GEBible — Godless Engineer's Bible App
Genesis 7:7-10 has Noah and family entering the ark, and then seven days later the flood waters come. Genesis 7:11-13 places Noah and family entering the ark on the 'selfsame day' the fountains of the deep broke open and the rain began. Same flood, two entry timings, four verses apart.
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
Cited passages
Noah went into the ship with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, because of the floodwaters. Clean animals, unclean animals, birds, and everything that creeps on the ground went by pairs to Noah into the ship, male and female, as God commanded Noah. After the seven days, the floodwaters came on the earth.
Cited passages
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the sky’s windows opened. It rained on the earth forty days and forty nights. In the same day Noah, and Shem, Ham, and Japheth—the sons of Noah—and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons with them, entered into the ship—
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The entry notes that Genesis 7:7-10 has Noah enter the ark and then, 'after seven days,' the floodwaters come, while Genesis 7:11-13 dates the breaking of the fountains of the deep and the rain to a precise day — 'the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day' — and says that 'in the selfsame day entered Noah.' Read as a single timeline, Noah enters seven days before the flood and also on the day the flood begins.
The apologetic harmonization treats the two passages as describing two moments in one process: 7:7-10 records the initial entry, with loading of family and animals still underway during a seven-day grace period, and 7:11-13 records the final sealing of the ark on the day the rains actually fell. Gleason Archer offers a version of this, and evangelical study Bibles often gloss 7:13 as 'on that same day Noah had entered.' The reading is possible in isolation, but it strains the Hebrew of 7:13. The clause is *be-etsem ha-yom ha-zeh ba Noach* — 'on the bone/substance of this very day Noah entered/came in.' *Be-etsem ha-yom ha-zeh* is an emphatic idiom ('on this very same day,' as in Gen 17:23 and Exod 12:41) marking the action as occurring precisely then, and the verb *bo* ('came in, entered') describes the entry itself, not a prior completed state. The harmonization must read 'on the selfsame day Noah entered' as 'on the selfsame day Noah, having already entered, was sealed in' — supplying a pluperfect the grammar does not provide and that the emphatic idiom resists.
The critical reading is both simpler and long-standing. Genesis 6-9 is the textbook instance of the Documentary Hypothesis: an interwoven double narrative of the flood, J (Yahwist) and P (Priestly), combined by a redactor who preserved both rather than smoothing them. Richard Friedman's *The Bible with Sources Revealed* color-codes the strands, and the doublets fall into two internally consistent accounts. The J strand supplies the seven-day notices (7:4, 'yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain'; 7:10, 'after seven days the waters of the flood were upon the earth'), the rain-driven flood ('forty days and forty nights,' 7:12), and the seven-pairs-of-clean-animals count (7:2-3). The P strand supplies the precise regnal-year dating ('the six hundredth year... the second month... the seventeenth day,' 7:11), the cosmic 'fountains of the great deep' and 'windows of heaven' (7:11), and the two-of-each count (6:19; 7:15-16). The redactor placed J's seven-day entry (7:7-10) immediately beside P's same-day entry-and-dating (7:11-13), leaving two timings of Noah's boarding side by side. Joel Baden's *Composition of the Pentateuch* and Jean-Louis Ska's *Introduction to Reading the Pentateuch* both use the flood as the demonstration case precisely because the seams are so clean; even Gordon Wenham's more conservative WBC volume concedes the doubling and the source markers while preferring a literary explanation. Claus Westermann likewise treats the entry notices as belonging to distinct strands.
The harmonization is thus available only if one insists on reading the chapter as a single seamless composition and supplies a grammatically unsupported pluperfect at 7:13. The far more economical account is that two flood narratives with different chronologies were stitched together; the 'two entry timings, four verses apart' are a redactional fingerprint rather than two phases of one event.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction at the level of the composite text — a source seam between J's seven-day-before entry and P's same-day entry, papered over only by an unwarranted pluperfect.
Sources for this reading