Pigeon Mission #3 (Gen 8:11–12)

The Flood

New to the column? Start here.

Get your free Biblical Hebrew Starter Kit here!

¹¹ Then Noah knew that the water had lightened off the surface of the earth.

וַיֵּ֣דַע נֹ֔חַ כִּי־קַ֥לּוּ הַמַּ֖יִם מֵעַ֥ל הָאָֽרֶץ׃

This is exactly why the pigeon was sent out in the first place: “to see whether the water had lightened off the surface of the ground” (v. 8). The crow experiment did not work at all — the crows turned out not to be on the team. The first pigeon attempt did work. Negative results are also results! Noah wanted to find out whether the water had “lightened,” and he found out what he wanted to know: it had not.

Now, after the second of the three pigeon missions, he not only got the intelligence report he was expecting, he got the information he was hoping to get. The water had “lightened.” As I pointed out when we first saw the word, this is actually quite a strange expression; the best explanation seems to be that it is pointing ahead to v. 21.

I still have a question, though. What would we see (from, let’s say, a spy satellite) at this point in the story? Let’s think it through. As always, I’m doing this for two reasons: (1) to make clear that this is literature, not journalism; and (2) to try to understand what the writer wants us to imagine and what the writer simply doesn’t care about.

Olive leaves come from olive trees, which grow quite low to the ground. (You’ve gotta be able to pick the olives, after all.) If Noah had had that legendary fourth son imagined by Washington Irving, the pigeon could have returned with a cone from a redwood tree, and Noah would know that the destroyed world was starting, just barely, to reappear. An olive leaf suggests that the water is essentially gone. The world is no doubt marshy and muddy everywhere, but the Flood is over.

¹² He waited expectantly for yet another seven days וַיִּיָּ֣חֶל ע֔וֹד שִׁבְעַ֥ת יָמִ֖ים אֲחֵרִ֑ים