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Genesis 8:13 declares the waters dried up on the first day of the first month, but Genesis 8:14 puts the earth's drying on the twenty-seventh day of the second month — almost two months later. The same narrative gives two different drying dates.
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In the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth. Genesis 8:13
Cited passages
In the six hundred first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth. Noah removed the covering of the ship, and looked. He saw that the surface of the ground was dry.
Cited passages
In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry.
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: Leans toward reconciliation
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.
Genesis 8:13 dates the disappearance of the water to "the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth," while 8:14 dates the earth's drying to "the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month" — a gap of nearly two months between two notices that both seem to announce the end of the flood. Read as a single timeline, the same event appears to receive two dates.
The principal harmonization, advanced by Archer and many conservative commentators, rests on a genuine lexical distinction. Genesis 8:13 uses the root *charav* (*charevu*, "were dried up"), connoting the disappearance of standing surface water, whereas 8:14 uses *yavesh* (*yaveshah*, "was dried"), connoting the ground becoming firm and dry. On this reading 8:13 marks the moment the floodwaters drained off — Noah removes the covering of the ark and sees that "the face of the ground was dry" — while 8:14 marks the later moment when the saturated mud had hardened enough to be habitable, after which the animals disembark (8:15-19). The two verbs do carry different nuances, and the surrounding logic (Noah looks out at 8:13 but does not exit until after 8:14) fits a two-stage drying. This is the entry's strongest defense, and on the final form of the text it is coherent.
The critical reservation is twofold. First, these two notices are not isolated observations but members of the Priestly system of dated waypoints that structures the entire flood (7:11; 8:4, 5, 13, 14). Friedman and Baden show that P's dates form a symmetrical, near-calendar-year scheme whose logic is liturgical and numerological more than reportorial; the intervals carry schematic weight. Reading 8:13 and 8:14 as a finely graduated geology of "surface evaporation" versus "firm substrate" imports a technical precision foreign to the genre, even where the Hebrew verbs happen to permit the distinction. Second, the verb difference is real but thin support for so specific a reconstruction: *charav* and *yavesh* overlap considerably in usage and are not rigid technical terms for two phases of soil moisture. The distinction the harmonization needs is plausible but not demanded by the lexicon. Westermann reads the doubled drying-notice as part of P's ordered framing of the flood's end rather than as two stages of a continuous physical process, and Wenham, while defending the text's coherence, acknowledges the symbolic architecture of the dates.
The most economical account is that the near-two-month gap reflects the editorial spacing of P's ceremonial timeline — the flood concluding in ordered, dated stages that mirror the ordered, dated stages of its onset — not a contrast between damp topsoil and bone-dry ground. This is why the better label here is *partially* harmonized rather than fully harmonized: the lexical distinction is available and not unreasonable, so the verses need not denote the identical moment and there is no hard factual contradiction; but the harmonization attributes to the author an interest (drainage hydrology) the text does not display, in place of the interest it does display (calendrical order), and the verbs alone do not bear the weight the reconstruction places on them. The reading is a defensible smoothing of the final form rather than a demonstration that no tension exists. This also keeps the entry aligned with the parallel flood-chronology entries (e.g., id 43), which rest on the same Priestly-calendar logic and are rated partially harmonized.
Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable on the lexical distinction between *charav* and *yavesh*, but the distinction is read into rather than out of the text; the gap is most economically explained as the spacing of the Priestly liturgical chronology rather than as either a fine hydrological report or a flat factual contradiction.
Sources for this reading