8
The Flood Ends
1But 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. 2The underground springs stopped flowing, and the clouds in the sky stopped pouring down rain. 3-4The 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 on the seventeenth day of the seventh month. 5The water continued to go down so that by the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains could be seen.
6Forty days later Noah opened the window he had made in the boat, and 7he sent out a raven. It flew here and there until the water had dried up from the earth. 8Then Noah sent out a dove to find out if the water had dried up from the ground. 9The 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.
10After seven days Noah again sent out the dove from the boat, 11and that evening it came back to him with a fresh olive leaf in its mouth. Then Noah knew that the ground was almost dry. 12Seven days later he sent the dove out again, but this time it did not come back.
13When 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. 14By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the land was completely dry.
15Then God said to Noah, 16“You and your wife, your sons, and their wives should go out of the boat. 17Bring 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.”
18So Noah went out with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives. 19Every animal, everything that crawls on the earth, and every bird went out of the boat by families.
20Then 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. 21The 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.”