Bible Study #6: Noah and the Flood (Genesis 6:9-9:17)

Short answer: Genesis 6:9-9:17 tells how God judged a world “filled with violence” with a great flood, while saving Noah, his family and the animals in an ark. The story ends with God’s first named covenant in Scripture, a promise to every living creature that a flood will never again destroy all life, sealed with the sign of the rainbow. It is a story about judgment, but even more about God remembering, rescuing and starting creation over.

The Passage

Reference: Genesis 6:9-9:17. Read the whole passage in the NIV here: Genesis 6:9-9:17 (NIV)

Key verses:

“This is the account of Noah and his family. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.” (Genesis 6:9)

“I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them.” (Genesis 6:13)

“So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.” (Genesis 6:14)

“Noah did everything just as God commanded him.” (Genesis 6:22)

“On that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.” (Genesis 7:11)

“Then the Lord shut him in.” (Genesis 7:16)

“But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark.” (Genesis 8:1)

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” (Genesis 8:22)

“I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” (Genesis 9:13)

What Happens in the Story?

Last time (Study #5) ended with God grieving over human evil and the line, “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord” (Genesis 6:8). This story picks up right there. God tells Noah to build an ark, a huge floating box with rooms and a roof, and to bring his wife, his three sons (Shem, Ham and Japheth) and their wives, along with animals of every kind. Noah obeys. The springs of the great deep burst open, the floodgates of the heavens open, rain falls forty days and forty nights, the waters rise over the earth for a hundred and fifty days, and everything outside the ark dies.

Then the turn: God remembers Noah. A wind passes over the earth, the waters go down, and the ark comes to rest on “the mountains of Ararat” (8:4). Noah sends out a raven and then a dove, three times, until the dove does not return. Noah leaves the ark, builds an altar and offers a sacrifice. God promises never again to curse the ground or destroy all life by flood, blesses Noah’s family with the same words he spoke at creation, and sets the rainbow as the sign of his covenant.

History: When and Where Is It Set, and Who Wrote It?

Setting. The story is set in the ancient world before Abraham, in the region of Mesopotamia and the mountains to its north. “Ararat” is the Hebrew name for the land later called Urartu, in the highlands of what is now eastern Turkey, Armenia and northwest Iran. Notice the text says the ark rested on the mountains (plural) of Ararat, a region, not one named peak.

Authorship and dating. Jewish and Christian tradition has long held that Moses wrote Genesis, drawing on older records and traditions, with the story preserved because it was given by God. Many modern scholars see Genesis as compiled over time from earlier sources. A common scholarly view is that the flood story weaves together two accounts, often called “J” and “P,” pointing to details such as the two-by-two pairs (6:19-20) alongside seven pairs of clean animals (7:2-3), and the forty days of rain alongside the hundred and fifty days of flooding. Traditional readers answer that these are not contradictions but layers: two of every kind for survival, extra clean animals for sacrifice (8:20), forty days of water pouring from above within a longer flood season. Both views take the text seriously; they differ on how it came together.

Local or global? Christians also hold different views on the flood’s extent. Some read it as a worldwide flood. Others read it as a catastrophic regional flood that covered the whole world as the writer and his audience knew it, since the Hebrew word erets can mean “earth” or “land.” Faithful believers hold both positions, and both agree on what the story teaches about God.

Context: The Ancient World Around the Story

The Bible is not the only ancient text with a great flood. Mesopotamia preserved several:

• The Sumerian flood story features a king named Ziusudra who survives a flood in a large boat.
• The Atrahasis Epic, known from Old Babylonian copies from around the 17th century BC, tells of gods who send a flood because humans are too noisy and numerous, and a hero who survives in a boat.
• Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh has Utnapishtim build a boat, survive the flood, land on a mountain and release a dove, a swallow and a raven, then offer a sacrifice. The gods, hungry after the flood, “gathered like flies” around it.

The similarities are real, and they show that Genesis speaks into a world that already told flood stories. The differences are where the meaning lives:

• In Mesopotamia, the gods flood the world over noise or overpopulation, and they quarrel among themselves. In Genesis, one God judges moral evil, specifically violence (6:11-13).
• In Atrahasis, the gods regret the flood partly because they lost the humans who fed them. In Genesis, God needs nothing. He receives Noah’s offering and responds with a promise.
• In Gilgamesh, the survivor is made immortal. In Genesis, Noah stays an ordinary mortal man whose story continues, flaws and all (9:18-29).

