Pemikiran Yahudi Kejadian 7:24: Akeidat Yitzchak

The author, after having taken issue with other commentators, points out that the line "the waters remained strong for one hundred and fifty days" (Genesis 7,24) is not to be understood as an additional rising of the water levels for one hundred and fifty days after forty days of rainfall. Rather, for a total of one hundred and fifty days the water level remained high enough for the surface of the earth to remain flooded. The highest levels of flood waters were recorded at the end of the first forty days, when the water level was fifteen cubits higher than the tallest mountain top. After that, the waters receded gradually. Since the ark could not come to rest anywhere till after one hundred and fifty days, the waters are still described as govrim, strong, prevalent. Though mountain peaks may have appeared prior to that, the turbulence prevented the ark from settling anywhere. At the end of one hundred and fifty days, on the seventeenth of Nissan, the turbulence subsided. The Arrarat mountain chain is rated as relatively low. After the initial forty days of G-d having completed His act of retribution, He activated a wind to accelerate the drying up process (G-d remembered Noach etc.). By the first day of Tammuz, the tenth month, surrounding mountain tops became visible. Forty days after that, about the tenth of Av, Noach sent out the first bird, a procedure repeated three times at seven day intervals. This brings us to the first day of Ellul. Between then and the first day of Tishrey, the gradual drying of the earth's surface continued. Another fifty-seven days later, the process had reached a stage enabling Noach and his passengers to leave the ark. (4) Because it had breached the sexual etiquette of the creatures in the ark (Sanhedrin 108), the raven was sent out as soon as Noach could be certain that he could survive outside the ark, not in order to determine the extent of the progress of the atmosphere's drying out. Since dogs and Cham could not survive outside the ark at that stage, they were not expelled from the ark, though they too had breached the sexual etiquette imposed on all passengers of the ark. With the dispatch of the dove, Noach's active search for resumption of a normal life on earth begins. The end of the paragraph illustrates G-d’s great Providence, in that not a single creature had failed to survive the long and arduous trip in the ark.