Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
God remembered Noah
Genesis 8:1-14
1 God remembered Noah, all the animals, and all the livestock that were with him in the ship; and God made a wind to pass over the earth. The waters subsided. · WEB
Three words turn the whole catastrophe, and everything after them undoes what came before in the same order.
God remembered Noah, all the animals, and all the livestock that were with him in the ship.
That is the hinge of the flood narrative, and everything on either side of it mirrors the other. Before it: seven days announced, forty days of rain, a hundred and fifty days of prevailing water. After it: a hundred and fifty days receding, forty days to the opening of the window, then seven days and seven days for the dove. The verbs mirror with the numbers — the deep opened and now is stopped, they came into the ark and will go out of it, the covenant was announced and will be established. The dates match at both ends, the seventeenth day of a month each time.
And at the center of the pattern is not a change in the weather but a sentence about God.
When Scripture says God remembered, it never means he had forgotten. The verb marks the moment he acts on a commitment already made — he remembers Noah here, he remembers his covenant when Israel groans in Egypt Exodus 2:24, he remembers Rachel and Hannah. Remembering, in this vocabulary, is the beginning of doing something. Nothing has changed in God's disposition; what changes is that the waters start to fall.
The detail that God remembered all the animals, and all the livestock is worth keeping. The creatures are not cargo in this account. They were blessed in chapter one, they are covered by the covenant in chapter nine, and here they are remembered by name of category alongside the man.
The means is a wind passing over the earth — the same word used for the Spirit hovering over the waters in the second verse of the Bible, and the same picture, a breath moving over a world covered in water at the moment it is about to become habitable. The account of the flood ends with a new creation described in the vocabulary of the first.
What follows is patient and slow, and the patience is the striking thing. Noah has been shut in for months and does not force the door — he opens a window. The raven goes out and ranges. The dove goes out and comes back with nothing, for the waters were on the surface of the whole earth, and there is one of the most tender gestures in Scripture: He put out his hand, and took her, and brought her to him into the ship.
Seven days, and the dove returns with a freshly plucked olive leaf. Seven days more, and she does not return at all — which is better news than her coming back, and Noah is left to understand it without being told.
Then the covering is removed and the ground is seen to be dry, and still he waits, for another eight weeks, until the earth is dry. He had been shut in by God and he does not let himself out.
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