What Does Genesis 7:12 Mean?
And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.THE KEY
The rain fills not just the land but the whole measure of time: forty days and forty nights.
THE MEANING
Rain covers the earth through every day and every night. The verse holds the full cycle in view, leaving no part of the named span outside the downpour.
THE ROOT
גֶּשֶׁם
geshem
GROWS FROM
גשם
Rain; rainfall.
The noun for rain and the verb for raining share the root גשם. The word holds the falling water and the act of its falling in one family; here that action continues across the entire span named.
ALSO GROWS
geshem: Rain.
גֶּשֶׁם
This is the noun naming the water that covers the earth.
gāsham: To rain.
גָּשַׁם
The verb shares the root, making the rain an ongoing action through the days and nights.
THE PATTERN
The repeated phrase “forty days and forty nights” marks a complete stretch of sustained duration.
And Moses went into the midst of the cloud and went up into the mountain, and Moses was in the mountain forty days and forty nights.And he rose, and ate and drank, and walked in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mountain of God.And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward he hungered.THE THREAD
The springs of the deep were shut, and the windows of heaven were shut, and the rain from heaven was held back.The “rain” here is again גֶּשֶׁם (geshem), from the same root. The two verses show the rain first covering the earth and then being restrained, giving its beginning and its ending as one continuous movement.
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