“Let the Waters Be Gathered Together, and Let the Dry Land Appear”: Sixteenth-Century Exegeses of Genesis 1.9–10 in Context

Building on both Christian scriptures and Aristotelian notions of the four elements, many patristic, medieval, and sixteenth-century Christians held that water could and perhaps should cover the whole earth. Christian and Jewish exegetes from Basil the Great and into the sixteenth century discussed the dry land’s existence in their commentaries on Genesis 1.9–10, arguing that its existence was either natural, preternatural, or a supernatural act of God. Analyzing patristic, medieval and sixteenth-century exegeses of these biblical verses, this article explores how these Christian and Jewish exegetes categorized water’s failure to flood the earth. It argues that the possibilities for characterizing water’s behavior expanded greatly in the sixteenth century. Whereas patristic and medieval authors tended to claim that the natural order God had established during the process of creation could account for water’s failure to submerge the earth, sixteenth-century exegetes offered a wide variety of categorizations, arguing that water’s behavior was natural, preternatural, supernatural, a wonder, or even a miracle. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on sixteenth-century cosmographical models, this paper argues that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sea voyages and encounters with people living in the Southern Hemisphere might have led these sixteenth-century exegetes to reexamine the categories as they did.