Myth #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 Egyptian solar-lunar calendar, a calendar cycle that lasted twenty-five years, with 309 complete months.

The conflict between the two sources can be seen further in the claims about when the earth dried off. Genesis 8:13 says that the earth dried off by the first day of the first month of the 601st year of Noah’s lifetime. The next verse says that the earth dried off on the twenty-seventh day of the second month of Noah’s 601st year. Some of this confusion occurred because the first dry period occurred on the 309th day of the P source chronology, which marks the connection to the solar-lunar calendar, but at the same time marks the 360th day after Noah’s six hundredth birthday in the J source chronology, which marks the connection to the solar calendar.