Genesis 7:12

12 Rain poured for forty days and forty nights.

Genesis 7:12 Meaning and Commentary

Genesis 7:12

And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights,
&c.] So long it was falling upon it, after the windows of heaven were opened. Aben Ezra would have it, that all things were in such confusion, during the flood, that there was no difference between day and night, since, it is said, "day and night shall not cease any more"; and that after the waters ceased, then Noah knew that forty days and nights had passed, for God had revealed this secret to him; but the text seems more to make against him than for him.

Genesis 7:12 In-Context

10 In seven days the floodwaters came.

11 It was the six-hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month that it happened: all the underground springs erupted and all the windows of Heaven were thrown open.

12 Rain poured for forty days and forty nights.

13 That's the day Noah and his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, accompanied by his wife and his sons' wives, boarded the ship.

14 And with them every kind of wild and domestic animal, right down to all the kinds of creatures that crawl and all kinds of birds and anything that flies.