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Genesis 2:5 has often been understood to mean that there was no rain from the time of creation until "in the six hundredth year of Noah's life... the floodgates of heaven were opened... rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights." (Genesis 7:9-10). The passage doesn't necessarily mean there was no rain during all this period, but may just mean that the hydrologic cycle had a beginning point, after the creation of the cosmos, and was not an inherent feature of the natural world when it was brand new. The traditional understanding is also possible and sensible though, that there was no rain prior to the events of Genesis 6-9, and that Genesis 2:6 describes a water cycle different from the one we know today. The world of Genesis 1-6 differed in several ways from the world we now know ("the world of that time was deluged and destroyed" 2 Peter 3:6). It seems unlikely that the waters above the firmament mentioned in the creation account (Genesis 1:6-7) are the clouds we see today, and one possibility is that there was at one time a great deal more water high in the atmosphere, what some have called a canopy of vapors, creating a greenhouse effect that gave the whole earth a more uniform tropical climate, in which mist and condensation may have been central to the water cycle instead of the rain cycle we know now. Seasonal change may have been much less noticeable in the early earth than in most of the world today, hence the reference to the heavenly lights as time keepers and markers of seasons (Genesis 1:14-19), but no mention of the dramatic difference in seasons until after the flood (Genesis 8:22). The earth was apparently overall a much healthier place for mankind (and animals too) before the flood (note the trend in lifespans recorded, Genesis 5, 11). I think it is likely that the water cycle was somewhat different, perhaps radically different, before the flood. It may be that the events of Genesis 7:11-12 included both meteor showers (asteroid impacts) and volcanic activity of great magnitude, contributing to changes in the hydrologic cycle with less vapor high in the atmosphere, more sunlight reaching the surface of the earth, and more airborn dust particles afterward. Each of these things and many other possible effects would make a big difference in seasons and in whether there had been a "rainbow in the cloud" before the flood. I think not, whether there was precipitation or not. The statement of Genesis 9:13, "I set my bow in the cloud," seems to be saying more than just "look at the rainbow." God has taken an action. The subsequent statement about gathering clouds (Gen. 9:14) seems also to imply that this was a process new to Noah. I think that Noah came out to see a world that looked very different, and with weather very different, than the one he'd left behind, and saw a rainbow in the sky for the first time ever (not that prismatic refraction of light was new, but that the very sky itself was different). Incidentally, the pre-flood world sounds like a world with one continent (Genesis 1:9-10) and the post flood world may have begun with a single continent as well, later broken up in the process of scattering mankind over the earth (Genesis 10:25). It is at least possible that great movements of the mantle of the earth are related to processes unleashed in the flood. Ps 104:6-9
6You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
The waters were standing above the mountains.
7At Your rebuke they fled,
At the sound of Your thunder they hurried away.
8The mountains rose; the valleys sank down
To the place which You established for them.
9You set a boundary that they may not pass over,
So that they will not return to cover the earth.
NASU
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