8
1God remembered Noah, all those alive, and all the animals with him in the ark. God sent a wind over the earth so that the waters receded. 2The springs of the deep sea and the skies#8.2 Or the windows of the skies closed up. The skies held back the rain. 3The waters receded gradually from the earth. After one hundred fifty days, the waters decreased; 4and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day, the ark came to rest on the Ararat mountains. 5The waters decreased gradually until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the mountain peaks appeared.
6After forty days, Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made. 7He sent out a raven, and it flew back and forth until the waters over the entire earth had dried up. 8Then he sent out a dove to see if the waters on all of the fertile land had subsided, 9but the dove found no place to set its foot. It returned to him in the ark since waters still covered the entire earth. Noah stretched out his hand, took it, and brought it back into the ark. 10He waited seven more days and sent the dove out from the ark again. 11The dove came back to him in the evening, grasping a torn olive leaf in its beak. Then Noah knew that the waters were subsiding from the earth. 12He waited seven more days and sent out the dove, but it didn’t come back to him again. 13In Noah’s six hundred first year, on the first day of the first month, the waters dried up from the earth. Noah removed the ark’s hatch and saw that the surface of the fertile land had dried up. 14In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day, the earth was dry.
15God spoke to Noah, 16“Go out of the ark, you and your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives with you. 17Bring out with you all the animals of every kind—birds, livestock, everything crawling on the ground—so that they may populate the earth, be fertile, and multiply on the earth.” 18So Noah went out of the ark with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives. 19All the animals, all the livestock,#8.19 LXX; MT lacks all the livestock. all the birds, and everything crawling on the ground, came out of the ark by their families.
God’s promise for the earth
20Noah built an altar to the LORD. He took some of the clean large animals and some of the clean birds, and placed entirely burned offerings on the altar. 21The LORD smelled the pleasing scent, and the LORD thought to himself, I will not curse the fertile land anymore because of human beings since the ideas of the human mind are evil from their youth. I will never again destroy every living thing as I have done.
22As long as the earth exists,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and hot,
summer and autumn,
day and night
will not cease.