1-2 God did not forget about Noah and the animals in that big boat called the Ark. So God stopped the water from coming up from under the ground. He stopped the rain falling from the sky and he made a strong wind blow on the floodwater to help it go down.

3-4 The flood water got lower and lower, and 5 months after the flood started, the water was so low that the boat sat down on some very high hills. Those hills were called the Ararat Mountains. 5 The flood water went down until the tops of the really high hills were sticking up out of the water.

6 Six weeks later, Noah opened the window in the top of the boat. 7 He let a black bird called a crow fly out from the boat to see what would happen. Every day the crow flew out and came back to the boat until all the floodwater had dried up.

8-9 And Noah let a bird called a pigeon fly out of the window to see if the flood water still covered all the ground. But the water was still too high and the pigeon could not find a place to sit down, so it went back to the boat. Noah picked it up and took it inside.

10 Noah waited for 7 more days and then he let the pigeon fly out of the boat again. 11 And just before the sun went down, the pigeon came back. It had a new leaf from an olive tree in its mouth. Then Noah knew that the flood water was getting lower and the trees were growing leaves again.

12 Noah waited another 7 days, then he sent the pigeon out again. This time it did not come back.

13 By the time Noah was 601 years old, nearly all the water was gone. And on the first day of the new year Noah took the roof off the boat and looked around. He saw that the ground was starting to get dry. 14 Two months later, the earth was really dry. 15 Then God said to Noah, 16 “You can go out of the boat now. Take your wife, your sons and their wives with you. 17 And take all the animals, the birds, and every little animal that moves around on the ground, out of the boat. Then they can go and live all over the earth and have lots of young ones.”

18-19 So Noah, his wife, and his sons and their wives all came out of the boat. All the animals and all the birds went out of the boat too, each group of animals came out together.

20 Then Noah got some big stones and made them into a table with a flat top, called an “altar” for the Lord. Then he went and found some of the animals and birds that the Lord said were clean. They were the right ones to use to show him respect. He killed the animals, and burned them on the altar to say, “Thank you Lord for keeping us all safe”.

21 The Lord smelled the meat cooking on the altar and he was happy. He said to himself, “People always think the wrong way all their lives, right from the time they are little until they die. But I will never again kill off every living thing like I did this time. I will never curse the earth again for what people do.

22 While the earth is still here, everything will be the same. There will always be day time and night time, and every year there will be a hot weather time and a cold weather time, wet weather time and dry weather time. There will always be a right time to plant seeds for food and a right time to get the food from those plants.”

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