Literary context. The story is shaped as an “un-creation and re-creation.” In Genesis 1, God separated the waters above from the waters below and made dry land appear. In the flood, “the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened” (7:11): the separation is undone and the world returns toward the watery chaos of Genesis 1:2. Then a wind (the Hebrew ruach, the same word as “Spirit” in 1:2) passes over the waters, dry land appears again, and God repeats the creation blessing: “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth” (9:1). Noah is a new Adam on a new earth.

Before the story comes the long genealogy from Adam to Noah and the strange account of the “sons of God,” the daughters of humans and the Nephilim (6:1-4), followed by God’s grief in 6:5-8. After it comes Noah’s drunkenness (9:18-29), a sobering reminder that the flood washed the world but did not change the human heart, which sets up the Tower of Babel and God’s call of Abraham.

Context From Enoch and Other Ancient Writings

Genesis gives the flood only a few lines of backstory. Ancient Jewish writers filled in that backstory at length, and the New Testament shows the early church knew their work. These books are not in the Protestant or Catholic Bible, but 1 Enoch is part of the Bible of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and it was widely read in Jesus’ day. Copies were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

1 Enoch: why the flood came. The section of 1 Enoch called the Book of the Watchers (chapters 1-36, usually dated to the 3rd century BC) retells Genesis 6:1-4. Two hundred angels, called Watchers and led by Semjaza (Shemihazah), come down, take human wives and father giants. They also teach humanity forbidden arts, including weapon-making, sorcery and the reading of the stars, under the angel Azazel. The giants devour the world’s resources and turn on people and each other, and the earth “cries out.” This matches Genesis’s own charge that the earth was “full of violence.”

1 Enoch 10: God sends his angels. In chapter 10, God answers with a four-part commission (quoted here from R. H. Charles’s 1917 public-domain translation):

• Uriel to Noah: “Go to Noah and tell him in my name ‘Hide thyself!'” so that “he may escape and his seed may be preserved for all the generations of the world” (10:2-3).
• Raphael against Azazel: “Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness” (10:4).
• Gabriel against the giants: “Proceed against the bastards and the reprobates,” and “send them one against the other that they may destroy each other in battle,” for “length of days shall they not have” (10:9-10).
• Michael against Semjaza: “bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgement” (10:11-12).

In Enoch’s telling, the flood is the last stage of a larger judgment: the fallen angels are bound, the giants are destroyed, and the earth is cleansed.

The Book of Giants: the dream of the cut-down trees. A companion work to Enoch, the Book of Giants, survives in Aramaic fragments from Qumran (including 4Q530 and 6Q8) and in later versions. In it the giants themselves have warning dreams. A giant named Hahyah, a son of Shemihazah, dreams of a garden full of trees. In the Qumran fragment the garden is destroyed by water and fire. In a later Jewish retelling of the same dream (the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael), an angel comes down from heaven with an axe and cuts down every tree but one, a tree with three branches. Scholars read the trees as the giants and the Watchers, the destruction as the coming flood, and the one surviving tree with three branches as Noah and his three sons. Fragment 6Q8 likewise mentions “three roots.” The point of the image is that no giant would outlast the judgment. Only Noah’s line would grow again.

Jubilees. The book of Jubilees (2nd century BC) tells the same story more briefly. It adds that the spirits of the dead giants became evil spirits that troubled Noah’s descendants, until God bound most of them (Jubilees 10).

How to read these sources. These books are ancient witnesses to how Jews in the centuries before Jesus understood Genesis 6, and some New Testament writers clearly knew them (see below). Christians weigh them differently. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church treats 1 Enoch as Scripture. Most other churches read it as valuable background, not inspired text. Many Christians, following another ancient line of interpretation, read the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 as the godly line of Seth rather than angels, which leaves no room for giants of angelic descent. As you read Enoch alongside Genesis, notice where the two agree (violence, judgment, Noah preserved) and where Enoch adds detail Genesis does not give.

Significance: Why Does This Story Matter?

God takes violence seriously. The reason given for the flood is not that people broke a ritual rule. It is that the earth was “full of violence” (6:11) and “filled with violence” (6:13). God’s judgment is the response of a good Creator to the ruin of his good world.

God saves through a person who trusts and obeys. Noah does not argue or bargain. Twice the text says he did everything God commanded (6:22, 7:5). His faith shows up as obedience over the long years of building.

