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Genesis 8 says that the mountains became visible on the first day of the tenth month as the flood ended. The Greek Septuagint changes this to the eleventh month, possibly to fix what the translator saw as a problem with the timing in the original text.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Genesis 8:5
Hebrew Bible
3 The waters kept receding steadily from the earth, so that they had gone down by the end of the 150 days. 4 On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ark came to rest on one of the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters kept on receding until the tenth month. On the first day of the tenth month, the tops of the mountains became visible. 6 At the end of 40 days, Noah opened the window he had made in the ark 7 and sent out a raven; it kept flying back and forth until the waters had dried up on the earth.
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
LXX Genesis 8:5
Septuagint
3 And the water subsided, and went off the earth, and after one hundred and fifty days the water was diminished. 4 And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, on the mountains of Ararat. 5 And the water continued to decrease until the tenth month. And in the eleventh month, on the first day of the month, the heads of the mountains were seen. 6 And it happened after forty days Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made. 7 And he sent forth the raven to see if the water had ceased; and it went forth and did not return until the water was dried from the earth.
Date: 300–201 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Sometimes the changes to the original narrative are 'corrections' based on logical inferences arising from the translator's reading of the text. Such is the case in Genesis 8:5 which describes the scene as the waters of the flood abate ... The LXX translator has interpreted the verse to mean that the level of the water diminished throughout the whole of the tenth month before it reached the tops of the mountains - i.e., at the beginning of the eleventh - despite the fact that the Hebrew specifies that this took place a month earlier ..."
Robert J. V. Hiebert, Translation Technique in the Septuagint of Genesis and its Implications for the NETS Version (International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Vol. 33, 2000), 76–93.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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