Fluent Translation · Read & Reflect
Genesis 8
The Waters Recede
God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and livestock with him in the ark. God sent a wind over the earth, and the waters began to fall. The springs of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, and the rain from the sky stopped. The waters gradually withdrew from the earth. At the end of 150 days, they had diminished.
On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters kept falling until the tenth month. On the first day of that month, the mountaintops became visible.
The Raven and the Dove
After forty days, Noah opened the window he had made in the ark and released a raven. It flew back and forth until the waters on the earth dried up.
Then Noah released a dove to find out whether the water had gone down from the ground. The dove found nowhere to set its foot, because water still covered the whole earth, so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out, took it, and brought it back inside with him.
He waited another seven days and released the dove from the ark again. The dove returned to him in the evening with a freshly plucked olive leaf in its beak. Noah knew then that the waters had gone down from the earth.
He waited another seven days and released the dove, but this time it did not return to him.
In Noah's 601st year, on the first day of the first month, the waters had dried from the earth. Noah removed the ark's covering and looked: the surface of the ground was dry. By the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the earth was dry.
Leaving the Ark
Then God spoke to Noah: “Leave the ark with your wife, your sons, and your sons' wives. Bring out all the living creatures with you—birds, livestock, and everything that crawls on the earth. Let them teem across the earth, be fruitful, and multiply on it.”
Noah left the ark with his sons, his wife, and his sons' wives. Every animal, every crawling creature, every bird—everything moving on the earth—left the ark by their families.
Noah’s Offering
Noah built an altar to the LORD. He took some of every clean animal and every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on it.
The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humans, even though the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth. Never again will I strike down every living thing as I have done.
As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will not cease.”