God remembers. The center of the story is 8:1, “But God remembered Noah.” In Hebrew, to “remember” is not just to recall information. It means to act faithfully on a commitment. Many scholars note the story is built in a mirror pattern, with the waters rising toward 8:1 and falling after it, putting God’s remembering at the very middle.

God binds himself by promise. This is the first time the Bible uses the word “covenant” for an agreement God actually establishes (first promised in 6:18, made in 9:8-17). It is unconditional and universal, made with Noah, his descendants and “every living creature” (9:12). Nothing is required of the other side.

Human life is sacred. After the flood God gives a new command protecting human life, because “in the image of God has God made mankind” (9:6). The image of God from Genesis 1 survives the flood.

Links to Other Scripture

• Genesis 1:6-7. On day two God made the vault (raqia, the firmament) “and separated the water under the vault from the water above it.” The flood opens what day two set in place.
• Genesis 6:1-4. The “sons of God,” the daughters of humans and the Nephilim, the backstory that 1 Enoch expands.
• Numbers 13:33. Israel’s spies report, “We saw the Nephilim there,” in Canaan, which raises the old question of how giants appear after the flood. Some readers take this as an exaggerated report, others as a later, separate line.
• Isaiah 54:9-10. God compares his promise to restore Israel to his oath after the flood: “To me this is like the days of Noah, when I swore that the waters of Noah would never again cover the earth.”
• Ezekiel 14:14, 20. Noah is named with Daniel and Job as an example of a righteous man.
• Matthew 24:37-39 and Luke 17:26-27. Jesus says, “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man,” describing people eating, drinking and marrying, unaware, “until the flood came and took them all away.”
• Hebrews 11:7. “By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.”
• 1 Peter 3:19-21. Christ “made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits,” those “who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah.” Many scholars connect these imprisoned spirits with the bound Watchers of 1 Enoch. Peter then compares the eight people saved “through water” to baptism, which now saves “by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
• 2 Peter 2:4-5 and Jude 6. Both speak of angels who sinned and are held in chains of darkness for judgment, and 2 Peter places this right beside the flood. Jude describes angels who “abandoned their proper dwelling,” held “bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day.” These echo 1 Enoch 10 closely.
• Jude 14-15. Jude quotes Enoch directly: “Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about them: ‘See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones.'” This is a quotation of 1 Enoch 1:9.
• 2 Peter 3:5-7. Peter ties the flood back to creation: the earth “was formed out of water and by water,” and “by these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.”
• Exodus 2:3-5. The Hebrew word for Noah’s ark, tebah, appears only here and in the story of the basket that carried baby Moses on the Nile. Both times God preserves a chosen person through deadly water in a small sealed vessel.
• Revelation 4:3. A rainbow surrounds the throne of God in John’s vision, an echo of the covenant sign.

Theological Importance and Tone

The tone of this story is solemn, not sensational. There is no description of the drowning crowds and no celebration of destruction. The text moves slowly and carefully, counting days and months like a ship’s log, as if to say this really happened in time and God was present for every day of it.

Theologically, the story holds together two things Christians must never split apart: God’s holiness and God’s mercy. He is just enough to judge evil and merciful enough to save, and in the end he chooses to bind himself with a promise to all creation. The famous line in 8:21 is striking: God promises not to curse the ground again even though the human heart is still inclined to evil from childhood. The flood did not fix humanity. Only grace could carry the world forward, and the rest of the Bible tells how God would deal with the human heart itself, finally in Christ.

Read with Enoch, the flood is also a story about God’s rule over the unseen world. Rebellion did not stay among humans. In this telling, God judges rebellious heavenly powers too, and the New Testament picks that thread up when it speaks of angels held for judgment and of Christ’s victory over every power (Colossians 2:15).

There is also a quiet detail worth slowing down for: “Then the Lord shut him in” (7:16). Noah did not close the door on the world himself. God did. Salvation is God’s work from start to finish.

Alternate Interpretations From Translation

Rain, or the waters above the firmament? English readers often picture the flood as forty days of very heavy rain. The Hebrew of Genesis 7:11 describes something bigger. “The floodgates of the heavens were opened” translates arubbot hashamayim, literally “the windows of the heavens.” That isn’t the ordinary word for rain. It names openings in the sky. To see why that matters, go back to day two of creation: “God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it” (Genesis 1:7). The Hebrew word there is raqia. The KJV renders it “firmament,” the NIV “vault,” and the ESV and NASB “expanse.” Read that way, the flood is God opening the windows in the firmament and releasing the waters he had held above it on day two. At the same moment “the springs of the great deep burst forth” from below. Creation’s separation runs in reverse. When the flood ends, both sources are shut: “Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky” (Genesis 8:2).

