Genesis 8:4

And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month,.... That is, five months after the flood began, and when the waters began to decrease; for this is not the seventh month

And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat. Seventh month - of the year (cf. Genesis 7:11) - not of the flood, which lasted only five months, thirty days in a month.

In the seventh month, from the beginning, not of the flood, but of the year, as appears by comparing , and , the ark rested upon one of the mountains of Ararat; by a frequent enallage of the number, as . And by Ararat is here commonly and rightly understood Armenia, as appears both by comparing , and by the testimony of ancient writers, produced by Josephus and others to this purpose; and by the great height of those mountains, and by its nearness to the place where the first men lived; this great vessel not being fitted for sailing to remote places, but only for the receipt and preservation of men and other creatures in it.

Genesis 8:4 And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.Ver. 4. Mountains of Ararat.] On the tops of the Gordaean mountains (where Noah’ s ark rested) we find many ruins and huge foundations (saith the Preacher in his travels), of which no reason can be rendered but that which Josephus gives: that they that escaped the flood were so astonished and amazed that they dared not descend into the plains and low countries, but kept on the tops of those mountains, and there built. The Preacher’ s Travels, by John Cartwright, p. 32. Joseph. Antiq, lib. i. cap. 5.

(4) The seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month.—As the months had each thirty days (see Note on Genesis 8:14), this makes exactly 150 days (see Genesis 7:11). The seventh civil month would be Abib; and the Speaker’s Commentary notices the following remarkable coincidences:—“On the 17th day of Abib the ark rested on Mount Ararat; on the 17th day of Abib the Israelites passed over the Red Sea; on the 17th day of Abib, Christ, our Lord, rose again from the dead.” Ararat.—If in Genesis 11:2 the Authorised Version is right in saying that the descendants of Noah travelled “from the east” to Shinar, this could not be the Ararat of Armenia. Moreover, we are told that the word in, Assyrian means “highland,” and thus may signify any hilly country. In the Chaldean Genesis the ark rests upon Nizir, a region to the east of Assyria, the highest peak of which, now named Elwend, is called in the cuneiform texts “the mountain of the world” ( Chaldean Genesis, p. 307). The rendering, however, “from the east,” is by no means certain, and many translate “eastward,” and even the Authorised Version renders the word east, that is, eastward, in Genesis 13:11. In 2 Kings 19:37 “Ararat” is translated Armenia; but it is more correctly described in Jeremiah 51:27 as a country near Minni, that is, near Armenia. There are in this region two mountains of great altitude, the Aghri-Dagh and the Kara-Dagh, the highest of which Isaiah 17,260 feet above the sea-level; and naturally legend chooses this as the place where the ark settled. But the inspired narrative says that it rested “upon the mountains of Ararat,” upon some chain of hills there, and seventy-three days afterwards Noah found himself surrounded by an amphitheatre of mountains, the word used in Genesis 8:5 being emphatic, and signifying “the tops of the mountains became distinctly visible,” and not that they had just begun to emerge. For, doubtless, after so vast a flood, mists and vapours would for a long time prevail, and shut out the surrounding world from Noah’s view. The Targum of Onkelos and the Syriac translate “on the mountains of Carduchia.” This range, which separates Armenia from Kurdistan, is regarded by many authorities as the hills really meant, because, as they are nearer the place whence the ark started, the difficulty regarding the course taken by it is not so insuperable.

Verse 4. The mountains of Ararat.] That Ararat was a mountain of Armenia is almost universally agreed. What is commonly thought to be the Ararat of the Scriptures, has been visited by many travellers, and on it there are several monasteries. For a long time the world has been amused with reports that the remains of the ark were still visible there; but Mr. Tournefort, a famous French naturalist, who was on the spot, assures us that nothing of the kind is there to be seen. As there is a great chain of mountains which are called by this name, it is impossible to determine on what part of them the ark rested; but the highest part, called by some the finger mountain, has been fixed on as the most likely place. These things we must leave, and they are certainly of very little consequence. From the circumstance of the resting of the ark on the 17th of the seventh month, Dr. Light. foot draws this curious conclusion: That the ark drew exactly eleven cubits of water. On the first day of the month Ab the mountain tops were first seen, and then the waters had fallen fifteen cubits; for so high had they prevailed above the tops of the mountains. This decrease in the waters took up sixty days, namely, from the first of Sivan; so that they appear to have abated in the proportion of one cubit in four days. On the 16th of Sivan they had abated but four cubits; and yet on the next day the ark rested on one of the hills, when the waters must have been as yet eleven cubits above it. Thus it appears that the ark drew eleven cubits of water.

4. the seventh month, &c.] The Flood had begun on the 17th day of the 2nd month (see Genesis 7:11): the highest point of the Flood is reached on the 17th day of the 7th month. Five months have elapsed. Probably the 150 days were reckoned as five months of 30 days each. the mountains of Ararat] Ararat is not a mountain, but a district mentioned in Isaiah 37:38; Jeremiah 51:27. It is the country which appears in the Assyrian inscriptions as “Urartu.” It lies between the river Araxes and Lake Van. It comprises a large portion of Armenia. There were high mountains in Ararat; and the loftiest among them, called in the present day Mount Ararat, is over 16,000 ft. high. Assuming that the tradition referred to this mountain as the highest known, and that the water was said to have covered it by 15 cubits (Genesis 7:20), the very existence of mountains of the altitude of Mount Everest (31,000 ft. high) was not contemplated. It is more probable that a well-known name like Ararat was accepted, in the Hebrew version of the story, for some similarly-sounding, but less familiar, name of hills in the neighbourhood of the Tigris.

4. The ark rested — Here is the reason of the statement made in the previous verse; at the end of five months, or one hundred and fifty days, it is known that the waters had begun to diminish,