1God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and livestock that were with him in the ship. God sent a wind over the earth, and the waters started to go down.
2The springs of the deep and the windows of the sky were closed, and the rain from the sky stopped.
3The waters steadily receded from the earth. After 150 days, the waters had decreased.
4In the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ship came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
5The waters continued to recede until the tenth month. In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains became visible.
6After 40 days, Noah opened the window of the ship that he had made,
7and he sent out a raven. It flew back and forth until the waters had dried up from the earth.
8He then sent out a dove to see if the waters had gone down from the surface of the ground,
9but the dove found no place to rest its foot, so it returned to him in the ship, because the waters were still over the entire surface of the earth. Noah reached out his hand, took it, and brought it back into the ship with him.
10He waited another seven days; then he sent the dove out of the ship again.
11The dove came back to him in the evening, and look, there was a freshly plucked olive leaf in its beak. So Noah knew that the waters had gone down from the earth.
12He waited yet another seven days and sent out the dove; this time it did not return to him.
13In the six hundred first year, in the first month, on the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth. Noah removed the covering of the ship and looked. He saw that the surface of the ground was dry.
14In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry.
15God spoke to Noah, saying,
16“Come out of the ship, you, your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives with you.
17Bring out with you every living thing: birds, livestock, and all the creatures that crawl on the ground, so they can breed plentifully on the earth, be fruitful, and multiply on the earth.”
18Noah left the ark with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives.
19Every animal, every crawling creature, and every bird—everything that moves on the earth—came out of the ship, family by family.
20Noah built an altar to Yahweh. He took some of every clean animal and every clean bird and offered them as burnt offerings on the altar.
21Yahweh smelled the pleasing aroma and said to himself, “I will never again curse the ground because of humans, even though people’s thoughts are evil from childhood. I will never again destroy every living thing as I have done.
22As long as the earth exists, planting and harvesting, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never stop.”