And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated.
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Ephrem The Syrian
AD 373
The springs of the abyss and the floodgates of heaven were open forty days and forty nights and “the ark was afloat for one hundred fifty days.” But after one hundred fifty days the waters began to subside and the ark came to rest on Mt. Qardu. In the tenth month the tops of the mountains were seen. In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth. In the second month, that is, Iyor, “on the twentyseventh day of the month, the earth was dry.” Therefore Noah and those with him had been in the ark three hundred sixtyfive days, for from the seventeenth of the second month, that is, Iyor, until the twentyseventh of the same month the following year, according to the lunar reckoning, there were three hundred sixtyfive days. Notice then that even the generation of the house of Noah employed this reckoning of three hundred sixtyfive days in a year. Why then should you say that it was the Chaldeans and Egyptians who inv...
And the waters returned St. Jerome on this passage remarks, "that all waters and torrents repair to the womb of the abyss, through the hidden veins of the earth "and by the abyss understands the sea: according to that of Ecclesiastes i. 7, all the rivers run into the sea. But as the sea itself, on this occasion, exceeded its limits, (otherwise its waters would not have been higher than the land) the sense perhaps confined to this, that the waters by degrees were diminished; as we may say of the inundations of land, that the waters are gone off, not by the regular course of ditches, but from the effects of the sun and winds which dry them up. (Estius)
