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Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
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And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.”
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So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so.
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And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so.
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God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.
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And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.”
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So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
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God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.”
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but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.
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A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters.
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And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood.
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For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth.
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The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water.
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The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits.
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The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.
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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.
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The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down,
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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.
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and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.
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Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground.
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But the dove could find nowhere to perch 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.
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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.
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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.
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I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
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I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.
