"Go into the ark" — or "Come"? The Hebrew imperative bo is literally "come," and older versions keep it: KJV GNV "Come thou and all thy house into the ark" — a rendering some readers cherish because "come" (rather than "go") can suggest the speaker is already inside. That's a devotional inference, not grammar — Hebrew bo covers both English verbs, and idiomatic modern English says "go into" when the destination is away from the speaker's implied position. NIV and MiSTeR render "Go into"; the note preserves what the older wording made possible. Verse 5 then repeats chapter 6's closing obedience formula in shortened form — again without a word from Noah.

Seven pairs of the clean — a real difference from chapter 6, not smoothed over. Genesis 6:19–20 said "two of each"; here the command distinguishes: seven pairs of every clean animal, one pair of the unclean. Readers have handled the tension two main ways: as a compatible refinement (the general command, then the detail), or as a seam between two originally distinct tellings of the flood story woven together — the same kind of seam flagged at Genesis 2:4, and the divine names alternate across this chapter in the same pattern (the LORD commands the sevens; God commands the pairs — see also v. 16, where both names appear in one verse). This translation renders both passages exactly as they stand and lets the reader see what's there.

"Clean" before Sinai. The clean/unclean distinction won't be legislated until Leviticus 11, yet Noah is assumed to know it — and the purpose surfaces in 8:20, where the extra clean animals become the post-flood sacrifice (you can't offer a species you'd thereby extinguish). One charming literalism: "a male and its mate" is, in Hebrew, ish v'ishto — literally "a man and his wife," the garden's own vocabulary (2:23–25) applied to the animals filing aboard.

Shiv'ah shiv'ah, "seven seven," is distributive Hebrew — "seven of each." Whether that means seven individuals or seven pairs is genuinely debated; "pairs" (so NIV and MiSTeR) follows the "male and its mate" phrasing; KJV's "by sevens" keeps the ambiguity.

The first "forty" in the Bible. Forty days and forty nights debuts here and becomes scripture's standard span of trial and transition — Moses on the mountain, Israel's forty years, Elijah's journey, the forty days in the wilderness. Whatever its origin as a number, its biblical career starts with rain.

Machah, "wipe out" — the verb used three times of the flood (7:4, 7:23 twice) — is the word for wiping a dish, erasing writing, blotting ink. The destruction is pictured as an erasure, undoing what was written; KJV's "destroy" here loses the image, and its own "blot out" at v. 23 recovers it. MiSTeR uses "wipe" both places so the repeated verb reads as repeated.

The narrative slows into solemn repetition — the boarding is narrated twice (vv. 7–9 and again vv. 13–16), a doubling some read as ceremony and some as the two woven tellings visible side by side. Note again the direction of the verb: the animals "came to Noah" (as 6:20 promised) — two by two, on their own feet, with no gathering expedition anywhere in the text.

Creation running in reverse — the chapter's theological center. This is not a heavy rainstorm. "All the springs of the great deep burst open" — tehom, the primeval deep of Genesis 1:2 — "and the floodgates of the sky were opened" — releasing the waters above the vault that day two of creation had shut away (1:6–7). The two great separations that made the world habitable are both unsealed at once, from below and from above: the flood is un-creation, cosmos giving way back to the watery chaos it was carved from. Day three's dry land disappears (v. 20), day six's creatures die (vv. 21–23) in the reverse order of their making — the architecture is deliberate, and it's why the story dates the moment to the exact day (Noah's 600th year, second month, seventeenth day): creation itself is being rolled back, and the ledger records when.

Arubot — "floodgates" — is literally "lattices, chimney-openings": KJV GNV ASV DRB "the windows of heaven" (a phrase that entered English idiom); NIV "the floodgates of the heavens"; NWT also "floodgates." MiSTeR "floodgates of the sky."

B'etsem hayom hazeh — "on the very bone of this day," an idiom of solemn exactness the Torah reserves for hinge moments (the same phrase marks the exodus itself, Exodus 12:41, and Abraham's circumcision, Genesis 17:26). The full family roster and the full creature taxonomy are then recited one more time — eight humans, every kind, "everything with wings" — the narrator counting everyone aboard like a manifest before the door closes.

"Then the LORD shut him in." Four Hebrew words, and the most quietly affecting clause in the flood story: the door is closed not by Noah but for him — protection he doesn't administer himself. Notice the names in this one verse: the animals came "as God [Elohim] had commanded him; then the LORD [YHVH] shut him in" — both divine names in a single breath, the seam flagged since Genesis 2:4 running right through the verse. Every shelf version keeps the clause's simplicity; TLB characteristically warms it ("the LORD God closed the door" and shut them in safely, in its free retelling). There is nothing to fix here — just a verse worth not hurrying past.

Gavar, "swelled" — a combat verb. The word means to prevail, to overpower (its noun is gibbor, the "mighty men" of 6:4) — the waters don't merely rise, they win, stated four times in eight verses, escalating through Hebrew's strongest intensifier: me'od me'od, "exceedingly, exceedingly" (v. 19) — the doubled form of the word that closed creation's "very good" (tov me'od, 1:31). The echo is bitter and almost certainly deliberate: what was very good is now very, very drowned.

"All the high mountains under the whole sky… 15 cubits above them." The language is total, and this translation renders it at full strength, adding nothing and softening nothing — while noting, as a matter of description rather than verdict, that the narrator's vantage is the observable world of the account itself ("under the whole sky" is how that world says "everywhere"). The 15 cubits — half the ark's 30-cubit height — is likely the draft of the loaded vessel: the depth that let it clear the peaks.

"The breath of the spirit of life" — a phrase found only here, fusing the nishmat chayyim ("breath of life") God blew into the human's nostrils at 2:7 with the ruach ("spirit/wind/breath") that has run through the story since 1:2. What was breathed in "into his nostrils" at creation goes out "in its nostrils" here — the verse quotes the making in order to narrate the unmaking. The casualty list of v. 21 walks day five and day six backward: flying creatures, livestock, wild animals, swarming things, humankind — creation's roll call, reversed.

"Only Noah was left" — the Bible's first remnant. The verb sha'ar, "to be left over, remain," is the root of she'ar/she'erit, "remnant" — one of the great load-bearing words of the prophets (Isaiah names a son "A-Remnant-Shall-Return"). Its theology starts in this clause: total judgment, and a preserved seed within it through whom the story continues. The chapter then closes on stillness — 150 days of water "swelling" with nothing left to overcome — and the narrative holds its breath there until God "remembers Noah" in the first verse of chapter 8.