Genesis - The Old Testament

¹ Yahweh said to Noah, 'Go aboard the ark, you and all your household, for you alone of your contemporaries do I see before me as an upright man.

² Of every clean animal you must take seven pairs, a male and its female; of the unclean animals you must take one pair, a male and its female

³ (and of the birds of heaven, seven pairs, a male and its female), to preserve their species throughout the earth.

⁴ For in seven days' time I shall make it rain on earth for forty days and forty nights, and I shall wipe every creature I have made off the face of the earth.'

⁵ Noah did exactly as Yahweh commanded him.

⁶ Noah was six hundred years old when the flood came, the waters over the earth.

⁷ Noah with his sons, his wife, and his sons' wives boarded the ark to escape the waters of the flood.

⁸ (Of the clean animals and the animals that are not clean, of the birds and all that creeps along the ground,

⁹ one pair boarded the ark with Noah, one male and one female, as God had commanded Noah.)

¹⁰ Seven days later the waters of the flood appeared on earth.

¹¹ In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, and on the seventeenth day of the month, that very day all the springs of the great deep burst through, and the sluices of heaven opened.

¹² And heavy rain fell on earth for forty days and forty nights.

¹³ That very day Noah and his sons Shem, Ham and Japheth boarded the ark, with Noah's wife and the three wives of his sons,

¹⁴ and with them every species of wild animal, every species of cattle, every species of creeping things that creep along the ground, every species of bird, everything that flies, everything with wings.

¹⁵ One pair of all that was alive and had the breath of life boarded the ark with Noah,

¹⁶ and those that went aboard were a male and female of all that was alive, as God had commanded him. Then Yahweh shut him in.

¹⁷ The flood lasted forty days on earth. The waters swelled, lifting the ark until it floated off the ground.

¹⁸ The waters rose, swelling higher above the ground, and the ark drifted away over the waters.

¹⁹ The waters rose higher and higher above the ground until all the highest mountains under the whole of heaven were submerged.

²⁰ The waters reached their peak fifteen cubits above the submerged mountains.

²¹ And all living things that stirred on earth perished; birds, cattle, wild animals, all the creatures swarming over the earth, and all human beings.

²² Everything with the least breath of life in its nostrils, everything on dry land, died.

²³ Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out, people, animals, creeping things and birds; they were wiped off the earth and only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.

²⁴ The waters maintained their level on earth for a hundred and fifty days.