THE Bible

The Great Flood

OUTSIDE the ark, the people went about their life the same as before. They still did not believe that the Flood would come. They must have laughed more than ever. But they soon stopped laughing.

All of a sudden water began to fall. It poured down from the sky as when you pour water from a bucket. Noah had been right! But it was too late now for anybody else to get into the ark. The door had been closed tight by Jehovah.

Soon all the low ground was covered. The water became like big rivers. It pushed over trees and rolled around big stones, and made a lot of noise. The people were afraid. They climbed up to higher ground. Oh, how they wished they had listened to Noah and gotten into the ark when the door was still open for them! But now it was too late.

The water kept getting higher and higher. For 40 days and 40 nights the water poured out of the sky. It rose up the sides of the mountains, and soon even the tallest mountains were covered. So just as God had said, all the people and animals outside the ark died. But everyone inside was safe.

Noah and his sons had done a good job building the ark. The water lifted it up, and it floated right on top of the water. Then one day, after the rain stopped falling, the sun began to shine. What a sight it was! There was just one big ocean everywhere. And the only thing that could be seen was the ark floating on top.

The giants were gone now. No more would they be around to hurt people. All of them had died, along with their mothers and the rest of the bad people. But what happened to their fathers?

The fathers of the giants were not really human people like us. They were angels that had come down to live as men on earth. So when the Flood came, they did not die with the rest of the people. They stopped using the human bodies they had made, and went back to heaven as angels. But they were no longer allowed to be part of the family of God's angels. So they became the angels of Satan. In the Bible they are called demons.

God now made a wind blow, and the waters of the flood began to go down. Five months later the ark came to rest on the top of a mountain. Many more days passed, and those inside the ark could look out and see the tops of the mountains. The waters kept on going down and down.

Then Noah let a black bird called a raven out of the ark. It would fly away for a while and then it would come back, because it could not find a good place to land. It kept doing this and each time it returned, it would rest on the ark.

Noah wanted to see if the waters had run off the earth, so next he sent a dove out of the ark. But the dove came back too because it did not find a place to stay. Noah sent it out a second time, and it brought back an olive leaf in its beak. So Noah knew that the waters had gone down. Noah sent out the dove a third time, and finally it found a dry place to live.

God now spoke to Noah. He said: 'Go out of the ark. Take your whole family and the animals with you.' They had been inside the ark for more than a whole year. So we can just imagine how happy they all were to be outside again and to be alive!