The deep water goes away

8 Then God thought of Noah, and all the wild animals and the farm animals that were with him in the ship. He caused a wind to blow over the earth. As a result, the water began to go down. ² Streams of water stopped coming up from below the earth. Rain stopped coming down from the sky. ³ The deep water continued to go down for 150 days. ⁴ On the 17th day of the seventh month, the ship stopped on the ground. It was sitting on the top of Ararat mountains. ⁵ The water continued to go down until the tenth month. On the first day of the tenth month, the tops of the mountains appeared above the water.

⁶ After 40 more days, Noah opened a window in the ship. ⁷ He sent a raven to fly away. The raven flew away from the ship and then it returned. It continued to do this until the earth was dry.

⁸ Then Noah sent out a dove. He wanted to see if the water had gone away from the top of the ground. ⁹ But the dove could not find anywhere to stand. Water still covered all the ground. So it returned to Noah in the ship. Noah put out his hand and took the dove back into the ship. ¹⁰ He waited for seven days. Then he sent the dove out of the ship again. ¹¹ The dove returned to Noah in the evening. It carried a fresh leaf from an olive tree in its mouth. Then Noah knew that the water had gone down. ¹² He waited for seven more days. Then he sent the dove out again. This time, it did not return to Noah.^[a]

¹³ Noah was now 601 years old. On the first day of the first month, the water that had covered the earth was now gone. The ground had become dry. Noah made a hole in the roof of the ship and he looked around. He saw that the top of the ground was dry. ¹⁴ By the 27th day of the second month, the earth had become completely dry.

¹⁵ God said to Noah, ¹⁶ ‘Come out of the ship. Bring your wife, your sons and their wives with you. ¹⁷ Bring every different kind of living animal out of the ship. Bring out the birds, the animals, and the living things that move across the ground. Now they may give birth to young ones again. They can grow in number all over the earth.’

¹⁸ Noah went out of the ship, together with his wife, his sons and their wives. ¹⁹ All the living animals also went out of the ship. The birds and the living things that move across the ground all went out. Every different kind of animal came out of the ship, each of them in its own group.

God makes a promise to Noah

²⁰ Then Noah built an altar to make sacrifices to the Lord. He took one from each kind of clean animal and clean bird. He offered them to the Lord as sacrifices which he burned on the altar.^[b]

²¹ The Lord smelled the sacrifice and it made him happy. The Lord said to himself, ‘I will never curse the ground again because of the bad things that people do. From the time that they are children, they want to do bad things. But I will never again destroy everything that breathes, as I have done this time.