Eileen again, She is locked in on the flood starting on February 17th:
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.
but what calendar?
777, assuming that the second month was Iyar, there are some other things that I didn't know until I started seeing if the commentaries named a Jewish month since Moses was way before the current calendar in the USA. It turns out that the Ark floated 150 days, and Scripture says that it was on the 17th of the 2nd month until the 17th of the 7th month, meaning that there were 12 months of 30 days. In other words, the Flood was so catastrophic that it altered the orbit of the earth from 360 days as originally intended to 365.25 days, although there are some extra minutes on there and sooner or later a day will have to be accounted for of the orbit of the earth will not reflect the time-keeping system.
This is explained more properly by the Institute of Creation Research but it goes to the curse from Adam and Eve as well as the destruction of all sinners and all animals except those on the Ark and amplifies the horrible effects of sin:
The fact that Genesis uses here a
pre-intercalationary calendar is a most important indication of its antiquity. Had Genesis been written during or after the Jewish exile in Babylon or Persia (6th-5th centuries BC), as modernists claim, it would have used the intercalationary calendar of Babylon and Persia, which, like the Jewish calendar, would certainly not have measured five months as 150 days.
Besides, the post-exilic Jews always named the months after the Babylonian fashion and would have used those names in any "edited" account. Genesis doesn't. It merely numbers the months in accordance with
pre-Babylonian usage. Illustrated above is an Assyrian lunar calendar (which names the months) from circa 1800 BC. It still works, but measures the post-Flood lunar year as 354 days. The Flood account in Genesis pre-dates its manufacture.
In other words, this part of Genesis was written before the effects of the Flood--the sudden slippage between lunar and solar time and so on--began to be observed and measured.2 Thus, the calendar portrayed in its first chapters is a further evidence of the antiquity of Genesis.
The Calendar and the Antiquity of Genesis
What could happen to change Earth's orbit? Its angular momentum is vast, and just like a spinning gyroscope is hard to adjust, the earth's motion resists change. It would take a mighty force to alter it.
The Bible does speak of such an event. Without giving all the details it indicates that the great Flood of Noah's day forever altered Earth's systems. If Earth's orbit has changed, this is when it happened. With the fountains of the great deep relocating a huge volume of liquid, moving continents, possible asteroid bombardment, etc., shifting the location of much mass, the length of the day, the length of the year, and the tilt of the axis could have all changed. We don't have the details as to precise amounts or forces involved, but at least we have certain knowledge of an event capable of doing the job.
In the Early Earth, Were All the Months Exactly Thirty Days Long?
