The Flood™ (Gen 6:17)

The Flood

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¹⁷ I am going to bring the Flood(-waters) upon the Earth.

וַאֲנִ֗י הִנְנִי֩ מֵבִ֨יא אֶת־הַמַּבּ֥וּל מַ֙יִם֙ עַל־הָאָ֔רֶץ

Okay, I’m joking a little bit with that Registered Trademark™, but (as noted when we began the “Flood” episode of the column) this word refers only and always to this special Flood belonging to Noah. There is a dissenting voice on that, which we’ll get to shortly. First, we’ve got to focus our attention on these two things:

• It is the Flood, not a flood. Noah — and we readers — are supposed to recognize this word.

• The word has to be explained with (-waters), suggesting we are not expected to understand what a mabbul is.

  ⇥ This is not simply “Flood waters”; that would be מי-המבול in construct. מים is an intrusive word in the Hebrew. ⇤

Tentatively, I am going to suggest that …

• Everybody knew that (1) there had been a Flood that destroyed (almost) all life on earth and that (2) this was going to be the story about it.

• The word mabbul itself was quite an unusual one, so that at some point a scribe decided that here, in its first occurrence, it had to be explained.

This is not the only such gloss on the word, so we’ll have to come back to that question again. For now, let’s concentrate on מבול. The thing to do, as you of course understand, is to look closely at the word itself first. Then we can begin to review what scholars have said about it.

Step One: Where does this word appear in the Bible? Answer: 12 times in Genesis 6–11 and once in Ps 29:10. This is not what happens in your basement; that might be שֶׁטֶף shétef in Biblical Hebrew, but not מבול. This word is the name of the Flood in the Noah story, and that’s why I’m capitalizing it.

Step Two: What’s the root of this word? That’s actually quite obvious, at least at first glance. The dagesh in the בּ must be from an assimilated נ, just like the double -ll- in the word illegitimate, turning legitimate negative by add the in- prefix we use to negate things. ⇥ Read more about that in this earlier post, and see Lesson 10 of my Hebrew course, “How Hebrew Letters Behave,” for more. ⇤

What does the root נבל mean? That’s where we begin to run into problems: