Catholic Commentary
The Earth Is Dry: Final Confirmation
13In the six hundred first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth. Noah removed the covering of the ship, and looked. He saw that the surface of the ground was dry.14In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry.
Genesis 8:13–14 describes Noah observing that the earth's surface has dried after the flood, first seeing it on the first day of the new year, then confirming complete dryness approximately two months later. The narrative distinguishes between visual drying and thorough, habitable dryness, marking the graduated restoration of creation and Noah's obedient readiness to leave the ark at God's command.
Noah waits for God's explicit command even after the waters recede—a lesson in patience that the renewal you see may not yet be ready by God's measure.
Genesis 8:13 — The First Day of the New Year: Seeing Dry Ground
The dating formula is unusually precise and unmistakably liturgical in tone. Noah is now 601 years old (cf. Gen 7:11, where the flood began in his 600th year, on the seventeenth day of the second month). That the earth's surface dries on the first day of the first month is not incidental. In the Hebrew calendar, the first of the month of Nisan (or its antecedent) carries new-year significance — a moment of cosmic reset. The Priestly author (to whom critical scholars attribute this layer of the flood narrative) elsewhere uses exact dates to signal theological weight: creation begins, covenants are sealed, and sanctuaries are dedicated on calendrically charged days.
Noah's action is intimate and deliberate: he "removed the covering of the ship" (Hebrew: wayāsar et-mikkesê hattēbâ). The word for covering (mikkāseh) suggests a roof or protective canopy — Noah himself lifts it, a gesture of agency and discernment. He does not leap out; he looks. The Hebrew wayyarʾ — "and he saw" — echoes unmistakably the divine refrain of Genesis 1, where God surveys each stage of creation and declares it good (wayyarʾ ʾĕlōhîm kî-ṭôb). Noah's act of seeing participates in that evaluative gaze. He observes that the pənê hāʾădāmâ — the "face of the ground" — is dry. The "face" language recalls the "face of the deep" over which the Spirit hovered at the beginning (Gen 1:2). The flood has been, in the deepest sense, an undoing and redoing of creation's first form.
Yet Noah waits. Even seeing dry ground, he does not exit the ark. This is a man of measured obedience: he entered at God's command (Gen 7:1), and he will leave at God's command (Gen 8:15–16). Verse 13 describes the end of the visible crisis, but full restoration is not yet confirmed.
Genesis 8:14 — The Twenty-Seventh Day of the Second Month: Complete Dryness
Nearly two months after the first visual confirmation, the earth achieves full, thoroughgoing dryness. The Hebrew uses two different words across these verses: in verse 13, ḥārĕbû (dried up, visually), and here yābĕšâ hāʾāreṣ — the earth was dry in the more absolute, settled sense (yābēš implies a thorough, stable dryness fit for habitation and cultivation). The distinction is meaningful: the flood does not end in a single dramatic moment but in a patient, graduated process. What God unmakes and remakes, He remakes thoroughly.
The total elapsed time from the flood's beginning (year 600, month 2, day 17 — Gen 7:11) to the final drying (year 601, month 2, day 27) is one solar year and ten days, or approximately 370 days — a complete cycle of time, bookending the event in cosmic wholeness.
The Typological Sense
The Church Fathers were unanimous in reading the ark as a type of the Church and the flood as a type of Baptism (1 Pet 3:20–21). In this typological key, the drying of the earth figures the emergence of the baptized into new life: the waters of death and judgment recede, and a cleansed, renewed creation appears. Just as Noah removes the covering and gazes upon a world reborn, the newly baptized Christian emerges from the waters to behold a world transfigured by grace. The two-stage drying — first a seeing, then a confirmation — may further suggest the gradual unfolding of Christian formation: the initial gift of new life in Baptism (the surface is dry; the candidate has emerged), and the deeper consolidation of that life in Confirmation and ongoing sanctification (the earth is truly dry; the Christian is established in grace). St. Augustine (City of God XV–XVI) develops at length the ark's significance as figura Ecclesiae, noting that every dimension of the ark's story yields spiritual meaning for those with eyes to see.
The Catholic tradition reads these verses within what the Catechism calls the "four senses of Scripture" (CCC 115–119): the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. At the literal level, the precise dating testifies to the historical seriousness with which the sacred author treats the flood event — not myth in the sense of fable, but a narrated act of divine sovereignty over history and creation.
At the allegorical level, the Church has consistently seen the flood and its resolution as a prefiguration of Baptism. The Council of Trent and the Roman Rite both use this typology in the Easter Vigil's blessing of baptismal water, which invokes the flood waters as a "sign of Baptism" by which God "washed away the sins of a guilty world." St. Peter makes the connection explicit (1 Pet 3:20–21), and St. Justin Martyr, Tertullian (De Baptismo VIII), and St. Ambrose (De Mysteriis III) all elaborate it in catechetical contexts.
The two-stage completion of the drying resonates with Catholic sacramental theology's understanding that grace works not in an instant flash but in a process of deepening and confirmation. Pope Benedict XVI, in Verbum Domini (§42), notes that God's Word always seeks to "dry firm ground" in the human soul — ground capable of bearing the weight of the divine.
Anagogically, the earth's final dryness anticipates the eschatological renewal promised in Revelation 21:1 — "the sea was no more" — where all chaos, death, and opposition to God are permanently removed and a new creation stands complete. The patience of Noah waiting across two months mirrors the Church's patient eschatological waiting: she has seen the first fruits (the surface is dry; Christ is risen), and she awaits the final consummation (the earth is truly dry; all things are made new).
Contemporary Catholics can draw two powerful spiritual lessons from Noah's posture in these verses. First, the discipline of waiting on God's confirmation before acting. Noah sees dry ground and still waits. In an age of instant information and compulsive decision-making, the flood narrative models a countercultural patience: what looks finished to the eye may not yet be ready by God's measure. This has concrete application in major life decisions — a vocational discernment, a reconciliation, a new beginning after loss. We see the surface, but God knows when the ground is truly firm.
Second, Noah's act of removing the covering and looking is itself a spiritual act — an attentive, prayerful reading of reality. Catholic spiritual tradition (from Ignatian discernment to the Carmelite practice of contemplation) trains precisely this kind of evaluative gaze on our lives. We are called to look at our circumstances the way Noah looked at the receding waters: with faith that God is renewing something, with patience that the renewal is not yet complete, and with obedience to wait for His explicit word before we move. The liturgical precision of these dates also invites us to treat time itself as sacred — our New Year's Days, our anniversaries of grace, as genuine thresholds worth marking with prayer and attention.
Commentary