The Internal Chronology of Noah’s Flood, Part 2: The P Source Chronology
For Part 1: An Overview, click here.
In Part 1, I noted that the story of Noah’s Flood combines two sources, which the scholars nicknamed J and P. I indicated that I would follow Richard Elliot Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? to separate the sources but that I would challenge his assignment of two verses to the P source. It is my view that these two verses were inserted by the Redactor in order to harmonize the J and P sources into a single narrative. I’ll explore that issue in a subsequent post in this series.
Here, I am going to look at just the P chronology and ignore the two verses in question. For completeness, though, I’ll show where they appear in the sequence of P chronological verses so that you will know what I am leaving out. The first of the two verses is Genesis 7:24. “And the waters swelled on the earth for one hundred fifty days. “ The second is Genesis 8:3. “and the waters gradually receded from the earth. At the end of one hundred fifty days the waters had abated;”
As I noted in the overview, all the other verses assigned to P follow a fixed date format, giving us the day, month and year in which the event happened. As to the J verses, the time frames are relative, telling us how many days passed from one event to the next. As you can see, the format of the two verses cited above more closely aligns with the J format than the P format. In what follows, I set out the P chronological sequence of events. Numbers in parentheses are the Genesis verse numbers. Verses not directly related to the P chronology are omitted.