Calendar narratives

Flood stories were widespread in the ancient world. One distinctive of the biblical flood account is its use of dates. There are five dates in the Genesis flood narrative. This is remarkable, since those are the only dates in the entire book of Genesis. 

Typically in ancient literature, an event's timing was indicated by relating it to another event, not by using dates. Timeline dating–plotting events on a transcendent timeline with dates–is common today, but ancient texts used event sequencing, temporally marking an event by relating it to other events. 

Throughout Genesis, event sequencing is used. But five dates appear in the flood narrative and nowhere else in the entire book of Genesis.

An important insight emerges when these dates are potted against the festival calendar of Israel. Three of the five fall directly on Mosaic festival dates. The only exceptions are the first and last, which nonetheless fall at the midpoint of Israel's grain-harvest festivals. All five dates appear to be "scheduled" with reference to Israel's festivals. 

1. The beginning of the flood (Gen 7:11). The flood's beginning date (2/27) is at the center of Israel's grain festivals.

2. The ark's landing (Gen 8:4)…In later Israel, this date would fall during the Feast of Booths. 

3. When the mountaintops became visible (Gen 8:5)…In later Israel, that same date was a new-moon day in between israel's festival days.

4. When the waters were gone (Gen 8:13). By New Years Day (1/1) the waters were gone. New Year's Day is a natural "new beginnings" point.

5. When the ground was dry (Gen 8:14). The ground was completely dry on 2/27. The significance of the flood's beginning in the heart of the grain harvest has already been noted. The same applies to its conclusion on a date one year later and even ten days after. 

These correspondences suggest that the alignment between the five dated flood events and later Israel's festival calendar are not coincidental. Noah's flood was retold in a manner that related his "exodus" to Israel's festival worship and agricultural labors. If this reading is correct, one may still ask whether Noah's flood actually took place on these dates, or whether these dates were added anachronistically. One further feature indicates that these are not dates recorded from observation but are a literary construction: the flood narrative uses schematic, thirty-day months rather than actual varying-length months. This is prima facie evidence of a constructed (rather than observed) timeline. 

The flood narrative uses schematic, thirty-day months. The five months between the beginning of the flood (2/17) and the ark's resting on Mount Ararat (7:17) are rendered as 150 days (Gen 7:24; 8:3) being five months of thirty days each…The use of aesthetically balanced dates and numbers throughout the passage, such as 7s, 10s, 40s, 150, along with the use of schematic months, indicates the constructed nature of this narrative's dates for a legal (rather than journalistic) purpose). It is therefore proposed that the flood account is an agricultural and festival calendar in narrative form: a calendar narrative. 

This function for the flood narrative is comparable to the contemporary practice of telling Jesus' birth story on December 25. Churches do so, not to assure that Jesus was actually born on that date, but to inform Christian observances on that date. Similarly, the flood narrative re-maps the events of Noah's deluge to the calendar of Israel's agricultural labors and harvest festivals for its instructional value. 

There are at least three calendrical features of the flood narrative and exodus narratives that are also found in the creation week, suggesting all three date-laden narratives serve this calendrical purpose. First, the creation week is structured around dates like the flood and exodus narratives. The creation week does not provide month dates like those other calendar narratives, but it does give week dates. Days of the Hebrew week were identified by number. 

This reading cautions against both young-earth and old-earth efforts to read Genesis 1 as a chronology of original creation events…This reading leads to conclusions largely congruent with "analogical day," "literary day," or "framework" views. Michael LeFebvre, “Reading Genesis 1 with the Fourth Commandment: The Creation Week as a Calendar Narrative,” G. Hiestand & T. Wilson, eds.  Creation and Doxology: The Beginning and End of God's Good World (IVP 2018), chap. 1. 

That's a very intriguing proposal. I appreciate LeFebvre's fine-grained reading of the text. That said, I find his interpretation unconvincing:

i) I agree with him that the calendar dates in the flood account may be anachronistic, but not in the sense he intends. Rather, they're anachronistic in the sense that modern historians use the Gregorian calendar to date events in ancient history or Far Eastern history. Obviously, the Gregorian calendar was not in use at that time or place. But the anachronistic calendar dates synchronize with actual events.

By the same token, the narrator may well be using a calendar that didn't exist at the time of the flood. Rather, he's using a calendar that developed in Mosaic times. But that's to be expected if the narrator is Moses. And that would be comprehensible to a Mosaic-era audience.

ii) Insofar as the Jewish religious calendar was a year-round calendar, any calendar dates in the flood account will land somewhere in the cycle of Jewish festivals (including the Sabbath). 

iii) If the narrator intended the dates in the flood account to evoke Jewish festivals, I'd expect him to date turning-points in the flood account in reference to the first day or last day of a Jewish festival, rather than in-between festivals or in the middl of festivals. There's too much leeway in LeFebvre's attempted correlations. 

iv) The use of 7s, 10s, 30s, and 40s suggests round numbers or numerological figures that aren't reducible to the Jewish calendar. While there seems to be a schematic element to the figures in the flood account, that's more complex than a single structuring principle. 

v) The creation account and flood accounts may be date-laden to prefigure the Mosaic religious calendar. In addition, the creation and deluge occur in phases, so it's natural to use temporal markers to indicate chronological divisions, progressions, or turning-points. Another narratives don't have the same internal requirements.

vi) The creation account and flood account aren't reducible to agricultural motifs. That's simplistic.