In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth had dried out. Then God said to Noah, “Go out from the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—that they may swarm on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” So Noah went out, and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him. Every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out by families from the ark.
Comment: 57 days or thereabouts have gone between the end of yesterday’s passage and the beginning of today’s. I presume that the ‘ground was dry’ in the two passages have different meanings. Yesterday the flood had gone, today the mud and slush has dried out making it possible for all the ark’s passengers to go out safely. What does ‘families’ mean. Had there been some births on the journey. By my quick calculation of the dates given, they were on the ark for more than 13 months. Or does it mean that not every type of sub-division of animals were there. In Amharic a donkey is an Ahaya, and a zebra is a Ymeda-ahaya (a donkey in the wild). They can interbreed and are the same family, although I am led to understand that their off-spring are usually sterile. The ark leaves us with a lot of interesting questions but eventually for each of us it comes down to whether or not we believe the story to be true. I do.
Prayer: Help me to let Your book judge me, rather than me trying to judge it.
As I read it! 