ContradictionsReading order 58Bible context 2 min read
When did Noah enter the ark?
One account places Noah's entry before seven days pass; the next identifies his entry with the day the flood's sources open.
- Textual conflict
- Interpretive tension
- The passages pull in different directions, but the conflict depends on how their wording, scope, or narrative context is read.
- Importance
- Major
- A major event or claim with wider implications.
The same family's entry precedes a seven-day interval in one sequence and coincides with the flood-opening day in another, with the first interval inferred from narration.
An editorial assessment of the quoted passages. Importance describes the stakes; it does not increase certainty. Reading order weighs both.
Noah enters the ark before a seven day interval
And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood. Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth, There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah. And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.
Genesis 7:7-10
Translation / edition: King James Version (KJV)
Read the full chapter:Genesis 7
Noah enters on the day the flood begins
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.