APPENDIX. NOTES. 385 



We are now arrived at the last epoch of this great 

 event, the gradual decrease and final subsidence of the 

 diluvial waters. The period of their increase, if with 

 Lightfoot we add the 40 days to the 150, would be 190 

 days, or, as was before observed, six lunar months and 

 about three weeks. In the seventh month of the deluge, 

 as the same author observes, 1 on the seventeenth day of 

 the month, the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat, 2 

 from which period the waters returned off the face of the 

 earth, going and returning, as it is in the Hebrew, 3 ren- 

 dered in our translation by the word continually, but 

 almost all the ancient versions adhere to the literal sense, 

 which seems to be important, and to indicate a flux and 

 reflux of the waters, which would affect the deposition of 

 the matters floating upon or suspended in them. Whether 

 this flux and reflux partook of the nature of a tide, and 

 was produced by the action of the moon, or whether it was 

 occasioned by the wind, which, as Solomon observes, 

 Goeth towards the south and turneth about to the north,* 

 does not appear. 



After the resting of the ark, more than two months elapsed 

 before the tops of the mountains were seen, and finally, 

 in nearly two months more the waters had universally 

 disappeared; and after their long domination over the 

 earth, lasting nearly eleven months, were confined again 

 within the limits that God had originally assigned to 

 them. Reckoning to the day of Noah's going out of the 

 ark, on the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the 

 whole period of his confinement appears to have been one 



1 Ubi supra. z See above, VOL. I. p. 45. 



8 Heb. mm "pVn pNn Vp oon nun 

 *'Eccles.i. 6. 



