Genesis 8

Genesis 8 opens with a single decisive sentence that reverses the direction of the flood narrative: God remembered Noah. A wind passes over the earth and the waters begin to subside. The springs of the deep and the windows of the heavens are closed. After one hundred and fifty days the waters have diminished and the ark rests on the mountains of Ararat on the seventeenth day of the seventh month. The waters continue to decrease until the first day of the tenth month, when the tops of the mountains become visible. Noah waits forty more days and then opens the window of the ark. He sends out a raven, which goes back and forth until the waters dry up. He sends a dove, which returns, having found no place to set its foot. He waits seven days and sends the dove again; it returns with a freshly plucked olive leaf.

Seven days later he sends the dove again and it does not return. In the six hundred and first year of Noah's life, on the first day of the first month, the waters are dried up. On the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth is dry. God speaks to Noah: come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives, and every animal. Noah comes out. He builds an altar to the LORD — the first altar in the Bible — and offers burnt offerings from every clean animal and bird. The LORD smells the pleasing odor and says in his heart that he will never again curse the ground because of human beings, even though the inclination of the human heart is evil from its youth, and he will never again strike down every living thing as he has done. The resolution is not that humans have improved. It is that God has changed strategy.