Genesis 8:13-14 - The Flood was an Eye-Witness Account
13 By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.
This is a good opportunity to point out an interesting pattern in the flood narrative. In verse 13, cutoff date for when “the surface of the ground was dry.” It is followed by verse 14, where see cutoff date for when the “the earth was completely dry.” In Hebrew, “ground” and “earth” are the same word we have been seeing throughout the narrative. So, how can the earth be dry by one day and “completely” dry by another?
It is my belief that Noah was not aware of everything as it happened, but that he noticed a great deal after the fact. Then later, Moses recorded what Noah observed in the order in which they occurred, not the order in which they were observed. For example, recall Genesis 7:20…
20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.
Inside the ark, Noah could not have known how deep the water was. In fact, even when the rains stopped, he could not possilbly tell the depth of the water. From a man’s eye view, all one can do is wait for the rain to stop and the water to calm. Then, look over the edge of the ark, and see how far down you can see. You won’t see the bottom, but if you are close enough to the mountains, then you might be able to judge the water’s depth relative to them. Well, verse 20 tells us precisely what a man on an ark would see, without attempting to say exactly how deep the flood itself was.
Here is another kind of example, also from chapter 7…
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.
If the flood is local to Noah’s region, then these verses are an accurate account of what he would eventually witness. However, at this point in the narrative, he has not witnessed it yet; he is still on the ark in the mountains of Ararat. Frankly, he won’t witness this until he has had a chance to survey the land, which is not recorded as part of the account. However, he did get to that point, yet this is where Moses wrote of what Noah saw. On the other hand, Noah was right there when verse 11 happened…
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.
And he could have only seen waters if he wasn’t on the ark when they happened… exactly as the account says. According to the account, Noah got onto the ark after the floodwaters started, and the waters continued after he boarded and God closed the ark door.
If this were a global event, then Moses’ account of the flood would be a combination of passed-down-through-the-generations-eye-witness-level detail (e.g., mountains covered to 20 feet) and God-revealed detail (everything on the planet killed). But in that case, why the mix? Why wouldn’t God have revealed the exact depth of the water? Well, some think he did, that somehow the highest mountain was submerged to 20 feet… unfortunately for them, the Hebrew does not mean “submerged”, but that the object’s hollows have been obscured. However, limit the flood’s extent, and all of those questions go away. Simply put, Noah’s observations are what we see; the entire account is passed-down-through-the-generations-eye-witness, which brings us back to Genesis 8:13-14 above…
13 By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.
At this point in the narrative, Noah could see the ground around ark, but not the earth at large. So, verse 13 is eye-witness testimony of what Noah saw from the ark. Verse 14 is eye witness testimony for what he would see a month later, after leaving the mountains of Ararat. What has reached us is Moses’ way of limiting the account of the dry ground to one location within the narrative, yet without missing any of the details that he knew.