The Flood Ends

8 But God remembered Noah and all the ·wild [beasts] and ·tame animals [cattle] with him in the ·boat [ark]. He made a wind ·blow [pass] over the earth, and the water ·went down [subsided]. ² The ·underground springs [^Lfountains/springs of the deep] stopped flowing, and the ·clouds [floodgates; ^Lwindows] in the ·sky [heavens] ·stopped pouring down rain [^Lwere closed and the rain from the sky/heavens were restrained]. The water that covered the earth began to ·go down [recede]. After one hundred fifty days ·it [^Lthe waters] had ·gone down [abated] so much that the ·boat [ark] touched land again. It came to rest on one of the mountains of Ararat [^Cin ancient Urartu, present-day eastern Turkey] on the seventeenth day of the seventh month. ⁵ The water continued to ·go down [recede] so that by the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains could be seen.

⁶ Forty days later Noah opened the ·window [hatch] he had made in the ·boat [ark], and ⁷ he sent out a raven. It ·flew [^Lwent] here and there until the water had dried up from the earth. ⁸ Then Noah sent out a dove to find out if the water had ·dried up [subsided] from the ground. ⁹ The dove could not find a place to ·land [^Lset/rest its foot] because water still covered the earth, so it came back to the ·boat [ark]. Noah reached out his hand and took the bird and brought it back into the boat.

¹⁰ After [^Lwaiting] seven days Noah again sent out the dove from the ·boat [ark], ¹¹ and that evening it came back to him with a fresh olive leaf in its ·mouth [beak]. Then Noah knew that the ·ground was almost dry [^Lwaters had subsided from the ground]. ¹² ·Seven days later [^LAfter waiting another seven days] he sent the dove out again, but this time it did not come back.

¹³ When Noah was six hundred and one years old, in the first day of the first month of that year, the water was dried up from the ·land [earth]. Noah removed the covering of the ·boat [ark] and saw that the ·land [^Lface of the ground] was dry. ¹⁴ By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the ·land [earth] was completely dry.

¹⁵ Then God said to Noah, ¹⁶ “You and your wife, your sons, and their wives should go out of the ·boat [ark]. ¹⁷ Bring every ·animal [^Lliving thing of all flesh] out of the ·boat [ark] with you—the birds, ·animals [beasts; livestock], and everything that crawls on the earth. ·Let them have many young ones so that they might […so they may swarm on earth and be fruitful and] ·grow in number [multiply; 1:22].”

¹⁸ So Noah went out with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives. ¹⁹ Every ·animal [living thing], everything that ·crawls [creeps] on the earth, and every bird [^Land everything that crawls/creeps] went out of the ·boat [ark] by families.

²⁰ Then Noah built an altar [^Ca place to offer sacrifices] to the Lord. He took some of all the clean [^Cin a ritual sense] birds and ·animals [beasts; livestock], and he ·burned them on the altar as offerings to God [^Loffered a whole burnt offering on the altar; Lev. 1]. ²¹ The Lord ·was pleased with these sacrifices [^Lsmelled the sweet savor/smell] and said ·to himself [^Lin his heart], “I will never again curse the ground because of human beings. ·Their thoughts [The inclination of their hearts] are evil even ·when [from the time] they are young, but I will never again destroy every living thing on the earth as I did this time.