1God remembered Noah and all the wild and domestic animals with him in the ship. So God made a wind blow over the earth, and the water started to go down. 2The deep springs and the sky had been shut, and the rain had stopped pouring. 3The water began to recede from the land. At the end of 150 days the water had decreased. 4On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ship came to rest in the mountains of Ararat. 5The water kept decreasing until the tenth month. On the first day of the tenth month, the tops of the mountains appeared.

6After 40 more days Noah opened the window he had made in the ship 7and sent out a raven. It kept flying back and forth until the water on the land had dried up. 8Next, he sent out a dove to see if the water was gone from the surface of the ground. 9The dove couldn't find a place to land because the water was still all over the earth. So it came back to Noah in the ship. He reached out and brought the dove back into the ship. 10He waited seven more days and again sent the dove out of the ship. 11The dove came to him in the evening, and in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf. Then Noah knew that the water was gone from the earth. 12He waited seven more days and sent out the dove again, but it never came back to him.

13By the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water on the land had dried up. Noah opened the top of the ship, looked out, and saw the surface of the ground. 14By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the land was dry. 15Then God spoke to Noah, 16"Come out of the ship with your wife, your sons, and your sons' wives. 17Bring out every animal that's with you: birds, domestic animals, and every creature that crawls on the earth. Be fertile, increase in number, and spread over the earth." 18So Noah came out with his sons, his wife, and his sons' wives. 19Every animal, crawling creature, and bird-everything that moves on the earth-came out of the ship, one kind after another.

20Noah built an altar to the LORD. On it he made a burnt offering of each type of clean animal and clean bird. 21The LORD smelled the soothing aroma. He said to himself, "I will never again curse the ground because of humans, even though from birth their hearts are set on nothing but evil. I will never again kill every living creature as I have just done.

22As long as the earth exists, planting and harvesting, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never stop."