Then God bethought him of Noe, and of all the wild beasts and the cattle that went with him in the Ark; so he set a wind stirring over the earth, and with that, the waters abated.

The springs of the great depth closed up again; so, too, did the flood-gates of heaven, and rain fell from heaven no longer;

more and more the waters receded from the land, beginning to abate, now that the hundred and fifty days were over.

And now, on the twenty-seventh day of the seventh month, the Ark came to rest upon the mountains of Armenia.

Inch by inch the waters abated, until the tenth month came; on the first day of the tenth month, the hill tops began to shew.

Noe let forty days pass, and then undid the window he had made in the Ark, and sent out one of the ravens,

which went this way and that, and had not come back to him when the waters dried up over the earth.✻

Then to make sure whether the waters had become shallow over all the surface of the ground, he sent out one of the doves.

But the dove came back to the Ark and its master, finding never a resting-place to perch on; and he put out his hand to catch it, and took it back into the Ark.

Seven days more he waited, and then sent the dove out from the Ark again;

this time, it came back to him at night-fall, with a twig of olive in its mouth, the leaves still green on it; and then Noe could not doubt that the waters had become shallow all over the ground.

But still he waited another seven days, and now, when he sent it out, it came back to him no more.

It was the first day of the first month of his six hundred and first year when the waters ebbed away from the land, and Noe, withdrawing the covering of the Ark, looked round him and found that the whole surface of the ground was clear.

And by the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the land itself was dry.

Then God’s word came to Noe,

telling him, Come out of the Ark, with thy wife and thy sons and their wives.

Bring out with thee all the living creatures thou hast there, of all kinds, birds and beasts and creeping things that creep on the earth; occupy this earth, increase and multiply upon it.

So Noe came out, and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him;

and the living creatures came out of the Ark, beasts and all creeping things that roam on the earth, in all their various kinds.

Thereupon Noe built an altar to the Lord, and chose out beasts that were clean and birds that were clean, and made burnt-offerings there.

And the Lord, smelling such a scent as pleased him, made the resolve, Never again will I plague the earth on man’s account, that has all the thoughts and imaginations of his heart, even in youth, so bent towards evil; never again will I send affliction such as this upon all living creatures.

While the earth stands, seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall keep their course unaltered.