1. The Lord told Noah:Take your whole family with you into the boat, because you are the only one on this earth who pleases me.
2. Take seven pairs of every kind of animal that can be used for sacrifice and one pair of all others.
3. Also take seven pairs of every kind of bird with you. Do this so there will always be animals and birds on the earth.
4. Seven days from now I will send rain that will last for forty days and nights, and I will destroy all other living creatures I have made.
5-7. Noah was six hundred years old when he went into the boat to escape the flood, and he did everything the Lord had told him to do. His wife, his sons, and his daughters-in-law all went inside with him.
8-9. He obeyed God and took a male and a female of each kind of animal and bird into the boat with him.
10. Seven days later a flood began to cover the earth.
11-12. Noah was six hundred years old when the water under the earth started gushing out everywhere. The sky opened like windows, and rain poured down for forty days and nights. All this began on the seventeenth day of the second month of the year.