Forty Days and Forty Nights
For 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.
-- Genesis 7: 4 (KJV)
Besides disputing how many beasts were brought aboard Noah's ark, the two different sources of the story disagree on numerous other points, and it's enough to make your head spin.
J (the Yahwist) claims, for example, that the floodwaters completely subsided after three weeks, while P (the Priestly author) claims it took 150 days for the water even to begin receeding and over a year for the land to dry. The two do concur on how long God caused rain to fall on the earth: "forty days and forty nights."
This isn't the last time these figures appear in the Bible, though it is the first. Later, Moses will convene with God on Sinai for "forty days and forty nights" (Exodus 24: 18), and the evangelist Mark tells us Christ sojourned in the wilderness for "forty days" (Mark 1: 13; see also Matthew 4 and Luke 4). Thanks to such repetition the phrase has become embedded in English as the most famous statement of duration, saving perhaps for the six days of creation.
Whenever it was that the earth was fit for habitation, Noah disembarks somewhere in the Ararat mountain range with his wife and sons (Shem, Ham, and Japheth), and the beasts. A few of the latter, it turns out, aren't as safe as they might have thought when invited onto the ark, for after piously building an altar to God, Noah burns a few of them as a sacrifice. "And," J continues (Genesis 8: 21), "the Lord smelled a sweet savour" from the burnt offerings, which prompts him to pledge never again to "curse the ground ... for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I have done."
As a token of this promise or "covenant" -- in which he seems to resign himself forevermore to human sinfulness -- God sets a "bow in the cloud" as a reminder both to man and to himself. This is the Bible's way of explaining rainbows, though at this remove it would be hard to say how seriously we're supposed to take it. J, at least, seems to think he isn't dealing in facts, but rather in a version of mythology common to the ancient Near East -- albeit a version specifically targeted to one group, the Israelites, among the descendants of Noah's eldest son Shem, namesake of the Semites.
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books
on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling
Brush Up Your Shakespeare!
