This article is meant to give a quick idea of the events of Noah's flood and what the story is really about. A more full-featured essay will follow, but not very soon, as I am still working on some details.

Genesis 7:6 The Beginning of the Flood

ונח בן־שש מאות
שנה והמבול היה
מים על־הארץ

VeNoach ben-shesh meot
shana vehaMavol haya
mayim 3al-haAretz

Two words in this are difficult, or at least go against the traditional English reading of the Bible.

The first is the word "shana", which in modern Hebrew (and in the last 3000 years or so) means "year". But that's not what the root of the word means.

Thinking about the word and the ridiculous age of Biblical characters it occured to me that it cannot mean "year".

So I researched a bit and read the dictionary and followed Hebrew grammar and its rules and found the following interesting details:

1. The word "shana" is the absolute form of the word "shanat", the root is Shin Nun Tav.

Both Hebrew and Arabic have a special form of the letter Hei to differentiate a Hei standing in for a Tav in the root of the word. In Hebrew a dot in the middle of the He shows that it stands for a consonant, not a vowel before a missing Tav. But that dot was only introduced in the middle ages. In Arabic the letter Hei with a certain punctuation stands for a missing Tav (and is even called a type of Tav).

So I looked up the word "year" in Arabic and found several words, including one written Sin Nun He. "Sin" is a variant of "Shin" used when the letter is pronounced /s/ rather than /sh/ (like in "Israel" or "Sarah"). And the Hei is indeed a missing Tav. So the root is likely Shin Nun Tav.

2. The verb based on the root Shin Nun Tav is "lishnot" and means "to change".

3. "shana" is hence, literally, a "change".

4. Genesis and Exodus use the Babylonian calendar.

This is important because the Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, based on years. The calendar Genesis and Exodus use is based on months. While a "change" in a calendar based on years is clearly a "year", an "alteration" in a calendar based on months is equally clearly a month.

And it turns out if the numbers given in Genesis are read as months rather than years, most ages mentioned seem very normal. And Noah was 600 months, that is 50 years old when he built the ark.

The second difficult word is "haAretz".

It's not actually difficult but a change in the English language (and most others) has made it so. The King James Bible translates "haAretz" variously as "the earth" or "the land". A Latin translation translated "haAretz" as "terra". "Terra" means in Latin exactly what "eretz" means in Hebrew. It also translates as "earth" another Hebrew word, which means something slightly different: "adama".

What is "haAretz" (and "eretz", the same word without the definite article)? This seems to be very difficult for some to understand.

During the age of exploration unknown land was marked as "terra incognita". "Terra incognita" means "unknown land". The Germanic word "earth" (or "Erde" in German) meant the same. It's the thing at our feet, the opposite of the heavens.

"Adama" is the sandy material that the surface is mostly made of. Man was made out of it, hence man was called "Adam". Man contains blood, and blood is "dam". The Bible loves a good word game.

About 500 years ago the word "earth" was more and more used to mean "earth, the planet" rather than "earth, the surface". And 100 years ago science fiction writers started using Latin "terra" to mean our planet (the actual Latin word for planet earth is "tellus").

In English the meaning of the word "earth" has changed almost completely. British English still uses "earth" to refer to the surface (which Americans call "ground"). But in German the cognate "Erde" still means "earth, the surface" in normal conversation, and the south-African animal "Aardvark" ("earth piglet") was named for digging in the surface rather than for being peculiar to planet earth.

Since the meaning of the English word "earth" has changed since the Bible was first translated into Germanic languages, and since the meaning of the Latin word "terra" has likewise changed since then, translating "haAretz" as "the earth" is now nearly a mistake. (It is not really a mistake because "earth" still has the meaning "land" or "earth, the surface", but it's widely used to mean "earth, the planet".)

But if one reads "the earth" as "the planet earth" rather than "the land", the meaning of the Hebrew text is no longer reflected in the translation.

In ancient times people also didn't know that the earth (the planet) was round. They thought of "the earth" as being something flat to live on, under the heavens, surrounded by waters or more land. The image of a ball completely covered with water is a relatively recent invention, it is not what the authors and readers of the Bible then had in mind. They saw a flooded land, surrounded by mountains that defined the limits of the land. (A land is usually defined by mountains and rivers at its borders.)

With this being cleared up, we can now have a look at the text again:

veNoach ben-shesh meot
shana vehaMavol haya
mayim 3al-haAretz

Translation (literal):

"And Noah (is) son-six hundreds change and the flood was water on the land."

Hebrew doesn't have forms of "to be" for the present tense (they are implied). "Son [some number] [some unit]" is the normal way to say an age of a person in Hebrew.

Genesis 8:4 The End of the Flood

ותנח התבה בחדש
השביעי בשבעה־עשר
יום לחדש על הרי
אררט

VaTnach haTiva baHodesh
haShevi3i baShev3a-eser
yom laHodesh 3al hari
urartu.

