Beginning with verse 11 and continuing to 8.19, the report presents the events of the flood with reference to the years, months, and days of Noah’s life. Thus the flood begins in 7.11 in the six hundredth year, second month, and seventeenth day. In 8.14-19 Noah and his family leave the boat on the six hundredth and first year, second month and twenty-seventh day, which appears to make a total of one year and ten days.
It is unlikely that these dates are based on the ancient Hebrew calendar, which gave each month a name and did not reckon the months as ordinal numbers. It is assumed, therefore, that these dates are based on the Babylonian calendar, which begins with April. However, this likewise is far from certain.
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month cannot be translated by any modern calendar dates, as there is no way known to determine these. Therefore translators must express this time in the most natural manner using the information given. In English, for example, the most natural sequence is the year, the day, and then the month, as in Good News Translation. Some translators, however, may find it more natural to express the order as day, month, and year. For example, Biblia Dios Habla Hoy says “It was the seventeenth day of the second month. At that time Noah was six hundred years old.”
On that day emphasizes that particular day, or as Biblia Dios Habla Hoy says, “precisely on that day.” However, in some languages this expression may be redundant.
The second half of this verse has a carefully-worked poetic form. The two parts are parallel lines, in which fountains of the great deep in the first line is matched in the next line by windows of the heavens, and burst forth is matched by opened. Each line receives a similar number of stresses. The two lines also form a chiasmus, or A-B-B′-A′ pattern, in which the first line begins with the verb burst forth, and the second ends with the verb opened. New Jerusalem Bible indents each line to show the poetic form.
All the fountains of the great deep: fountains translates a word meaning “springs,” a source of water flowing out of the ground. For deep see discussion on 1.2. For the Hebrew conception of the water beneath the earth and above the sky, see the illustration and description on page 27. Burst forth translates the causative form of a verb used also in Job 26.8, in which it is said of the rain-filled clouds that they do not burst apart: “keeps them from bursting with the weight” (Good News Translation). It is used of the bursting open of wine skins in Job 32.19. So the picture in the first line is the sudden eruption and flowing of water that lies beneath the earth. Therefore the flooding does not depend entirely upon the rain from above.
In the second line the poet moves our vision upward. The windows of the heavens recalls 1.7, in which God separated the waters under the firmament from the waters above it. Windows of the heavens is also used in a poetic passage in Isa 24.18; so also Mal 3.10. When these windows are opened, the water above the firmament or dome of the sky pours down on the earth as rain. The picture given by these two lines may require the translator to place a footnote referring back to a note at 1.7 or elsewhere, where a more detailed description of the ancient Hebrew view of the universe is given.
Translators should if possible try to recapture the poetry of these two lines. This may require using other metaphors, or a combination of images and similes; for example, “All the springs in the earth shot up like fountains, and the rain poured down through openings like windows in the sky.” One recent translation has “The ground opened and the big water underneath the ground shot upward. The doors in the sky opened and water tumbled down.” Another translation, which avoids using a picture in the second line, has “Water holes in the ground came open, and water rushed out. Big rain kept coming down, rain that was no ordinary rain.”
In some cases it may be necessary to indicate that God is the one causing the flood; for example, “God made the water under the earth spring up, and he opened the windows of the sky.”
Quoted with permission from Reyburn, William D. and Fry, Euan McG. A Handbook on Genesis. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1997. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .