Lesson
The Flood
Noah is 600. The waters cover the earth the text describes. The bow is set. The year is 1656 on the Masoretic count. A BC date is only a later sum.
October 7, 2026
The LORD tells Noah to make an ark. The reason is named. He will destroy all flesh under heaven, and every thing that is on the earth shall die. Noah does what he is commanded.
He is 600 years, 2 months, and 17 days when the fountains of the great deep burst and the windows of heaven open. The same day Noah, his sons, his wife, their wives, and the animals enter. The LORD shuts him in. Forty days the rain falls. The waters prevail 150 days. Every living thing on the face of the ground, in whose nostrils was the breath of life, dies. Noah remains, and those with him.
The ark rests in the mountains of Ararat. The tops of the mountains are seen. A raven, a dove, an olive leaf, and then a dove that does not return. In Noah's six hundred and first year, the first day of the first month, the face of the ground is dry. By the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the earth is dried out, and God tells them to leave.
The bow, and the next sin
Noah builds an altar and offers. The LORD smells the pleasing aroma and says He will not again curse the ground because of man, nor again strike down every living thing as He has done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.
Then a . Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood. The sign is the bow in the cloud. Peter reads that world as a world that perished, and the present heavens and earth as stored up for a judgment that is not water.
Noah plants a vineyard, drinks, and lies uncovered. Ham sees. Shem and Japheth cover him without looking. Noah wakes and speaks over his sons. Canaan is cursed. Shem is blessed. Japheth will dwell in the tents of Shem. The man who walked with God through the flood is not beyond shame. The new world is not a new nature.
The table of nations follows, and then Babel. The flood did not end the line of the seed. It judged a world, saved a household, and started the nations the rest of the book will walk through.
The year
On the count from creation, adding the ages in Genesis 5, the flood is year 1656. That arithmetic is in Seth to the Flood. It is a Hebrew year in the sense this timeline uses that phrase. It is not a layer an archaeologist has labeled 1656.
If someone keeps adding the biblical years until the temple, the flood falls in the third BC. That is a sum. It is not a measurement. How the year should be said out loud is the minor lesson below.
This lesson's home is Timeline.