Genesis: Chapter Eight (The Flood Ends)

In which God ends the flood, his genocide having been a great success, and Noah kills a lot of the surviving animals to thank God for killing practically everyone he knew.

Finally, "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." (8:1) It's about time. Noah and the animals have spent roughly six Gregorian months (or a really uncertain number of Biblical years) on the ark, and no animal has died or gone hungry. But I wonder where the water receded to. I mean, it was covering the entire earth to the point where the tallest mountain was covered by twenty feet of water. All land was completely covered, so it's not like there were any separated oceans for the water to recede to. Wind doesn't implicitly cause evaporation, either, so it didn't just heat up until the floodwaters became clouds. The Bible is full of this kind of magic.

The water recedes over the course of the 150 days following the cessation of precipitation. So God didn't release a mighty wind after all, but instead made wind blow for that entire 5-6 month period, and slowly the water went away. Doesn't that generally happen anyway? It seems like a lot of acts of God are actually attributable to natural events. This one isn't wind, though. It's normal evaporation caused by energy from the sun exciting the water particles and turning them into gas. Exciting. Godlike.

Verse 8:5 gives us some more great insight and Biblical/lunar calendar debunking fodder: "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." 150 days into 9 months (because we're only one day into the tenth month) shows us that there are an average of... *starts calculator software* ...16 ²/₃ days per month. That's 0.59 lunar cycles per month, on average. The Gregorian calendar's months are not an example in constant day distribution, some months being as short as twenty-eight days and others as long as thirty-one, so I will accept that some Biblical months are shorter than 16 days and some are longer. In fact, that must be true. If all months contained the same number of days, we would not have the two-thirds of a day on the average. Days are measured in whole numbers within the context of a month. Therefore, I continue to posit that one Biblical year cannot possibly be equal to a lunar cycle. Each month averages nearly seventeen days in length. Chapter Seven tells us that there are, at minimum, two months in one year. Therefore, at minimum, there are thirty-four days in one Biblical year, which exceeds the length of a lunar cycle by six days.

Okay. Back to the story.

Noah sends out a raven through his skylight, which is described here as a window, and it flies back and forth until all the water is dried up. (8:6-7)

But now I get confused because after the raven flies "until the water had dried up from the earth" (8:7), Noah then sends out a dove "to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground." (8:8) So what happened with the raven? Why did Noah bother with it if he was just going to send the dove later? Is there any explanation for why the dove "returned to Noah in the ark" when it "could find no place to set its feet," but the raven "kept flying back and forth"? How is it even possible that the raven could fly until the water was gone, but Noah could still send out a dove who then found no dry land anywhere? If the raven flew until the water was gone, why is it that Noah "waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark" (8:10) to search for land again?

And how is it possible that after 190 days of water completely covering the earth that there could possibly be a "freshly plucked olive leaf" (8:11) for the dove to return with? No olive tree could possibly survive 190 days of intense flooding, and even if it survived, it would be so drastically damaged that it wouldn't be able to recuperate and produce leaves within a week. None of this makes any sense whatsoever. Two birds fly out and find a lack of water at different times set two weeks apart. Neither of those birds suffered from weakness after 190 days with limited food supply (probably no substantial food existed past the first week, maybe two). I'm so lost. I think this is what the Bible counts on because I'm getting ready to just quit and accept that a bunch of rain fell, Noah and a bunch of animals survived for a really long time, and then everything was all better because...

MAGIC!!! Yes. Magic. Certainly that's it. I'll just skip over the whole funny business of two birds and impossible timelines and implausibly surviving olive trees and just resolve to call it all MAGIC!

But then, just as I've resolved to ignore all of this, the Bible pulls another one out of left field. First, it says that "the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth." (8:13) The very next verse contradicts this: "By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry." (8:14) Which is it? Did the flood go away on month one, day one, or month two, day twenty-seven? I'm not even going to mention the further timeline complications of this.

In 8:15-19, God commands Noah to get off the ark along with all the animals "so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it." They comply. Then, in 8:20, Noah builds an altar to praise God and his wonderous acts of mass genocide. To solidify his praise, he takes some of the clean animals and burns them on the altar in sacrifice, finishing what God started and doing away with all of those excess diverse genes and reducing the entire planet to the point where incest is required for future generations to live.

God decides that "never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done." So that's good. It's also good that God makes this proclamation in 8:22 --

As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.

I feel it necessary to mention what this implies:

• Before this proclamation, plants bloomed all the time, not requiring any time to germinate, and they produced edible food constantly.
• There was never any variation in heat, despite the fact that God already created day and night on the universe's first day of existence.
• There were no seasons beforehand.
• Day and night didn't exist despite what Chapter One says about God's first day of labor.

Or God could just be blowing smoke again like I suspect he did when he banished man from the Garden of Eden and made childbirth painful and took away the legs of all snakes.