In Genesis, on what day did the floodwaters begin covering the Earth in Noah’s time?

Genesis says the flood began on the seventeenth day of the second month in Noah’s six-hundredth year.

Genesis 7:11 presents the date alongside references to the great deep bursting open and the windows of heaven being opened. The date is part of the narrative’s unusually careful chronology, which also records the duration of the rain and later stages of the flood.

Readers sometimes confuse this date with other dates in the story, including the day the Ark came to rest or the month when the mountain tops became visible. Those later chronological markers belong to different stages of the account.

The passage uses an ancient calendar framework, so converting the date into a modern calendar day is not straightforward. The canonical answer is therefore the biblical month-and-day wording rather than a modern date.