A Very Specific Date

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.
Genesis 7:11 (NIV)

I find it interesting that after discussions about “approximate years” and “outrageous ages” of the men listed in the genealogy of Genesis 5 (suggesting that the dates are vague approximations or merely symbols of “very long times”), we are presented with this extremely specific day of the flood.

Long Lives

The Rabbis debate over the ages in Genesis 5 regarding whether or not the long lives were attributed to all humans prior to the flood, or if they pointed to the remarkable ages of the lineage from Adam to Noah.

There is reason for this. They look here:

Pharaoh asked him, “How old are you?”
And Jacob said to Pharaoh, “The years of my pilgrimage are a hundred and thirty. My years have been few and difficult, and they do not equal the years of the pilgrimage of my fathers.”
Genesis 47:8-9 (NIV)

10s and 100s

Something important is happening with the ages listed in Genesis 5.

With Adam, the Hebrew language descdribes his age as 900, and 30 years.

But for everyone else in the list of ages, the 10s and 100s are reversed: Seth lived 12, and 900 years. Enosh lived 5 and 900.

The next time we see the person’s age listed with the 100s first, it’s with Abraham.

One rabbinical teaching is that when an age is written 100s and then 10s, it means the last years of their lives were good and productive. So we seem to be told that God has redeemed Adam.

That doesn’t mean the rest are not redeemed, but specifically that God has compassion on Adam, the first of the lineage to die from the curse (from dust, to dust).