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.
13. On that day Noah and his wife went into the boat with their three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their wives.
14. They took along every kind of animal, tame and wild, including the birds.
15. Noah took a male and a female of every living creature with him,
16. just as God had told him to do. And when they were all in the boat, God closed the door.
17-18. For forty days the rain poured down without stopping. And the water became deeper and deeper, until the boat started floating high above the ground.
19-20. Finally, the mighty flood was so deep that even the highest mountain peaks were about seven metres below the surface of the water.