Genesis
8
- But God remembered Noah and all the wild
animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind
over the earth, and the waters receded.
- Now the springs of the deep and the
floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling
from the sky.
- The water receded steadily from the earth.
At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down,
- and on the seventeenth day of the seventh
month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
- The waters continued to recede until the
tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains
became visible.
- After forty days Noah opened the window he
had made in the ark
- and sent out a raven, and it kept flying
back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.
- Then he sent out a dove to see if the water
had receded from the surface of the ground.
- But the dove could find no place to set its
feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned
to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it
back to himself in the ark.
- He waited seven more days and again sent
out the dove from the ark.
- When the dove returned to him in the
evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew
that the water had receded from the earth.
- He waited seven more days and sent the dove
out again, but this time it did not return to him.
- By the first day of the first month of
Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah
then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground
was dry.
- By the twenty-seventh day of the second
month the earth was completely dry.
- Then God said to Noah,
- "Come out of the ark, you and your wife and
your sons and their wives.
- Bring out every kind of living creature
that is with you -- the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move
along the ground--so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and
increase in number upon it."
- So Noah came out, together with his sons
and his wife and his sons' wives.
- All the animals and all the creatures that
move along the ground and all the birds -- everything that moves on the earth
-- came out of the ark, one kind after another.
- Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and,
taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt
offerings on it.
- The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and
said in his heart: "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even
though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again
will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.
- "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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