⁶ After forty days^(A) Noah opened a window he had made in the ark ⁷ and sent out a raven,^(B) and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.^{(C) 8} Then he sent out a dove^(D) to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. ⁹ 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. ¹⁰ He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. ¹¹ 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.^{(E) 12} He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

¹³ By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year,^(F) 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. ¹⁴ By the twenty-seventh day of the second month^(G) the earth was completely dry.

¹⁵ Then God said to Noah, ¹⁶ “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives.^(H)

⁸ Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: ⁹ “I now establish my covenant with you^(A) and with your descendants after you ¹⁰ and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. ¹¹ I establish my covenant^(B) with you:^(C) Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.^(D)”

¹² And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant^(E) I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come:^{(F) 13} I have set my rainbow^(G) in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. ¹⁴ Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow^(H) appears in the clouds, ¹⁵ I will remember my covenant^(I) between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.^{(J) 16} Whenever the rainbow^(K) appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant^(L) between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”