Dual Panel1Then God turned his attention to Noah and all the wild animals and farm animals with him on the ship. God caused the wind to blow and the floodwaters began to go down.
2The underground springs were shut off, the windows of Heaven closed and the rain quit.
3Inch by inch the water lowered. After 150 days the worst was over.
4On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ship landed on the Ararat mountain range.
5The water kept going down until the tenth month. On the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains came into view.
6After forty days Noah opened the window that he had built into the ship.
7He sent out a raven; it flew back and forth waiting for the floodwaters to dry up.
8Then he sent a dove to check on the flood conditions,
9but it couldn't even find a place to perch--water still covered the Earth. Noah reached out and caught it, brought it back into the ship.
10He waited seven more days and sent out the dove again.
11It came back in the evening with a freshly picked olive leaf in its beak. Noah knew that the flood was about finished.
12He waited another seven days and sent the dove out a third time. This time it didn't come back.
13In the six-hundred-first year of Noah's life, on the first day of the first month, the flood had dried up. Noah opened the hatch of the ship and saw dry ground.
14By the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the Earth was completely dry.
15God spoke to Noah:
16"Leave the ship, you and your wife and your sons and your sons' wives.
17And take all the animals with you, the whole menagerie of birds and mammals and crawling creatures, all that brimming prodigality of life, so they can reproduce and flourish on the Earth."
18Noah disembarked with his sons and wife and his sons' wives.
19Then all the animals, crawling creatures, birds--every creature on the face of the Earth--left the ship family by family.
20Noah built an altar to GOD. He selected clean animals and birds from every species and offered them as burnt-offerings on the altar.
21GOD smelled the sweet fragrance and thought to himself, "I'll never again curse the ground because of people. I know they have this bent toward evil from an early age, but I'll never again kill off everything living as I've just done.
22For as long as Earth lasts, planting and harvest, cold and heat, Summer and winter, day and night will never stop."