How many animals were on the ark?

19 And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female. 20 Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground, according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you to keep them alive (Gen 6:19-20).

 

2 Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate, 3 and seven pairs of the birds of the heavens also, male and female, to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth. 4 For in seven days I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.” 5  And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him.

 

6 Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth. 7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood. 8 Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground, 9 two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah. 10 And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth (Gen 7:6-10).

Unbelievers typically allege a contradiction in the number of animals. Was it one pair per kind, or seven pair per kind?

i) Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we bracket the inspiration of Scripture. Even if Genesis was just a human document, even if the flood story was just an ancient myth, assuming this is a contradiction, it’s not a subtle contradiction. Rather, it would be a glaring contradiction. A back-to-back discrepancy.

But it’s unlikely that the narrator would be oblivious to such a conspicuous discrepancy. It’s not like he lost count. The flood account is a carefully crafted story. The narrator is very mindful of what he’s doing.

ii) I think the difference is due, in part, to the narrator’s compositional technique. He employs a synoptic-resumptive/expansive technique, whereby he begins with a general presentation, then circles back to focus on certain details. Moving from general to specific. Supplementing and refining the initial presentation.

iii) Over and above that are other considerations. Why one pair? Because one pair symbolizes the minimal reproductive unit. You need at least one male and one female to produce more males and females.

iv) This, in turn, alludes to Gen 1-2. In Gen 1, God makes natural kinds that reproduce according to their kind. God also creates man and woman as a reproductive pair.

In Gen 2, Adam becomes aware of what he’s missing by naming animals in the garden. They come in pairs, but there’s no female counterpart to himself.

So the flood account mentions one pair of each kind to play on the reproductive symbolism of paired kinds.

Why seven pair? For several reasons:

a) If some animals are sacrificial animals (8:20), while other animals are food items (9:20), then you need more than one pair to maintain a replacement rate.

b) But this also trades on the numerological significance of seven. Indeed, notice the parallel between seven pairs and seven days (7:2-4). Surely that’s not incidental. That’s a back-to-back comparison.

And, of course, this also triggers associations with the seven days of the creation week, in Gen 1. So the septunarian numbering of the animals parallels the septunarian schematization of time.

c) In addition, it foreshadows the kosher laws later in the Pentateuch (Lev 11; Deut 4).

So the alternate numbering of the animals both backshadows and foreshadows other Pentateuchal motifs. We’re dealing with a somewhat schematized version of events, containing some numerological symbolism.

Liberals attribute the “contradiction” to the unsuccessful efforts of the redactor to combine two divergent flood traditions–yet as we’ve just seen, the alternate numbering involves larger, integrated patterns. It’s not confined to the flood account. It picks up on themes that precede the flood account, and it carries over into themes that succeed the flood account.