1God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark. He sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. 2The springs of the deep and the floodgates of the skies were closed. So the rain stopped falling from the sky. 3Water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down. 4On the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5The waters continued to recede until the tenth month. On the first day of the tenth month, the tops of the mountains became visible. 6After forty days Noah opened the window he constructed in the ark. 7He sent out a raven. It kept flying back and forth until the water dried up from the earth. 8Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. 9The dove, however, could find no place to set its feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth. It returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and held the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. 10He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. 11When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. 12He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him. 13By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry. 15God said to Noah: 16»Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. 17»Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you, the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground. They will multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it.« 18Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. 19All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds, everything that moves on the earth came out of the ark, one kind after another. 20Noah built an altar to Jehovah and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. 21Jehovah smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: »Never again will I curse the ground because of man, for the intent of his heart is evil from childhood. I will never again destroy every living creature, as I have done. 22»As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.«