Genesis 7:12 · World English Bible
Genesis 7:12 Meaning It Rained on the Earth Forty Days
It rained on the earth forty days and forty nights.
What does Genesis 7:12 mean?
The number 40 is the fourfold nature of a person: physical, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional, and the rain falling that long is the dissolving force coming down through every one of them. Water descends on the mind and softens what was hard-set in it, night and day alike, until the whole fourfold self is steeped and nothing dry and rigid is left standing.
From the Esoteric reading below.
Genesis 7:12 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Esoteric
ESOTERIC
Esoteric
The number 40 is the fourfold nature of a person: physical, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional, and the rain falling that long is the dissolving force coming down through every one of them. Water descends on the mind and softens what was hard-set in it, night and day alike, until the whole fourfold self is steeped and nothing dry and rigid is left standing. Completion comes not by climbing or striving but by staying under it, still, letting the downpour do the loosening.
40 days and 40 nights is the full measure of a person met by that steady descent. Rest here is stillness held while the water works, and the self is remade by being soaked rather than by doing anything at all.
The number 40: the fourfold nature of a person, physical and spiritual and intellectual and emotional Rain: the descending, dissolving force that comes down to soften and loosen what has hardened in the mind Earth: the mind, the ground on which the whole inner weather falls
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Live Genesis 7:12 today
- Pick one thing today that you have already decided about, maybe a person, a grudge, an opinion you say the same way every time, and sit with it for five minutes without arguing your side. You are not solving it, you are letting it get a little less hard.
- When someone close to you says something you have heard before and you feel the shut door come down, stay in the conversation one minute longer than usual. Let them finish. You do not have to agree, just stop drying yourself off.
- Next time a day piles on, the traffic, the email, the thing that broke, resist the urge to fix your mood. Let it rain on you, drive or walk or stand in the kitchen and let it be heavy, and see if anything in you gives way on its own.
What part of me has gone so hard that I have started calling it my personality?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching 78
Nothing in the world is softer than water, yet it wears down what is hardest. The yielding thing outlasts the rigid one, not by force but by never stopping.
Zen · Shikantaza
Just sitting, with nothing added and nothing chased. The practice is to stay put while something in you that was set hard quietly comes apart.
Sufism · Rumi
He said the field of grain had to be ground down before it could become bread. What feels like being broken is often just being made soft enough to be useful.
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