101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

90
yth #39:
The rain lasted forty days and forty nights.
The Myth: 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…And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights. (Gen.
7:4, 12)
The Reality: The J and P sources disagree about when the rains stopped. J says
forty days, P 150.
The biblical redactors worked from two different flood chronologies, one from the
J source and one from the P source. In the J source, the rains lasted for forty days. In
the P source, the rains lasted for 150.
Genesis 7:12 says that the rains lasted forty days and Genesis 7: 19 says that the
flood was on the earth for forty days. Then, Genesis 8:6 says that forty days passed and
Noah opened the window of the ark so that he could release the birds. Although all
three forty-day periods could be one and the same, in context they appear to be
sequential periods. Interestingly, three periods of forty days add up to 120 days, the
length of the Egyptian flood season in the solar calendar.
Mingled among these three verses are some other passages that also talk about the
flood chronology. Genesis 7:24 says that the waters prevailed for 150 days and two
verses later it says,“The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were
stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained” (Gen. 8:2). Reading the story in
chronological order as the biblical editors intended, we find a period of 150 days
passed as the water increases in depth and then the rains stopped.
There are two different rain periods because the biblical editors worked from two
different stories. In the one version, derived from the J source, the flood story was based
on the Egyptian solar calendar, which Egyptians divided into three seasons of 120
days, one of which was the flood season, with five additional days tacked on at the end
of the year. In the other, derived from the P source, the flood story was based on the