Genesis 7:1–8:19

The Flood Begins

7Then the Lord said to Noah, “I have seen that you are the best person among the people of this time, so you and your family can go into the boat. ²Take with you seven pairs, each male with its female, of every kind of clean animal, and take one pair, each male with its female, of every kind of unclean animal. ³Take seven pairs of all the birds of the sky, each male with its female. This will allow all these animals to continue living on the earth after the flood. ⁴Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth. It will rain forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe off from the earth every living thing that I have made.”

⁵Noah did everything the Lord commanded him.

⁶Noah was six hundred years old when the flood came. ⁷He and his wife and his sons and their wives went into the boat to escape the waters of the flood. ⁸The clean animals, the unclean animals, the birds, and everything that crawls on the ground ⁹came to Noah. They went into the boat in groups of two, male and female, just as God had commanded Noah. ¹⁰Seven days later the flood started.

¹¹When Noah was six hundred years old, the flood started. On the seventeenth day of the second month of that year the underground springs split open, and the clouds in the sky poured out rain. ¹²The rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights.

¹³On that same day Noah and his wife, his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their wives went into the boat. ¹⁴They had every kind of wild and tame animal, every kind of animal that crawls on the earth, and every kind of bird. ¹⁵Every creature that had the breath of life came to Noah in the boat in groups of two. ¹⁶One male and one female of every living thing came, just as God had commanded Noah. Then the Lord closed the door behind them.

¹⁷Water flooded the earth for forty days, and as it rose it lifted the boat off the ground. ¹⁸The water continued to rise, and the boat floated on it above the earth. ¹⁹The water rose so much that even the highest mountains under the sky were covered by it. ²⁰It continued to rise until it was more than twenty feet above the mountains.

²¹All living things that moved on the earth died. This included all the birds, tame animals, wild animals, and creatures that swarm on the earth, as well as all human beings. ²²So everything on dry land that had the breath of life in it died. ²³God destroyed from the earth every living thing that was on the land—every man, animal, crawling thing, and bird of the sky. All that was left was Noah and what was with him in the boat. ²⁴And the waters continued to cover the earth for one hundred fifty days.

The Flood Ends

8But God remembered Noah and all the wild and tame animals with him in the boat. He made a wind blow over the earth, and the water went down. ²The underground springs stopped flowing, and the clouds in the sky stopped pouring down rain. ^3–4The water that covered the earth began to go down. After one hundred fifty days it had gone down so much that the boat touched land again. It came to rest on one of the mountains of Ararat ⁿ on the seventeenth day of the seventh month. ⁵The water continued to go down so that by the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains could be seen.

⁶Forty days later Noah opened the window he had made in the boat, and ⁷he sent out a raven. It flew here and there until the water had dried up from the earth. ⁸Then Noah sent out a dove to find out if the water had dried up from the ground. ⁹The dove could not find a place to land because water still covered the earth, so it came back to the boat. Noah reached out his hand and took the bird and brought it back into the boat.

¹⁰After seven days Noah again sent out the dove from the boat, ¹¹and that evening it came back to him with a fresh olive leaf in its mouth. Then Noah knew that the ground was almost dry. ¹²Seven days later he sent the dove out again, but this time it did not come back.

¹³When Noah was six hundred and one years old, in the first day of the first month of that year, the water was dried up from the land. Noah removed the covering of the boat and saw that the land was dry. ¹⁴By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the land was completely dry.

¹⁵Then God said to Noah, ¹⁶“You and your wife, your sons, and their wives should go out of the boat. ¹⁷Bring every animal out of the boat with you—the birds, animals, and everything that crawls on the earth. Let them have many young ones so that they might grow in number.”

¹⁸So Noah went out with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives. ¹⁹Every animal, everything that crawls on the earth, and every bird went out of the boat by families.