1(7:24) When the waters had increased over the earth for a hundred and fifty days, (8:1) God thought of Noah and all the wild animals and the cattle with him in the ark, and he made a wind pass over the earth, and the waters began to subside. 2The springs of the abyss were stopped up, and so were the windows of the sky; the downpour from the skies was checked. 3The water gradually receded from the earth, and by the end of a hundred and fifty days it had disappeared. 4On the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark grounded on a mountain in Ararat. 5The water continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains could be seen.
6After forty days Noah opened the trap-door that he had made in the ark, 7and released a raven to see whether the water had subsided, but the bird continued flying to and fro until the water on the earth had dried up. 8Noah waited for seven days , and then he released a dove from the ark to see whether the water on the earth had subsided further. 9But the dove found no place where she could settle, and so she came back to him in the ark, because there was water over the whole surface of the earth. Noah stretched out his hand, caught her and took her into the ark. 10He waited another seven days and again released the dove from the ark. 11She came back to him towards evening with a newly plucked olive leaf in her beak. Then Noah knew for certain that the water on the earth had subsided still further. 12He waited yet another seven days and released the dove, but she never came back. 13And so it came about that, on the first day of the first month of his six hundred and first year, the water had dried up on the earth, and Noah removed the hatch and looked out of the ark. The surface of the ground was dry.
14By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the whole earth was dry. 15And God said to Noah, 16'Come out of the ark, you and your wife, your sons and their wives. 17Bring out every living creature that is with you, live things of every kind, bird and beast and every reptile that moves on the ground, and let them swarm over the earth and be fruitful and increase there.' 18So Noah came out with his sons, his wife, and his sons' wives. 19Every wild animal, all cattle, every bird, and every reptile that moves on the ground, came out of the ark by families. 20Then Noah built an altar to the LORD. He took ritually clean beasts and birds of every kind, and offered whole-offerings on the altar. 21When the LORD smelt the soothing odour, he said within himself, 'Never again will I curse the ground because of man, however evil his inclinations may be from his youth upwards. I will never again kill every living creature, as I have just done.
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