The first word is really difficult and I didn't figure it out for a while. It's spelt Vav Tav Nun Het. A Vav at the beginning of a word usually means "and". And the King James Bible indeed translates "And the ark rested in the seventh month [...]". However, that translation doesn't explain the Tav.

Tav Nun Het is no word. So what does the Tav mean?

I wondered for a while and then remembered that a Vav at the beginning of a verb can also, mostly in Biblical Hebrew, change past tense to future tense and future tense to past tense. (What really happens is that in Hebrew an "and" before a verb negates the tense of the word and it presumably makes sense in Hebrew that it does so.)

There should be a word for "rest" or "land" (as in "the ark rested" or "landed") in the sentence. There is no such word after haTiva ("the ark") and Hebrew is gerally Verb-Subject-Object (at least Biblical Hebrew is).

So I looked up possible verbs and found "lehanachit" ("to land", "to bring about"). I looked up the root in "501 Hebrew Verbs" and found that Nun Het Tav is the word I am looking for.

But Tav Nun Het is not Nun Het Tav. So what was I missing?

501 Hebrew Verbs also mentions that there is a colloqial form of Nun Het Tav which skips the Tav. Hence "nach" (Nun Het) alone is a usable verb for our sentence and means "to land".

In this case the Tav is simply a part of the conjugation and makes the word "nach" future tense (third person singular masculine). And the Vav makes it past tense.

VaTnach haTiva baHodesh
haShevi3i baShev3a-eser
yom laHodesh 3al hari
urartu.

Translation:

"Landed the ark in the month the seventh at the seven-ten day in the month on the hills of Urartu."

Biblical Hebrew is written without vowels. Later Biblical Hebrew is written with long vowels where the letters Vav and Yud (/v/ and /y/) are also used to represent long vowels (/u/ and /o/, /i/ and /e/ respectively). But Genesis doesn't use Vav and Yud that way. (Arabic and Aramaic also use Aleph (glottal stop) for a long vowel (/a/), but Hebrew doesn't.)

I put in the vowels according to an easy algorithm:

1. If I knew the word, I'd simply use the correct vowels.

2. If I didn't know the word, I'd guess the vowels.

The first method worked for "tiva" ("ark") and "hodesh" ("month"). It also worked for "urartu".

Urartu was a kingdom existing in today's north-eastern Iraq (in the Kurdistan autonomous region) just behind Arbil (as seen from the south-west). Today's Mount Ararat is at the northern tip of the region. In 1200 BCE the kingdom was possibly well-known, but at Noah's time it didn't exist.

Hebrew "har" is not a mountain, it's a hill. And Noah did not land on the top of the mountains or a mountain but simply "on the hills". Northeastern Iraq is a mountainous region, but the relative height of the hills of Urartu wouldn't be that impressive. "Urartu", written without vowels, can be read as "Ararat". The two are the same word. (The word begins with an Aleph, a silent glottal stop: 'RRT. Fill in /u/ /a/ /-/ /u/ and you get "Urartu", fill in /a/ /a/ /a/ /-/ and you get "Ararat".)

So here we go. The Bible tells the story of a man and his family and animals living in a valley region in northern Mesopotamia, where floods happen a lot, who when he was 50 years old built a boat to rescue his family and animals when the land was flooded. And he landed on the hills next to the flooded valley land.

That is, literally and word for word, what the Bible tells us.

And that is exactly what I believe to be totally true.

To read "change" as "year" or "earth, the surface" as "earth, the planet" is an assumption we cannot safely make, a non-literal interpretation of the original text. Both came into use a long time after the events and are based on the changed meanings of words. For the English word "earth" we can easily see how and when the meaning of the word changed, but with Hebrew "shana" it was a bit more difficult.

Updates:

There are two roots Shin Nun Tav. One was Tav Nun Tav originally. Their meanings are closely related: "to repeat" (Tav Nun Tav) and "to change" (Shin Nun Tav).

The Aramaic survivor of the Tav Nun Tav root, "tana" (Tav Nun Aleph, the Aleph standing for the vowel /a/) means "teach".

The Arabic version of "shana" (سنة) shows the original Hei-for-Tav spelling of the word. (A Hei with two dots refers to a missing Tav that reappears in construct forms.)

Both Aramaic and Arabic spell "two" ("Shnaim") with a Tav rather than a Shin suggesting that the word for "two" derives from the Tav Nun Tav root.

Planned next:

The long version of the reading of Noah's story with comparisons with Sumerian legend. (Was Noah a Sumerian king?)

The story of Abraham and how it fits into the history of Aram and Canaan and why Jesus spoke Aramaic and not Hebrew.

The story of Adam and Eve and whether to read it literally or not. (Is a snake a snake or is it symbolic for the devil? What else is symbolic?)

The story of Ishmael and his descendants after being sent into "midbar" (the "wilderness") as per Arab legend and Quran.

The relationship between Sumar and Semitic tribes and Iranians and Kurds and Semitic tribes and how it affected Judaism and Zoroastrianism. (Did G-d sent prophets to the Israelites and the Iranians?)

I can assure you that you will be surprised!