Readers who hold this view, including many who read Genesis through its ancient Near Eastern setting, see it as the most natural sense of the original words. Ancient hearers pictured the sky as a solid dome holding back a heavenly sea. The same “windows of heaven” show up again in 2 Kings 7:2 and Malachi 3:10.

Christians read this in different ways:

• The firmament reading takes the waters above as a real reservoir God set in place at creation and opened in judgment.
• The phenomenal-language reading (argued, for example, by Vern Poythress) says Genesis describes the sky the way it looks to someone standing on the ground. On this view the “waters above” are the clouds and rain we see, not a literal sea in the sky.
• The vapor canopy theory, popular in some creationist writing from the 1960s on, imagined a layer of water vapor around the early earth that collapsed at the flood. Some major creationist ministries have since moved away from it.

Whichever view you hold, the text is clear that the flood is no ordinary storm. It is God undoing the order he made on day two.

• “Gopher wood” or “cypress”? The Hebrew goper (6:14) appears only once in the Bible, so no one is certain what wood it was. Older translations like the KJV simply transliterated it as “gopher wood.” The NIV and others guess “cypress,” a strong, rot-resistant wood used in ancient shipbuilding. Other proposals include resinous wood or reeds. The meaning of the story does not depend on it.
• “Pitch” and “atonement.” The Hebrew for “coat it with pitch” uses the root kpr (kopher, kaphar). The same root, in a different form, later means “to atone.” Some preachers draw a spiritual link: the ark was “covered” as sinners are covered. Most scholars see the word here as simply meaning a tar or bitumen coating (related to Akkadian kupru, bitumen). The link is a devotional reflection, not the plain meaning of the text.
• “Earth” or “land.” As noted above, erets can mean the whole earth or a region. This translation choice sits behind the debate over a global or regional flood. Both readings are grammatically possible.
• The rainbow as a “bow.” The Hebrew word for rainbow, qeshet, is the ordinary word for a war bow. Many commentators suggest the image is God hanging up his weapon, pointed away from the earth, as a sign of peace. This is an interpretation, not stated in the text, but it fits the word well.
• “Regretted” or “grieved.” Just before this passage (6:6-7), the Hebrew nacham is translated “regretted” (NIV) or “repented” (KJV). It does not mean God made a mistake; it describes God’s real sorrow over human sin and his change in how he deals with the world.

FAQ

Is Noah’s flood the same story as Gilgamesh?

They share a common memory or tradition of a great flood, and the details overlap. But the Bible’s version has a very different view of God: one righteous God judging moral evil, saving through grace and binding himself by promise, rather than quarreling gods acting on irritation.

Why did God send the flood?

Genesis gives the reason directly: the earth was corrupt and full of violence (6:11-13). 1 Enoch fills in the backstory, tracing that violence to fallen angels, the Watchers, and the giants they fathered.

What does the Book of Enoch say about the flood?

In 1 Enoch 10, God sends Uriel to warn Noah, Raphael to bind Azazel, Gabriel to turn the giants against each other, and Michael to bind Semjaza and the Watchers until judgment. In the related Book of Giants, a giant dreams of a garden of trees destroyed from heaven, with only one tree with three branches left, a picture of the giants wiped out and Noah and his three sons surviving.

Was the flood just a lot of rain?

The text mentions rain (7:12), but its main description is “the windows of the heavens” opening and “the springs of the great deep” bursting (7:11). Many readers take this to mean the waters God placed above the firmament on day two were released. Others read it as poetic language for a massive downpour.

Did the flood cover the whole planet?

Christians differ. Some hold to a global flood; others to a catastrophic regional flood covering the known world. The Hebrew word erets allows either reading.

What does the rainbow mean?

It is the sign of God’s covenant never again to destroy all life with a flood (9:12-17). The sign is first a reminder to God himself: “I will remember my covenant” (9:15).

How does Noah point to Jesus?

The New Testament uses the flood as a picture of judgment and rescue. Jesus compares his return to the days of Noah, and Peter compares the ark to baptism, which saves through the resurrection of Christ (1 Peter 3:20-21).

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Written by Nathan Weed for nathanweed.com’s Bible Study series, walking through Scripture one story at a time.

“Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,” says the Lord, who has compassion on you.
Isaiah 54:10 (NIV)

Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.