Paul Kretzmann Commentary - Genesis 7:1 - 7:6

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Paul Kretzmann Commentary - Genesis 7:1 - 7:6


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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:

The Order to Embark

v. 1. And 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. Here is the solemn command of Jehovah with which He announced the coming of the cataclysm; it was the signal of the approaching judgment. of all the millions of men then living only Noah had been found righteous in the eyes of God.

v. 2. of 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.
Here the account is more specific, distinguishing between clean and unclean animals. Cf Leviticus 11; Deuteronomy 14. of clean animals a total of seven of each kind were to be taken into the ark, probably three pairs and a fourth male intended for a sacrificial animal; but with regard to the unclean animals the arrangement by pairs was observed.

v. 3. of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female, to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.
So these animals and birds were to be the progenitors of the animal world after the Flood, to restock the earth, which would be rendered desolate by the universal destruction.

v. 4. 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.
First it had been years of respite, but now the time has narrowed down to a few days, thus emphasizing once more the inevitable doom. The destruction was to be brought upon the earth by a flood inaugurated by a steady rain of forty days and forty nights, and it was to include all animate creation, everything that had its own separate existence, all of which was to be blotted out from the face of the earth.

v. 5. And Noah did according unto all that the Lord commanded him.
Cf Gen_6:22.

v. 6. And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.
The hundred and twenty years of grace had begun even before his marriage, or at least before the birth of his sons, Gen_5:32, and the latter were now almost one hundred years old. Thus the entire congregation of believers had dwindled down to eight souls, Methuselah having died in the year of the Flood.