Places of the Bible

The mountains of Ararat

The first solid ground in a world that had none, and the place where the waiting started.

The ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat, and the account is careful to say that resting is not the same as arriving. Months pass between the keel touching rock and the door opening. The tops of other mountains appear, a raven goes out and does not come back, a dove goes out and finds nowhere to land, and only on the third sending does it stay away for good. Ararat is where a year of water turns back into a world.

Where it appearsGenesis 8 to 9

Genesis

Scroll down to the account

The movements, in the order the text gives them.

The Account of The mountains of Ararat

01
Genesis 8:1-5
The waters go down
The wind passes over the earth and the account reverses its own opening, water giving way to land a second time.
The ark finds a resting place long before anyone receives permission to leave it. That distinction matters. Its hull settles on the seventeenth day of the seventh month, but the mountain tops do not appear until the first day of the tenth. Arrival is not yet release. The Book of Genesis refuses to hurry past the calendar.
God remembered Noah opens the change, and the sentence immediately includes the animals. Remembering here is not an admission that someone slipped God's mind. It marks the action that follows: wind passes over the earth, the sources of the flood close, and water withdraws from land. The vocabulary recalls the opening chapter, where God's Spirit is over the waters and dry ground emerges. A devastated creation is becoming habitable again.
Yet the renewed world is disclosed by degrees. First the vessel stops moving. Later the mountains can be seen. Dry ground and the command to come out still belong to subsequent dates. Ararat is not a finish line with a celebration waiting beside it. It is the place where safety becomes something solid beneath the ark, while the long work of waiting continues.
Verse by verse
1. 8:1
  Remembered marks divine attention expressed in action, as it does when God remembers Abraham in Genesis 19:29.
2. 8:1
  The Hebrew ruach means wind here and is also the word translated Spirit in Genesis 1:2. The shared vocabulary contributes to the creation echo.
3. 8:4-5
  The ark rests in the seventh month; visible mountain tops are dated to the tenth. These are distinct stages, not alternate descriptions of the same day.
Worth knowing
Genesis 8:4 says mountains of Ararat, not one mountain named Ararat. Jeremiah 51:27 later lists Ararat among kingdoms summoned against Babylon, alongside Minni and Ashchenaz. That biblical usage points to a region. The passage identifies the territory of the landing without naming the particular peak beneath the ark.
Genesis 8:1-5
King James Version · 5 verses
8:1And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters asswaged;
8:2The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained;
8:3And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated.
8:4And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.
8:5And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.
02
Genesis 8:6-12
The raven and the dove
Three sendings and one olive leaf. The most famous image of hope in Scripture is a bird returning with proof of a tree.
An entire flooded earth is measured against the sole of one bird's foot. The dove needs somewhere to settle, and until she finds it, the immense change outside the ark has not yet become useful ground. Noah reaches out, takes her, and brings her back inside. After so much water and so many dates, the scale suddenly becomes a hand.
The birds are not assigned moral characters. The raven goes to and fro; the passage does not call it disobedient or explain what it eats. The dove's movements provide Noah with successive pieces of information. Her first return says that she has found no resting place. Her next return brings a freshly plucked olive leaf, not the branch so often supplied in pictures. The Book of Genesis names Noah's conclusion with unusual plainness: so Noah knew. He is observing evidence.
Even that evidence does not produce an immediate departure. Seven days pass before the final release of the dove, just as seven passed before the previous one. A leaf is welcome information, but it is not a boarding announcement. The last bird report is the one that does not come back.
Verse by verse
1. 8:7
  The raven goes to and fro. Only the final departure of the dove is explicitly followed by a statement that she did not return.
2. 8:11
  The text specifies an olive leaf pluckt off. It does not mention a branch or identify the location of the tree.
3. 8:10-12
  Two further waits of seven days are specified. The passage does not name either interval as a Sabbath observance.
Worth knowing
The Hebrew word for the dove's resting place in Genesis 8:9, manoach, belongs to the same word family as the verb describing the ark's rest in 8:4, nuach. The repetition links the two scales of the passage: the enormous vessel has found support, but the small bird still needs its own place to settle.
Genesis 8:6-12
King James Version · 7 verses
8:6And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made:
8:7And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth.
8:8Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground;
8:9But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark.
8:10And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark;
8:11And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.
8:12And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove; which returned not again unto him any more.
03
Genesis 8:15-22
Go out
The door opens on an empty world. The first thing built on it is an altar.
The first construction recorded after the ark is an altar. Before the Book of Genesis says anything about a house or a vineyard, Noah gives something back from the life that has been preserved. The distinction between clean and unclean animals was already part of the boarding instructions in 7:2; the offering is not an unexpected subtraction from an ark stocked without provision for it.
The departure itself sounds like creation beginning again. Creatures emerge after their kinds, and the command to be fruitful and multiply applies to the animals as well as to the human future. But the heart has not been remade by the water. The imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth is a sobering sentence to place beside a fresh start. Before the flood, human evil occasioned judgment; afterward, its persistence is acknowledged in the declaration of restraint. The promise is not a certificate of improved human behavior.
What follows is wonderfully ordinary: planting and reaping, heat and cold, summer and winter, day and night. These familiar pairs have become the language of divine commitment. Isaiah 54:9 later reaches back to the waters of Noah when speaking of enduring mercy. The world resumes its rhythms under a promise, not under the illusion that its inhabitants are now harmless.
Verse by verse
1. 8:17
  Be fruitful, and multiply repeats creation language from Genesis 1:22 and 1:28; here the immediate instruction includes the animals leaving the ark.
2. 8:18
  The four men and their wives make eight people. First Peter 3:20-21 explicitly recalls those eight and relates the flood passage to baptism through Christ's resurrection.
3. 8:21
  Imagination translates Hebrew yetser, the shaping or inclination of thought. The verse concerns moral disposition, not the human capacity for artistic invention.
4. 8:22
  The assurance concerns the continuing order of life while the earth remains. It does not say that every locality will be free of drought, famine, or failed harvests.
Worth knowing
Noah's altar in Genesis 8:20 is the first structure explicitly called an altar in the biblical text. It is not the first offering: Cain and Abel had already brought theirs in Genesis 4:3-4. That distinction keeps a genuine first from becoming an invented one, and separates the named structure from the earlier practice.
Genesis 8:15-22
King James Version · 8 verses
8:15And God spake unto Noah, saying,
8:16Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons’ wives with thee.
8:17Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth.
8:18And Noah went forth, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him:
8:19Every beast, every creeping thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark.
8:20And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
8:21And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.
8:22While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

Why it matters

Ararat is the hinge between judgment and covenant. Everything that happens on it happens slowly, which is unusual for an account that has just drowned a world in a few verses. The altar built here draws the first response of the new world, and the bow is set in the cloud over it.

3 songs

The music

Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.

Genesis 6:1-9:29
The Ark Above the Deep
Play here
Open song page Read lyrics
Genesis 6-8
Waters Over the Earth
Play here
Open song page Read lyrics
Genesis 9:1-17
The Bow in the Cloud
Play here
Open song page Read lyrics

Nearby

All the places

Report an error on this page

The mountains of Ararat

The Account of The mountains of Ararat

The waters go down

Verse by verse

Genesis 8:1-5

The raven and the dove

Verse by verse

Genesis 8:6-12

Go out

Verse by verse

Genesis 8:15-22

Why it matters

The music

The Ark Above the Deep

Waters Over the Earth

The Bow in the Cloud

Nearby