In the Genesis Flood account, on what date did the waters begin?

In the Genesis Flood account, the waters began on the seventeenth day of the second month of Noah’s six-hundredth year.

Genesis 7:11 gives this date while describing the opening of the great deep and the windows of heaven. The passage combines Noah’s age with a day and month, creating one of the story’s most precise chronological markers. The rain then fell for forty days and forty nights, but the date of the Flood’s beginning is a separate detail.

Readers sometimes confuse this date with the seventeenth day of the seventh month, when Genesis 8:4 says the Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. Other dates in the account mark the drying process and Noah’s eventual departure. The narrative therefore uses several calendar references rather than one single Flood date.