Genesis 8:6-7 - “Is the land dry?”
6 After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark 7 and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.
Having spent time developing the argument that Noah built the ark within the mountains of Ararat, away from the general population that was to be destroyed, it starts to paint a picture of Noah’s thought process as he processes what to do after the ark lands.
One of the things that always confused me was why he sent out the birds. After all, he knew the water outside the ark was going down. Why wasn’t watching it good enough? Well, consider that Noah knew he was in the mountains of Ararat. He knew it, because he built the ark there, and was familiar with them. Therefore, he also knew that the land from which he had escaped dying in was out of view. Now, I suppose he could have gotten out of the ark and trekked over the mountains himself, but apparently he did not. My guess is that Noah couldn’t deal with it. So, he sent out a raven.
There are several kinds of ravens in the world. A few are from the Middle East. One kind is the Brown-necked Raven…
This species has a wide range across virtually the whole of North Africa, down as far as Kenya, the Arabian peninsula and up into the Greater Middle East and southern Iran. It lives in a predominantly desert environment visiting oases and palm groves.
You can see it’s habitat here…
Now compare its habibitat to the map below. What you will see is that the mountains of Ararat fall north of the brown-necked raven’s habitat…
This makes the brown-necked raven a good candidate for the kind that Noah sent out. It’s habitat included Southern Iraq, and therefore much of the land around and between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. If the land were dry, the raven would have seen it. However, with such a large habitat to explore, that raven might have flown to an area that told Noah nothing of the region he was interested in. I believe therefore that the fan-tailed raven is a better candidate. Its habitat is much tighter, and still encompasses the key “earth” that God destroyed. The same concerns would still apply, but it is better match.
Being adapted to the desert, neither of these ravens would have likely found a suitable source of food or shelter in the immediate vicinity of Iran, Iraq, and perhaps not even Saudi Arabia. If the flood reached the Red Sea, a likely consideration given its connections to the Meditarranean Sea, then parts of North-Eastern Africa would have to recover as well, making this raven’s habitat an excellent test for Noah. Preferring deserts, the raven would see a bunch of wetlands (i.e., they were still drying). So, they would just keep flying around. The water could have even have receded by now, but these lands were by no means dry. And as the scripture says, Noah sent out the raven to see if the land had dried up. But all it did was fly around… guess the waters hadn’t dired yet. But had they at least receded? That test would take a different kind of bird…