Scripture · Genesis 8:1-5
Genesis 7:11-12
The Deluge
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month, all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And the rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights.
People cling to exposed rocks as floodwater rises beneath a violent sky in John Martin’s vision of the Deluge.
About the artwork
Martin gives the foreground to people outside the place of safety. Small bodies struggle against rocks while the sky and water move on an overwhelming scale. Following the figures brings the enormous disaster back to the immediate problem of finding somewhere to stand or someone to hold.
The Yale Center for British Art explains that the painting draws on more than Genesis. Martin also used Byron’s drama Heaven and Earth and contemporary speculation about a collision involving the sun, moon and a comet. The disturbed sky carries those additional ideas into his 1834 canvas; its cosmic mechanism is the artist’s synthesis.
Featured in: Top 10 John Martin Paintings of Biblical Judgment, Explained
What does Genesis 7:11-12 mean?
Genesis 7:11–12 describes the beginning of the Flood through waters released from below and rain falling from above. The following verses alternate between those entering the ark and the waters rising over the earth. Eventually even the mountains disappear beneath the flood.
Martin concentrates on the people exposed to that rising water, giving the catastrophe an immediacy beyond its brief textual description. The painting’s extraordinary sky should be understood separately from the scriptural account. Genesis names the breaking fountains and opened heavens, but does not supply the celestial collision incorporated into Martin’s image.
The exposed figures and surging water make the onset of Genesis’s Flood tangible, while the sky incorporates Martin’s additional literary and scientific influences.
Sources
Top 10 John Martin Paintings of Biblical Judgment, Explained. Artwork reading adapted from this guide.
Genesis 7 — Berean Standard Bible. Context for Genesis 7:11-12.
Also from Genesis:Elohim Creating AdamThe Creation of Adam
Continue looking:The Eve of the DelugeNoah’s ArkMoses the Prophet