How could the ark come to rest in the seventh month when the mountain tops were not seen until the tenth?

A boat runs aground while the ground beneath it is still under water. The ark was a large, deep vessel (thirty cubits high, 6:15), loaded with people, animals and food, and it will have sat low in the water. When the waters began to fall at the end of the 150 days (8:3), it would touch bottom on a high ridge long before that ridge, or any other summit, showed above the surface. Genesis 7:20 says the waters had stood fifteen cubits above the mountains. Keil and Delitzsch thought that figure probably reflects how deep the ark lay in the water, and the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi, followed by the English scholar John Lightfoot, reckoned (as Gill reports) that the ark grounded with about eleven cubits of water still over the hill on which it rested.

The two verses also speak of different peaks. The ark rested “upon the mountains of Ararat”: Ararat is the Hebrew name of Urartu, a mountainous country north of Mesopotamia (Jeremiah 51:27; also 2 Kings 19:37, where the KJV has ‘Armenia’), not a single peak, and the NET Bible translates ‘on one of the mountains of Ararat’, taking the plural in the sense of one of them. Some ten weeks later, as the water went on falling, “the tops of the mountains” came into view: in Keil and Delitzsch’s words, the tops of the highlands that surrounded the ark. So the ark stopped floating in the seventh month, and the other summits appeared in the tenth. The text itself joins the two: “the waters decreased continually until the tenth month” (8:5).

Seen from the ark

Some point out that Noah’s view was limited: the ark had a window (8:6) and a covering (8:13). The tops ‘were seen’ may mean when they came into Noah’s sight, which could be later than when they first broke the surface.

One mountain of the range

Eric Lyons (Apologetics Press) explains the plural “mountains” as a figure of speech in which a plural stands for one, as in the Gospels’ ‘thieves’ who reviled Jesus; the ark rested on one mountain in the range.

Where the ark came to rest is not known. The Targums and the Syriac render the place as the mountains of Kardu (Cordyene), south of Lake Van, while later tradition pointed to Mount Ararat (Ağrı Dağı) in eastern Turkey.