GENESIS 8

¹But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and farm animals with him in the ark. He sent a wind over the earth, and the water began to go down. ²The springs of the deep and the floodgates of the sky were closed, and the rain stopped falling from the sky. ³The water steadily went down from the earth, and at the end of 150 days it had gone down. ⁴On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. ⁵The water kept going down until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains could be seen.

⁶After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark ⁷and sent out a raven. It kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. ⁸Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had gone down from the surface of the ground. ⁹But the dove could find nowhere to land, because water still covered the whole earth, so it came back to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand, took the dove, and brought it back inside. ¹⁰He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. ¹¹When the dove came back to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly picked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had gone down from the earth. ¹²He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not come back to him.

¹³By the first day of the first month of Noah's 601st year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. ¹⁴By the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the earth was completely dry.

Noah Comes Out of the Ark

¹⁵Then God said to Noah, ¹⁶"Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. ¹⁷Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you: the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the ground. Let them spread out over the earth, have young, and increase in number."

¹⁸So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons' wives. ¹⁹All the animals and all the creatures that crawl on the ground and all the birds, everything that moves on land, came out of the ark, one kind after another.

²⁰Then Noah built an altar to the LORD. He took some of every kind of clean animal and clean bird and offered them as burnt offerings on the altar. ²¹The LORD smelled the pleasing smell and said to himself, "I will never again curse the ground because of human beings, even though every plan of the human heart is evil from childhood. And I will never again destroy every living thing as I have done.