Genesis 7:21-8:5 - The Ark Finally Lands
21 Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. 22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. 23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.
 24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.
Now consider that in English, the phrase “the earth” usually refers to the planet, but the word used in the Hebrew usually refers to a region of land. Well in the Flood account, the region God flooded only needed to be large enough to rid the world of the evil created by Adam’s descendants. We know they are only Adam’s descendants because Genesis 5:1 starts with all of mankind, then zooms into Adam and his descendants. We know Adam came from mankind because a straightforward reading of scripture has mankind being created on Day 6, Adam after Day 7, and Genesis 5 includes Adam in the generations of mankind. So, lining all of these up, we can know that the “the earth” was only a region. (I have blogged on all of these details)
So, now we see that every living thing that moved in the region of Adam’s descendants perished, including mankind.
22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.
Why clarify this? Because we know see that there were bodies of water flooded in addition to the land. Lake Van for one. Potentially the Caspian Sea, and Black Sea for others. The Tigris and Euphrates were probably flooded as well, in addition to parts to the Mediterranean. And I’m sure that list is incomplete. So, while sealife was preserved, the land that Noah had lived on for 600 years was completely wiped out.
23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.
These verses were put in sequence of the events, but I see them in the sequence of Noah realizing them. Seeing that huge flood, seeing everybody gone, and knowing you survived in a secret ark? It’s no wonder he got drunk after the flood.
 24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.
The first 40 days were rain, and some portion of the beginning included springs waters violently bursting forth as well, most likely contributing to the closing off of the region of the mountains of Ararat where Noah had built the ark and was still floating in at this point of the narrative. Over the last 110 days of the period in verse 24, Noah was watching the waters go down. He could see the mountains in the distance, water covering them from the bottom, clouds obscuring them from the top. It would have been an awesome sight, if not outright fearsome. Moving on to Genesis 8, we see a summary of that 110 days…
1 But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. 2 Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. 3 The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, 4 and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.
Verse 5 is cool. It makes it sound like the receding of the water is what made the mountain tops visible. However, recall that the Hebrew word for “cover” refers only to covering the mountains’ hollows. However, there were clouds over the mountains as well. Verse 5 is therefore both a reference to the mountains becoming visible from the bottom (”the waters continued to recede”) and the top… the clouds were pulling back as well.
Now, one obvious objection to my description is that scripture does not literally say that the clouds were receding. That is true, but remember that Moses was not writing this to us. He did not know that leaving out details about the clouds would be a stumbling block in the 21st century. However, it should seem obvious when you think about it that clouds would have to recede after the rain, that it takes longer for clouds to recede within the mountains, and that rainbows appear when the sun penetrates those clouds… and we know that God only showed Noah a rainbow after he was off the ark. Why Moses didn’t actually mention the clouds, I don’t know. However, what he did write is completely consistent with how clouds would have been involved. If they obscured the mountain tops at the end of the rains, then took a long time to dissipate, until eventually a rainbow was seen, then everything Moses wrote is consistent with it. In my mind, Moses wrote enough.