Genesis 8

¹ Then God acted in Noah’s favor, and in favor of all the wild animals and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. God sent a wind over the earth, and the waters went down.

² The springs of the deep and the floodgates of the sky were closed, and the rain from the sky was held back.

³ The waters gradually receded from the earth. At the end of 150 days, the waters had diminished.

⁴ On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.

⁵ The waters continued to diminish until the tenth month. On the first day of the tenth month, the mountain peaks appeared.

⁶ At the end of forty days, Noah opened the window he had made in the ark.

⁷ He sent out a raven, which went out and kept going back and forth until the waters had dried up from the earth.

⁸ Then he sent out the dove to see whether the waters had gone down from the surface of the ground.

⁹ But the dove found no place to rest its foot, and it returned to him in the ark, because there was water over the surface of the whole earth. He reached out his hand, took it, and brought it inside the ark.

¹⁰ He waited another seven days and sent the dove out from the ark again.

¹¹ The dove returned to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf. Then Noah knew that the waters had gone down from the earth.

¹² He waited another seven days and sent out the dove, but it did not return to him again.

¹³ In the year 601, on the first day of the first month, the waters had dried up from the earth. Noah removed the covering of the ark, looked out, and saw that the surface of the ground was dry.

¹⁴ On the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the earth was dry.

¹⁵ God spoke to Noah:

¹⁶ “Come out of the ark, you, your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives with you.

¹⁷ Bring out with you every living creature that is with you, of every kind: birds, livestock, and every creature that crawls on the earth. Let them swarm over the earth, be fruitful, and multiply on the earth.”

¹⁸ Noah came out with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives.

¹⁹ Every animal, every crawling creature, and every bird—everything that moves on the earth—came out of the ark according to their families.

²⁰ Noah built an altar to the LORD, took some of every clean animal and every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.

²¹ The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said to himself, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth. I will never again strike down every living thing as I have done.

²² As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”

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