“It was after the passage of seven days, and the water of the Flood was upon the earth” (Genesis 7:10). “It was after the passage of seven days, and the water of the Flood” – this teaches that the Holy One blessed be He gave them a reprieve during the seven days of mourning over the righteous Methuselah,21A calculation of the various chronologies found in the first few chapters of Genesis will show that Methuselah died the very year when the Flood started. so that they might repent [in the interim], but they did not do so.
Another matter, “it was after the passage of seven days” – Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: The Holy One blessed be He observed mourning over [the destruction of] His world for seven days before the Flood came upon the world. What is the source? “He was saddened in His heart” (Genesis 6:6), and sadness denotes nothing other than mourning, as it is stated: “The king is saddened over his son” (II Samuel 19:3).
Rabbi Yosei ben Durmaskit said: They sinned with the orb of the eye,22They used their eyes to covet other people’s property and ultimately steal it. that is like water; the Holy One blessed be He, too, exacted retribution against them only with water. “In the six hundredth year of the life of Noah, during the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the wellsprings of the great depth were breached, and the windows of the heavens were opened” (Genesis 7:11).
Rabbi Levi said: They acted corruptly with their conduits;23They inseminated other people’s wives, and engaged in other sorts of sexual perversion. the Omnipresent, too, changed the natural order for them. The natural way of the world is that rain falls and then the depths rise, as it is written: “Depths call to depths to the sound of your conduits” (Psalms 42:8).24When the rain falls it calls out to the underground water to rise towards it.
See Bereshit Rabba 13:13. However, here, “the wellsprings of the great depths were breached,” and after that, “the windows of the heavens were opened.”