1But God hadn't forgotten about Noah and all the wild animals and livestock with him in the ark. God sent a wind to blow over the earth, and the floodwaters started to drop.

2The subterranean waters were closed off, and the heavy rainfall was stopped.

3The floodwaters steadily receded from the earth. They had gone down so much that by 150 days after the flood began

4the ark grounded on the mountains of Ararat. This happened on the seventeenth day of the seventh month.

5The waters continued to drop so that by the first day of the tenth month the tops of mountains could be seen.

6Forty days later Noah opened the window he'd made in the ark,

7and sent a raven out. It flew back and forth until the water on the earth had dried up.

8Then he sent a dove out to see if the waters had gone down enough to expose dry ground.

9But the dove couldn't find anywhere to land. So it came back to Noah in the ark because water was still covering the whole earth. He reached out his hand, picked up the dove, and took it back into the ark with him.

10He waited another seven days and sent the dove out from the ark again.

11When it came back to him in the evening it had a freshly-picked olive leaf in its beak, so Noah knew the floodwaters were mainly gone from the earth.

12Again he waited another seven days and sent the dove out again, but this time it didn't return to him.

13By now Noah was 601, and by the first day of the first month, the floodwaters on the earth were gone. Noah pulled back the ark's covering and saw that the ground was drying out.

14By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was dry.

15Then God told Noah,

16“Leave the ark, you and your wife, your sons and their wives.

17Let all the animals go—the birds, the wild animals, the creatures that run along the ground—so that they can breed and increase their numbers on the earth.”

18So Noah and his wife, his sons and their wives, left the ark.

19All the animals, all the creatures that run along the ground, all the birds—everything that lives on land—also left, each kind leaving together.

20Noah built an altar, and sacrificed some of the clean animals and birds as a burnt offering.

21The Lord accepted ³⁷the sacrifice, and said to himself, “I won't ever again curse the ground because of human beings, even though every single thought in their minds is evil from childhood. I won't ever destroy all life again as I have just done.

22As long as the earth exists, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never come to an end.”