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Quick Summary:

Noah enters the ark wtih his wife, sons and their wives.  Also entering the ark are 2 of every kind of animal (male & female) and 7 male/female pairs of the clean animals and birds of the sky.  God tells Noah it will rain for 40 days & 40 nights… and once again Noah does everything he is commanded to do.

The great flood begins in Noah’s six-hundreth year with water coming from the watery depths as well as the sky above.  The waters surge and grow until even the high mountains are covered with at least 20 feet of water.   All that were in the ark were saved, but everything on dry land was wiped out (it doesn’t mention the fish).  All human life was extinguished except for Noah and his family.

Commentary:

It’s interesting to see how things are first summarized, and then given additional details (the same technique was seen in the Creation account in Genesis.  First we’re told about the 40 days & 40 nights, the different pairs of animals, etc.  and then in verses 11-24 we get a much more detailed account of everything that was just summarized.

2-3 “You are to take with you seven pairs, a male and its female, of all the clean animals, and two of the animals that are not clean, a male and its female, 3 and seven pairs, male and female , of the birds of the sky – in order to keep offspring alive on the face of the whole earth.”

I often wonder about the clean and unclean definition here.  We are given the clean & unclean regulations in Leviticus, so by having this segregation here means two things:

1. That clean & unclean animals were already specified by God for the sacrificial system.
2. The author (Moses) is writing Genesis AFTER he had already been given the laws of Leviticus and so he inserts this knowledge into the text, although it has not happened yet.

Of those two options, I think #1 fits better overall.   Obviously if only two animals of every kind were brought on the ark, then none of the animals could be used for food… or for a sacrfice & food after the flood.  I think there were animals on the ark that ate other animals, and therefore the 7 pairs of “clean” animals were brought on in part to satisfy that need.

Verse 3 describes seven pairs of all the birds of the sky – which by Leviticus rules are not all clean animals.  So there was either a food supply there of unclean animals to give to the other animals… or these were sacrificial rules which were given to Adam & Eve and were not the same as Levitical rules.  Interesting questions, I don’t have a definite answer.

I always admire that Noah does everything the Lord commanded him.  How hard would that be, as bizarre as all these instructions are?  Faith on display once again.

Some argue that this couldn’t possibly have really happened because there are so many animals they’d never fit — even on a large, triple-decker ark.  We have to think about a few points here:

1. This is divine intervention, obviously, so the normal rules are not going to apply.  Nobody could ever go out and round up all the earth animals…. so God is hand-picking everything.
2. They could have all been small, baby animals.  Less food to feed them, and less space on the ark.  With divine intervention, they could’ve grown more slowly, eaten less food, etc.
3. All the “master” species were represented.  If you study creation science, we see that genetics eventually creates more specialized traits, but they can descend from the same original species.  For example… two wolves, male & female, could’ve been responsible for ALL the different dogs, wolves, and other closely related animal classifications we use now.
4. The FISH were not on the ark, which means there was still plenty to eat if you just went fishing. 

So considering those four things, it is not only possible but conceivable for us to comprehend the possibility that God hand-picked the baby animals to march onto the ark, and that their food needs were manageable and the genetic code classes sufficient enough to eventually give us the great animal diversity we now have on Earth.

Interesting that in verse 10 the deluge comes “seven days later” after the animals and Noah enter the ark, but in verse 13 it says “on that same day” shortly after describing the sky opening for 40 days & 40 nights.  At first glance this seems like a contradiction, but one easy explanation is that the “on that same day” part of verse 13 is not talking about the preceding discussion on the 40 days & 40 nights, but on the following verses about the animals entering the ark.  We actually know the animals entered the ark the same day as Noah, so with that knowledge the phrasing should read more like:
- “On the same day Noah entered the ark, so did all the animals”.

We are told repeatedly that all the animals entering are land animals, as well as birds of the sky.   The fish could obviously survive, and did… which is one more food supply QUITE available to feed the hungry crew on the ark.  However, everything that was left on land did indeed perish.

How could this flood be a local flood, as some have postulated?  Not only does EVERYTHING on land perish, but even the “high mountains” are covered with water to at least 20 feet deep.   What we don’t know is how much the flood changed the world.  Perhaps the pre-flood world had much more groundwater spread throughout the Earth, and more atmospheric water.  Perhaps those high mountains of Genesis were not as high as the peaks we have today (with tectonic activity, volcanoes and more).  It seems plausible that as the flood waters receeded into the Earth and gathered into oceans it shifted and carved up the land into more valleys, more extremes, lower lows and higher highs.  It was a massive shift!

Other questions:

Why did the 800-900 years of living disappear shortly after the flood?
If water covered the Earth, where did the “receeding” waters go?
How did the antedeluvian world differ from the post-flood world?

So many interesting questions and worth asking, but I feel we should (and can) answer them with the approach that the Bible speaks truth even as strange as it might seem to us today.