The Raven and the Dove

And God remembered Noah.

And God sent a wind over the earth.

It came across the face of the water, steady and strong, the way the Spirit of God had moved across the face of the deep on the very first day, before there was any light. It was as if the making of the world were beginning all over again. And the waters, which had stood for a hundred and fifty days, began to go down.

God closed up the great deep beneath, and sealed its mouths. He shut the windows of the sky. The rain stopped, and did not start again. He who had a key to open the waters had a key to shut them, too.

And slowly, day by day, the water went down.

On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, there was a long scraping sound under the ark, and a shudder, and then a stillness that was different from every stillness they had felt in five months.

The ark had stopped.

It had come to rest in the high country of Ararat, on a mountain called Lubar. Noah felt it settle under his feet, and went up to look, and saw, far below, a small piece of ground showing round the hull, wet and dark. And he did not say anything. He stood there quietly for a long time. And for the first time in many months, he let himself hope.

Noah, his father had called him: rest. And now the ark that carried him had come to rest.

But it was not over yet.

It flew off over the water, black against the grey, and did not come back to him. But it did not go away for good, either. It went out, and back, and out again, to and fro, to and fro, over the face of the flood. It had found something out there. The drowned things of the old world were floating on the water, and the raven was content to stay out among them, and feed. It did not need the ark. It went to and fro like that until the waters dried up from the earth.

So Noah sent out a dove.

So she came back.

She came back to the ark, tired, her wings barely holding her up, and fluttered at the window. And Noah put out his hand.

She had not brought him a thistle, or a thorn, or a branch from some poison tree. She had brought him an olive leaf, green and whole, carried home in the beak of a dove at the end of the day.

And Noah knew that the waters were going down from the earth.

He waited seven more days, and sent her out once more.

This time she did not come back.

On the first day of the first month, in Noah's six hundred and first year, he climbed up and took the covering off the ark.

By the old reckoning, that day fell on the very same day of the year as the first day of all, when God had said Let there be light over a dark and empty world. Now the light was falling on a world made empty again, as if it were the first morning.

But the ground was not ready for them yet. They waited until the twenty-seventh day of the second month, when the earth was completely dry. By the dates of the story, they had been inside the ark a year and ten days.

Then God spoke.

"Come out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and their wives with you. Bring out every living thing that is with you, every bird and beast and creeping thing, so that they can spread out over the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply on it."

They had gone in men with men and women with women. Now God called them out husband and wife together, two by two, like the animals. It was time for families to begin again.

Be fruitful, and multiply. They were the very words God had spoken over the fish on the fifth day, and over the man and the woman on the sixth.

And as it went up, Noah prayed.

He had come through the flood. He had watched the water take the earth, and waited a year while it gave the earth back. Now he was standing on dry ground with his family alive beside him, and he was still afraid.

What if it happened again? What if it happened every year?

So he begged God to let things go on in their right order. Let the seasons come and go. Let people plant their fields and build their houses and live in peace. Don't let it happen again, he begged. Because if every heavy rain brought the terror of another flood, then the ones who had been saved would be worse off than the ones who had died. They would have been rescued only to live their whole lives afraid of the sky.

And the LORD smelled the offering, and it was a sweet smell to Him.

And the LORD said in His heart:

"I will never again curse the ground because of man, even though every thought of his heart is evil from his youth. And I will never again destroy every living thing as I have done."

Even though. That is the remarkable thing. God did not say, I will never do it again, because now they are good. They were not good. The flood had washed the earth, but it had not washed the evil out of their hearts. It was still there, from their earliest days, the same as it had always been.

But God bound Himself anyway, with a promise. Whatever they did from now on, He would never again bring the waters over the earth.

"Do not be frightened," God told Noah, "when the heavy rains come, however hard they fall. The water will never cover the earth again.

And the great clock of the world, which had stopped for a year, began to tick again.