So it never rained before the flood? How do we know that? It certainly never rained for 40 days before, but would it not have rained normally? I think it did. Rain is part of the normal meteorological cycle, the absence of which would change our understanding of the evolution and development of the earth being suitable to human life. Without rain, the planet would have all been a desert.
If it never rained before the Flood, it would certainly change our understanding of the development of life on Earth. However, not raining doesn’t necessarily translate into desert.
To understand why there are some people who think there was no rain prior to the Flood, you need to see where in scripture they’re getting this, and what line of reasoning their using to come to this conclusion.
First, see Genesis 2:5 - “And every plant of the field before it sprung up in the earth, and every herb of the ground before it grew: for the Lord God had not rained upon the earth; and there was not a man to till the earth.” So, here we see an allusion to the Flood when it says “God had not rained upon the earth.” We can understand this as an allusion to the Flood because between this verse and the first rains of the Flood, rain is not mentioned.
Yet, God plants a garden of paradise and places man within it. How does the garden grow? See Genesis 2:6 - “But a spring rose out of the earth, watering all the surface of the earth.” There is a supposition by some that prior to the Flood, the Earth’s meteorological systems looked rather different. From Genesis 2:10 - “And a river went out of the place of pleasure to water paradise, which from thence is divided into four heads,” we see that between the “spring” and the “rivers” this is how the surface of the earth was watered. But because of our understanding of evaporation, condensation and precipitation, to hold that there was no rain before the Flood, some have suggested a denser layer of atmospheric gases, less dust content in the atmosphere, and generally higher levels of humidity in the air.
So what about the Flood? The first time we hear about rain again after Genesis 2 is Genesis 7:4, when God warns Noah about how He will destroy humanity: “For yet a while, and after seven days**, I will rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights**; and I will destroy every substance that I have made, from the face of the earth.” Notice that the same language is used regarding rain. In Genesis 2, it says “God had not rained upon the earth,” and in Genesis 7, God warns “I will rain upon the earth.” So there is an obvious corollary here.
Then, in Genesis 7:11-12, we see a kind of mechanism of the Flood, “[11] In the six hundredth year of the life of Noe, in the second month, in the seventeenth day of the month,
all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the flood gates of heaven were opened: [12] And the rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.” Whereas in Genesis 2, God had not yet rained, but a spring rose from the earth, in Genesis 7, the fountains of the deep (the source of the spring) were broken up, and the floodgates of heaven were opened.
The idea here is that there is a fundamental change in how the earth worked. Before, a spring from within gave the earth life. At and after, that spring was broken up, and the floodgates of heaven were opened. It should be useful to note that if the heavens were opened at the flood, they must have been closed prior to the flood.
The final piece of the puzzle is the rainbow. God gave us the rainbow as a sign that He would not flood the earth again. The thinking here is that the rainbow, to function as a sign in this manner, had to be something new and marvelous, a real sign. Indeed, if the earth had fundamentally changed, and there were no longer “fountains of the deep” because that water had been broken up, then the rainbow would have been a sign not just that God wouldn’t flood the earth again, but that it was impossible for it to do so in the new order of things.
Let’s look at the text itself: Genesis 9:11-17 - “[11] I will establish my covenant with you, and all flesh shall be no more destroyed with the waters of a flood, neither shall there be from henceforth a flood to waste the earth. [12] And God said: This is the sign of the covenant which I give between me and you, and to every living soul that is with you, for perpetual generations. [13] I will set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be the sign of a covenant between me, and between the earth. [14] And when I shall cover the sky with clouds, my bow shall appear in the clouds: [15] And I will remember my covenant with you, and with every living soul that beareth flesh: and there shall no more be waters of a flood to destroy all flesh. [16] And the bow shall be in the clouds, and I shall see it, and shall remember the everlasting covenant, that was made between God and every living soul of all flesh which is upon the earth. [17] And God said to Noe: This shall be the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh upon the earth.”
Note lastly that this is the first mention of clouds in the Bible. Cheers!
