From the years far back, before the Bible was written, there had been handed down the tale that one time the earth had grown so wicked that there seemed nothing for God to do but to wash it clean and to start again.
God had to find someone fit to make the new start, and the one he found was Noah. God told Noah that there was going to be such a flood as had never been seen before. The waters would be so wide and deep that they would cover all the earth. God said that Noah must build a boat that would be big enough to take in all his family and also two of every sort of bird and animal he could find in the whole world. The boat was to be like a floating house, and it should be called the ark. It needed to be big, considering all that was going to be in it.
So Noah began to build the ark. It was a hard job to build such a tremendous boat, and it must have been all the harder when the neighbors stood around and laughed. “Who ever heard of building a boat in a dry meadow?” they asked. There the sun was shining down, and there was not enough water to float a stick, much less a thing like this huge ark. Noah must be crazy! But Noah kept on working.
Then one day it began to rain. Noah and his family went into the ark and took with them a male and female of every kind of living thing that came walking and running and creeping and flying from the face of the earth. As the water came up higher, the ark was lifted up and floated above the meadows.
It kept on raining, and it rained harder. Day after day the water poured out of the sky as if the earth had been turned upside down and the ocean put on top. Forty days and forty nights it rained.
All the other people and creatures had climbed up to the tops of the hills to try to be out of the reach of the flood. But at last every spot of earth was covered, and nothing was left alive except Noah and his family and what they had with them in the ark.
At last the rain stopped and the sun came out, but for a hundred and fifty days the ark floated on the waters, above the empty earth. Then, little by little, the flood began to go down. One day Noah felt the bottom of the ark jolt on something, and there it was, scraping the top of the highest mountain that had been in all that part of the earth — Mount Ararat. No other land could be seen around it, but Noah knew that before long the rest of the earth would begin to be uncovered.
Noah went into the part of the ark where the birds were. He took a dove and opened a window and let the dove fly away. But presently the bird came fluttering back in the window again, because it had not found a single dry spot anywhere to rest.
A week longer Noah waited. Then he sent the dove out again. This time when the dove came back it carried in its bill a green olive leaf. Noah knew by this that somewhere the earth and the trees were rising above the water. Once more he sent the dove out. This time the dove did not come back at all, and Noah knew that it had found a place to build its nest.
Then at last the ark itself settled down on solid ground. Noah opened the doors, and he and his family and all the beasts and birds and everything else came flying and running and scrambling out, glad to be back on the earth again.
Noah thanked God, and when he looked up he saw a rainbow in the sky. The rainbow was God’s sign — the sign of his promise that “while the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease.”
