THE CURSE IS REVERSED

A few decades ago, during my Bible studies, the Spirit quickened to me the connection between Scripture's recording of two of the greatest acts of divine rescue in history with calendar precision. One is the night the Lord brought Israel out of Egypt. The other is the day the ark Noah built came to rest after the flood. Both point to the actions of the same God who is the governor of time, reverses curses, and makes a way where there seems to be no way.

The Lord Himself named the month all this happened. Exodus 12:2 records His word to Moses and Aaron, when he said, “This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you.” Exodus 13:4 and Deuteronomy 16:1 identify that month as Abib (later called Nisan after the exile). It falls in what we now call March–April, when the barley is in the ear.

On the fourteenth day the Israelites, the dwellers in Goshen, killed the Passover lamb. That night the destroyer (death angel) passed over the houses marked with blood. The next day, which was the fifteenth of Abib, Israel marched out of Egypt “with a high hand.” The month that had been ordinary became the first month of their sacred year because God made it the month of redemption.

Abib means “ear of grain” or “green ears.” It is the month of firstfruits, of something new pushing up after winter. God did not deliver them in harvest or in midsummer. He delivered them at the turning of the year, when the earth itself was waking up. "Green ears" can be a play on words, in which God wanted them to hear His word as a guide to a new way of life, moving them from slavery and bondage to deliverance and freedom.

Genesis 8:4 is equally exact, when it stated, “And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.” Keep in mind the month had not been changed yet, because the Passover had not been instituted in Noah's day.

The flood began on the seventeenth day of the second month of Noah’s six-hundredth year (Genesis 7:11). One hundred fifty days later, which counted as five months of thirty days each, the ark grounded. That landing date is the seventeenth of the seventh month.

How the months were numbered matters (see the article on the sins of Jereboam). Before the Exodus, Israel’s civil year appears to have begun in the autumn (later called Tishri). Under that reckoning, the second month is Cheshvan and the seventh month is Abib/Nisan. Many early Jewish sources, including the Targum of Jonathan and Rashi, identify the day the ark rested as the seventeenth of Nisan, which was the same month God later chose for the Exodus.

The numbers line up with later redemptive history as well. Some commentators have noted that the seventeenth of Abib/Nisan is also the traditional date associated with Israel’s crossing of the Red Sea and, in the New Testament, with the resurrection of Christ. Whether every link is intended or not, the calendar itself keeps placing deliverance in the same season: spring, firstfruits, new beginning. Personally, I believe that God, who is not the author of confusion but of exactitude, worked time into His divine plan. That exactness can be seen in His warning to Moses to follow every minute detail in the construction of the tabernacle in the wilderness.

The name Ararat is of foreign origin. It corresponds to the ancient kingdom of Urartu in the Armenian highlands, the region around Lake Van. The Bible never points to a single peak. It speaks of “the mountains of Ararat,” a range.

Hebrew lexicons have long offered a folk etymology that fits the story, which is “the curse reversed” or “precipitation of curse.” The root ’arar means “to curse.” After the flood that judged the earth, the ark comes to rest on a name that sounds like the curse itself being turned back. New ground. New covenant. The same God who sent the waters now causes them to recede.

Other proposed meanings include “holy ground” or “mountain of descent.” All of them circle the same idea, which is "the place where judgment ended, and life began again." "Green ears." Comments?