¹ But God had Noah in mind, and all the wild animals and all the cattle that were with him in the ark. God sent a wind across the earth and the waters began to subside.

² The springs of the deep and the sluices of heaven were stopped up and the heavy rain from heaven was held back.

³ Little by little, the waters ebbed from the earth. After a hundred and fifty days the waters fell,

⁴ and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.

⁵ The waters gradually fell until the tenth month when, on the first day of the tenth month, the mountain tops appeared.

⁶ At the end of forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark

⁷ and released a raven, which flew back and forth as it waited for the waters to dry up on earth.

⁸ He then released a dove, to see whether the waters were receding from the surface of the earth.

⁹ But the dove, finding nowhere to perch, returned to him in the ark, for there was water over the whole surface of the earth; putting out his hand he took hold of it and brought it back into the ark with him.

¹⁰ After waiting seven more days, he again released the dove from the ark.

¹¹ In the evening, the dove came back to him and there in its beak was a freshly-picked olive leaf! So Noah realised that the waters were receding from the earth.

¹² After waiting seven more days, he released the dove, and now it returned to him no more.

¹³ It was in the six hundred and first year of Noah's life, in the first month and on the first of the month, that the waters began drying out on earth. Noah lifted back the hatch of the ark and looked out. The surface of the ground was dry!

¹⁴ In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry.

¹⁵ Then God said to Noah,

¹⁶ 'Come out of the ark, you, your wife, your sons, and your sons' wives with you.

¹⁷ Bring out all the animals with you, all living things, the birds, the cattle and all the creeping things that creep along the ground, for them to swarm on earth, for them to breed and multiply on earth.'

¹⁸ So Noah came out with his sons, his wife, and his sons' wives.

¹⁹ And all the wild animals, all the cattle, all the birds and all the creeping things that creep along the ground, came out of the ark, one species after another.

²⁰ Then Noah built an altar to Yahweh and, choosing from all the clean animals and all the clean birds he presented burnt offerings on the altar.

²¹ Yahweh smelt the pleasing smell and said to himself, 'Never again will I curse the earth because of human beings, because their heart contrives evil from their infancy. Never again will I strike down every living thing as I have done.

²² As long as earth endures: seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.'

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The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) is a Catholic translation of the Bible published in 1985. The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) has become the most widely used Roman Catholic Bible outside of the United States. It has the imprimatur of Cardinal George Basil Hume.

Like its predecessor, the Jerusalem Bible, the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) version is translated "directly from the Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic." The 1973 French translation, the Bible de Jerusalem, is followed only "where the text admits to more than one interpretation." Introductions and notes, with some modifications, are taken from the Bible de Jerusalem.

Source: The Very Reverend Dom (Joseph) Henry Wansbrough, OSB, MA (Oxon), STL (Fribourg), LSS (Rome), a monk of Ampleforth Abbey and a biblical scholar. He was General Editor of the New Jerusalem Bible. "New Jerusalem Bible, Regular Edition", pg. v.

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