Pip: The Winding Path — where we slow down long enough to notice that the Bible is doing something more complicated than you remember from Sunday school.
Mara: David Cartwright’s recent posts walk through Genesis chapters seven through nine in close detail — the flood, the ark, the covenant, and what the text is actually doing beneath the surface. Let’s start with the flood itself.
May 26 — Noah, the Flood, and What the Text Is Actually Doing
Mara: The opening chapters of Genesis 7 raise a question the text doesn’t fully answer: God tells Noah to bring clean animals by sevens and unclean ones by pairs — but Mosaic Law hasn’t been given yet. How would Noah know the difference?
Pip: The post offers two possibilities. One is that God communicated this to Noah privately, outside what scripture records. The other is more elegant: the animals sorted themselves. The ones that arrived in sevens were the clean ones — the grouping was the message.
Mara: That second reading carries real weight. As the post puts it, “God gathered the animals and brought them onto the ark to Noah” — which means the act of gathering may itself have been the instruction.
Pip: So the taxonomy lesson and the logistics were the same event. That’s a tidy solution to what looked like an anachronism.
Mara: Then comes verse 11, which gives a specific month and day for the flood’s beginning — not anchored to any historical calendar we can use, but precise within Noah’s own lifespan. The post flags something important in the language there: this is a reversal of creation. In Genesis 1, God separates the waters and secures dry land. Here, those separations collapse. The post calls it “de-creating.”
Pip: Which reframes the flood entirely — not just as punishment, but as the undoing of the original ordering of things.
Mara: And the number forty carries its own freight. The post draws the pattern explicitly: forty days of rain, forty days of Jesus fasting in the wilderness, forty years in the desert. The number signals, as the post puts it, “a time sufficient to accomplish an intended purpose.”
Pip: Then the waters simply prevail. The post captures that helplessness well — there’s nothing to do but watch.
Mara: And it doesn’t soften the loss. Verse 22 surfaces the phrase “in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life” — a reminder, the post argues, that life belongs to God, which makes the grief real but also reframes who holds the right to it.
Pip: After 150 days afloat, the turn arrives in three words.
Mara: “God remembered Noah.” The post traces that phrase across Genesis — God remembering Abraham, Rachel, the covenant in Egypt — and argues it’s always a faithfulness marker. Memory here means action, not mere recollection.
Pip: Then comes the raven and the dove, which the post reads as more than navigation tools. The raven scavenges and keeps flying; the dove needs plant food and comes back empty, then returns with an olive leaf, then doesn’t return at all. Each flight is a report on whether the earth is ready.
Mara: Chapter 9 brings dietary changes, a covenant God makes essentially with Himself — no conditions on Noah’s side — and the rainbow as a sign God sets as a reminder for Himself. The post notes that framing is worth sitting with, given how we usually think about divine omniscience.
Pip: And it ends with Ham, Shem, and Japheth — a family scene that quietly sets up the Canaanite storyline several books ahead.
Mara: Noah winds up living 950 years, and his narrative moves us from judgment through de-creation and back to something that looks like a fresh start — though, as the post is careful to note, the ground-level struggle described in Genesis 3 hasn’t been reversed yet. Paul’s groaning creation in Romans 8 is still waiting.
Pip: Which means the rainbow is a promise, not a resolution.
Pip: De-creation, re-creation, a covenant with no conditions — Genesis is doing a lot of structural work underneath a story most people think they already know.
Mara: Next time, more of that slow reading. There’s more path ahead.
The Winding Path 