The Flood

God was offended by these things, and above all by the wickedness of mankind, which had gone beyond all bounds, and he had determined to destroy the whole human race. But he spared Noah, a righteous man of blameless life, from the doom that had been decreed. Warned by God that a flood was coming on the earth, Noah built an ark of wood of enormous size and coated it with pitch to make it watertight. He was shut inside it with his wife, his three sons, and his three daughters-in-law. Pairs of birds, and of the different kinds of animals, were taken in as well, while all the rest were wiped out by the flood. [a]

Then Noah understood that the violence of the rain had stopped and that the ark was floating quietly on the deep. Thinking, as was really the case, that the waters were going down, he first sent out a raven to find out how things stood. When it did not come back, having settled, I suppose, on the dead bodies, he then sent out a dove. Finding no place to rest, the dove returned to him; sent out again, it brought back an olive leaf, clear proof that the treetops could now be seen. Sent out a third time, it did not come back at all, and from this it was understood that the waters had gone down. So Noah went out of the ark. This took place, by my reckoning, two thousand two hundred and forty-two years after the beginning of the world.