The ark is “lift up above the earth” (Gen 7:17) and its inhabitants will, after a year, emerge as survivors of a passage through the Flood. Does this not suggest other passages through waters?

So it does, and this is a recurring theme in the Bible. The next instance, perhaps, will be Abram’s crossing of the Euphrates into the Promised Land (cf. Gen 12:4-5; 15:18; and 31:21, with the latter establishing that the journey did require crossing this water). The most famous of course is the crossing of the Red Sea (Gen 14:22), with a similar feat repeated by Joshua (Josh. 3:15-16). These trips through water—and Noah’s specifically—were recapitulated symbolically by baptism, as Peter makes explicit (and as Henry points out): “… once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us…” (1 Pet 3:20-21) The trip through water accomplishes two related things: it announces the travelers to be under God’s protection, and the passage allows them to pass forward into a new promised blessing: the new, post-Flood earth, cleansed of sin (for a short time); the Promised Land (twice); the Mosaic Covenant; and the state of grace, i.e., the salvation by the blood of Jesus and the blessedness of the Holy Spirit. It is not without significance, in this connection, that “the deep” and “floods” held terrors for the Bible writers, meaning awful death and symbolically representing a watery state of chaos before the creation. To cross over such a flood is to defeat death and chaos indeed.