1And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation. 2Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.
3Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.
4For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.
5And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him.
6And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.
7And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.
8Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth,
9There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah.
10And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.
11In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
12And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
The story of Noah and of the flood itself is interesting. The story of the great flood was common to all cultures including in the Americas. There are people who will claim that the bible got the story of the flood from the Sumerians because of the similarities; but, the American Indians and the South American Indians have similar stories and they did not get them from the Sumerians, nope, the story was known all over the world even in the ancient times before there was a written word.
A couple of minor points regarding these verses. Firstly,it restates what was said earlier and then it mentions that Noah and his family boarded the boat seven days before the flood began. I have wondered why they had to go in seven days before the rains began, I think I would have liked to stay outside as long as possible. Perhaps it was to keep them separated from the others, we just don't know; but, when God creates great transitions in people's lives, he often separates them from others for a period before beginning something new.
In either case, God opens the seas and releases the water from the sky. If we go back to earlier in Genesis we read about where God put a firmament (membrane, separation) in the sky to keep the waters separated. That is the restraint that is removed from the waters. And it rained 40 days and 40 nights, the numbers 7 and 40 both reoccur in the bible. Jesus spent 40 days and 40 nights in the desert prior to his ministry beginning, the nation of Israel spent 40 years in the desert before arriving in Israel. Many believe that 40 refers to purification and after reading about Noah this is better understood.
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