2. the wellsprings of the deep . . . and the casements of the heavens, the rain. In keeping with the stately symmetry that governs the style of the whole Flood narrative, the ending of the Flood precisely echoes the terms in which its beginning was represented, in the same order: the poetic inset of 7:11 immediately followed by “rain” at the beginning of 7:12.

5. the mountaintops appeared. There is an echo here of “that the dry land will appear” of 1:9.

6. at the end of forty days. After the ark comes to rest, not the forty days of deluge.

13. in the six hundred and first year. Of Noah’s life. The Septuagint adds these words, although whether that reflects a gloss or a more reliable text at this point is unclear.

ground. The Hebrew is ʾadamah, the word that also means “soil” and that figures importantly in the Garden story and its immediate aftermath. It recurs again in verse 21 in God’s vow not to destroy the earth again.

14. completely dry. There is no “completely” in the Hebrew but that may be implied by the verb used. The verb for “was dry” in the preceding verse is ḥarev; the verb here is yavesh. The two are occasionally paired in poetic parallelism (e.g., Hosea 13:15), but they also occur twice in what looks like a temporal sequence (Isaiah 19:5 and Job 14:11): first a water source dries up (ḥarev), then it is in a state of complete dryness (yavesh).

19. The verb ramas and the noun remes usually refer to crawling life-forms, but there are a few contexts in which they appear to designate any kind of moving creature. (The meaning of the root is probably linked with minute movement, shuffling, or trampling.) In Genesis 9:3, remes must indicate all kinds of animals because Noah’s diet is surely not restricted to reptiles and insects. Here, the initial romes seems to mean “crawling things,” because it stands in contradistinction to “every beast,” whereas romes in the next clause summarizes the catalogue that precedes it, which includes birds.

21. And the LORD smelled the fragrant odor. Noah has followed in the literary footsteps of the hero of the Mesopotamian Flood stories in offering thanksgiving sacrifice after the waters recede. The frankly anthropomorphic imagination that informs Genesis has no difficulty in conceiving God’s enjoying the aroma of the burnt offerings. What is rigorously excluded from the monotheistic version of the story is any suggestion that God eats the sacrifice—in the Mesopotamian traditions, the gods are thought to be dependent on the food men provide them through the sacrifices, and they swoop down on the postdiluvian offering “like flies.” The word for “fragrance” (or perhaps, something pleasing or soothing), niḥoaḥ, is always attached to “odor” as a technical term linked with sacrifices, and it probably puns here on the name Noah.

The thanksgiving sacrifice is evidently a requisite narrative motif taken from the Mesopotamian antecedents, but the Hebrew writer’s attitude toward it may be more complicated than meets the eye. The first reported animal sacrifice, though equally pleasing to God, led to the murder of the sacrificer. Noah is about to be warned about the mortal danger of bloodguilt, and he himself will become the victim of an act of violation, but not as a consequence of his sacrifice. In any case, divine acceptance of ritual offerings does nothing to mitigate man’s dangerous impulses.

and the LORD said in His heart. The idiom means “said to himself” but it is important to preserve the literal wording because it pointedly echoes 6:6, “and was grieved to the heart,” just as “the devisings of the human heart are evil” explicitly echoes 6:5. The Flood story is thus enclosed by mutually mirroring reports of God’s musing on human nature. Whether the addition here of “from youth” means, as some commentators claim, that God now has a more qualified view of the human potential for evil, is questionable. But after the Flood, God, once more recognizing the evil of which man is capable, concludes that, given what man is all too likely disposed to do, it is scarcely worth destroying the whole world again on his account.

damn. The Hebrew verb, from a root associated with the idea of lack of importance, or contemptibility, may occasionally mean “to curse,” as in the Balaam story, but its usual meaning is to denigrate or vilify. Perhaps both senses are intimated here.

I will not again. The repetition of this phrase may reflect, as Rashi suggests, a formal oath, the solemnity of which would then be capped by the poetic inset at the end (which uses an unconventional short-line form, with only two accents in each verset). What is peculiar is that this is a pledge that God makes to Himself, not out loud to Noah. The complementary promise to Noah, in the next chapter, will be accompanied by the external sign of the rainbow. The silent promise in God’s interior monologue invokes no external signs, only the seamless cycle of the seasons that will continue as long as the earth.