Biblion Bible Commentary
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The waters prevailed
Genesis 7:17-24
17 The flood was forty days on the earth. The waters increased, and lifted up the ship, and it was lifted up above the earth. · WEB
Eight verses of rising water, told in the vocabulary of totality, with one clause of exception at the end.
The paragraph does one thing and does it by accumulation. The waters increased, and the ship was lifted; the waters rose and increased greatly; the waters rose very high; the waters rose fifteen cubits higher. Four successive statements of the same fact, each stronger than the last, which is how a narrator conveys a duration and a scale that cannot be shown.
The extent is stated in the widest terms the language has: All the high mountains that were under the whole sky were covered. Then the destruction, in a list that reaches for every category the first chapter had made — birds, livestock, animals, creeping things, and every man — and closes with the phrase that defines what died: All on the dry land, in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, died.
That clause is precise about what perished. It is land creatures with breath, which is the same description used of the man's own making in Genesis 2:7. Fish are not mentioned in the list and could not be, on the account's own terms.
The scale is not incidental color, and the narrative argues from it later rather than merely asserting it. A vessel of the dimensions given in the previous chapter is unnecessary for a local event; birds do not need preserving from a regional flood, since they fly; and the promise God makes afterward — that never again would all flesh be cut off by a flood, and never again a flood to destroy the earth Genesis 9:11 — would have been broken many times over if it referred to something less than what these verses describe. The promise is the strongest internal evidence for the extent, because a limited promise about a limited event would have failed within recorded history.
The writer also keeps the numbers running. The waters flooded the earth one hundred fifty days, which is the outer count in the mirror the narrative is building, and the figure will appear once more on the way back down.
And then the exception, in eleven words at the end of the destruction: Only Noah was left, and those who were with him in the ship. Eight people and a cargo of animals, in the middle of the widest statement of loss in Scripture. The whole of what follows — every nation in chapter ten, Abraham, Israel, and the promise of Genesis 3:15 still outstanding — hangs on that clause.
The New Testament reads the episode twice as a warning about a judgment still to come, and both times fastens on the same feature: it was ordinary until it was not. People were eating and drinking and marrying until the day Noah entered Matthew 24:38–39, and the world that then existed perished by water 2 Peter 3:6.
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