The Flood Ends
8 But God remembered Noah and all the wild and tame animals with him in the boat. He made a wind blow over the earth, and the water went down. 2 The underground springs stopped flowing, and the clouds in the sky stopped pouring down rain. 3-4 The water that covered the earth began to go down. After one hundred fifty days it had gone down so much that the boat touched land again. It came to rest on one of the mountains of Ararat[a] on the seventeenth day of the seventh month. 5 The water continued to go down so that by the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains could be seen.
6 Forty days later Noah opened the window he had made in the boat, and 7 he sent out a raven. It flew here and there until the water had dried up from the earth. 8 Then Noah sent out a dove to find out if the water had dried up from the ground. 9 The dove could not find a place to land because water still covered the earth, so it came back to the boat. Noah reached out his hand and took the bird and brought it back into the boat.
10 After seven days Noah again sent out the dove from the boat, 11 and that evening it came back to him with a fresh olive leaf in its mouth. Then Noah knew that the ground was almost dry. 12 Seven days later he sent the dove out again, but this time it did not come back.
13 When Noah was six hundred and one years old, in the first day of the first month of that year, the water was dried up from the land. Noah removed the covering of the boat and saw that the land was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the land was completely dry.
15 Then God said to Noah, 16 “You and your wife, your sons, and their wives should go out of the boat. 17 Bring every animal out of the boat with you—the birds, animals, and everything that crawls on the earth. Let them have many young ones so that they might grow in number.”
18 So Noah went out with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives. 19 Every animal, everything that crawls on the earth, and every bird went out of the boat by families.
20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord. He took some of all the clean birds and animals, and he burned them on the altar as offerings to God. 21 The Lord was pleased with these sacrifices and said to himself, “I will never again curse the ground because of human beings. Their thoughts are evil even when they are young, but I will never again destroy every living thing on the earth as I did this time.
22 “As long as the earth continues,
planting and harvest,
cold and hot,
summer and winter,
day and night
will not stop.”
Footnotes
- 8:3–4 Ararat The ancient land of Urartu, an area in Eastern Turkey.