Genesis 8 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
The primeval era before Abraham, set by the book's own internal reckoning roughly a thousand years after creation and long before Israel existed as a nation
Location
The ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat, the highlands of eastern Turkey and Armenia at the northern edge of the ancient Near Eastern world
Audience
Israelites of the Mosaic era, hearing the origin story of their world and of the covenant God who would later call Abraham
Situation
The floodwaters recede, Noah sends out a raven and then a dove three times to test whether the ground has dried, and the family and animals leave the ark. Noah builds an altar, offers burnt offerings, and God resolves never again to curse the ground because of humanity.
Key Background
Sending birds to find land was standard practice for ancient sailors, and the same detail appears in the Mesopotamian flood accounts preserved in the Gilgamesh epic, which Israel's neighbours knew well. Genesis tells the story with a pointedly different theology, since the Mesopotamian gods flood the earth because human noise annoys them and then swarm the sacrifice because they are starving, while here one God acts on moral grounds and needs nothing. The promise of unbroken seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, would have struck farmers whose survival depended on predictable seasons as the foundation of ordinary life.
But Elohim Noah and every wild animal and every domestic animal that was with him in the Elohim sent a over the earth, and the waters began to settle.
The and the of the were sealed shut, and the downpour from the was held back.
The waters kept receding from the earth, steadily pulling back. After a hundred and fifty days, the waters had gone down enough.
On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the chest came to rest on the mountains of
The waters kept going down until the tenth month. On the first day of the tenth month, the tops of the mountains became visible.
After forty days, Noah opened the he had made in the chest
and sent out a It kept flying back and forth until the waters had dried up from the earth.
Then he sent out a to see if the waters had gone down from the surface of the ground.
But the dove couldn't find a place to land, so she came back to him at the chest because water still covered the whole surface of the earth. He reached out his hand, took her, and brought her back inside with him.
He waited seven more days and again sent the dove out from the chest.
The dove came back to him in the evening, and there in her beak was a freshly plucked So Noah knew the waters had gone down from the earth.
He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again. This time she didn't come back to him.
By the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the waters had dried up from the earth. Noah removed the covering of the chest and looked out — the surface of the ground was drying.
By the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the earth was completely dry.
Then Elohim spoke to Noah:
"Come out of the chest — you, your wife, your sons, and your sons' wives with you.
Bring out every living thing that is with you — birds, animals, everything that crawls on the ground — so they can spread out across the earth, be and on the earth."
So Noah came out, along with his sons, his wife, and his sons' wives.
Every animal, every crawling thing, and every bird — everything that moves on the earth — came out of the chest, sorted by their
Noah built an to He took some of every animal and every bird and offered burnt offerings on the
Yahweh breathed in the and Yahweh to "I will never again the ground because of beings, even though the of the is from youth. And I will never again strike down every living thing the way I just did.
As long as the earth endures, and and and and will never stop."